First game, fractal, prince, Babylon, standard, 6 opponents,
great fun.
Won eventually with a slightly shoddy rocket
after 19 nailbiting years,
(the new spaceship building tech tree is much, much tougher)
as Churchill, who had only ever been friendly till the launch,
threw everything he had at me and my vassals.
Modern armour is good. Drafting is good.

What was weird was that I only ever met five opponents.
But to the east of my land was a huge island which had several barb size 8+ cities on it before me and Churchill colonised it.

On the replay it appeared that Stalin had actually started there,
never managed to build a second city
and was then destroyed by barbarians in the BCs.
Blimey. He wasn't very good.
I don't remember this happening in any gane I've ever played before.

Reasons?
One big difference from Warlords is that the AI doesn't always seem to protect cities as strictly (min 2 archers always) as it used to.
Another thing I noticed is that my early scouts/warriors come across
many more wounded animals than before.
It seems to me that the AI no longer gets huge bonuses against lions etc
and actually their early units get killed a lot more,
including it would seem in Stalin's case, his first few settlers.

My third game I met Victoria 0AD or so,
I had four cities, my neighbour had six
and she, alone on a lovely, big island to the north had two!
What had she been doing for 4,000 years?

I stumbled upon maybe the big reason for early AI struggles in this game
as about 1200BC my two smug hilltop archers
were shocked to see FOUR barb axemen
suddenly appear out of thin air right next to our border.
Luckily these buggers went off wandering before coming back 500 years later
to be ridden down by rapidly built chariots,
but still, I've never seen such concentrations of potential early death before.

Maybe it's these scary armies of axemen that did for Stalin and trashed Viccy?

Actually I concur, I was playing Bynzatine..

I caught Willem De Orange with two cities completely unguarded (size 6-8)! This was AD, and he had longbow in other cities.

I was also sat outside Hannibals territory, sat in captured Carthage.. when I watch him a few turns later he moves a stack of archers and numidian cav, with a catapult away out of he nearest city to me (It was his production city, size 6).

I couldn't believe my eyes, I have NEVER seen the AI do this.

Needless to say, I caught those cities with my Horse Archers.. and raped them!

Very very odd though, might go back into a save and get a screenie..

I've found that the AI sometimes diverts too much of its economy to espionage. On a continent in my first game, there were at least 8 other civs.... most of which were humming along nicely with plenty of room to expand for everyone.

Except the Vikings!

They had three times as many espionage points as me, and I had double the espionage points of everyone else. The Vikings had 2 or 3 cities while everyone else had 8+.... they were also far far behind in techs. I'm not sure whether this is a planned strategy for the AI to sometimes take, but it didnt work out particularly well for them. I eventually took them under the wing by vasselising them but they'll never amount to much - they just fell too far behind.

The stack of barbs could have come from a random event. I had one last night where very early on a stack of 4 spearmen appeared as a result of a random event.
This was my first game and it was very intresting. I had similar settings (standard size fractal map on Noble). I was on a large W shaped continent with four other civs. There were two islands which both had a civ on. On one of these was Isabella and she managed to get all the religions and did not contact the rest of us until quite late in the game. It was strange at the time to see myself and four other civs all without a religion.
The thing I learnt most was that I need to pay attention to the espionage side of things. The Ai really kicked my ass because of this.

The AI acts more like humans and takes risks I think. For example in my first game I was in war with Sitting bull and while I was camped out side his city the workers where building improvements 3 tiles further!

The AI also doesn't ensure it can't lose works now.

I've captured numerous workers that previously would have moved away from my units. Now they just kept on doing their thing.

I don't think it has anything to do with the AI changes, considering I saw this happen a few times in Warlords. Most memorably was Ghandi, who founded Buddhism and Hinduism only to have his cities captured by barbarians...and the barbarians were in control of two Holy Cities for pretty much the entire game, until the AI started using nukes on them. :lol:

Every game I've played thus far I've used the raging barbs option, and it's not unusual to see 1 or 2 civs crumble under the sheer numbers. I think it's hilarious tbh, as it's about time the AI suffered under this condition too. In past games if you chose the raging barb option, then went on to build the GW, it made the raging barb option redundant as the AI weren't affected by them.

I've seen the AI be really deviously clever with workers as well.... I saw 3 barb workers moving across the northern edge of my border (no other AI's were further north).... I quickly knocked out a Knight as I had no forces present in the area...... chased after them and a couple of turns later came into viewing range as my movement points ran out.

Next turn I followed after them and lo and behold, there was only 1 of them ahead - it took another turn to capture him and then I wandered round for a bit looking for the others.

My curiosity was peaked, so I looked in the WB and found that the AI had split his 3 workers up and sent them different ways!!! 1 was heading north, the other had doubled back through the woods, and the last that I had caught had followed the path he'd been using.

Not sure how much of this I can ascribe to a planned strategy from the AI, but it was certainly unexpected.

Later situations saw more Worker shenanigans. Sometimes they leave the worker to just get caught - other times it can be like herding cats.