I got into Civ IV again recently; compared to my time in V and VI I have relatively little experience. I appreciate a lot of things about IV like the music, presentation and short loading times. But what I can´t stand about every Civ Game (including SMAC) is the combat and how the game straight up spits in your face for playing peacefully.
Since I started playing on Noble, pretty much every game has progressed the same: I get a stable few early cities, try to build a fair amount Units while also building my Economy and Culture, I get to the early medieval Era and then Alexander, Shaka, literally any other Civ comes in with 5 doomstacks of 10 units each and causes me to ragequit.
And what I can gather from this is if you do literally anything else besides produce stack Millitary units in your border cities for the first 100 turns, you can quit already. If the game punishes you like this for playing peacefully, why is the option there at all!?