If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the “natives” should be killed anyway. The Quillboar, for instance, are in league with the Scourge.
I actually have a really hard time with a violent playstyle in Civ, so I never really have moments like that. My usual mode of conquest is to either wait until someone else attacks me, and then since we’re at war anyway strip them of all their wonders and resources, or to plop down a city right next to a border and rush all the culture buildings in it (right now, I’m waiting for a small French town with uranium to finally get around to recognizing the superiority of Russian culture, since nobody was polite enough to declare war on a nation as big as any two of them combined).
If we’re talking realpolitic, though, I will shamelessly meddle in the outcome of wars I’m not actually fighting in, by things like supplying vital resources or cutting off right of passage for the side I don’t like. And I also keep settlers waiting near battlefields, to snatch up “liberated” land.
Hah, I was just recently replaying Oblivion and suddenly realized that I was killing people and taking their hearts to use for ingredients - sure, they were Daedra but they were clearly tool and language using sentients as smart as any mortal.
Well, this is touching on another thread I started: Recommendations: fantasy virtual world, where I asked for recommendations for MMOs that were not based heavily on (combat-based) level grinding.
In that thread, the main complaint was the monotony of it, but I think the morality is part of what annoys me. I wouldn’t slay innocents just for the sake of levelling up (“I had to bludgeon him to death, your honour, I needed to kill 20 people to gain +1 Blunt Weapons”), so the whole role-play concept is hurt by being forced to do that.
I once considered living a life of crime. But then I played GTA4 and saw that being constantly bothered to take my accomplices bowling and hearing them go on and on about their lives as I’m driving to the job just wasn’t worth it.
Thanks Rockstar.
Snap.
In the kitchen after 7 hours of FF.
I’m pretty brutal when I play 4X games. I generally play a build-heavy style. I stay peaceful until I have the capacity to raise a massive army and steamroll my enemies. I usually hate where the AI founds cities in Civ IV, so usually just raze their cities so I can found new ones (usually just one or two tiles away from the former sites of the conquered cities). I’m a lot nicer when I use tweaked custom assets that prevent the AI from founding cities with overlapping radii.
Daedra hearts are really too cumbersome to be useful for making healing potions. You’re better off making your healing potions out of lightweight ingredients like aloe vera leaves and mugwort seeds or somesuch. When you kill a Daedra you should just eat its heart right then and there :p.
Speaking of Civ… not at the world, but at certain people.
Way back when, everybody in our table-RPG group played Civ I, including the quiet guy who years later ended up getting a PhD in Agricultural Engineering and who is now a college professor. You know, the guy who pretty much doesn’t open his mouth unless someone wants to talk about fruit trees or statistics. He also happened to be the most brutal conqueror: his target was, always, to conquer the world as fast as possible. He followed burnt-earth strategies: prisoners, what’s that? Plunder and conquer, and put everybody to the sword. The other guys, specially the two which on paper would have looked like the most aggresive but who were 5yo ballerinas compared to him, never quite looked at him the same way again (I was the economic conqueror, running to grab the capitals and then buying off the rest; Middlebro never built aqueducts because then “my towns grow too big”; Littlebro and The Golem were agressive but nowhere near as efficient as my strategy, which looked insultingly metagamey to them; The Waffler didn’t finish a single game ever, but then, he’s the guy who only got married because his would-be-wife dragged him to the judge).
For a few weeks during and after every time I play Okami, I have to suppress an urge to feed small birds and other animals when I see them outside.
The Prince of Persia games, years later, still have me scanning buildings for ledges and poles and other ways to climb up.
Back in the 90s I lived way out in the country, didn’t have cable, and had a n64 and a copy of starfox64. Needless to say this resulted in much replays of the game. The ends of levels almost always feature a boss that passes you from behind and features glowing flashing targets you must shoot to defeat it.
Life moved on, I found other interests, and pretty much forgot the game until the Massachusetts turnpike. I was driving along when a utility truck, a big one with a sign passed me from behind. It was one of those ones they use to tell you the lane is closed, big flashing lights.
Somewhere deep in my brain the signal “oh shit andross! fire the hyper lasers at the flashy things!” fired off to my motor-cortex. Naturally it responded “I don’t know how! we’re in a car not an arwing!”. As the adrenalin flooded my body I realized it was just the highway crew.
In hindsight it was pretty awesome. For a moment it was like playing starfox in real life.
A new one ! I’ve been playing Mount & Blade lately (how could I miss this gem for so long ?!) and it really makes you understand just how utterly *crap *it was to be a peasant in Medieval Europe, esp. during the Hundred Years War.
I mean, I already knew that on a conceptual level of course - but reading about it doesn’t quite drive the point home like seeing the same tiny village being raided by brigands, Seven Samurai style, then looted and burned to the ground by marauding armies of no less than three different realms in the span of a month.
Then going there yourself to tax the cocks off these chumps, just in case they got too comfy. Oh, and give me those cows of yours while you’re at it, my good man. My mercenary band isn’t going to feed itself, now, is it ?
In the Total War games I’ve played, in the combat portion, when you double-click on a unit, the camera moves its point of view to the location and facing of the newly-selected unit. This is done smoothly and quickly so that the camera is both flying around the battlefield and reorienting itself at the same time.
It was disconcerting, not to mention dizzying, to me for awhile when this happened. But eventually my brain got trained to anticipate this.
Then, I found I could apply this to real life situations. I have become much better at imagining rotation and movement of real life objects, and rotation and movement of my point of view, all because my brain didn’t like getting jarred by sudden movements.
When I was playing Red Dead Redemption, my wife would sometimes watch me play and occasionally offer suggestions. One day while driving around, she had to resist the urge to tell me to shoot the hawk flying off to the side of the road.
I used to play Fields of Glory and after a particularly meet grinder of a battle between the Prussians and the French I surveyed the field and there was a hill I had tried to take 5 times in vain and was just covered in Prussian bodies.
I felt bad about electronic pixels on a screen.
“Hmm. I need to get my rook onto the open file but the bishop is blocking it. I can’t get the bishop out until I push some pawns. Look good? Ok, then. Pawn-pawn-bishop-rook. Solved.”
“Hmm. My friends all need to get from the parking lot into the bar but there’s only one door. Mark’s ahead and to the left. He can slide in diagonally and go stand by the jukebox. Then Tom can get in. He’ll have to go straight in and then go three tiles to the left. I’ll then head straight up the middle.”
But then we all start moving at the same time and my brain screams “WHAT? You can’t do that! That’s not a move!”
‘indigenous lifeforms’ Alpha Centauri
I find myself sizing people people up to be garroted. I blame this on the Hitman series…at least I hope this is where that is from.
Funnily enough, whenever I play GTA-like games, I almost invariably drive on the left hand side of the road, even if it does mean dodging traffic at high speed whilst trying to leap over the rapidly raising drawbridge. 
I often get those moments too… where a relatively minor border dispute over something like a Horses resources ends up turning into a centuries-long World War 0.5 that wipes out entire civilisations, bankrupts everyone else, and leaves the victor realising that they’ve now advanced so far along the tech tree (in a bid to stay ahead of their rivals) that Horses are now an obsolete resource anyway, what with all the Tanks and Airships and Infantrymen they can build instead.
Having said that, I do wish the AI in the Civ games was less prone to declaring they would fight some more forever (even when they have Knights and you have Mechanised Infantry), and more prone to accepting they cannot win and calling a cease fire after you’ve captured a couple of their cities or wiped out most of their army within three turns.
There’s probably some sort of telling Realpolitikal/Social Commentary in there, but I can’t hear it over the sound of Imperialism. 
In the same vein, Empire: Total War shows just how awful it was to be poor in the 18th century. Army and navy life were often downright hellish. As one of the loading screen quotes puts it:
Working in a factory was no picnic, either.