What happened to the AI in BNW??

Sup everyone so i just finished updating my Civ V game to a BNW and omg what did they do to the AI? I know in vanilla the AI was extremely aggressive, was constantly expanding, constantly conquering other civs and if they saw that your nation was weak they wouldnt hesitate to conquer you.

Now in a BNW I look around and the AI is pretty much indifferent. They just sit there with their one or two cities not even bothering to build an army or improve their tiles or anything. Meanwhile i'm here building a giant army and just gobbling up these poor defenseless civs and everything around me and the only thing thats stopping me is well...nothing is stopping me. What gives? I almost feel like uninstalling BNW and going back to vanilla.

What difficulty do you play on?

I'm pretty sure the AI is the same in BNW. I get attacked a lot and the AI settles cities in the same way vanilla did. Same thing goes for the military. I almost always see the AI with a big army unless they have been in constant war with someone.

oPunchDrunko said:

What difficulty do you play on?

I'm pretty sure the AI is the same in BNW. I get attacked a lot and the AI settles cities in the same way vanilla did. Same thing goes for the military. I almost always see the AI with a big army unless they have been in constant war with someone.

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i'm playing it on normal mode forget that thats called. But I mean is it normal for the AI not to improve its tiles or to just sit there not expanding? So used to the vanilla AI.

Maybe the difficulty is the problem. I'd suggest trying out King, which is a step up from Prince. The AI does improve tiles, trust me.

It's basically the same AI, but the logic has always been condition specific and rules changes change the conditions.

G&K upon release introduced Embassies and the no contested borders positive modifiers which weren't in Vanilla which of course had the impact of making the AI more peaceful.

One example is the fall G&K patch was advertised as teaching the AI how to properly cash rush units, which it did. However that caused the AI to have higher military strength which caused to be extremely aggressive, even the ones with low flavors, and so that got rolled right back in the release of BNW.

The AI in Civ V is flavor driven, bad flavors for the situation make the AI look like an idiot. Giving the AI a bigger handicap by playing at a higher difficulty level will help offset AI's problems from bad flavors.

The AI in immortal really becomes a lot more difficult after emperor. Emperor and the lower difficulties, aren't as difficult as the last 2 difficulties, immortal and deity.

AIs in higher difficulty have a lot more to offer and steal technologies a lot less since the difficulty level allows the AIs to make more research than you. That means that AI will be less likely to steal from you and you will be able to steal more from AI.

The AI is still as aggressive, it's just early gold isn't as easy to come by and so you and the AI usually need to rely on trade routes. Also I think the AI considers overall score amongst other things when deciding to DOW ad-hoc. On Emperor and lower you probably are the tech leader fairly quickly and have snagged a few wonders making you the score leader and thus not perceived as weak.
On Deity you will be perceived as weak and will be invaded, all this before you reach the Renaissance era.

I play around prince level, and I've rarely(if ever)been dow'd by an AI since I got BNW. I plan on going up at least to king soon, as sometimes it's almost boring how passive the AI is.

I agree that the AI is too passive and some nations don't work their land properly. Would be nice if we could improve the AI rather than giving it more bonuses on higher difficulty. However, it is just as well as the military ai is particularly crappy, despite the fact that it is simple mathematics how much damage I can do on an enemy unit when I move to that square and how much damage I might receive from counterattacks when moving to that square (not to mention the embarking nonsense)...

phillipwyllie said:

The AI is still as aggressive, it's just early gold isn't as easy to come by and so you and the AI usually need to rely on trade routes. Also I think the AI considers overall score amongst other things when deciding to DOW ad-hoc. On Emperor and lower you probably are the tech leader fairly quickly and have snagged a few wonders making you the score leader and thus not perceived as weak.
On Deity you will be perceived as weak and will be invaded, all this before you reach the Renaissance era.

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The AI also looks at your gold stack as "potential" units, ie, if you have 1000 gold and warriors cost 200 each, then they consider you to have those 5 warriors already. I sometimes will keep some gold lying around if I don't want to get a DoW in fact, and I often see them DoW me immidiately if I spend all of my gold to rush buy universities, factories, ally with a CS, rush buy settlers, whatever.

Having gold in your budget will tempt the ai into asking you into a research agreement. AIs will want to spend your money that way.

I am currently playing a game as Venice on king. My nearest neighbor was Japan, who DOWed early because I was ignoring military. But it was easy to see them coming, and I finished researching construction in time to upgrade my archers to CBs. Meanwhile, to the south, Carthage was hostile (coveting my MoV acquired second city) and pushing lots of troops in my direction. I shifted forces away from Japan (who had offered 3 luxuries for peace) and bought a couple of spearman as defense against their elephants. Carthage backed off. If Japan and Carthage had attacked at the same time, I would have been in trouble.