I, too, like to play Civ this way. For my money, Civ4 (and its various mods) comes the closest to allowing this style of play. The game itself is highly moddabl

I, too, like to play Civ this way. For my money, Civ4 (and its various mods) comes the closest to allowing this style of play. The game itself is highly moddable, and provided you play with the right set of AI personalities, you can actually conduct geopolitics without reverting to the simplistic "Blow them up before they blow you up" imperative every few turns. But make no mistake: this is not how the game is designed. The game is designed around conquest, by one means or another. Sooner or later, the game 'wants' you to go to war. Everything pushes towards war. There's a lot of fun, in fact, in trying to be a stabilizing force in a world hell-bent on going Mad Max. But it will go there, sooner or later. Every faction ends up going to war with the others, and you'll find yourself taking various sides in an attempt to shore up the defenses of the helpless, the aggrieved, and the outmatched. Since the roles of aggressor and aggrieved change every few cycles, you'll pretty much go to war with every other nation in a grim rotation of shifting alliances. Eventually you're rewarded for your peacekeeping efforts with the seething and irreparable enmity of every other faction on the map. At that point, you've got two choices: 1) Cheat and reset relations with the other factions; 2) Accept your new role as World Police, bringing democracy and prosperity at gunpoint.