AI swimming in gold?

[Arksa]

Not sure if this is normal, but I'm playing on emperor and every AI seems to get a minimum of 60 gold per turn (by 0 AD) and for example Oda has 4500 gold.

And overall I seem to be getting my butt handed to me hard. Is the overall difficulty increased? I used to be able to cope on emperor (even won my first one with America) but it feels a lot harder now. I did start slow with expanding since Mongols declared war on me though, that could explain it.

They were completing Notre Dames while I entered Medieval era pretty much .

 

[gdwitt]

That's normal for emperor.
One advantage to this is that if you play your cards right and gang up on a civ, they will offer 1000 to 2000 for a peace treaty if you stop just short of taking a city.
In Emperor, if you are playing with aggressive civs and they all attack, you are doomed. Just quit an restart. I make at least 6 units before anything else in emperor.

Note that civs cannot spend their money on anything like fast builds or units, they just accumulate it. They do like to throw money at alliances with CS.

Another advantage is that it is fairplay for an aggressive human player. I found the best way to get gold is to conquer their city and sell it back before some anger point is tipped.

 

[Arksa]

Note that civs cannot spend their money on anything like fast builds or units, they just accumulate it. They do like to throw money at alliances with CS.

This could explain why the AIs that focus on City states generally tend to do better than the ones that don't.
Siam, Greece always are strong in my games.

 

[Thalassicus]

I make changes to AI priorities incrementally in each version, but the adjustments are so small and numerous I don't add them to each patch note release. It usually involves things like "build mounted units a little more."

Unfortunately, we're unable to directly alter how the AI saves up tremendous amounts of gold. A human would burn excess cash on buying resources from others, building armies to start wars, or buying up all the citystates. The AIs don't always do that and just waste the money on a huge reserve. There's not anything I can do about that particular behavior with our current modding tools.

 

[Zaldron]

I make changes to AI priorities incrementally in each version, but the adjustments are so small and numerous I don't add them to each patch note release. It usually involves things like "build mounted units a little more."

Unfortunately, we're unable to directly alter how the AI saves up tremendous amounts of gold. A human would burn excess cash on buying resources from others, building armies to start wars, or buying up all the citystates. The AIs don't always do that and just waste the money on a huge reserve. There's not anything I can do about that particular behavior with our current modding tools.

On the other hand if I saw 40000 gold worth of infantry coming at me, I might be tempted to quit my game....

 

[Arksa]

The big problem with the reserve is that when they have that 14 000 gold and you are still kicking their ass, they want peace and are willing to give you 9000 for it...

 

[Thalassicus]

It's one of my priorities on my long-term todo list for when we get access to the game core.