I've been running the game automated; questions

[Miznia]

I've been playing on small maps, generally, with only three or four players, and I set myself to be the Barbs (meaning I do nothing). I've mostly done Apolyton Pack as Cradle gets a bit slow by 4000 BC.

One thing I've noticed, though, advancing Apolyton Pack to about 2000 AD, is that I never see any land unit more advanced than Infantryman (the guys in red), and no sea unit better than a Longship. Why might that be? Is tech progression just slow, or is it maybe because the AI isn't needing to replace any units?

Also, does anyone know what the trumpets, white flag, red encircled X, etc, symbols mean? I assume they're battles, but I can never tell what's going on, especially when it seems to involve boats.

I finally couldn't help but notice that no matter what the difficulty level, and be it Apolyton Pack or Cradle, the AI players make awfully slow progress in killing each other off. It's hard for me to tell what the main cause for that is.

Hope this message is clear.

Miznia

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Miznia
One thing I've noticed, though, advancing Apolyton Pack to about 2000 AD, is that I never see any land unit more advanced than Infantryman (the guys in red), and no sea unit better than a Longship. Why might that be? Is tech progression just slow, or is it maybe because the AI isn't needing to replace any units?

In Apolyton Pack tech progression is much slower than in the original game, as far as I remeber I was finished with the tech tree between 1500 and 1800 maybe 1900 but I was fast and had enough time but the AI was always hopless underdeveloped, that is also true for the AI in Apolyton Pack, I had some success to make the AI ahead of you until the industrial age when pollution comes into play and reduce the city happyness of the AI havily, you could test GoodMod with the latest strtegies.txt how it work there, of course with pollution and without pollution.

Originally posted by Miznia
Also, does anyone know what the trumpets, white flag, red encircled X, etc, symbols mean? I assume they're battles, but I can never tell what's going on, especially when it seems to involve boats.

The trumped can mean two things: On the one hand it means that a unit was expelled but this is less probably. On the other hand it means that a tile improvement was pillages. Maybe there is a third possibility the AI civs can also just pillage a foreign trade route.

Originally posted by Miznia
I finally couldn't help but notice that no matter what the difficulty level, and be it Apolyton Pack or Cradle, the AI players make awfully slow progress in killing each other off. It's hard for me to tell what the main cause for that is.

That is a very rare event I just saw it twice, in one game one civ conquered another civ that appeared, because one city revolted on random (surprise, surprise). But it needed a lot of time to get the idea that it should reconquer this city, and first I increased the goal for choke points. In an non patch game I saw an AI civ that conquered another AI, nearly unfortunatly this powerfull civ was conquered by another more powerfull civ before it was ready to launch the final attack. And finnaly with a experimential strategies.txt I saw an AI civ that wiped out another huge AI civ. But normally the AIs make only slow progess to kill each other. The reason why the AI in Cradle is judged as so agressive is that Cradle contain frenzy mod this mod cuase the AI to move all its troops to the territory of the human player and not to other AI players.

-Martin