Need some advice

[Sartre311]

So first of all, I want to thank Karadoc for all the exceptional years of hard work he's put in in creating the greatest AI mod of all time, just wow. Civilization is by far my favorite game and I believe the greatest game ever made but without a truly competent AI all the content in the world cannot make up for it (various mods on this site, Civ 6) and ultimately the game gets lackluster and boring as you steamroll to a victory if you even play it out that long. Thank you, thank you so much.

So I want to ask you guys a few questions about how to proceed given the results of my last game.

I would play emperor level in the base BTS, the last game I played on it I succeeded because it was just me and one other Civ on a continent and even though I was behind, eventually once I got my praetorians up I took him out settled the whole continent, built up my navy and then it was just a matter of time.

I play with Rome and am a domination victory style player. My settings are standard map size, normal speed and continents.

The AI is very smart in Kmod and is very competent and quite Makavelian and warlike from my experience in the last game. I wanted to ask if this is a normal occurrence but all 7 civ's spawned on one continent with me and the other side of the world was just essentially 4 medium sized islands that were all inhabited by barbarians, is this normal behavior or was this just an anomaly and normally you get the typical layout of 4 on one conntinent and 3 civs on the other?

This made it very difficult as I was surrounded on all sides by war mongers like Tokagowa Brennus, and DeGaulle who was steam rolling everybody to a domination victory. It was immensely fun and challenging and at no point I thought it was just a matter of time for me to get my economy and army up to gear up for the conquest, which I absolutely love and did not feel was the case playing without this mod. I got absolutely annihilated and it was exhilarating and terrifying seeing these stacks come at me and not knowing who was going to declare on me next and from which side.

My second question is does the AI only attack cities when it knows it can take them? Now maybe it just seemed this way because I have the smallest army and was down to the next rival worst by 100,000 troops and otmanned 2-1 by the leader so that might have been just a given. However if the AI is programed to only attack cities if it knows it could take them, then this may take some of the mystery and exhilaration of being terrified but somehow thinking that you can fend them off eventually with reinforcements.

So furthermore if the answer to the above question is yes and the AI is programed to attack only if it knows it can take the city then does it take into calculation you shuffling troops from other cities and whipping more in that city or is that the way that you can trump it's knowledge of knowing/thinking it can take that city and somehow make a comeback?

My final question is rather than going down to Monarch which I might need to do. Are there any settings I can try to try to even up the game a little bit more on emperor as I love the way the AI plays at this difficulty level and it is very challenging and fun? I know some people have mentioned turning tech brokering off, any other settings that you would suggest? I thought of turning vassals off as well by the way.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Zholef]

I wanted to ask if this is a normal occurrence but all 7 civ's spawned on one continent with me and the other side of the world was just essentially 4 medium sized islands that were all inhabited by barbarians, is this normal behavior or was this just an anomaly and normally you get the typical layout of 4 on one conntinent and 3 civs on the other?

As far as I know, K-Mod doesn't change player placement. I blame the map script.

My second question is does the AI only attack cities when it knows it can take them?

No. The AI can get screwed by the random number generator just as much as humans can. It doesn't have foreknowledge of how its battles will go. However, it's better than its BtS counterpart at estimating its odds when attacking cities, so it will rarely waste huge stacks attacking strong positions, but instead pillage the countryside while looking for easier targets.

My final question is rather than going down to Monarch which I might need to do. Are there any settings I can try to try to even up the game a little bit more on emperor as I love the way the AI plays at this difficulty level and it is very challenging and fun? I know some people have mentioned turning tech brokering off, any other settings that you would suggest? I thought of turning vassals off as well by the way.

First off, the AI doesn't play differently depending on difficulty setting. It's just a question of who gets which bonuses. You can create a custom difficulty setting by copying the file "Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4HandicapInfo.xml" to "Mods\K-Mod\Assets\xml\GameInfo\CIV4HandicapInfo.xml" and editing the values in the Monarch section to be closer to the values in the Emperor section. Simply delete the file to restore the mod to its default state.

 

[Sartre311]

I would probably need more details on how to do this exactly and where/how to adjust the values. But before we get into that, what other settings can I mess with to keep it on emperor with trying to make it a little easier e.g turning tech Brokering off, vassals off and things of that sort to even it out?

 

[Zholef]

I don't know. The only game options I ever touch are "No Tribal Villages" and "No Random Events". Just look at CIV4HandicapInfo.xml (in a simple text editor). It's not hard to understand what's in there.