By this point in time, I'd signed quite a lot of deals with the AI civs, and keeping track of them had become difficult. Wars have also broken out between some of the civs over there on the eastern side of the map. What tools does Civ5 give you for managing the global politics? Check out this screen:
This is the diplomacy overview screen. And... it's a total mess. When I first saw the screenshots in previews, I honestly thought that this was a placeholder which would be removed before the final release version of the game. Notice that despite the huge amount of available screen space, information is only being displayed in something like 20% of the overall interface. I can only see three civilizations at once, and must scroll down to see the rest of them. Furthermore, the game only lists their relationships with text, making no graphical representation of the diplomatic situation at all. I have to sit down and think carefully to figure out what's actually going on; the information is not displayed cleanly or efficiently. This is one of three panels on this menu; here's the main panel:
This is the only way to tell how much gold the AI civs have, what their score happens to be, the luxuries they have available, and so on. Once again it's a mess, displaying only three civs at once and forcing me to scroll through the rest. I think this works out fine for the city states, given the limited interactions that you can have with them, but it simply fails when working with the AI civs. Compare to the diplomatic interface from Civ4:
Graphically, this screen is much more simple, however it immediately presents the player with all of the information about what is tradeable, what is not, and how much gold each of the AIs has available to spend. There was another panel for resource trades, in addition to this one for technologies. (By the way, that's not a picture from Beyond the Sword either - I'm comparing apples to apples with the non-expansion Civ4.) It should be much easier to design a diplomatic screen for Civ5, given that technology trades have been removed from the game completely. Instead, we have the confusing mess pictured above. The "global politics" situation was presented more cleanly in Civ3!
Well, as cleanly as you could get with those crazy Civ3 AIs, anyway! 
(Try to imagine displaying that situation above in TEXT form, and it should be clear how silly the Civ5 situation currently is.) To me, it's not acceptable that the interface forces all this scrolling, and can't display a simple matrix of war declarations. Civ5 should be blowing Civ3 out of the water, not struggling to match the same level of information. Also, what's up with the -185 gold possessed by Washington?! Seriously, huh? How can you have negative gold in this game? What is the AI doing there?!?
With more gold from a second round of resource sales, I'm able to purchase Allied status with my third city state, bringing another influx of magical maritime food. I'm now up to +6 food in all cities, an insane +12 food in my capital. Check it out in my newest city:
Pi-Ramesses has a food surplus of +8, nearly all of that coming from the maritime food bonuses. It literally doesn't matter what tiles I work, this city will grow insanely fast for the first couple of sizes regardless. Only two turns to grow to size 2, for example. Then the geometric increases in the size of the food box will kick in, and the city will start crawling once it hits about size 7. I know a lot of people will say, "stop thinking in Civ4 terms! This is Civ5!" but I truly feel that having a more arithmetic progression of growth would make for a better game. Slower growth initially, then faster growth later on. The current model is really, really weird.
Notice also the ungodly long time required to build anything. Even the basic improvements take anywhere from 30-60 turns to complete. That will drop as the city grows and picks up more shields... but it won't drop that quickly. Meanwhile, I'm just burning through techs with my research; I reached the Medieval era a little after Turn 85, and I'll be in the Renaissance by about Turn 135. The whole time that I continue to plow ahead on research, my cities will be unable to build the new improvements that are opened up due to lack of production. Forget about wonders or units, I can't even manage to construct the basic city improvements that come along - and that's with me skipping granaries/watermills, barracks/armories, and any kind of city defenses. I simply can't afford to build anything other than monuments/temples, libraries/universities, markets/banks, and anything happiness related. I'll say this again: techs need to be significantly more expensive, or buildings need to be significantly cheaper. The game design is not working here, guys. I'm feeding my entire civ with ridiculous maritime food, working max shields in every city, and I still can only build the most basic infrastructure possible. Research and production are not in sync with one another in this game right now.
Here's why you have nothing to fear from selling your luxuries to the AI civs:
This is the happiness ranking of each civ; it appears to be nothing more than a reading of how much happiness each civ in the game possesses. You can see that I'm at -2 in the top left corner, and indeed I rank at -2 on the chart. In comparison, the AIs all have something like 35-50 surplus happiness! Yeah, looks like they are getting "some benefits" there. 
Hiawatha has 10 cities, he has significantly higher population that I do, and he actually has fewer luxuries than me. Nevertheless, he can run his massive empire with no happiness issues at all. It's pretty obvious that the AIs basically have infinite happiness on Immortal, thus you might as well get what you can from your luxuries and not worry about what benefits the AIs are receiving. I actually don't begrudge them these advantages, since I expect the AI to cheat when I turn up the difficulty level. Still somewhat grating nonetheless, that they can completely ignore a basic game mechanic and expand with zero penalty.
The AIs will build very large armies on this difficulty, and even though their tactics are abysmally poor, they can sometimes make up for it with sheer weight of numbers. For whatever reason the Ottomans had gotten on everyone else's bad side, and they were under attack from America + Iroquois + Siam. I was watching their movements with my scout unit, and the numbers were very impressive. Here's a bit of a pathfinding bug:
I can't see anything over there in the clouds, yet the game's pathfinding tells me that there's a land connection down in the south, which did indeed prove to be true. Seems like this could be a minor exploit when scouting in the early game, clicking around in the fog and seeing what the game tells you. Minor issue, obviously.
140 turns into the game, I had planted my seventh city and completely filled out my starting core. My cities have been getting infused with maritime food for practically the whole game; I do not think they possibly could have grown much faster. I've claimed every luxury in my starting area, I'm trading for three more from allied city states, I've built quite a few colosseums/circuses, and as Egypt, I have the awesome Burial Tomb unique building for additional happiness. I have pushed the happiness cap as far as I possibly can, and achieved what I think is a very impressive result.
Unfortunately, Hiawatha has made my empire look paltry in comparison. 
He's all the way up to 13 cities, and they have outgrown mine by quite a bit. It's very obvious that the AI is not playing the same game as the player here... I'm not quite sure what the player is supposed to do in this situation. In past games, the player could sacrifice economy in favor of expansion, and thus sacrifice research power to try and be competitive in overall growth. You can't really do that in this game, since the happiness cap is completely independent of research. I'm doing quite well in beaker production, keeping pace with the AI despite a smaller empire. Actually, I'd like to sacrifice some of that research for more cities if I could! But I can't really do that in this game. Many of the AI leaders play like idiots in Civ5 (such as Harun of Arabia in this game, who was far behind) but others appear to be much more competent. Hiawatha in this game, and I've heard Napoleon and Nobunaga can both be quite fierce. If the AI does start outgrowing the human player, I'm not exactly sure what the proper response is supposed to be. Military aggression, I guess? Getting them to slaughter all their units through the AI's use of poor tactics, perhaps. I think we as a player base and community are going to need to figure this out over time.
Suleiman was clearly on his way out, down to just his capital here. In classic Civ3 fashion, I sold him more luxuries for all his remaining gold, and then got my resources back when he kindly expired on the next turn. At least you can't bilk techs out of them anymore for gold per turn...
From the minimap, you can see that I was out of room for more peaceful expansion. I reasoned that the next move going forward was to eliminate the weak Arabs, taking me from seven to nine cities, and securing my back lines. Then I would try to instigate a war between the Iroquois and Siam (the game's two superpowers) and expand through the Iroquois territory. So long as I didn't have to face the entire army of the Iroquois by myself, I was confident that I could hold my own and capture a city or two from them. But first, the war with Arabia:
I had exactly six units for this war: two longswords, two trebuchets, one pikeman, and one Egyptian war chariot. The key units in this game seem to be the catapults/trebuchets/cannons, which easily take down cities and annihilate all of their military contemporaries. You just need 2-3 contemporary melee units to stick out in front to prevent the siege units from being flanked; I think of them as blocking dummies for the real ranged killers. Add in one or two mounted units (solely to finish off redlined units with their "attack and then move" ability) and you can take down huge numbers of enemy forces with zero losses. In the above picture, I had one treb over in the east to pick off any stray Arabian units wandering in from that direction, while the rest of my units destroyed the weak new city of Damascus. I razed that one and then pushed forward to Medina and Mecca.
Check this out:
Shockingly, I am actually the tech leader! Wow. Wasn't expecting that. For all of their size, the AI obviously has no idea how to manage its own economy, and simply pushes through on brute force research discounts. My intelligent use of scientist specialists, Great Scientists, and research pacts is keeping me ahead of the pack. Once I incoporated Arabia into my empire, I would be in really good shape here. Speaking of that:
Here's my positioning against the Arabian core cities. Harun has one swordsman and one archer remaining, plus his city defenses. I had some difficulty taking out the swordsman on the hill, in part because the Arabs had a Great General in Mecca and I lacked one myself. I ultimately had to use up one promotion for instant healing on a longswordsman, but other than that, I suffered zero losses in capturing these two cities. Six units proved to be more than enough for this campaign. I had to keep Mecca, as a capital, and I chose to raze Medina to replace it in a spot with less desert further to the south. Bizarrely, Medina continued to grow from receiving maritime food as I was razing it, GROWING in population as I tried to burn down the city. Ummm, not sure that's supposed to be happening?
I felt really good about my situation in the game at this point. I had nine cities, I was in pretty good shape from a happiness standpoint, I was researching faster than the AIs, and I had three allied maritime cities. So far I had enjoyed great diplomatic relations with the other civs in this game; I had research pacts and "pacts of cooperation" with everyone, and a long history of Open Borders + luxury resource trades. And then suddenly, in the aftermath of the Arabian war, all of the AIs started dialing me up and canceling our various deals. They also started calling me "oppressor of the weak" and various other pejorative terms. I could see where this was going, and just a few turns later:
Wait, what? We were best friends just a couple of turns ago! Why was I now suddenly hated by all of my former allies? Something about that Arabian war sure as hell pissed them off as a group, because now I was universally regarded as scum by the other civs in the game.
I did not want to face the Iroquois and their much larger army, not one bit. Fortunately I had just used a Great Scientist to slingshot the Chemistry tech and unlock cannons. Hiwatha would have to walk through a killing field of cannon fire to take any of my cities; I was hopeful that I could kill enough of his units to secure some kind of peace. Here comes the initial wave:
Every cannon shot killed one of Hiawatha's units, even relatively modern ones like this musket. I was just a little bit short of the damage capacity that I needed though; two cannons up here, and another two down by Memphis, that was what I needed to force back this attack. I had half of that, although I was building more cannons as pictured. The problem here was my lack of iron from earlier in the game; I had two sources of iron, but each one was a piddly deposit of only two iron. Four total iron. I used two of that for longswords and two of that for trebuchets. I would have built more trebs, just lacked the iron to do so. Cannons are resourceless units, however the lack of trebs meant I had to build them very slowly, and couldn't upgrade to them. Unfortunate, that.
I was very frustrated in this war by a lack of roads. This game is supposed to be all about tactical movements, and yet my units kept getting gummed up on the roads and unable to move where I wanted them. If I could just build roads, I'd have this whole front line covered with a dense network, and my units could move around freely into the best positions. But nope, can't do that, because the road upkeep is too expensive. I would crash my economy if I built those roads. It was so, so frustrating to be limited tactically by a lack of roads; a sound road network has always been fundamental to combat in every previous Civ game. I understand why roads cost money, that it's a design decision to limit the player from having too much gold. Still - couldn't we have another way to do this? Penalizing the player for building roads strikes me as counterintuitive. Roads should be a good thing, you should want to have players building them! I doubt we'll ever see this changing, since it's fundamental to Civ5's design, but I'd love to see those roads lose that economic penalty. I've never been a fan of modding, I might change that opinion with Civ5.
I was doing pretty well against Hiawatha, only to see this happen:
Oh bloody hell. Now the other AI superpower is jumping on too; it's turned into an AI feeding frenzy. Nor will Hiawatha negotiate peace, despite the enormous losses I'm inflicting on his army. He won't even talk to me. That means this game is over - I needed these two AIs to attack one another, not attack me. This won't end well, folks. 
Here they come:
Look at all those Iroquois units. Individually they're achieving nothing, but against numbers like that... Even the mindless Zerg tactics will win eventually with enough pure numbers. To add insult to injury, Siam is allied with two city states, Vienna and Dublin, and so that blue city state to the east of Memphis is now attacking me as well. Dublin, the Militaristic city state in my back lines, made this even more absurd by randomly spawning an elephant for Siam, which appeared next to Dublin, and then suddenly started attacking Giza. Yes, a unit magically appeared right outside my backlines and started attacking me. Uh huh. Fun game mechanic there.
It's all over now except for the screaming. Egyptian screaming, that is. I've killed about 20 Iroquois units against 2 of my own units killed, not that Hiawatha is willing to talk to me. They just have too many units:
Yep, that about sums it up. Hiawatha was actually about even with Ramkhamhaeng in military power before this war began, giving you an indication of how many military units I was able to destroy. There's nothing I can do about all that military force - if I had even half that many units, I would be hopelessly bankrupt, given the huge unit support costs at this difficulty level. I needed to avoid this conflict, and I wasn't able to do so.
Humorously, Hiwatha was unable to capture Memphis, which fell to the mighty soldiers of Venice. Haha, take that! No prize for you Hiawatha. Since none of the AIs would sign peace with me, and Washington refused to talk to me since I was the "bloodthirsty slaughterer of the innocent" or something like that, I took my leave of the game here, a clear loss to the AI.
Some people will look at this game and see it as a vindication of the AI, that the AI "played to win" and successfully attacked me when my military was small. There's some truth to that interpretation, no doubt about it. Nevertheless, I had a small military for the previous 150 turns, and the AI never seemed interested in attacking earlier. I enjoyed great relations with all of them right up until I attacked Arabia, and then "snap"! Something changed and now I was the global pariah, the North Korea of this particular continent. I'm... still trying to figure out what happened there. In the space of ten turns, there was a universal change in the AI attitudes. Suddenly no one would have anything to do with me, and the war declarations followed very quickly thereafter. Seriously, wtf just happened?! 
I really hope it wasn't the fact that I declared war on Arabia that caused the complete reversal in AI attitudes. Hiawatha declared war over and over again throughout this game, at least six different times counting his many wars against city states, and three times against other AIs. At no point in time did this prevent him from signing research pacts and continuing to work with the rest of the AIs. If this game paints the human player as an aggressor for declaring war, and doesn't do the same for the AIs, then I'm basically done with Civ5 right here and now. Not interested in playing that game, sorry. At the moment though, we don't have enough information to conclude that, so I'll give the AI a little more patience for now.
Or perhaps it was the razing of two cities that the AIs didn't like. That was one thing that the AIs never did, puppeting or annexing all of their city captures. Of course that introduces its own problems if true, since you don't exactly want to have to keep every poorly-planted city that the AI puts down. In the end, this is another fault of Civ5's lack of feedback with diplomacy: I still have no real idea why the AIs decided to hate me so much. I did something that ticked them off - but they won't tell me what that was, and we, as a community, have to determine these things through tedious trial and error. I have very little patience for that.
This wasn't a fun ending to a game. I don't mind losing, but I want to know why I lost, and I don't have the answer to that. I'm sure part of the answer is "build more military", which I'll try to do in the future. It may well be a good idea to have one Militaristic city state in your employ, just to keep a constant trickle of units coming your way. Maybe, still trying to figure these things out. Of course, if your empire is being fed through maritime food, and your army is being provided by the military city states... what exactly are you, the player, doing in this game again?
I still have very mixed feelings about this game. Next time, I'm going to turn off the diplomacy altogether and just play Always War. Kill them all until they die. 
