Well there is no reason for them to be ahead of you, they were not ahead of me. I am not sure of the turning point, but it was not long in coming. I improved the land quickly and then smashed a few of Smokes cities, end of doing great research for him.
If you give peace, you have to wait for them to declare or 20 turns. Well of course you can break the deal, but I do not allow that.
Remember, I made many workers right at the start to allow improving tiles that needed it. I was able to get more rails sooner with those extra workers.
Also by taking land from everyone, I am getting stronger and they are getting weaker. They did a fair job of staying close, because I left Smoke alone after taking down a handful of cities.
A brief history of patrol. It was asked for way back at the start of Civ3. The reason we demanded it was that the Ai would have a town surrounded by you and park a bunch of units in the open on his land.
Each turn they would move around using all their movement points. This tedious and boring to watch. So they turn turned it off. Eventually we figured out that the barbs would no longer attack as they use to and you had to be on certain angles for them to go at you.
I would see things like 16 or 32 barbs from an uprising sit near a town with one unit and the barbs did not move an inch. So they gave us an INI entry to turn the patrol back on.
So if you do no use this flag the barbs sit most of the time, even with units next to them. With it on, you will have the ai moving units around and they will bump into your army. Without it they will leave it alone, if it is healthy and too strong.
It will attack say an archer army with cavs, even if it is full health. The human does not "patrol", it is an ai routine.
IIRC civ2 had that same patrol crap.