I just finished (quit/gave up) a game as Cat. going for a space colony but I noticed something and I wonder if anyone can tell me why. I had a decent number of cities (6 or 7) and shared a continent with Wang Kon and Suiliman (sp). I gathered a stack of Rifleman and trebs to roll Suil. since he was teching fast and had a higher score. I sent a spy in and saw that in just that city he had like 25 Grenadiers and 15 cap. along with a splash of other units. So I decided to roll Wang Kon instead.

Okay enough history on to my question. How can he have such large cities? He had 12 or 15 cities all with pop 18 or more. None of them had farm spams or such and my cities were all around 6 or 8.

So how does the AI grow cities so large and so fast?

So how does the AI grow cities so large and so fast?
I think its the sickness decrease and happyness increase...
and anyways Ottomans are crazy about expanding and getting GIGANTIC cities.
i dont think anybody gets bigger cities than them except for Gilgamesh on a couple of occasions.
but personally i think the Ottomans are the biggest expansionistic civ like....ever.

They get massive food bonuses as well on the harder levels

They get massive food bonuses as well on the harder levels

Excuse me, were do you get that from o_O

I always saw bonuses to production, science and maintenance in the handicaps, but never about food

Well it's obviously not true JujuLautre, in any given game at some point you'll have enough Espionage to look into some of the AI cities. The happiness/health adjustments are there to see. Theres definitely not any food bonus - unless Mr.Olleus means "better start locations", but again I've seen AIs with junk starts too.
If anything, the AI might whip less, and due to more happiness/health than the player would generally not have to halt growth.

The AI also gets massive reductions in maintainence, making larger cities more profitable.

Not to mention that they get a hammer reduction for everything (fast granaries/workers) = faster growth

Yeah, on higher levels the bonuses help them expand and they prioritize food over production or commerce. I'm not sure how ridiculous the happy bonuses are but I think thats the ticket.

I just finished (quit/gave up) a game as Cat. going for a space colony but I noticed something and I wonder if anyone can tell me why. I had a decent number of cities (6 or 7) and shared a continent with Wang Kon and Suiliman (sp). I gathered a stack of Rifleman and trebs to roll Suil. since he was teching fast and had a higher score. I sent a spy in and saw that in just that city he had like 25 Grenadiers and 15 cap. along with a splash of other units. So I decided to roll Wang Kon instead.

Okay enough history on to my question. How can he have such large cities? He had 12 or 15 cities all with pop 18 or more. None of them had farm spams or such and my cities were all around 6 or 8.

So how does the AI grow cities so large and so fast?




The bonuses that the AI gets in some levels is that there is a reduced % of the food required to grow the next pop. Let's say that a human and an AI have the same city on a certain high difficulty level. The AI will probably get his/her city up to pop2 first because there might be, say, less food required to grow to the next pop (such as 80% as much as the human has to).

I just Worldbuildered some tests to see it for myself: indeed, the AI has bonuses for food to, thanks for the information.

I didn't do extensive tests, but at normal speed/emperor level, the AI needed 3 less food to grow to the next level at pop 1, 2 and 5.

That is interesting. It's not as much a bonus when you first look at it but over time it does add up.

More accurately, it's a bonus to growth, not food. With the same amount of food and health and happiness, the AI controlled city can't grow to a larger size. But it will get at maximum size somewhat sooner at high difficulty levels.

The various bonuses at high difficulty levels do add up for the AI, but they don't explain the difference between a size 6 to 8 city for the human player and size 18 for the AI (like the OP told). The AI must have done something better. Most of the bonuses appear at levels above noble.

well, the AI does get given bonuses for sure on the higher levels. But see the thing is, you had a problem in that a 'runaway' civ had formed and unfortunately it hadnt been dealt with quickly enough. evidently you saw the problem because you noticed he was high in score etc. but he had become just tooo powerful.

I think the main problem here isnt the bonus but the overall strategy. If an enemy civ can build unit 20percent quicker, that means we build units 40percent more than the AI to get the advantage, or war better or preferably both. Either way, you need to create a strategy to stop too large build up of troops occuring, it really depends on ur situation. in one game i played i had the chinese with 2.5 million troops who were knocking down civ after civ on a pangea map....i knew that they could achieve a domination victory if i didnt act quick....we were technologically similar...
he had grenadiers, i had rifles (grens beat rifles normally) so he had the slight advantage..i had about 1.5million troops, which is considerably less and certainly not enough to take the fight to the enemy..
so what did i do?
i built me some cannons and stockpiled rifles just behind our frontlines and i wardecced....
i sent one-two units into china just to get their leaders attention..
then the inevitable stack of doom came..i waited till they got to outside my frontline city before cannoning them and sallying my riflemen out of the city to hit the weakened troops ( i couldnt afford for them to run off before i killed them)..overall i must have been down to 1mill troops by the end of the war, and he was down to 1.5million.....me closing the gap by 500,000 troops as all i could achieve in that war since he was so damn strong, i lost no cities and i went for peace once i felt i had killed enough of his troops...
call it a war of attrition.....it works sometimes, i think in your case, this type of war would have done the job....its high risk though, u can easily lose the war if u cant use ur troops with peak efficiency..
edit: actually i lost two cities but regained them and signed peace.