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Notes -
Difficulty levels enable vastly greater challenge.
Any idiot can beat civ 4 on Settler. Noble isn't too hard. Monarch is quite difficult. Emperor requires advanced tactics and strong execution turn-by turn. Immortal and Deity are really hard, Deity in particular is astonishingly hard. You need hundreds if not thousands of hours of experience and really strong game knowledge to win. Apparently 37% of players beat Elden Ring, 15% beat Dark Souls 1, 30% beat Sekiro. I'd be surprised if 1% of civ4 players beat deity. I've played it for 15 years and I can only beat Immortal, sometimes. Only 3% of Civ 5 players have won on Deity and that's far, far easier since there's a reliable meta-build for it plus some cheese you can do in game setup to hamper the AI.
No game designer would release a game that was locked to a truly hard setting, the 'hard' games you play are pretty easy to finish and the statistics show it. People want to be able to finish games with a reasonable investment of effort. Difficulty levels allow for a real challenge worthy of real elitism.
Sounds like a skill issue, you picked an uncompetitive build. That's real difficulty: the huge proliferation of strategies that used to be competitive narrow down to a few workable methods. Higher difficulties on civ 4 don't make the AI smarter, they just get huge bonuses to production and science. You have to overcome the cheating machines, turn them against eachother and outgrow them.
This makes me want to take up the challenge to demonstrate that I am that idiot who can't 🤣
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