Turning down the number of city states

joncnunn said:

Austria barely uses it's UA anyway. In fact, some humans have gone thru entire games as Austria without using it either.

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Yeah, I don't know what controls it but in some games Austria spreads through city states like a cancer while in others it wont use it once.

joncnunn said:

As to Venice, with 8 city states their AI should still be fine since there's usually at least 1 city state close by. (More so if when you added a major AI or 2 you also kept 1:1)

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In a recent game Venice was doing well, had picked up three city States. All three it lost in war. Thereafter it didn't do much and never acquired another CS. I put this down to the limited number of CS available, though it could just be brittle AI.

joncnunn said:

Now, adding additional major AI or two does have the nasty side effect of adding a lot more competition for religions since that max number of religions is set by world size and NOT number of major civs. (In the World Size XML file)

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That is annoying. Piety plus faith pantheon usually suffices. Otherwise rely on luck and prepare to go multi-faith. This is 12-12, standard.