Puppets shouldn't produce urbanization unhappiness + Warmonger discussion.

[notaspambot]

I haven't seen the AI improvements in 5.0 yet, but personally, I think that the biggest "buff" that warmonger AIs need is to simply know when to give up on certain cities. The AI seems to be pretty good at taking cities on open, easy to attack terrain, but struggles against cities surrounded by defensive terrain. They then get "stuck" on such cities, wasting a bunch of turns they could have used against easier targets, or simply demanding tribute from nearby CS, and eventually get outscaled by the more peaceful civs.

For example, I forward settled the Aztecs in a recent game and the Aztecs declared war soon after, but I was in little danger from it because my city was surrounded by 2 coast, 2 forest, and 2 hill tiles, with only a single tile in the second ring to shoot it from. The Aztecs also did not start on the coast, and had no navy to help siege my city with. The end result was that I basically stuck a garrison in there, deterring any melee units from attacking it, and then stalled the Aztecs for a bunch of turns until they eventually gave up.

Of course, I'm not sure how relevant this is in 5.0, as this could simply have been solved by better siege AI, but it also felt like they could have done with some form of target evaluation telling them that certain cities just aren't worth it.

 

[Voremonger]

My experience is also that the AI could still use improvement when it comes to evaluating the tactical impact of terrain, both for settling and for deciding where to attack. Conversely, once Field Guns or Artillery are available the AI should become a lot more aggressive.

Also the AI is I think not assigning their units optimally: for a long front line they send I think any unit to any position but what I think is a better strategy is to concentrate Siege Units around 1 or 2 Cities that you intend to take while defending with other Units everywhere else. Particularly I think it makes sense to keep a few fast Units in reserve in order to rapidly respond if there are any unforeseen problems (but then again the AI has way more Units so maybe it's not as much of an issue for them).