Endless Legend - 16/20 hours

I lost my most recent game, on "easy" difficulty. It was 100% my fault. I dropped the ball. I was playing as the Cultist faction, who can only build one city, but have, in exchange, the ability to convert minor factions to their religion and thereby gain resources and (a whole shit-ton of) extra soldiers, and I was having such a grand time wandering around the map spreading my holy creed that I let a rival conquer almost all the major AI factions.

I figured, they are no military threat to me, so why should I worry - and then I got to 25 turns before the game's limit, and discovered I was 600 points behind in score. Oops. I immediately went on the offensive, and managed to close the gap to about 200 points, but it was too little, too late. The time limit came, and I lost.

In retrospect, I played that game wrong from the very beginning. I should have used my free units to terrorize the AI and raze their cities while the factions were still weak. Ultimately, my aim should have been for an elimination victory. Yet my gentle and retiring nature got the better of me. Given the opportunity, I prefer to build in peace, and only go to war when provoked. Which is generally a stupid way to play. It is almost always best to go to war as early as possible (provided you can win, which on easy difficulty is not much of a caveat), because winning a war gives you more territory and resources and knocks out a potential rival, which makes everything in the game easier. The sooner you do it, the more of an advantage you have.

In fact, the advantages of an early war are so great, that it's almost never a good idea to play passively. Even if you're going after a peaceful victory, the extra resources and breathing room that comes from knocking out your closest neighbor or two more than outweighs the build time lost (plus the military build-up helps dissuade any aggressive AIs from picking on you).

I know all this from long experience with the genre. Pacifists are hard mode. Yet it's a trap I always fall into. Strange as it seems, I can't help but think of the AIs as fellow players, and it is just monumentally rude to attack other people and steal their stuff. The fact that the AIs are literally unfeeling automatons does not mitigate this nearly as much as you might think.

This tendency towards useless empathy has caused me more than my share of heartache. In Civilization 4, I would accomplish great cultural deeds as Gandhi, only to be ransacked by whatever random thug happened to spawn near me. And then I would pull my hair out and rant and swear, because once more, violence and greed overcame high-minded constructiveness. Granted, it was always my fault for projecting my ideology onto the game, but then again, perhaps the necessity of violence is the game trying to project its ideology onto me.