The AI still produces stuff like artillery, cruise missiles and tactical nukes in stock game. You can see it every time you have spies. But these things are stuck uselessly in their original city and in C3C the artillery doesn't even fire. There are times when I've spied into the city I'm about to attack, turned on combat animation, expected their artillery pieces to fire upon my troops parking outside for a turn before the assault. But that never happened.
The AU mod had "never build artillery" checked. The AI is better off not wasting shields on them at all if all they do is provide static defensive bombard.
If you enable AI artilery use in Flintlock patch these same otherwise idle pieces would be put into action. What does change is the AI thinning out their city defenses to escort them. I try to offset that by ticking "build defensive units often". You can also adjust how artillery heavy you want the AI to be.
With artillery being capturable however, the number of pieces would accumulate over time, making run away AIs run away even worse. The same snowballing effect also applies to the human player. You shall never have to build another piece after defeating the first AI.
Other than you saying "Flintlock patch", I think you're correct.
But, my question concerned about what changes happen to the AIs production and their
economy with the Flintlock mod instead of the classic not modded game as it stands on disks, steam, or GOG. Catapults are less expensive than horseman and swordsmen, just as expensive as spearmen, though more expensive than warriors. Trebuchets are less expensive than medieval infantry, longbowman, knights, cavalry, and just as expensive as pikeman. Cannons are also less expensive than many other units. Artillery proper are more equal to other units, but if you start in the ancient era, the AIs have already been building other units, so such an equality doesn't matter as much as earlier potential differences. The AIs build artillery type units more often with the Flintlock mod than in the classic game. Flintlock said that he changed frequency in an earlier post, and I think we've both observed that even accounting for artillery type units in cities in the classic game. The AIs build those artillery type units rather than something else as they do in the classic game, but I don't exactly know what they build artillery type units instead of. But still, I'm guessing that usually with the Flintlock mod the AIs will have more units overall than if they had been under the classic game's conditions. And thus,
I conjecture that the AIs in Flintlock's mod usually, if not almost always, have to pay more in unit support than classic AIs do. If the AIs pay more in unit support, that suggests there doesn't exist as much gold per turn that the human player can obtain by selling technology, AND there's often less gold per turn that an AI can use to purchase technology from another AI.
In the Flintlock mod, without us changing the settings, just as they come if you download and install it, what are the AIs building artillery type units instead of?
