After playing a few games at high difficulty levels, I'm sorry to report that the AI is just dumb. It doesn't know how to attack cities, or defend them: if the AI fought to win (instead of just fighting to annoy) it would make big stacks of city raiders and use them against one city at a time, the way a human does. Of course, when a human does it, the AI doesn't move defender reinforcements into the only city within reach of the raiding column. No, the AI would rather let that city get overrun while leaving a big stack of defenders in a city that's in no danger at all, which is so stupid that the AI is almost no fun to beat.
I imagine this is fixable in a mod. I'm sure Civ4 AI is complicated and I don't have time to work on it myself, though I would be happy to test and maybe write some pseudo-code to address the worst AI behaviors.
I wrote code for a mod that involved improving the AI for spellcasters in Baldur's Gate 2. In the end, a well-programmed AI wizard could, without cheating, almost always beat his human-control duplicate. I'm not saying CivAI goals should be that lofty, but there is so much room for improvement, surely we should get started, no?
I imagine this is fixable in a mod. I'm sure Civ4 AI is complicated and I don't have time to work on it myself, though I would be happy to test and maybe write some pseudo-code to address the worst AI behaviors.
I wrote code for a mod that involved improving the AI for spellcasters in Baldur's Gate 2. In the end, a well-programmed AI wizard could, without cheating, almost always beat his human-control duplicate. I'm not saying CivAI goals should be that lofty, but there is so much room for improvement, surely we should get started, no?