Is it just me or is the game way harder after the patch?

[Shogun Gunner]

Yes, I had no problem at Noble keeping up and exceeding the AI. However on higher difficulty levels, I find myself severly outstripped by the AI is exactly the situation described. To keep pace scientifically and city expansion, I neglected my military and fought round after round of military conflicts with my neighbors. Interesting that they never fought each other, they only took turns fighting me. Bastards.

Okay, good. This is my next challenge in cIV. Good information. Thanks.

[AoA]

Geo is 100 % right. I've complained a lot about the AI launching wars on me (and the -3 diplo hit I get just for being attacked) but its only been when I've had weakly defended cities. The AI even when annoyed can be appeased for quite a long time and never war if you gots the muscle.

Shogun: I have had some success and victories with only defending. In fact, some games there never wasn't even a shot fired against me,

But it does seem like you have to expand early and often. I think gone are the days of SMAC when I can win with 4-6 bases (and the AI has 20), no conquest and no crawlers. Thats a peaceful relaxed game.


Is it me or does the AI respect a mix of units better than all 1 kind?

[Cordelayne]

There is one most important rule: never fall lower than 2 on soldiers. You don't have to use them very often, but you have to have them.

[xxFlukexx]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
uh oh.... Am I starting to detect a "one formula" to winning? I also have had the experience of not faring well when sticking to building and science. And yes, AIs smell the blood in the water -- which is actually a good thing, it seems realistic and a good tactic on their part.

However, one of the knocks against Civ3 was that there is no way to remain peaceful and win the game in the upper difficulty levels. Is this thread suggesting that if you do not prune your neighbors, you cannot win?

This has given me the idea to play the next cIV game completely peaceful -- only defending if attacked -- and concentrate of building/science AND a strong military to see if that will avoid conflict and allow me to be a builder. Is this a viable strategy?

Yeah I really doubt you can beat an AI to the space race without super good luck on continents or attacking the AI in some way. The bonuses the AI gets on the spacerace is just too much to handle, even if you have a good tech lead on the AI(which I dunno how you'd do that on Emperor), the AI gets discounts all over the place, I believe it was 810 hammers for those expensive spaceship parts compared to 1000 for the player.

I don't think there's only one strategy, but I definetly think you need to go to war with the top 1-2 AIs pointwise eventually. You could just bribe others to war with the top dogs or just turn off spaceship victory or go for a cultural victory, but a diplo or spaceship victory being non-agressive? mmmm I don't think so on the harder difficulties.

[guermantes]

Sorry, a bit off topic, but how would I go about doing that? I have not grasped the possibilities of diplomacy yet...

>
>You could just bribe others to war with the top dogs...
>

[Datajack Franit]

one thing I noticed with the new patch: the AI floods your land with settlers, building their stupid cities 10 tiles away from your capital