Questions About Civs' Aggression

[Theov]

Opportunity is a big factor in an AI declaring war or not.
The AI def looks at their military, then looks at your military and if you are deemed weak, they will demand animals, goods or smokes.
Or they park some guys with weapons at your borders and snag up some workers when they pass by.

I always make sure I got enough fighting power, otherwise the AI will just see me as a lame duck that will even wake Ghandi from his peaceful meditations.

 

[Theov]

Those are some great observations in the posts above.
I will surely look again at the agression setting in my mod.

 

[Ozymandias]

I'd like to note here that with Flintlock's patch you can nerf Agricultural civs by making their extra food from city centers be applicable for the despotism tile penalty as well, so they'd only get their bonus once they switch governments. That could already be all the nerf you need for their early game aggression.

You can also just go into the standard editor and remove the "-1" Food Penalty from Despotism.

 

[Fergei]

I will have to revisit this. Taking steps to slow down the production of settlers massively increases the power and effectiveness of AI Civs with early UUs. In vanilla settings these guys often haven't even hooked a resourcse before Feudalism isn't too far away and making ancient era UUs pretty redundant.

But slow down settler production and the AI will quickly build a proper military force and contemplate war lòoooong before all territory will be settled. It feels much more like how I remember the snowballing early AI aggression of Civ1. I might even have to reverse my aggression tweaks for some Civs like Egypt as they are absolutely lethal in testing with reduced settler output. Prior to that I can't recall ever really seeing Egypt go on the offensive much.

 

[Ozymandias]

A few recollections lost in the mysts of memory from long ago:

1. Rigorous testing showed that "Build Often/Never" only changes builds ~5%.
2. I've never really noticed much difference between Aggression 4/5.
3. Ditto 1/2.