u/Individual_Increase2

This is the answer.

The division-based pro/rel is fine to do manually when you've got a small pyramid with only 2 or 3 tiers, but yours is huge, that would be a nightmare to do every season.

I stopped using divisions in a pro/rel setup, always found it to be a pain in the ass and requires handling manually.

Well the recommendation to just use if tired is to make things as basic as possible to ensure things are working first. Then once it's rotating players appropriately start making changes again.

I typically use a mix of "if tired" for my best players to get them as many PA's as possible, then every 2nd/3rd/4th game for the lesser guys to get some rotation. The super injury prone guys get a custom setting of 98 or 99 percent (hopefully to keep them healthy long enough to trade lol).

I would start by removing every custom setting you've done related to fatigue benching. Get things back to square one and use the depth chart with the backups being set to "If Starter tired".

The only time I ever set a custom fatigue number is for very injury prone players, then I'll set it in their player strategy.

https://preview.redd.it/ypfspt994wxh1.jpeg?width=1845&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7fabd60a46ea1009773072f2338ac415828eabe7

I've never had a problem with players getting rest when I don't change any fatigue settings. So either something got "broke" with the global team setting, or you don't have depth charts set up properly.

What does your lineup vs rhp page look like? Are there backups listed at every position and how often they should be playing?

I love OCC, and pretty much always play landowner. I've lost more than I've won, but they're always super fun. Builder makes for a great first leader, lets you get that army of workers you need out early.

Unless you've already got everything cranked up to the max and still steamrolling the AI, then I've got nothing, cause I can't do that.

If you've got too many turns happening where you know that you've already won, you're not playing on a high enough difficulty.

Oh you took Tyranny after the plague ended? That's not too bad to take when it's only a couple of cities though.

Perfect time to get that event. lol

What's up with your landowners opinion? They're usually pretty easy to keep super happy as long as they have the most cities.

You can stay on the glorious, change the aggression level to competitive, then throw an extra AI or two on the map.

What difficulty are you playing on?

Setting the AI aggression level to competitive should ramp up the volatility.

Barracks and officers.

Join the Cult of Boldus!

Are they on the 40-man roster?

The esteemed bunny of fluff has your answer, you can click-n-drag the view around same as when outside of the city.

You pay the remainder of a major league contract when you release a player, so you've gained nothing financially.

Why wouldn't you just try to send them through waivers yourself and then demote them?

Nothing wrong with getting the base game first, then making up your mind. I had the base game for nearly a year on Epic before I bought a complete bundle on Steam later.

All of the DLC are great though.

How many other groves are around? Looks like a Sage spot first glance, but rushing land con is a hard sell for only 3 of them.

Greece UU is going to be a little rough without woods around. I'd try to get marsh farms online sooner than later and drop granaries next to them. I'm guessing the price of wood is going to get insane.

Flatland quarry spam >>>>> having no quarries

Don't wait for mountains to get stone.

If you play with the raging tribes option on they'll have a fatigue limit of 2, makes them far more useful when in an alliance.

It's alright to run the occasional festival to pump a little growth somewhere you really need a citizen. Try not to get into the habit of hard building a ton of festivals though, build queue time is precious. Better to just buy them with a judge if you've got developing culture.

I'll run council quite often when I've got a citizen coming in one or two turns and there's a specialist I want to start immediately when ready.

I had a situation last summer where I allowed by primary ssd drive to get exceptionally full. Windows relocated by virtual memory location to the secondary physical drive, which made the game (and many other games) exceptionally difficult to play. I thought my laptop was finally giving up the ghost, took me a few weeks to realize just what had happened.

I suck at strategies, so here's just a couple broad ideas.

Tall culture - Like what Hazard described. Focus big culture into one location to get to legendary as abnoxiously quick as possible to power-spike your way into a dominant position.

Wide culture - Playing for points, lots of cities capable of getting to strong culture or better. Reduces your need to build a ton of wonders to hit points threshold, or maybe the need to take a bunch of neighboring cities. Or if planning to war, getting all your cities to at least developing is super important for being able to rush out units.

Many games I won't build a single odeon. My current game is turn 108 and I haven't even researched drama.

I just saw your spec post. Your potato is definitely worse than mine by quite a bit.

An SSD drive is a must, a huge portion of your lagging is going to be due to the data getting swapped into and out of virtual memory.

I've also got a dedicated 1060ti video card in mine. Ancient by today's standards, but was a terrific video card for its time. Yours is using integrated graphics, which means it's steal system memory for its needs.