Civilzations building too many units?

I am playing a personal mod of civilization and I have noticed this: Some, not all, civilizations randomly decide to build a ridiculous amount of units and it really slows down the game. The culprits are different every time, and I have several methods of detecting this anomaly.

1. On the map, Civilizations normally have built temples in their cities by the middle ages, and civilizations that build too many units cannot afford to maintain any improvements in their settlements, therefore their cultural borders never expand past the standard borders.

2. Using the MP program (there's a thread for it on here somewhere) I can convert all civilizations from AIs to human players and then I can see the military adviser screen of AI civs only to notice that they have built an absurd quantity of units.

3. Through direct combat I can also tell who is building too many units. In one of my past games i declared war on a neighbor with Cultural borders that have not been expanded, and in a turn or two, i see several very large stacks of units approaching my borders, larger than an regular AI can come up with within several turns of being attacked.


My question is: Why are these civilizations building way too many units?
Is there something in the editor that i accidentally marked off to cause this? How can I stop civilizations from behaving this way? Please let me know, it would be much appreciated!

Check the C3C editor for each Civ. In the lower right of the "Civilizations" tab, examine the "Build Often" and "Build Never" options (just be careful: limit to "Build Often" choices hits the AI's "That-does-not-compute" level at about 4 options; try not to use "Build Never" options; there are some Mysterious AI Behaviors lurking there ...

Best,

Oz

I'd follow Ozy's advice.

I remember many times game speeds so slow it took hours to load the next turn...and often the culprit was a massive AI army of so many units it took minutes for them to move a single stack.

Don't let it happen to you!

I have growth, science and culture checked off as build often. I still can't seem to find out what is causing this!

dominatr, AI cheats - it explores resources before specific tech was discovered, of course, it shares info about resources among AI civs. The same it does with total units numbers. For example, if AI civ1 has 10 cities with 3 units in each (total = 30), then civ2 may have 2 cities with 15 units in it (again 30). So, you won't affect this mechanics directly. However, there are few ways to do it:
1) units auto-production by building(s). This is very good approach, however, some people heavily dislike it (why I can't build additional forces while having perfectly developed cities?). One more important thing is the number of auto-production timers is limited. I don't know what's exact value is, but application freezes sooner or later (with 455 cities on the map + 4 types of auto-productive buildings = freeze around turn 180-190). So the dream about only auto-productive units can be done, but on the small maps only.
2) increase units coast. This will make each unit more valuable - and player can build as much as they can. It'll make game a bit boring (especially on the start) - when you just pressing Enter/Space key skipping turn by turn and nothing happens, you just wait (it's about my personal impression ).
3) units require population to be built (like settlers/workers - 2/1 citizens). It's interesting approach I didn't try myself since there were comments on the forum about heavily underdeveloped cities because of massive units production in case of war.
4) adjust citizen's food consumption. By default it set to 2, but you can set to any value, e.g. 3. This will slow down population growth and decrease production => number of units. However, there's "dark side of the moon" as well - if civ is at war and changes its government, then there's big chance of civ's cities disappear from map. To resolve the situation it's necessary to increase number of luxury resources, so they'll pacify the population OR to give all civs the "Religious" trait (revolution in 1 turn).

So, these are basics in addition to the good point from Oz.