How does the AI do this?

Look at the gold per turn.


Yet she's able to keep up such a big navy that I'm actually scared she could destroy my tiny fleet south of this huge fleet.


If I were losing that much gold per turn, wouldn't I be losing units left and right? How can she maintain a navy this big like that?

Pretty sure there's no way for somebody with 6-8 cities can have such a low economy, it is possibly a bug, same way as the inverse of it (+2056) which also seems to occur.

Its possible, just delete all of your gold producing buildings and get really unhappy.

Well, you only lose one unit per turn and it's usually the weakest unit. Maybe she can outproduce that and keep things relatively intact. How long has she been like that?

I've regularly seen the AI run -100 to -200 but never over a thousand in the hole a turn.

As for the auto-disbanding, I was under the impression the AI ignored that rule (I've never seen their units vanish even when I had visuals of their entire empire through air patrols). While I've watched their units turn into barbarian rebels when their unhappiness gets too great, I don't recall ever seeing units simply vanish due to deficit... I've seen CS sell off/delete units when I send them another gift and I've seen AI civs disband wounded units they couldn't save to rob me of the xp from finishing them off.

I seem to recall I've lost more than one per turn as well... depending on deficit it seems to disband until I'd have enough gold from disbanding them to pay for how much I'm in the hole that turn so if I were to run -35 with 0 in the treasury, it'd disband at least 35 gold worth of units so I could afford to pay the others. At least it did that last time I had a horrible economy, which I haven't done since pre-G&K.

I have no proof of this but sometimes I believe the gold information is incorrect with the AI.

I had an AI embargoed but the Diplomacy Screen showed he still had about 30000 gold (from memory). I was able to steal his CS allies and he made no attempt to get them back so I suggest the gold really didn't exist.

In your scenario Elizabeth certainly has a large Navy but perhaps the gold per turn debt is not correct.

It could be a bug showing the wrong GPT, but who knows?

Louis XXIV said:

How long has she been like that?

Click to expand...

I think she's supposedly(according to the trade screen)been losing gold for a while now. I only recently discovered that huge fleet, which scared me so bad that I put a nuclear missile in the vicinity.

Barghaest said:

I've regularly seen the AI run -100 to -200 but never over a thousand in the hole a turn.

Click to expand...

I've seen it worse than this IIRC. Me and my bro often play far Into The Future, so we see that a good bit.

Barghaest said:

As for the auto-disbanding, I was under the impression the AI ignored that rule (I've never seen their units vanish even when I had visuals of their entire empire through air patrols). While I've watched their units turn into barbarian rebels when their unhappiness gets too great, I don't recall ever seeing units simply vanish due to deficit... I've seen CS sell off/delete units when I send them another gift and I've seen AI civs disband wounded units they couldn't save to rob me of the xp from finishing them off.

Click to expand...

I also think it's a possibility that the AI may be exempt from that for some reason. It could be that or just a bug showing the wrong GPT, which several others have said could be the case.

Heerlo said:

I also think it's a possibility that the AI may be exempt from that for some reason. It could be that or just a bug showing the wrong GPT, which several others have said could be the case.

Click to expand...

There is a bug on rare occasions causing it display improperly (I watched England go from -17 to 3239 for two turns before suddenly showing -18 in one game), but I tend to revisit Diplomatic Overview every turn or so - especially when tweaking my mod - so I can tell you the display is USUALLY right as their balance reflects this over multiple turns. It can also be double checked via opening a trade window and seeing how much treasury/GPT that empire can offer in trade.

The AI will run extreme deficits with no apparent loss in units - although it does tank their research rate and causes them to lag behind a bit.