This is the story of my game of Epic Four from Realms Beyond Civilization. Deity level, no scenario goals.
I got rocked by barbarians, as I'm sure everyone did, but the RNG also hated me. I popped four huts, that ALL spawned barbs, then lost TWO settlers to barbs. The last was on a hill, escorted by a spear, and got attacked by ONE barb WARRIOR, and lost. I just couldn't deal with the frustration, and decided to simply skip the Epic. Challenging Deity, sure, but not minus a third of my cities after an RNG disaster.
I'm ashamed to admit this, but I... restarted the game. I played Five, then was looking around for something to play and decided to give Four another shot. But I had deleted the saves, so the only thing to do was start over from 3500 BC. I played almost the same - even sending the first warrior north to scout though I knew the other civs were to the south - but of course it played out differently (the huts behaved a bit better), and also I researched Bronze a bit earlier.
I played for my own experience as a solo Deity game, and reached tech parity in the Industrial Age with some great tech brokering, but didn't finish it the second time either, after a city flipped back and canceled a bunch of lux exports and my reputation. Didn't have the motivation to finish it after that, especially with patch 1.29 now revamping Deity.