If you rush victory, yes. However I like to play it out a bit and see what happens in the world, rather than massively focused on wiping out every opponent from season 1.

I typically get a dragon by the time my Armor research is done. If you are telling me the game is supposed to end before then, then I think something is wrong with that design choice.

Nukes in Civ4 does not in anyway have the same effect as a dragon. Nukes are expensive, one time use, and make everyone hate you. Dragons are one man armies that can wipe the floor with any AI army.

As for Bombers, they are used to mainly level city defenses in any strategy game. And they ALWAYS have a counter that the AI employs. Dragons have no such counter, nor do they only have a single narrow purpose.

To be fair, I'm not saying Dragons should be weak, I am merely saying Dragons should Start out weak so the game won't basically HAVE to end by the time you get them (Why continue on upgrading your troops when you no longer need them except for defense?)

You'd still get a very powerful dragon if you so choose, it just will take some more effort than research a easy research and build a cheap building to get.

The problem is that I shouldn't have "practically won" simply because I researched a middle of the line research and built a resource.

hehe yeah "middle of the line" is stuff like education or blacksmithing dance with dragons is quite expensive research wise actually. with the amount of research you spend on that single tech, you could probably unlock the first 3 tiers of all three tech trees combined. 

If you think dragons are too powerful, I think the real problem is that you need to play on a higher difficulty level. If you get dance with dragons before armor, you either need that dragon desperately to save your ass from the AI hordes invading you, or the AI just isn't a threat to you in general.

and if you have a faction that has first 3 tiers of all 3 trees researched pitted against one with a dragon, who would win? The ridiculously lopsided match that would be demonstrates how overpowered the dragon is in that stage of the game.

Make a level curve where your dragon start at level 1 or something, and be at most, as powerful as a champion.

I can kill dragons using leather-armored spear-wielding horsemen and a decent champion or two. Perhaps the AI cannot do so, but that's more of a human-vs-computer issue than a game balance issue. It certainly helps for the troops to be better-equipped than leather and spear and for them to be reasonably high-level, but it is doable (though not necessarily easy). Multiple dragons in a single army (especially four all at once, like in your screenshot) would be a lot harder, but I think that most of the lopsidedness comes from you outclassing the AI. (I doubt that I could do this against a decent human player, however).

Also, having the first three tiers of all three research trees seems like an excessively spread-out research to me. I usually focus on Civilization and either Warfare OR Magic, but not all three at once, depending on resource availability (I will almost always get Leatherworking and at least one of the mounted-warfare traits, but if I have lots of crystal and little iron, that's about where the Warfare research stops for me; alternatively, if I have little crystal I focus my military tech on the Warfare line regardless of whether or not I have iron and only really get Shard Harvesting from the Magic tree). I haven't paid enough attention to the AI to know how it handles its research, but if it's scattering everything around in all three trees, that is something that should be worked on.

If a dragon is only as powerful as a champion until it gets to be level 20, it would be useless, unless that level 1 dragon is equivalent to something like a level 15 champion. Remember, dragons are primarily melee damage/tank units, and this is the role in which trained units excel (and in which champions more or less stink).

More to the point, if I'm far enough ahead that I can have both similarly-equipped trained units to what the AI is fielding AND dragons, I have essentially already won the game, especially if I can win the battles against the AI with minimal health-loss to my own side.

There might be an argument for making Dance with Dragons require more of the Civilization tree (or also have prerequisites in Magic and/or Warfare) to be researched before you can get to it, since it only really requires about a third of the tree to be researched, but it's still an end-game tech, not mid-game unless you've concentrated your research to get there fast. If you did focus your research into Civilization heavily enough that you've got dragons coming out when the AI is only starting to field, say, chain and boar spear equipped units, then unless you've been so lucky with dragon cave spawns that you can have multiple armies containing dragons, you ought to be overrun by enemy armies which you can't face, not because your dragon army can't fight them but because you've only got one or two armies with a dragon in them and your other armies aren't able to face the AI forces on an equal footing.

If end-game tech doesn't give me superiority over mid-game tech (or early-game tech) then there is something wrong with the end-game tech (and since my preference is to continue to use leather armor for the majority of my units throughout the game rather than upgrading to chain and plate, there might in fact be something wrong with the higher-end warfare armor techs). Unless you've rushed ahead to pick up Dance with Dragons, you should start seeing plate-equipped AI units with mid- or end-game weapons at roughly the same time you can field your dragons (although given the initiative penalties of plate armor, that might be more of a blessing than an issue for you).

maybe the answer should be increasing late tech costs - i believe that there are settings on the elementaldefs file that increase tech costs according to the number of techs already researched...

Stardock, please do not nerf dragons, they are good as they are.

Think of it as the game called "Age of Mythology", where the expansion packs adds Titans in the end of the game.

Now, yes, dance with the dragons is the end of the civilization tech tree, however not the end of the game, per se as there often are a lot more researches to be done in warfare and magic tree.

Further, each time I've received my dragons, I've gotten it during my 1st, or 2nd war, where there are still many opponent to be fought and killed. This means that when I get my dragon, none of the wars mattered because I could suddenly easily crush them with impunity.

So the game degrades to me finding epic level quests and end game wilderness because they can still be a challenge. When I'm done with them, guess what? The "Civ" aspect of the game no longer mattered. It essentially instantly kills all player vs ai aspect of the game because unlike age of mythology, the AI will not get a dragon at around the time you do, and does not have any spells, or strategies to counter the damned thing.

Ask yourself this, is reaching the end of the civ tree a good time to basically be counted as a technological victory? Because that is essentially what it is.

There are many possible solutions for this without making dragons less powerful (sort of)

1. Make all non-allied AI declare war on you, much like nukes in civ

2. Dragons cannot be Healed, and passive regen limited to 2 a turn

3. Make dragon cost a very high upkeep in either gold or mana, or a combination of both

4. Start dragons weaker, and grows stronger

5. Delay your first dragon and dragon spawn times to say 30 turns, and that your enemy AI would prioritize that location to destroy/raze

6. Make the dance with dragons a 3 part research, that requires 3 techs near the end of all 3 trees.

etc etc.

I can't believe this thread is still going. SevenAus, you AGREED with his suggestions? Are you all paying attention?

The original poster is playing on challenging/normal. He clearly has played the game a few times.  He likely is playing a huge map, with resources set to dense. I know this because dragon caves are not common, and always guarded by - you know, DRAGONS.   

He is exploiting the system and farming dragons. Then, he complains that dragons are overpowered. Can we turn our brains on here? Not a balance problem for the average gamer playing his first 2-3 FE/LH games. It's a balance problem he has with his own play choices. If he just played expert/expert next, I doubt he'd find acquiring dragons to be so easy.

When players purposely find an exploit and repeat it, it's not the job of the devs to nerf dragons. It's the players jobs to change settings on his next game, so it isn't so easy.

The AI can recruit dragons, too. Dragons are FINE AS IS.

If you can beat the dragons guarding the dragon lair, and a single dragon can beat the AI, doesn't that mean you can beat the AI anyway? Isn't that the transitive property of dragon-slaying?

Edit: I could have swore I saw Parrottmath prove transitive closure over the set of dragon-related combats in a thread somewhere here.

Yes, I think this makes sense, though in my previous post I was more referring to the post before it rather than the OP.  I don't mind if dragons stay the same.