Do civilizations know how to expand anymore?

[Grapa]

I don't know what the last patch did to the A.I, but now most civs don't even have an empire by the Renaissance period. It's 1400 in my game, and almost every civ has placed maybe 3-4 cities, MAX, on a LARGE map. What the hell? There's huge swaths of land open, and none of them both to expand at all. They just sit there, declaring war on each other. This never happened before the patch.

Anybody else get the same problem? Hell, Persia hasn't even placed more than 2-3 cities in any of my games. This is annoying.

 

[BobDole]

They definitely expand. Some might stick to a few city (and some will almost always do that, like Polynesia or India), while other will expand like crazy (Russia comes to mind, they always spread like a plague).

 

[Grapa]

Funny how you mention Russia, since it's 470 AD right now in my game, and they have one city.

 

[roguepro92]

AI can't expand smart or tactically to save their life...but they can spread like plague due to no happiness cap at alllllllll or so it feels like

 

[Montov]

Yeah, less expanding is clearly happening in my games too.
Persia seems to expand pretty well though, as well some other civs. But not many.

But for this reason I add 1 or 2 more civs in the advanced setup, so there is less empty space and you don't have all the time of the world to place the cities where you want to.

 

[Polycrates]

I'm glad there's no longer the insane REXing of a couple of patches back, but this does seem like maybe slightly too much of a swing in the opposite direction. I had Inca limit themselves to one city surrounded by fantastic unclaimed terrain in my last game, and they're the last people who should be doing that. Great if it lets me put a couple of extra civs in the same size map, and an interesting change from the land rush, but not if it means that enemy civs are crippling themselves in the process.

 

[Agent Cooper]

I feel like the AI civs are still expanding pretty fast post-patch. But they usually set up a bunch of junk cities with no luxuries and sometimes just 1 food resource or something like it. It sucks so bad because if you war them and decide to raze a lot of these worthless junk cities, your diplomacy with everyone else could go down the toilet. That's the poor mechanics of diplomacy at work in Civ5.

 

[Carlx]

Depends what victory settings you have on. For a cultural victory its much easier to stick to a half dozen or so cities than expand out to 10 or 20. Because of the way it aggregates culture and the social policies tree. So some civs - particularly India which gains advantages from small numbers of cities with large pop - that are going for culture victory will not expand too much. Depends on the civ and the AIs focus. You can actually win conquest victories with only a few cities now anyway, it's just a bit harder to do. With Civ 4 it no longer became a race to put down 100 cities, this was considered just a really sad sort of urban sprawl always wins tactic, so they made population happiness link with number of cities and the rest is history. This could also be why if you are playing on easy levels, like prince, the computer will not be able to expand as fast as you because of crippling unhappiness. Playing on say monarch or above you'll notice you can't expand as fast as the AIs too often because its not possible to hook up enough luxuries quickly enough, where as the AIs just "cheat" so they get to expand faster.

 

[Carlx]

I feel like the AI civs are still expanding pretty fast post-patch. But they usually set up a bunch of junk cities with no luxuries and sometimes just 1 food resource or something like it. It sucks so bad because if you war them and decide to raze a lot of these worthless junk cities, your diplomacy with everyone else could go down the toilet. That's the poor mechanics of diplomacy at work in Civ5.

There's a host of poorly thought out issues with Civ 5. I hate how the computer can afford to raise vast armies on harder difficulty settings and you are left with 5 or 6 units before your money all goes down the can. On CIV this was not a problem, on CiV with 1 upt it's a monumentally badly thought out idea. The computer cheats enough as it is without making it farm out vast armies in no time it can easilly support as part of it's retinue of cheating. Not averse to having it have advantages just even for relatively easy levels Monarchish it's conspicuous just how much the AI cheats its way out of trouble.

 

[Bezurn]

I've noticed this too, its annoying.

It seems that by making nearly every Civ go for a warrior rush at the start of the game, that most AI's only stick to 1-4 cities at most by around 1 AD. I personally like to get all of my cities down by at least 1000 AD, as it takes a very long time to get the infrastructure up to make the city productive. Any cities after that are often just to claim newly found strategic resources. I also think that more often than not civs either pick Tradition / Honor more often than Liberty and so this has an effect as well.

But Tradition isn't the only problem. In a game I played as Rome, America had gone Liberty and was my only neighbor to the west. I only took one city site from them, which was 4 tiles from my capitol, so it was bound to happen. Then I started expanding into Montezuma's land (who only built 2 cities and got gang DOWed the entire game by all civs on the continent.

Eventually America mounted their inevitable war, which I won after some back and forth and took only one city. There was a great city location south of them, with 3 cattle, 3 gold, river and hills. Going there would give them more resources to trade around as well as make a lot of money and science for them. I was too busy expanding into my back country to try and snatch it from them. I waited and waited, founding about 6 more cities behind my front. Then by the time I had cannons the site still wasn't claimed so I munched it up.

In that game the only AI that 'played to win' was Persia, who founded a decent number of cities. I think the emphasis on going tall and culturally is too pronounced in this game and often ends up leading to some very barren land until the Industrial Era or later. City sites, especially those that claim luxuries should all picked up mostly by the late Ren. era (unless its Ghandi of course).

 

[General Tso]

I have only played one game since the patch, but I noticed the same thing. The AI isn't expanding as well as it did in the past. Late game, one AI civ has a single city and the other AI civs had unused land around the edge of their civs.

 

[radiohodet]

Which difficulty level do you play on? In my first game on Immortal post patch, Greece had 5 cities before my beelined NC was finished, and there was no more land left for me....

I also didn't notice any difference from pre patch in my Emperor game. I don't think I've ever seen a Civ not expand like crazy. (Except on Archipelago map 1000 patches ago) This was also the case in Civ 4 though.

 

[CivCube]

By the time I discovered the other continent by the 1600s in my last game, Egypt of all civs was conquering Mongolia. I think they had close to ten cities when they were done.

 

[MadDjinn]

the 'flavour' of the AI will determine how often, or when, the AI expands. (war counts as 'expansion' if it's done correctly)

I see more 2-3 city empires, but there'll still be a few that want to spam settlers until every last hex of the map is covered.

 

[Carlx]

Which difficulty level do you play on? In my first game on Immortal post patch, Greece had 5 cities before my beelined NC was finished, and there was no more land left for me....

I also didn't notice any difference from pre patch in my Emperor game. I don't think I've ever seen a Civ not expand like crazy. (Except on Archipelago map 1000 patches ago) This was also the case in Civ 4 though.

Exactly I think this is more of a difficulty issue than a post patch issue.

 

[General Tso]

Maybe I just happened to have to right (or wrong depending on how you look at it) combination of AI players. I'll have to try another game.

 

[TPQ]

I'm inclined to agree that AI expansion does seem to be a little less aggressive. It's not changed much though, as far as I can tell. Raging barbs tend to trim AI expansion a bit usually, so if the AI aren't expanding enough, it might be an idea to turn barbs off as some AIs seem to struggle to recover after barbs capture their settlers/workers.

 

[Samuil]

They definitely expand. Some might stick to a few city (and some will almost always do that, like Polynesia or India), while other will expand like crazy (Russia comes to mind, they always spread like a plague).

Seconded...
Russia had 4 cities when I managed to get my second on King... weird

 

[Save_Ferris]

The AI seem to have a dire longing to hold onto their precious happiness, even if it's at 50.

 

[elprofesor]

It depends on the flavour of the civ, and the roll at the beginning of the game. I've seen Ramkamhaeng do a OCC until I launched the Spaceship. And I've seen Harald Bluetooth settle a total of 20 cities in my direction while puppeteering another five from Ramesses in the other.
The latter had settled 9 cities before getting invaded, which was a remarkable high score for him, considering he usually stays at 3.
But yeah, difficulty is the real parameter, and the happiness boost that goes with it.