Does the AI cheat?

[Caesarion]

At what difficulty setting does the AI give itself additional resources, if any?

 

[Darth Gromit]

If I'm not mistaken, Noble is the 'parity' level, where you get no bonuses and neither do the AI civs. Beyond that, it scales in favor of the AI (build speed, happyfaces, healthcrosses, etc) just like it scales in your favor in the other direction.

As to other cheats like instant or "shared" research betw. AI civs, scads of "how-the-hell-did-they-produce-those" units that show up mysteriously when you invade, buildings that (if you checked with the cheat function in prior games) appear but were never in the build queue... All that seems to be gone. Unless you sign up to give them some bonuses at the diff. level stage, the AI civs have to build and earn everything they get.

 

[dh_epic]

As far as I know, the AI only gets production bonuses at the higher levels... and a better start. I think at deity, they start with archers, even.

They don't get any priveleged information, and they don't know where hidden resources are, and so on...

 

[VeniceBeach]

I can confirm the no-cheat when it comes to discovery. I've played a few Terra games (where there is a large empty landmass somewhere on the map). The AI does not beeline for it as soon as they have ocean-going tech. They only appear to become aware of new land by bumping into it during the course of normal sea exploration.

 

[milo2]

The only hint I've seen was one game where I got physics centuries before the other civilizations and managed to grab every uranium resource on the globe. Immediately Gandhi and Montezuma started bombarding me with offers of cows or sugar for uranium, probably one offer from each every three turns. I was half-tempted to trade them some, just to see what they would do with it...

Not exactly a cheat, but probably a bug.