AI too peaceful?

[gdpdht]

Regarding AI aggresiveness, has anyone seen an AI use nukes and as a first strike before the human player uses them?

In the three games I have played until now the games finished with a space ship victory before anyone had the chance to build nukes and use them. So I think I will disable that victory in my next game so that the modern age is not cut short.

[Lucan]

has anyone seen an AI use nukes and as a first strike before the human player uses them?

Not yet. In fact, in all the games I've played so far, I've been the only one to get nukes at all.

One thing I liked about Civ 3 is that it forced you to think long and hard about acquiring nuclear weapons. D'you remember, when you built your first one, your own civilization would hate you, never mind all the others?

What I really want is to have (A) a nice big nuclear arsenal, and (B) a damn good reason not to use it.

I've found that nuking somebody doesn't have the same devastating effect on your international relations that it used to. It used to be that if you fired one nuke at someone, the rest of the world would immediately declare war on you.

[Freddz]

In my third game, I played on Prince difficulty with Gandhi.
I had pretty much a tech lead from the start, and with a lucky patch of marble beside a second town I could build a lot of wonders. Marble is very powerful for a builder.
Built most of the wonders. No one attacked me until in the late 1800s or beginning 1900 or so when the Aztec made a move on me, but I was a bit dissapointed to see his major force in just one great stack. I punished him greatly with several artillery and tanks as I had pretty decent defence all the way through the game.

In the end game, my tactic was just to have state property to appease the biggest (and chinese) neighbor. I really think they should be just a bit more aggressive when a player is about to win or have a big tech lead. There should be a minus in the final 100 turns on diplo if you have a tech lead of 4 or more important techs or so.

I must admit though, that I played above my own normal sloppy standard and micromanaged every worker to get specialized towns and all. And that I constantly had times when I concentrated on upgrading military better than I usually do. Eventually, I won a cultural victory in 1992 but it could easily have been won earlier if I had specialized more on it turning up the cultural % earlier.

All in all, my experience with the A.I. is that he is a little bit too unaggressive, and a bit too easy to manipulate if you have the lead, but I have so far only played on Noble and Prince.
I'm glad he isn't superaggressive all the time though, like in the earlier versions of civ.
This way the builder gets some breathing room, but a bit too much breathing room at times.

[Freddz]

To add to the above I wrote, I would like to state that I feel that constant pressure from the A.I. has always been a huge fun factor in civ-games, and this game sometimes lack it for large periods of playing time if you do good.

[SSBLoveU]

I am playing Spain because Isabella is the cutest partner to build an empire with. Persia was friendly with me even thou they did not like my religion. I developed quickly, and as usual, I had one of the most popular cities. When I began to explore, I found America and Germany. Who in turn attempted to find me, but stumbled into Persia. Germany and America have been asking me to stop trading with Persia. They have not stopped the war since the earliest part of the game. I like the peaceful AI. The barbarians attack forever while upgrading their own units. The Huge map is small. Of course, I only play in the epic mode, and I have not finished my first game yet.