AI victories other than space race?

[Phaedrus1313]

I'm very curious if people have seen the AI either achieve or attempt any victory types other than space race. In my experience (many games at noble, prince, and monarch), the computer, pretty much regardless of how aggressive it is during the meat of the game, ends up digging in and trying to build a space ship once it reaches rocketry and the Apollo Program...

I haven't tried it yet, but does anyone know if disabling the space race as an allowed victory condition causes the computer to actively attempt other victory means (at least domination/conquest, but I'd be very impressed and glad to see it try for culture or diplomacy). I'm afraid that if I disable space race, the AI will sit around and do its same old, same old until reaching 2050.

thanks,
Lee

(Finally won my first monarch game (a peaceful game the entire way culminating in a space race victory) after 16 tries yesterday. Woo!)

[ghen]

Its possible for the AI to win Diplomatic if you set the vote up.. I've never seen the AI put victory to a vote though.

[Cort Haus]

Congrats for beating Monarch peacefully, Phaedrus. How many cities did you manage to build? What kind of map was it?

It certainly seems like the AI is geared-up towards a Space Race and not really anything else. Wouldn't it be great to see the AI spreading 3 religions around, building cathedrals and beelining for Radio to get a culture win for a change! Maybe in the XP.

[Phaedrus1313]

Hi Cort,

It was a standard size continents map. I'd tried a bunch of pangaea maps on monarch but put them aside as I couldn't expand quickly enough before my neighbors swallowed up the available space.

Oddly, I (random leader --> Cyrus/Persians) ended up on an island by myself, with ALL of the 6 other civs on a giant continent a few ocean squares away. This allowed me to expand at my own pace, ending up with 8 cities (7 of my own and one captured barb. city) spread out on the island. Even still I didn't quite close my cultural borders, and Asoka snuck in two small cities once we all got Galleons.

When I met everyone else (I did a relative beeline for caravels so that I could meet otherpeople), I was next to last in points and lacking a lot of ancient tech. and a couple of contemporary techs. I kept teching deeper into the tree so that I could trade the new techs for mounds of old techs, and kept ramping up my commerce on my island. Researching astronomy was key as it opened up huge trade routes that rocketed my commerce forward.

While I did concentrate commerce in a couple of cities, all of my cities except for one ended up quite large (15 - 21 in size) and so it proved worthwhile to build universities, etc. in most of them. The small city (size 8) was my production center, with Heroic Epic & IW, and it churned out all military units in 1 or 2 turns and supplied them to my whole civ.

The spanish landed once w/ elephants, grenadiers, and conquistadors, but i had just started building infantry and marines by then, and even though they landed about 30 troops, we repelled them w/o much trouble and made peace as soon as we could (and got some gold in the deal).

My commerce and production were eventually #1 and as my pop. grew my score grew as well until I was #1. I built the Apollo Program first and beelined for Fusion, building the Internet along the way which grabbed me 3 free techs to keep me ahead. I sold non-spaceship techs to my rivals (e.g. mass media for 4,000 gold) to keep my coffers up so that I could run at 100% science the whole way. Saladin was my main competition, but he was still a couple of spaceship parts short when I won.

I founded Confucianism (even w/o trying for the CS slingshot) which brought in a bit of gold through a handful of missionaries. Other than that, it was just a solid infrastructure that ended up rocketing me ahead.

And yeah, it would be great to be able to think to myself: I wonder why the AI isn't attacking or building spaceship? And hey, those are 3 damn nice cities it has. Hmmm...?

Oh well.

Lee

[Cort Haus]

Good to see you pulled that off from an isolated start. I've got a game like that where I'm about 10 techs behind on meeting the others, and I reckon that's too far gone. How many techs behind were you when you met them?