Mostly Pacifist Playthrough vs Deity AI

[Leefizzy]

Has anyone tried out scaling the AI in culture or science without taking their cities even if they attack you first. Maybe burn a very annoying forward settle if it gobbles up a sweet adjacency tile.

I've always tried to do it in previous civ games, cause the AI is not so good at fighting so war and conquest was the 'easy way out' of high difficulty from maybe civ5 onwards and got around to doing it here.
But while you can win, I haven't been able to catch up to the AI's 80%+ yields, you could be beating 6 of em in culture or science, but there's always 1 leader that's gonna be ahead of you by 80-100 per turn because of their bias/preferred strat, if not both if it's a runaway AI.

Obviously it's a 80%+ bonus they're getting so it's hard to go over that, even if they're not good at min maxing placements. In addition to what I think is their inability to beeline/prioritize stuff outside of their biases that lets you snipe wonders you'd never usually get if they could prioritize(Gate of All Nations being the one you usually get cause the AI ignores it most of the time).

 

[protocol7]

Never beat their yields, but they do brain dead things with them so you can win as you describe. I’ve never encountered a challenging runaway AI in VII, they suffer way more than the human does from crises plus they keep getting reset each age.

 

[Fluffball]

If you remember it is not actually a race, you simply have tick all the boxes before the end of the era to get the legacy points you don't have to worry about the AI running away in culture/science.

You can generally out settle the AI as you only need a few actual cities and thus need to be of any decent size. Towns only need to have enough pop/growth to grab the resources in range and then just be turned to specilisation...usually hub for influence.

If you use all your influence to befriend city states and then steal tech/civics you should be grabbing multiple future tech/civics each era.

For the final victory era the AI never seems to even know how to start in my experience so even if they out science/culture you, you can still win easily.