Slitherine

Looking at the AARs most seem to have almost nonstop war making it difficult to upgrade your cities, population, infrastructure etc. If I wanted to play where I could have some time to learn those things what group and settings would be a good start? I'm not looking for no wars, just not almost nonstop.
Thanks for any opinions.

Hi, stormbringer3, and welcome to the forum!

Suggest you do the tutorials if you haven't already, then perhaps a Custom map on Low/Easy settings; of particular note for your interests would be the Opponents, Difficulty, and Development options, as well as the Low-High sliders on the right. The tooltips should give all the info you need, but feel free to come back with more questions!

I found Egypt is a friendly nation for beginners.
Rome would be soon have to fight with Carthage, the most powerfull naval power in the game, so it is stressful for the beginner.
Egypt don't have to fight powerful nations in early stage. Their only fighting is a small weak Seleucus, which is a good tutorial for learning how to do war.
Also it is quite developed nation in the main land,and Palestine and north Africa are good training grounds for learning city developing.

My fault, focusing on the wars in my AARs. I gave a skewed impression. There are often periods of peace, with the exception of that Bructeri AAR.

I had one custom map game on EASY diffuculty where there was a good mix of long peace and some wars.

In the historical scenario, you can set the AI difficulty for each nation. You could play Rome, for instance, against an EASY Carthage - resulting in less aggressiveness probably by Carthage.

I play random maps on the Medium AI level, but if you increase the Diplomacy setting by one notch it seems to make a big difference in how often you are at war--there are still many wars, but not constant, vs the whole world