Has AI changed in 1.52?

[TheHateMale]

Just played my first post-1.52 patch game, and the AI seems to really have taken a dislike to me. 4 (out of 12) different civs all went straight past usable land to box me in before I could build my third city (this was on noble), one travelled over a screen's worth to do so (although much of that was tundra, so it sort of makes sense). After getting irritated and giving myself nukes and modern armor in the WorldBuilder (due to there being no 'stab them graphically in the face' option) I retired to check the expansion patterns. Sure enough, on the rest of the continent expansion tended to grow outward in a circle from the capital, but these civs dumped their second or third cities just outside my borders and worked back from there.

Do I need to change my tactics to total warmonger now to compete, or was I just randomly incredibly unlucky?

On a side note, the free unit or so that the AI gets at the beginning of the game seems a little overpowered on marathon, where it's ~30 turns that they have an extra scouting unit. I can deal with that though - it's the concerted aggressive city placement that was annoying.

[MasterDave]

I have not seen any huge changes in the AI since the patch. I have been playing on Monarch level lately.

[Darkstar]

That's standard AI tactics out of the box. Very irritating, but smart playing, considering its what I often do to them. The AI does occasionally due it to itself (other AI) so it's not just something it does to make the game more challenging for you.

To stop it, you need to beat them to the punch.

[TheHateMale]

Huh. I've not seen it happen to that scale before. Usually I don't have too much difficulty on noble. I suppose it was exacerbated by two of them declaring war on me as soon as they'd done it.

I'm going to go with unlucky coincidence and try another one tomorrow.

[Darkstar]

I usually ICS my starts, but on the starts I don't ICS, I've noticed the AI will always send their second or third settler out to get as close to me as possible.

Early on, you should definately be doing the standard SMAC land grab in SP. You want to box off the AI so you get the majoirty of all land possible. A cramped AI has problems doing a sea run around you then, especially if it cannot get in touch with the other AI to do its standard liberal tech swapping.

[TheHateMale]

As I said, I don't normally have any problems outbuilding the AI, but I was in the middle of a continent, making boxing anyone else off impossible. I was just beaten to the position of my third city by about two turns (and due to the two square building radius had to put it quite a distance away), then soon after had three or four other settlers plonk down.

At the time of posting I was royally p'd off, but chilled now. My problem could have been trying to use the same build order on marathon that I was using on epic. 12 civs was possibly too many to use on a large Terra map as well. (What are the recommended numbers of civs for given map sizes?)

Live 'n learn. And stuff.