Runaway thread = Iroquois

Sherlock

Just one more turn...
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All the time. I can't recall the last time I played a game where the runaway wasn't Hiawatha. Beating your score, taking Wonders by one friggin turn. Spamming cities like crazy.

What's the deal with the AI Iroquois? Do they have no negative happiness for founding new cities? Looks like it because they create more cities than any Civ I've seen.

It's getting boring, I may advanced setup them out of my games for awhile.
 
I actually don't have much of an issue with the Iroquois running away.

But other users theorize that it's an easy Civ for the AI to take advantage of because there UA is so straight forward. If they have a lot of forest, it's really easy on their happiness and economy. Their UU is cheap and effective and their production gets rolling with their UI.


I think ironically though, it comes down to their Leadership. I think Hiawatha is one of the most rational and reasonable leaders on the board. Alex, Monty, Shaka, and Atilla are really sociopaths. They're so bent on war that they're willing to sacrifice they're own existence to be at war. Caesar, Lizzy, and Bizmark and Maria Teresa are nearly insane as well.

Hiawatha is one of the few rational actors on the board. He doesn't mind or cower from war but he only conducts wars he knows he can win. I really think you can take him at face value when you play him.
 
I think ironically though, it comes down to their Leadership. I think Hiawatha is one of the most rational and reasonable leaders on the board. Alex, Monty, Shaka, and Atilla are really sociopaths. They're so bent on war that they're willing to sacrifice they're own existence to be at war.
That is certainly part of it, and the other part is that he has one of the highest flavours for expansion - and after all, the AI's discounts on techs, policies, buildings, units etc. get used most when they go wide. Whereas spamming cities on any bare tile, no matter how god-forsaken it is, does not good for the human player on higher details, for the AI, this might still work to their advantage.
 
High expansion AI != runaway in Civ V BNW

Remember that each and every city increases science costs by 5% (on standard, somewhat less on bigger maps)

Irq is a very high expansion flavor AI, but it won't build the science structures needed to take advantage of it.

A human playing standard 4 city tradition will get lightyears ahead of the Irq AI.

As to the AI happiness, basically there are two multiplers that matter for happiness.

1. On all difficulty levels, the AI only has 90% of the pop & city unhappiness that a human on Prince does. In addition, AI has a flat +6 extra happiness. (Back in G&K and Vanilla, the AI got the chieftain level happiness bonuses)

2. If the human is playing above Prince, then every difficulty level further reduces the AI unhappiness.
 
High expansion AI != runaway in Civ V BNW
I agree with you in as much that I don't find Iroquois running away very often, but none-the-less, the AI's that perform best in any game I play is always the one who manages to go wide and not become disliked by entire world. The AI may not be able to control science infrastructure in wide empire, but neither is it in tall empires, and tall AI tends to stall much earlier than wide AI in my game (which is indeed very different from human player conditions) - at least until ideology unhappiness becomes a factor, in which case wide AI will suffer dramatically (in my last game, poor 25-city Iroquois got a -100 happiness hit due to ideology pressure, whereas the tall counterparts only got hits in the range of -10 to -30).
 
Hiawatha used to be even more of a nuisance. There was a time when new cities didn't come with the same science penalties we have today. That was also the time when melee units could manhandle cities without the need of ranged support. Hiawatha built Mohawk warriors like crazy and would flood your lands with them at a moment's notice. Those were the days that the Iroquois were the big-time runaways.
 
The AI does so well with Hiawatha also in part because the terrain bonus negates the AI's biggest weakeness (allowing itself being ranged to death). The forests grant very good mobility. And since he goes wide, he can run across a lot of obstacles that would stop someone else.

The Inca are a pain to fight for the same reasons.
 
Iroquois have Mohawk warriors which don't require any metal as if their swordsmen were gunpowder units. After that, upgrading to longswordsmen will require iron but then upgrading to musketmen won't require iron. Iroquois as ai still does expand a lot quick and early with the expansion then because I have noticed quick Iroquois expansion in earlier non patch versions of civilization 5.
 
The Inca are a pain to fight for the same reasons.

Probably because they tend to be around a lot of hills which kill your movement points and at the same time their units move through the hills like they are nothing basically.
 
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