Me: Tatars
Allies: Poles and Mayans
Rival: Sicilians, Italians, and celts.
Map: highland
I am more of a booming player, so I go heavy on booming until early Castle age with 40-50+ villagers. I did some raiding with no success in 6/10 games, because the enemy players already had defenses or big armies.
For the peaceful period of the game, i boomed and made some Cav Archers and Camels to defend my base, and plenty of trade.
Things later went disastrous, when the Celt’s nasty army of Woads and Onagers started devastating my main base (although I had a second base elsewhere), backed by Italian Genoese XBows and Sicilian Cavalier. To complicate things, the enemy team built enemy buildings close to our camps! Camels were sniped the Genoese XBowmen and Cav Archers were massacred by the Onagers. Sicilian Cavaliers are more resistant to their counters btw to they can be quite scary for my camel riders.
When I wanted to attack the siege weapons, my cavalry units are reduced to a bloody mess by Cavaliers, and Archers! I had a sizeable number of units and they cannot match the even more numerically superior army. The Sicilian player defeated my Mayan ally, while me and the Polish ally were bagged by the Italian and Celt player.
How broken could the rival civs be?!