In the end, the game suffers under the same shortcoming as so many other games:

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Blake
In short, AI's don't and can't understand what needs to be done to win. They can only follow their scripts and whether they win or lose comes down entirely to luck.

Thats what make the game stale after alot of playing. After you get a feel for the script it becomes less of a challenge. Adding some randomness could help.

[Axxaer]

They have alot of randomness.

[Strategist83]

Good post, Blake.

Originally posted by Blake
If the AI is given awareness of players, and the objective of killing the player, then the player would lose every game, because the AI's would just team up.

I of course am not asking to have all the AI's team up to destroy the player. I want all the AI's to seek victory by whatever means necessary, including AI vs AI action.

Originally posted by Blake In contrast, if the AI's are not able to distinguish between the human and other AI's, and has the objective of personal victory, then it's going to lose anyway because AI's simply aren't skilled and devious enough, any half-decent human would run circles around AI's playing for their own victory, because an AI really can have no awareness of what it needs to do to triumph, it understands how to play but not how to play better than the player and other AI's. In particular it doesn't understand the nuances of defeating others so that they can't win. If the AI has a tendency to attack stronger players, the player will stay under the radar. If the AI attacks weaker players, the player will make sure to be big and scary so no individual AI will dare attack. If the AI attacks randomly, the player will just turtle up and let the AI's destroy each other, with some opportunistic nibbling on weakened AI's.
In short, AI's don't and can't understand what needs to be done to win. They can only follow their scripts and whether they win or lose comes down entirely to luck.

That is what the above-noble 'cheating' difficulties are for: Artificially empowering the AI's. Or do you believe you can still run circles around the AI at 'deity'?

[Vynd]

I'm with the people who argue that while dogpiling can happen, it can also be avoided or managed through good diplomacy. I have never suffered an unprovoked attack from a friendly AI. I have seen my relations drop and have them be followed up pretty quickly by a war. But in this circumstances there were always warning signs, like the fact that I was trading with their enemy, or that my military was obviously much weaker than theirs, or my culture was pushing into their territory.

So my advice is get some friends, don't piss them off, and try to stay at least in the middle of the pack militarily. If you do get attacked, get your friends to help you fight. Also, don't neglect to play the AIs against each other. They're a lot less likely to attack you if they're busy fighting each other.

[bucephalus12]

If you pay attention to your relationship indicators with the other civs you can get a pretty good feel for who to watch out for. One good rule of thumb I use is when starting off next to an aggressive leader like Monty or Tokugawa, I will usually invest a little more in military in the early game than I would do normally. Also, if they do declare war I always try to bring another civ in to help me out. Of course this can be difficult to do in the early game if you have nothing to offer them.

True it is always possible to to get wiped out early but this tends to happen rarely in my experience and I agree with previous posts that the very real possiblity of losing makes the game interesting. A game I can beat every time quickly ends up on the shelf.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by bucephalus12
If you pay attention to your relationship indicators with the other civs you can get a pretty good feel for who to watch out for. One good rule of thumb I use is when starting off next to an aggressive leader like Monty or Tokugawa, I will usually invest a little more in military in the early game than I would do normally. Also, if they do declare war I always try to bring another civ in to help me out. Of course this can be difficult to do in the early game if you have nothing to offer them.

I would go further and try to get other civs to start up on them before they have a chance to turn against me Sometimes this can be easy if they have Caesar or Alexendar on the other side.