What's a good way to prop up the AI?

[Privateer]

Does anyone know a good way of helping the AI stay somewhat competitive in the modern age and up? My games usually end up being my fusion tanks against their machinegunners. That's if I'm lucky; otherwise it might even be musketeers against me. Of course, this is boring, and I'm thinking of ways to make the AI not fall so far behind.

Before you suggest just cranking up the difficulty, I naturally thought of that. I can't survive the ancient age on Diety. Basicly, the early game is too hard on Diety, but the mid-game and late game is too easy on King and below. Emperor works well sometimes, but I often still get kicked around in ancient times.

So, I give the AI techs and money instead, but the problem is that they are often so far behind in infrastructure, it's like giving a monkey an M-16. It might hurt you by accident, but it's still no great adversary.

I guess my biggest problem is that I give AI techs too late. For a while it seems like they could still challenge me, and by the time I start helping them stay competitive, they are already too far behind to threaten me even if I give them everything.

Anybody else had this problem with weak mid-game opponents? Any good solutions?

[Grandpa Troll]

try playing deity a bit more to bring up your "A" game

I love this game been playing so long..I enjoy the occcassional smacking I get by ai

[Privateer]

Thank you, Grandpa Troll.

I doubt I'll play on Diety. I don't want too big a challenge nor really want to play against humans. I really like the later stages of the game where you have modern and future techs, so I wouldn't be very thrilled if AI rides over me in the early game repeatedly.

I've tried a few things in terms of helping the AI and it seems that my biggest advantage comes from three things: intelligent wonder selection, relatively small and outdated military, and due focus on the navy. I think it's interesting to analyze this because it shows what I'm doing right.

The AIs don't seem to pursue key wonders very aggressively. Oh, sure, they will build wonders sometimes, but they wouldn't try their hardest that get THAT tech and beat everybody to it. Once I get London Exchange, for instance, my science just skyrockets because a huge chunk of gold that used to go to maintenance is free. Edison's lab is nice too. This is the point where the AIs drop badly behind, even if they were kind of keeping up before.

Sometimes they can't keep up even this far. The reason is my earlier leap in population and thus production/gold/science around the time Ocean Faring and Hullmaking become available. I build ships aggressively and post two-unit groups of them around my major ports. That lets me put up fishing nets in huge quantities and not worry much about the AI coming and ravaging those expensive structures. They can come, but even a Trireme costs more than a firshery, and I make sure they lose that Trireme if it hits my net. With all the extra gold(ocean tiles give 5 gold, unlike flatlands with, which I'd otherwise have to rely on) and food, my cities grow very strong and I can divert a lot of free people to mining. Mining just makes my production and economy explode. In a good way.

Lastly, I usually limit my military to armies posted on border chokepoints, which I established during the settlement phase, as well as fleets. Together, this is usually enough to defend myself against almost anything the AIs can muster. This lets my cities concentrate on building improvements, while the AIs build humongous Musketeer stacks that have no hope of digging out my five Pikemen and four Cannons out of that Fortification anyway. So, their developemnt falls behind and mine continues.

[J Bytheway]

There is one thing you could try. Open up your DiffDB.txt (in [Your CTP directory]\ctp2_data\default\gamedata) and find the difficulty level you're playing on. Look for lines like these:

AI_TECHNOLOGY_COST 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.0 
AI_PRODUCTION_COST_ADJUSTMENT 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 0.4 
AI_GOLD_ADJUSTMENT 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.1 1.2

These give the AI bonuses. Each of the five numbers in each field corresponds to an age of the game. As you can see, the bonus given to the AI increases as the game goes on (in an effort to prevent the problem you're experiencing). You can make this bonus more extreme in the later ages.

Another possibility is to try playing without building the London Exchange, or some other such handicap.

[Privateer]

Nice! Just what I was looking for!

Thanks, J Bytheway!