I've been trying to play as Japan, as they're generally the ancient/classical civ that the AI manages to succeed with the most. I don't get it. They start with only two settlers and two land units. (The Romans, who start at the same time, have three settlers and seven land units). They tend to be hemmed in by China. And when I play, I usually fall frustratingly far behind in the tech race.

How does the AI manage to succeed?

I think that a part of the success may be due to the longer timeline

@ Arkaeyn
Really? When I play as Japan I tend to do just fine, though there is a bit of luck invovled regarding your starting location. The key tends to be that you don't start with lots of tundra.If you build up enough units I find it's not too hard to invade China. In fact I've always found playing as China harder than Japan for some reason.

P.S.- Whenever I've played with Japan on high likeness they seem to get better starts.

I think that a part of the success may be due to the longer timeline

What makes the timeline longer? Is there something hardcoded that allows the Japanese to survive and last longer?

Really? When I play as Japan I tend to do just fine, though there is a bit of luck invovled regarding your starting location. The key tends to be that you don't start with lots of tundra.If you build up enough units I find it's not too hard to invade China. In fact I've always found playing as China harder than Japan for some reason.

Yeah, the tundra is important. Probably the main reasons the Vikings always stink, also.

I'm getting better at China, but it's still very difficult to balance getting resources, founding cities, and founding a religion (the last being key to long-term stability).

The classical era has been extended a few versions ago. This, despite the rebalancement, may have improved classical civs performance

Cramped Japanese starting location:

will they flip the chinese city? In that case you can't say it's cramped

Nope, I clicked a few turns in.

I just played Japan yesterday, found myself in the far east of the big land mass (weel just like the real Japan, but on the continent like the real Korea). I was far from every one (no China, no India or any other not middle eastern asian civ) met the Greek,Rome, Egypt and later on Turks, French, Spain, etc. The only civ that spawn near me and "flipped" one of my cities was Spain actually. I am playing middle level (monarch?) and doing very fine (on top with Russia) and I am some how the tech leader (about to discover liberalism when none has education). The only thing is that I won't score my HVC n 1 because a independant city spawed near my capital in the BC area was razed by the barbarian in the first AD period, I settled the area looooooog go but there are still some 5% independant culture there some 1000 years afterwards !!!!! snif. I even bulbed a great artist there to try to get rid of that remaining foreign culture, but it did nada. Next time, priority numebr one would be to settle ALL the land near my capital (or maybe I should have moved my Capital !!! I just thought about that idea now) !!

I have started a game as China on Monarch/Huge/High and Japan spawned in Siberia instead of on the empty Honsu island to the east. I restarted the game and settled more to the north, but Japan still didn't spawn on it's island. I wonder if that's something that can be improved...

I don't think I've played a single game of RAND as Japan where I started on an island. Actually, I don't remember the last time Japan had its own island at all.

Yeah, I've only seen it happen twice and would estimate from my expierience that it's happened only about 20% of the time.

I have played on 8 maps and Japan have had their own island on 5 or 6 of them. The rest of the time, they had a very narrow strip of land connecting it to mainland Asia.

That's what usually happens in my games too. Japan is to the east of China. Hence my surprise that Japan spawned on a Mongolia location when I was playing as China and there was a big island to the east of me.

That scenario must've been epic. Had Japan been a mainland Asian civ in real life, I just can't imagine what the world be like today.

Had Japan people been on mainland, their society would be really different isn't it? I mean, it developed the way it is now mainly because it's an island :)

And actually, they tried once to go mainland; did not succeed so much... :p

And thanks to that, the glorious USA is the worlds remaining superpower.
YEAAAAHHHH Nationalism. I'm one of those "ugly Americans" :mischief:

Hangzhou doesn't flip. ARG.

Yeah, I've only seen it happen twice and would estimate from my expierience that it's happened only about 20% of the time.

In my experience Japan starts on an island the majority of the times, both as AI and if I play it. Do you play with Huge map High Likeliness, and do you play the last version (it used to be how you report in the previous version) ?

I've got the newest version but I tend to play large, medium likeliness. The smaller map size may be the cause of this.

yes it is, exactly. I used to play large map before and Japan started on mainland most of the times. But it was also the previous version so I wasn't sure.