Why doesn't the AI use public works?

[Akron]

I've had CtP for over a year but for some reason it never worked and finally figured out why and fixed my computer up. I got the 1.2 patch and the game is alright, but the AI plain sucks! I'm playing on king level, and in the ranking screen everyone else is going linearly, all clumped at the bottom of the graph while my line is zooming up exponentially. No one is able to even come close to taking a city of mine, and they are FAR behind in tech. Even though in the middle game I deliberately gave all of them all my techs and continued doing that for some time and let them get all the wonders. Somehow, they still suck. When I got the globesat, I realized why. They never improve their terrain! They build cities in the middle of deserts mountain ranges, forests, and other places where they can get absolutely no food! None of their cities have more than maybe 4 tiles improved. They never seem to terraform. On the other hand, for all my cities, all arable land is farmed, all mountains and hills mined, and all ocean squares fished.

So does the computer EVER improve their economy to a reasonable extent? Or do they just build units constantly, even though their cities are dirt poor, with little production and terrible growth? This never happened in civ 2. Games in civ 2 were actually challenging. (And civ 2 also had diplomacy. Activision must have been on crack when they took that out and replaced it with this. Stupidity.)

[Akron]

About the difficulty thing, when you have played 200 turns into the game and gotten into the "good part," its EXTREMELY discouraging to have to restart from scratch. Anyway, I don't want to have to waste my time playing deity to find out whether that is a challenge. Thats why I'm wondering whether I should go ahead and play on deity without mods or get some kind of mod and then play. I don't want to mess with any mods, but if I have to then I will. There really should be a way to change difficulty in game so that the game is fun.

(One suggestion for future civ games is a level where depending on how well you are doing, the difficulty will change.)

[Locutus]

The MedPack 3 beta (on WesW's homepage) is exaclty what you're looking for: a much more challenging AI (don't be surprised if you get your ass kicked on higher difficulty levels ) and more fun in playing as well (less cheating, more extra units/features).

[WesW]

Akron, if you do get my modpack, be sure to read the Miscellaneous readme. I think you will find some things that pertain to your computer setup.

[TheLimey]

Firstly, why are you playing on King and complaining about difficulty. Play on Deity and then complain.

Civ2 cities cheated far worst than any game I can ever recall. Production/Gold/Trade levels unrealistically modelled to the improvements in a city. Science was another thing that was based more on difficulty level than the computers expertise in science.

Without an AI strong enough to pose a realistic threat, the AI has to make up for this by fudging the resources available to it, so that it can makes up for its inadequacies, and can stay relatively close behind.

FYI I respect CtP for limiting the cheating to simple multipliers rather than totally departing from 'game reality'.

I agree that some of the weighting code in the AI files was weak. Have you tried the 'Awesome AIP's pack'? This goes some way to retifying the AI's weaknesses.