What's going on here?

Before BNW I had to worry about the AI gobbling up luxuries, planting cities next to me and coveting my land. Now I'm on a Huge Continents map / Marathon with Poland and France on the same landmass. There's more than enough expansion room but it's 750AD and Casi has three cities and Napo two. Is this a byproduct of the nerfed AI aggression others have been talking about?

VladTepes said:

Before BNW I had to worry about the AI gobbling up luxuries, planting cities next to me and coveting my land. Now I'm on a Huge Continents map / Marathon with Poland and France on the same landmass. There's more than enough expansion room but it's 750AD and Casi has three cities and Napo two. Is this a byproduct of the nerfed AI aggression others have been talking about?

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More or less so, the AI simply has other focuses now, and generally it seems to like culture a lot. Some civs still expand wherever there is land available but a lot prefer to grow tall and focus on wonders and improving their cities.

Also the AI has more unhappiness problems now (closer to those of human players) so expansion is more difficult.

Certainly in my experiences with BNW, while it's more sporadic I've still had some pretty aggressive settling from my opponents. In my first game as Brazil, I had Ramesses spring up a couple of cities within a couple tiles of my borders.

We were never aggressive (quite the opposite) but it still flummoxed me enough to change my settling plans considerably.

Also the AI doesn't get as much free happiness anymore, so they can't expand as quickly.

The AI seems to play more like a human player does, they get their early 3-5 cities and then stay on them for a while before the mid-lategame happiness bonuses kick in. Crazy city-spam does still happen but mostly in the industrial era and beyond. It's also less beneficial to the AI due to science and happiness nerfs.

It's for the better I think, a G&K AI would build infinite cities and still have 80 happiness. Culture and ideology pressure would have no effect on them.

VladTepes said:

Before BNW I had to worry about the AI gobbling up luxuries, planting cities next to me and coveting my land. Now I'm on a Huge Continents map / Marathon with Poland and France on the same landmass. There's more than enough expansion room but it's 750AD and Casi has three cities and Napo two. Is this a byproduct of the nerfed AI aggression others have been talking about?

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Either this or they roll sometimes lower on their expansion chart. Certainly Cathy is not the old good REXer I remember her to be (and neither is so twisted...) but that can be a personal observation and not stand. In my last game there was plenty of room to settle should I wanted to. They also seem to respect the don't settle near me diplomatic option now.

Peng Qi said:

Also the AI doesn't get as much free happiness anymore, so they can't expand as quickly.

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That is probably another of the reasons indeed.

1: Gold, the AI has sanity checks so it doesn't go to war with a trade partner and it's easier for the AI to get gold starved.

2: Bug Fix: The AI used gold to much to buy unit's in G&K that the devs finally found and fixed.

3: More stuff to build

Alex or Monty, etc. is no less a warmonger than they were before, but they are less stupid, avoiding those suicide wars from G&K.

On #2: Not so much a bug fix but reverting; they had on purpose increased AI cash rushing of units. (But found it had more of an effect than what they were trying to do.)

Note that I'm now finding in later game I'm now finding the AI just sitting on huge stashes of cash.

The AI does have a lot more stuff to build now.

On the trade partners; the AI is considering its trade routes with other players; NOT other players trade routes with them. (The AI would be happy to cancel the target's trade routes) In fact if you see an AI winding down its trade routes with you its a good sign you are on their hit list.

Lets not just discuss the how the AI works again ok? Whether flawed or godly working, it will not be a long time before it is tweaked and we will see what it was of the two.