Well, I'm through with the game

[thejeff]

Why would you insist?

Because you can only play irregularly. Because you don't want to deal with diplomacy.

Because it's fun.

I tend to enjoy the lower levels, where there's less to deal with every turn. The first 2-3 years of a game. After that it usually becomes more work than I want to deal with. Less so in MP, but it still happens.

Luckily, those early years are where the AI does well. On impossible, it can throw huge decent armies at you from all sides. And you don't yet have the really abusive tactics to stop it cold. Thugs, but no real SCs (if you avoid SC pretender), battle magic is mostly evocations and the weaker buffs. Fighting the AI on something resembling it's own terms is not trivial.