I tip my hat off to the AI...

I'm playing as Venice on Huge King, gunning for diplo victory. I had 13 delegates in World Congress, and every resolution so far had gone my way.

Then on turn 340 France suddenly attacked my overseas colony (a CS I purchased) when we'd been perfectly chummy for 300+ turns. And midway through the war he drags in Gajah, Shaka and Elizabeth, who's been my major trading partner since turn 1. Despite my best efforts, my navy, which was on the way to defend my colonies gets caught by Lizzie's sudden declaration of war and her navy wreaks havoc on mine. My army which was marching through Gajah's lands to get to France gets torn in two. My city state ally on Shaka's continent gets swallowed up. From second in game score I drop to near bottom as I lose 2 puppeted CS and an ex-Indonesian city, one of which was 30 pop and my largest city; the other two were 20 pop each.
I had miraculously held on to a science lead despite being Venice. My army was superior in tech to my enemies. But France's deviousness tore my lead to shreds as my science count got halved from all my losses. All my trade routes lost, 10 of them because they were with England, who'd been friendly with me since the start until they declared war.

I tip my hat off to Napoleon. Well played. From being chums with almost every other player, I become public enemy number 1 as 4 civs declared war on me simultaneously; with the force to back it up. BNW's AI is way smarter than G&K

Wow. Not exactly my experience.

Wow! That is awesome! I like that the AI responded to your "science runaway" and got others involved to help set you back into place! That is quite good! The fact that they DoW'd out of nowhere (friendly beforehand) makes it even better! That means to me that the AI still places a lot of importance on taking out or dealing with civs that pose the greatest threat to their VC.

Never trust AIs in late game with high Diplo Balance or Victory Competitiveness (aka: most European powers).

One of the problems with the friendly AI is that there's much lower diplo balance and victory competitiveness for the AIs in the newer civs. If you ran BNW w/ only Vanilla civs, the game would be a lot more tumultuous.

This is exactly what I was talking about, when the whole "low aggression" claim, mainly supported by two forum members, "exploded". The new AI is situational aware, and has a level of opportunism that I have only seen once before: in EU3's AI, and only after the last patch. Very good work from Beach et all.

I actually played with all BNW civs with the addition of France, England and Persia. Shoshone got steamrolled by Poland very on (turn 100-ish), Brazil of all civs crushed Assyria and Morocco got torn between Brazil and Poland. The BNW civs were way more aggressive than the vanilla ones

Aristos said:

This is exactly what I was talking about, when the whole "low aggression" claim, mainly supported by two forum members, "exploded". The new AI is situational aware, and has a level of opportunism that I have only seen once before: in EU3's AI, and only after the last patch. Very good work from Beach et all.

Click to expand...

I still haven't seen much aggression towards me from AIs unless I'm an aggressor first, even ones happy to tear each other apart and even when known aggressive AIs are provoked (as in my current game with Askia, who seems to be trying to maximise the use of his UA, now Morocco is dead, by invading every city-state he has access to, but refuses to engage me despite coveting my lands, mutual denunciation, disliking my Congress proposals, spreading my religion and refusing to stop and probably a few other modifiers I've forgotten).

That isn't to say the AIs don't seem somewhat better at pursuing their own interests. I'm on a 3 (surviving) player Pangea and get to see the other AIs in detail in a way it's harder to do with 12 of them crowding the map and behaving in seemingly identikit way.

I have Askia: seems to enjoy hunting out barb camps and easy target cities to take advantage of his UA. In the couple of games I've seen him in, he's been resolutely non-expansionist, and true to form he's razed every Moroccan city except the capital. As in the past he seems to favour diplo victory - possibly knocking out CSes is a way to lower the vote count as well as earn cash to spend bribing the survivors. Just before I shut down last night he orchestrated a coup to remove my supporters in Budapest. He has the usual AI inability to see that adopting the world religion is a good diplomatic move, sadly - now he's reconverted all the cities I converted, I'll leave him to it to make his diplo life that much more difficult.

And for my next trick I'll land him with a Standing Army Tax...

Then there's Kamehameha. Again, the usual - he's still a fan of culture victories, and was not pleased at my proposal to boost Sciences Funding (mostly as a way to stall him). We had a rocky relationship - started out as friends, until I expanded "too aggressively" and took land (i.e. El Dorado) he wanted for himself, leading to denunciation. He cooled off after I fulfilled my promise not to expand, and spread my religion to him (naturally he voted in favour of making it the world religion). His own proposal was to inconvenience Askia, who had denounced him, by banning whales. He's slowly accumulating tourism Wonders - next on my list of plans to screw with him are Natural Heritage Sites ASAP (I have two Natural Wonders, +8 cpt to help my cultural defence) and World's Fair.

At the very least, they feel like players with coherent goals to meet their victory conditions and some ability to understand their civs' strengths (although why, if he wanted a diplo victory, Askia didn't shoot for Printing Press before I got it I don't know).

EDIT: Update on this: I'm now really impressed with some elements of this AI. Askia did declare on me eventually (seems Budapest was actually a cunning plan to attack from inside my borders rather than a shot at diplo - he showed no interest in any other CS. I saw this targeted CS alliance occasionally in G&K and was impressed every time). Unfortunately for him, Batam is essentially impregnable, and I have a pair of triplane squadrons shooting down any bombers he throws my way. He accepted my peace offer as soon as Standing Army Tax hit (he was already embargoed, a Polynesian proposal), though later declared on me again. I'll offer him peace again now that Budapest's out of the picture - neutralising that (and, significantly, its vote) was my key goal - Askia's lack of the world religion has prevented him securing enough delegates to make proposals, but he's bound to vote with Kammy against things that benefit only me (such as Freedom as the world ideology), so Budapest had to go.

The diplo game is really shaping up. Kamehameha responded to my science funding with an attempted repeal (sadly, it succeeded) - the next time I tried instituting it, since he didn't have enough votes to block it, he proposed Arts Funding which cancelled out the effect when both passed together! With my science lead, he since proposed Scholars in Residence (with the meagre support Askia could bring to bear) but I managed to block that. I now have a majority of the votes (Kammy has a few from Wonders, but I now have all the surviving CSes as allies - after I took down its defences Jerusalem captured Budapest just before I called it a night). Otherwise we've both been pushing cultural effects; defensively in my case since he's still making cultural headway against me and - despite being the last to adopt an ideology - decided to go for Autocracy although I had Freedom and Askia Order. Autocracy seems a bad fit for his playstyle, but perhaps he's reckoning on the fact that we've had several joint wars against Askia by now. Or maybe he wanted to cause both of us problems with happiness.

Oh well, I don't think he can do anything about my new proposal for Freedom to become the world ideology, which will give me extra delegates to push through the repeal of arts funding.