AI no longer expanding as much?

[Rohili]

Is it just me or does the AI no longer expand as much in BNW? Most of my AI opponents have only 3-5 cities. Even in the Modern Age, one of the continents is still half empty.

It used to be civs would fight tooth and nail over every inch of land, but now that expansionism is so heavily penalised, land is abundant and there is less need to go to war over territory. I think it takes something away from the game.

Perhaps one solution would be simply to increase the number of AI opponents from the default, for the same map size?

 

[Scott Jegg]

Depends who it is. Rome will still take every inch of the map they can get, as will others. I just posted in another thread - the AI seem happy to send settlers to the other side of the map early on now if it means grabbing a new luxury. This is very annoying indeed, especially if it's right into your territory when they have started nowhere near you.

on immortal/standard/fractal I find the map can be filled by turn 100 or so, to the point where you don't see a barbarian for the rest of the game.

 

[kaltorak]

Yep, I see them expanding much less. It may just be that they are too bussy building everything now. Mostly caravans and cargoships. But adding that to all the buildings, and units they want, they probably have less time to expand.

I am playing a game with 2 friends and one of them only has vanilla civ, so the game doesn't have any expansion active. The AI's are expanding like crazy. Askia seems to be trying to conquer us by flooding each gap of our frontiers with cities
Well, he doesn't have to go for religion, doesn't have to build caravans, misses several expansion buildings and wonders... So yeah, why not settlers ^^

 

[Makavcio]

It depends on the difficulty you are enjoying, Rohili. You can expect that on king some less land-hungry civilizations will remain reasonably small even in late game. On the other hand, civs like Indonesia, Rome and especially the Iroquois, will have the whole map settled by the end of Renaissance. Starting with emperor, even less aggressive civilizations will move to claim all available land, including tundra, deserts and snows. Dread Americans with +3 population in newly funded cities.

 

[evilcat]

Well it depends, indeed even around renescaince there is a lot of tasty ground to take, which is cool so you can conquere this new land for yourself if you want colonies

There are some civs who spam rome, shoshone, Russia... there is probably some more which i do not notice.

I don't consider it drawback that AI is less spammy, since generally i hate city spam. It is ok as strategy, but in the same time it's troublesome to manage wide empire. :-/

 

[Randall_Flagg]

Early game, yes!! Later, no!! The frigging little buggers still take every little space that can be taken.

For me, i do not mind the less early game spam. It allows my borders more time to grow. That means I have less wars for border disputes.