AI isn't expanding in G&K

I've been playing civ5 since it came out and am currently playing between emperor and immortal difficulty. I've typically done half decent on immortal but struggle a good bit and its a good challenge for me. Once I installed the G&K expansion, I've tried immortal and the AI isnt building cities and expanding at near the rate they used to. They build their capital and sometimes one other city later on. I've searched through the forums and found a suggestion to edit the file "CIV5AIEconimicStrategies.xml" to change how the AI behaves and expands. After editing that like suggested, I've yet to see the AI build more than 3 cities. I've tried all different size maps and they have plenty of room to expand, but dont.

Is this a bug with G&K (I havent seen it in the reported bug list) or is there a way to fix it so the AI is more competitive like they used to be before the expansion?

Yeah, I've noticed this too, but it was in multiplayer so I just assumed it's one of the many problems multiplayer had.

The Celts seem to suffer from it, but I've seen Germany expand extremely slowly as well.

Yea I've tried different civs as well. I've always had mongolia, babylon, polynesia, and siam expand well, but even they aren't expanding beyond 3 cities.

It depends on the civilization and the situation. Sometimes they don't expand beyond 1 or 2 cities until very late in the game (usually these are culture-oriented civs), but other times they go nuts early and spam cities.

There seems to be quite a diversity of AI behavior in G&K. The most common is a reasonably quick expansion to 4-6 cities and tall from there (barring further conquests), but I've often seen very deliberate almost OCC-style cultural approaches with only 1-2 cities and few military units produced (Austria seems to like this - maybe in the expectation of expanding later on when she can pick up fully-built CSs for practically nothing), and at the other extreme ultra-wide empires - essentially pure ICS (Bismarck and Monty seem to go for this). I assume that if you dig through the xml, each AI has a weighting in favor of each style.

In principle, I think it's good that the AI will now pick an expansion strategy, from several viable choices, and then pursue it coherently. Certainly there are many, many worse things about the G&K AI.

Wouldn't only allowing a Domination victory discourage an AI from being smaller and culturally dominant and work towards being victorious through expanding and domination? I've done this to try and encourage them to expand with no positive results.

Yeah there's a bit more variety now than before. I also always have at least one civ that's settling relatively fast. Russia, Greece, Germany and America are the known suspects. OCC is not that uncommon now if they start hogging up more and more wonders. It also seems there's at least 1-2 civs going for a cultural game in my games too (but they often start settling more afterwards if there's still space).

I also notice they will settle like crazy if you settled faster than they are in the early game. I've seen Egypt and China expand like crazy in different games, when they're usually growing tall.

Ive seen Russia found 6 cities on a continent o.O.

ive honestly never had this problem. in GnK i saw persia settle 6 cities by turn 180 and this was on Warlord difficulty.

1 to 2 civs in each of my games settle 3+ cities and the rest only 1 to 3. But a lot of those civs are also warring to take cities so even though a civ only settle 3 cities they took 5 more in combat, etc. i play emperor mostly and some immortal and always standard speed and settings (8 civs and 16 CSs).