What difficulty?

What difficulty level starts you and the AI with everything exactly the same? No cheats or bonuses or anything.

None.

What you are looking for is Prince Difficulty - which is supposed to be "fair". However the AI still has some hidden bonuses like 60% barb bonus (compared to your 33%), 15% discount on unit hammer costs and paying only 1/5 of the unit maintenance costs.

Don't forget a pretty large happiness bonus. I'm not sure why the AI would get this.

salty mud said:

Don't forget a pretty large happiness bonus. I'm not sure why the AI would get this.

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Same reason as the other bonuses. The bonuses compensate for the AIs playing in a way that will typically lose them more than you, and to strategies that aren't as strong at specialising. More happiness allows them to have larger populations, more cities, and because they have more production slots, more units and buildings. The AI will never efficiently target Wonders, choose and adapt its tech paths to best effect, specialise generation of Great People (in fact when my spy peeks at AI cities, all specialist buildings are always unoccupied), or use its units carefully and without losses in war. So it has to use a brute force approach in all spheres to compete - it can't play a war as well as the human can, so it needs more units. It can't prioritise techs as well as a human can to meet its win condition, so it needs more beakers so that it can research more overall. It will make bad production decisions, so it needs to have more production to compensate. And so on and so forth.

This topic pops up all the time. The AI handicap is set for Chieftain, meaning it receives the bonuses at this level all of the time. Then there are the adjustments made for each level. For example, the AI only pays 67% unit maintenance as default (Chieftain), but then has an additional reduction (15%) as an AI bonus at Prince. It's the Chieftain handicap that gives the AI most of it's bonuses and you can change that to Prince if you want (under GlobalAIDefines - I attached a link to one of the previous threads). Just be prepared for a really boring game.

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ5/difficulties
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=387484

I just hate seeing the "people who like to smile the most" list eith me invariably at the bottom because I don't get the 8 or 9 bonus the AI does. Makes the list a bit useless really.

The answer is Chieftain difficulty.

salty mud said:

I just hate seeing the "people who like to smile the most" list eith me invariably at the bottom because I don't get the 8 or 9 bonus the AI does. Makes the list a bit useless really.

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You sure do get the 9 happiness bonus that the AI gets. What you don't get are the other happiness bonus that the AI gets!

I thought I remember reading a dev say something like on higher difficulties the AI makes optimal decisions, and on lower difficulties it makes less than optimal decisions. Ideally I would want to play with the AI always making the most optimal decisions, just without all the bonuses...

mike20599 said:

I thought I remember reading a dev say something like on higher difficulties the AI makes optimal decisions, and on lower difficulties it makes less than optimal decisions. Ideally I would want to play with the AI always making the most optimal decisions, just without all the bonuses...

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I surely wonder about that.
AI rarely seems to make optimal decisions as far as i can see, regardless of difficulty.

The AI is just plain stupid, it can't make any "optimal decisions" at all.

Of course on levels like Imm/Deity they attack you, but look what they're attacking with? They are an age higher than you and all you get is warriors, spears and archers...sometimes catapults.

You have 3 archers and 2 warriors to defend that horde of 20 units, of course you win as you're the human. Kill 2-3 per turn and don't get killed is easy. BUT if they decided to upgrade their before an attack, then I (we) would be in trouble.

Just kill melees first!

If the A.I actually played like a human with all its bonuses youd never win, it would just blow you out by sheer volume.

Esperr said:

If the A.I actually played like a human with all its bonuses youd never win, it would just blow you out by sheer volume.

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Indeed. The bonuses they get basically compensate for their inability to be a human