sneezelord, I'm religious and friendly... somehow that's what I usually end up as, and on normal mode, I can generally make this work and convert everyone, especially once I get the "make a city entirely unhappy" ability. Small towns, especially, are fairly easy to convert after that. Interestingly, in religious mode, I only get a few spice nodes at first as it's easier to stay under the radar that way, and after the early part of the level, they don't make me as much money as the cities, so I generally let them get captured without worrying about them once my cities get going and really profitable. Especially since as soon as I send a vehicle or two to tend to the spice node, that seems to be a signal for a city to come attack me, and my vehicles are way over there rather than defending my city.
On this hard mode, though, I got clobbered quite a few times... sometimes I had two different cities attacking me at once even though it wasn't that long into the level. I barely had time to get my city together and some money to get vehicles and guns for the city before I started getting attacked. After a few rounds of that, I figured out who was the main aggressor and so the next time, I got some help ganging up on that city... the other city helping me just happened to be that other city's enemy, so we became allies. Long story short, I now have 3 cities - not enough to get airships unfortunately - and my ally has the rest. I have LOTS of money, but not that much of a fleet. I have been able to keep the other city as a total ally (highest level ally) so far by giving them gifts - no problem since even good gifts are like 4000 a pop, but I have almost 150,000 and climbing so no problem. But eventually I think the game is going to throw a curve, and they'll say "wait a minute, time to attack." And of course I can't win unless I get all of the cities. As soon as I attack one though, we'll be at war rather than allies and they'll send their spaceships over to clobber me.
I've never had this happen before in the previous 2 or 3 games at this level I've done so far. Usually when it's just me and another city left, we are total enemies by that point. At least now I'm at a good starting point once my city is clobbered, though, so I don't have to start from the beginning of civilization anymore. Heh. It may end up that I stay in this stalemate though. An interesting and entirely new predicament.
