Turn on Random Personalities if you play by yourself, it's much better than having almost all "peaceful" civs.
I really like Civ V, I really only like playing SP (MP games take forever), I mainly play when I'm waiting to spawn in crpg battle mode. Also, if you haven't seen it recently, during NA evenings on a weekend (like this last Saturday), there was a massive list of MP game lobbies. When I put up 6 or 8 man games, they were filling up in under a minute.