Does The Ai Cheat?!?!

[Harovan]

I can't see a starting location penalty for the human, and I have seen AI capitals in hill and jungle areas, with just a few grassy tiles and no bonus resources.

Sure the starting location does matter. I had several starts with only desert and coast around. Time for a laugh and a ctrl-shift-q. But you have no need to be very picky. All you need for a start position are 2 shielded grassland tiles. Don't compare the expansion speed too quick, in till 2000..1500BC the AI sure has a lead, but that's the point, where your geometric progression starts to work. The AI meanwhile builds useful stuff like Temples, Pyramids and Oracles in it's productive cities. Let it. You don't need this stuff (yet). Build settlers, and keep your cities size 1-3. About 1000BC you break even, and 10AD you're the biggest fish, given you succeeded to keep peace. At this time, the territory quality should have been middled out.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Sir Ralph,

The problem was that once the AI dicovers where you are and you have one city in place, you can't produce another settler fast enough to block the gap.

Not that having the gap blocked stops the AI from sending troops though your lands. Especially since I was trying to build settlers and only had a few spearmen and warriors. The last game, the Romans settlers showed up with Legionaries at around 2000 BC (from their 2 cities) and my Egyptians were still trying to build a settlers ( from my two cities). The Romans send 4 settlers and Legionaries past my blocking city before I could finish one settler in 20 turns (my cities were growing at 10 turns/pop and that was all I could manage with the locations available).

When I managed to trade for a map using an auto-save just to see what I was up against, the Romans had 4 bonus food tiles and 1 luxury tile each at their first two sites. Guess it's time to take off the "Culturally Linked Starting Locations" option...

D.

[Harovan]

Gen.Dragolen: So you mind that the AI sneaks cities in? Let it. These cities are easy prey later, either cultural or (most likely) military. Sometimes I even intentionally leave gaps to invite the AI, especially to crappy places where a city would not be able to build more settlers. In the BC's I try to expand peaceful, in the early AD's I consolidate my empire, and when's Knight time..., well, that's another story.

[Gen.Dragolen]

If I don't mind, it doesn't matter... I think

Sir Ralph,

Well, it was a little un-nerving to see so many settlers so close together that early in the game and all of them headed in my direction. The Romans put out 4 cities in a hurry and had another settler on the way into my heartland. Starting with a city in a veritible desert was not conducive to my ReXing plans in that game.

The only grace was that with the Egyptian Culture, I would have had most of them by 1 AD. Assuming the Romans didn't try to wipe me out first... Those Legionaires can be annoyingly tough to kill. Usually costs me an archer and sometimes a swordsman to finish one. And cities need to be well bombarded to even bother.

Like I said, the difference was the starting locations. I see more games where the Computer Civ's (CC) gets a sweet starting location and it just follows that they can out produce you... at first.


D.