Started my first game of RoMRevDCM 2.2 today and I had a couple observations...

Is it just me or is it just too easy? I normally play vanilla BTS at Nobel and do pretty good, but they AI keeps me on my toes at least as far as score. But I am totally kicking butt at Nobel in RoM. I'm nearly to the industrial era and my score is easily double the next highest civ. And I'm cranking at 95% science with change to spare. Meanwhile most of the other civs are fracturing left and right. Not sure how many civs this standard map started with, but now there's like 15 of them. Most only have a couple cities. I had maybe one city that I got from teh Mongols nearly get to the point of rebelling, but that was pretty easy to fix. Why does the AI have such a tough time with rebellion?

It did help that I was able to Horse Archer rush the Mongols out of existence early on (ha! Irony!) so that gave me a pretty good leg up on everyone else.

Now, I know I'm not THAT good at Civ. I guess the simple answer is to just raise the difficulty, but I was wondering if these are common observations.

I had also played a game of RoM 1.1. It was a similar situation there. It is just so easy to get a civ going FAST with all those nifty buildings and free specialists. I think one combination of civics got me 4 free specialists.

In fact RoM is more complicated than vanilla BTS. It is even more complicated with Revolution. However in any strategy game the more complicated it gets the easier it is to kick the poor AI's butt. BTS being simpler allows the AI a chance to be a challenge (for some time). Things that seem obvious for you are not so for the AI. You can use the extra buildings and match them in a city to maximize your gains. You have a long term strategy for how to specialize cities and prepare for invasions. The AI is programed for one step decision so it will choose the best building to build in a city (NOW) it won't decide based on the potentials of the city or how it envision the development of tiles improvements (the AI can't be programmed to have a vision in the first place).

Anyway, the short answer is "Play on a higher difficulty". You may find the game more challenging a little bit or at least in the early stages of the game. The AI will start with some advantages but will almost certainly lose them with time as you will still manage your empire better. Higher difficulties differ in two things 1- The AI starts with more techs and more units on some levels. 2- The AI is more likely to train more units and will most probably use them. However on higher difficulties the AI is not smarter nor is it a better empire manager.

Yeah, I really didn't have a whole lot of long term vision. I basically just built every available improvement in every city... usually starting with growth and then money, and then tech. Very little specialization. And that was quite successful. Well, that and, like I said, destroying my nearest neighbor earily on.

I'll try the higher levels, but I still wonder about the way the AI was so quicly fracturing from rebellion. Was that a function of having so little land and so many civs? Seriously, there was only like one AI that didn't fall appart from rebellion.

Yes, sometimes the Revolution mod hurts the AI more than it hurts the human player.

Yarnosh, you culd have a look in Revolution.ini in the Mods folder. It has some settings that affect the human player only, and some for the AI IIRC. I can't give you much specific help - you'll have to experiement with it yourself.

Or you could try straight RoM2.2 without the Rev add-on. ;)

JosEPh :)