The Eternal Peace

s.bernbaum · Dec 3, 2024

It's quite easy to remove Global Warming from the game. The GlobalDefines.xml, which exists for every version of the game (vanilla, Warlords, and BTS), holds many game parameters. Global Warming is one of them.

The file is located in each version as follows:
...\Civilization 4\Assets\XML
...\Civilization 4\Warlords\Assets\XML
...\Civilization 4\Beyond The Sword\Assets\XML

Code to look for is:
<Define>
<DefineName>GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB</DefineName>
<iDefineIntVal>20</iDefineIntVal>
</Define>

Changing the "20" to "0" will remove Global Warming from the game. However, don't do this in the file itself. Either create a mod or copy the GlobalDefines.xml file from the main XML directory into the XML directory in CustomAssets. Change the 20 to 0 in the copy. Any settings in CustomAssets override identically named ones in the main directory. It is easy to do and can be reversed easily by removing the change from CustomAssets.

I don't like Global Warming in the game, so I used the CustomAssets method years ago and have played happily without Global Warming since then. (I also don't like nukes, so I got rid of them too, using the same method, by making the Manhatten Project unbuildable.)

Fins · Dec 3, 2024

s.bernbaum said:
It's quite easy to remove Global Warming from the game. ...

I'm aware. Popular game tweak indeed. And, thanks for trying to help, but i don't need global warming disabled. Quite the opposite - i want it enabled. For "normal" games - i mean duration-wise - games always end before or soon after GW starts, and so it's not a problem at all. While "endless" kind of games - for thousands turns, - i can endure it; like i did in this Eternal Peace run. I'm going for Evergreen game now - the way i defined it in my previous post, - not because it's the only way i know to prevent GW, but because it's fun to "defeat GW" which is a threat exactly like in-game rules of BtS define it; and even more fun to play the game in one quite different way while having a good reason to do it. You know?

f1rpo · Dec 7, 2024

Fins said:
The "short" of its plan - is this: in BtS, prevent GW by preventing too much pollution by stomping AIs before they could pollute too much, prevent any and all nukes and meltdowns, and achieve over 40% forest cover for the world ASAP - to make GW impossible ever since.

In the code, it does look like the 40% condition is legit. Falling short of that a little for some time may not be harmful either as nearly 40% will still only result in a very small chance of a GW event. And, on Warlord difficulty, marginalizing 10 AI civs in time sounds doable too. Probably judicious chopping early on could save more vegetation on the bottom line by conquering AI land faster.

Fins said:
Warlord due to no creeping-in diplomacy deterioration which exists in higher difficulties,

The iAttitudeChange in XML? That's not a progressive effect, just a hidden -1 to all relations, AI-AI as well as AI-human.
Pollution from buildings won't really matter for GW if you've got the forests, but I guess you want to avoid those for aesthetic reasons too.
Gotta say that leaving some reservations does not measure up to a "no genocide" ethos in my mind. Ah, I see you've already embraced a more sardonic tack:

Fins said:
wanna keep the game "not won" by anybody for indefinitely long time, so at least one AI must remain alive anyway; and then - the more the merrier, right? [...] but it's not right to drive even such parasites to complete extinction.

Digressing a little (at some length - let's put it all in a big spoiler),

Spoiler :

I'm still fond of the idea of some seemingly fragile but ultimately durable equilibrium. And of letting the AI do all of the playing. While I consider BtS the standard version of Civ 4, going with the base game has an appeal in this context because diplomatic relations don't necessarily deteriorate through espionage in the base game. (No hope to avoid GW, however.) So I've run a few tests using the Autorun developer tool in the CivilizationIV.ini. I recall reading in interviews that Firaxis (on the slow PCs of that time) let such games run over night, presumably with a turn limit, but it's also possible to set no turn limit. Apart from that, I wanted to leave the settings as close to the defaults as possible, so I only disabled Time, Space and Culture victory. Culture is totally inevitable when the AI is playing, Space – in theory, the AI could perhaps get stuck in wars so destructive that Space victory never materializes, but, well, maybe it's not even really a theoretical possibility. Among the remaining victory conditions, Diplomacy is the one that the AI is the likeliest to achieve in a long game. Inflation not disabled.

Already on the second attempt, I got each of the two continents (Continents is the default map script in the base game) fully conquered by one civ each, and the stronger of those two then tried in vein for 2000 years to conquer the other, sinking more than a thousand warships in the process. Eventually, the Chieftain handicap assigned to the civ watched by the human player meant that inflation forced its Noble-handicapped adversary much earlier to disband their military, which quickly tilted the game toward a UN victory vote by about AD 4000. Chieftain is, if I'm not mistaken, the default human handicap when launching Civ 4 for the first time. But, arguably, when the human player is put under AI control, it makes a lot of sense to also give that player the default AI handicap (Noble). So that's what I used for my subsequent attempts. Putting the human civ more or less on equal footing with the proper AI civs meant that the human civ frequently got eliminated ... not exactly early on, but maybe sometime in the 21st century. Although this doesn't stop the game – and only slightly limits the ways that it can be inspected –, I decided that I wanted the human civ to stay alive until the end.

I got one run where four amigos liked each other enough to stay at peace indefinitely (despite being warlike characters), and I think it would've continued past the year 10k, but then it crashed in about 7680. Probably some UI interaction crashed it, but I couldn't try to resume the game because the autosaves created while fully automated can't be loaded, so they're only good as an indication of the turn on which a crash occurs. The other way to pick up a crashed game is to use fixed RNG seeds and then hope that the game is indeed fully reproducible this way. It seems that this usually works, – but I hadn't been prescient enough to fix the seeds until I got my first crash. A later attempt failed when the game got hung up in an infinite loop that kept recurring.

The one game that somewhat fit my criteria of a stable equilibrium ran until 24k when it crashed while running in the background – probably irretrievably (I didn't bother to try). No real clue what caused the crash. The only numbers that I noticed getting pretty large were city culture values, – but even those were nowhere near an overflow. Maybe some internal intermediate result based on big numbers like that. This game's story is just two psychopaths, Peter and Montezuma, conquering the world together and striking up a lasting friendship in the process – and then blocking each other in the victory votes. A pretty boring outcome really – tumbleweeds on a desert planet. Some screenshots, some with (rather carelessly written) annotations:

Spoiler :

Seems that a human player could delay an inflation-caused strike until at least the year 5000. Well, the larger the civ, the worse inflation hits.

Just to make the point that this game trajectory could, in principle, be recreated, these are the INI settings I've used, the relevant ones being bolded:

Spoiler :

The coolest would perhaps be all 8 civs staying alive, 4 on each continent, friendly among each other and perpetually at war with the other continent. (Hostile relations within a continent staying in limbo is just not going to happen, I think.) But even just two eternal archenemies would seem more fun than the eternal peace. Sending underdimensioned invasion fleets and armies of spies at each other until, at last, their units go on strike and they're like two hate-filled brothers whom their families put in the same retirement home and they can't even get out of bed anymore to choke each other out.

Fins · Dec 8, 2024

f1rpo said:
In the code, it does look like the 40% condition is legit. Falling short of that a little for some time may not be harmful either as nearly 40% will still only result in a very small chance of a GW event. And, on Warlord difficulty, marginalizing 10 AI civs in time sounds doable too. Probably judicious chopping early on could save more vegetation on the bottom line by conquering AI land faster.

The iAttitudeChange in XML? That's not a progressive effect, just a hidden -1 to all relations, AI-AI as well as AI-human.
Pollution from buildings won't really matter for GW if you've got the forests, but I guess you want to avoid those for aesthetic reasons too.
Gotta say that leaving some reservations does not measure up to a "no genocide" ethos in my mind. Ah, I see you've already embraced a more sardonic tack:

Digressing a little (at some length - let's put it all in a big spoiler),

Spoiler :

I'm still fond of the idea of some seemingly fragile but ultimately durable equilibrium. And of letting the AI do all of the playing. While I consider BtS the standard version of Civ 4, going with the base game has an appeal in this context because diplomatic relations don't necessarily deteriorate through espionage in the base game. (No hope to avoid GW, however.) So I've run a few tests using the Autorun developer tool in the CivilizationIV.ini. I recall reading in interviews that Firaxis (on the slow PCs of that time) let such games run over night, presumably with a turn limit, but it's also possible to set no turn limit. Apart from that, I wanted to leave the settings as close to the defaults as possible, so I only disabled Time, Space and Culture victory. Culture is totally inevitable when the AI is playing, Space – in theory, the AI could perhaps get stuck in wars so destructive that Space victory never materializes, but, well, maybe it's not even really a theoretical possibility. Among the remaining victory conditions, Diplomacy is the one that the AI is the likeliest to achieve in a long game. Inflation not disabled.

Already on the second attempt, I got each of the two continents (Continents is the default map script in the base game) fully conquered by one civ each, and the stronger of those two then tried in vein for 2000 years to conquer the other, sinking more than a thousand warships in the process. Eventually, the Chieftain handicap assigned to the civ watched by the human player meant that inflation forced its Noble-handicapped adversary much earlier to disband their military, which quickly tilted the game toward a UN victory vote by about AD 4000. Chieftain is, if I'm not mistaken, the default human handicap when launching Civ 4 for the first time. But, arguably, when the human player is put under AI control, it makes a lot of sense to also give that player the default AI handicap (Noble). So that's what I used for my subsequent attempts. Putting the human civ more or less on equal footing with the proper AI civs meant that the human civ frequently got eliminated ... not exactly early on, but maybe sometime in the 21st century. Although this doesn't stop the game – and only slightly limits the ways that it can be inspected –, I decided that I wanted the human civ to stay alive until the end.

I got one run where four amigos liked each other enough to stay at peace indefinitely (despite being warlike characters), and I think it would've continued past the year 10k, but then it crashed in about 7680. Probably some UI interaction crashed it, but I couldn't try to resume the game because the autosaves created while fully automated can't be loaded, so they're only good as an indication of the turn on which a crash occurs. The other way to pick up a crashed game is to use fixed RNG seeds and then hope that the game is indeed fully reproducible this way. It seems that this usually works, – but I hadn't been prescient enough to fix the seeds until I got my first crash. A later attempt failed when the game got hung up in an infinite loop that kept recurring.

The one game that somewhat fit my criteria of a stable equilibrium ran until 24k when it crashed while running in the background – probably irretrievably (I didn't bother to try). No real clue what caused the crash. The only numbers that I noticed getting pretty large were city culture values, – but even those were nowhere near an overflow. Maybe some internal intermediate result based on big numbers like that. This game's story is just two psychopaths, Peter and Montezuma, conquering the world together and striking up a lasting friendship in the process – and then blocking each other in the victory votes. A pretty boring outcome really – tumbleweeds on a desert planet. Some screenshots, some with (rather carelessly written) annotations:

Falling short of 40% means "some" GW would still occur. Then, it's really about which chance is higher: a GW event, or reforestation event. Both, when they happen, reduce probability of the other: new forests reduce GW directly, while GW reduces reforestation chances by killing existing forests and making tiles near existing forests to become non-reforestable. However, the problem is - the longer these two processes compete, the more tilted weights become to favor GW. Because the more "dotted" by desert tiles the map becomes - the more difficult it gets for forests to spread, with desert tiles "blocking the way" for new growth. That's why the margin is really very small: few percent below 40%, and for a short time - should be survivable, with lots and lots of forests preserves working to get it to 40% soon enough. But anything way less than 40% - 30%, perhaps even 35%, with some GW going on, - i suspect would only delay the inevitable, not prevent it.

Judicious chopping? Naah, don't need it. Like you said, it's Warlord. Every chopped tile takes a long time to grow back. On average. Besides, 1 food and 4 hammers is quite OK for a tile - i.e. your average forest with lumbermill and railroad.

iAttitudeChange - yes, that. No idea how, but for some reason i thought i played some high-difficulty _and_ long Civ4 games where relations kept going worse and worse the further i played. Must be some other 4x title, then. Been years since those. Sigh... Thanks!

Pollution from buildings - on the contrary, extremely relevant. On most maps, including Earth2 i chose to play for Evergreen game. Assuming that the normal situation of "AIs expanded to settle most of land areas, at some point" - happened. They chop most trees down, meaning the map will get far below 40% for a very long time - until the player manages to have the reforestation slowly gets it back to 40% and above. And i remember reading somewhere that it's quite small amount of green faces which is the treshold of GW starting in BtS: ~100 or so. I assume that this is for the whole world combined - player's and all AIs' pollution added up. And since AI's build polluting stuff readily, but are slow-to-never about building recycling centers, every last bit of avoided pollution may matter.

And about your "digression" under the spoiler. Except, it wasn't a digression to me. :·) Rather - one pretty fun variation of how Eternal Peace may and may not occur. Totally fits this topic.

Spoiler A few comments :

- nice screenies and comments. I like! :·)

- i doubt that game crashes you've got - are from culture getting too high. See, in my game, i had me one Los Angeles which was my cultural center, and by 12,777 AD it had well over 10 million culture on the culture bar. Chugged out over 1.5k culture per turn at its peak some time in 3rd millenium. I doubt any AIs could get it that high in your runs. And since my game didn't crash even once - i really doubt it's culture, yep.

- inflation not disabled: why? As i said somewhere above in this topic, if you let it run some millenia, then it pretty much cripples the game; no way around it other than to disable the thing. None i can imagine at least.

- warmongers liking each other: yep, they often do that. I see it in my games: as long as two or more of them are not cornering each other, they are often best pals. Makes sense, too: expansionits have certain respect to each other - from a distance.

- crop yield graph showing GW progress: aha, you see? Quite a striking difference to significantly "wavy" shape of the curve i presented before. Clearly in your tests it didn't proceed as it did in my game, where there were periods of "easing up". I still suspect it was some hella hard-to-catch bug related to civics and/or revolutions. But who knows...

- a thousand warships sank: yeah. Nice detail. :·D

- noticed major difference in "Future Tech" numbers on one of screenshots: Montezuma 951, human player 27. That's a LOT of beakers eating commerce for one, but not for the other.

- and i wonder why you said that it's impossible to prevent GW in vanilla. Quite the contrary: easier to do than in BtS. Because no GW from pollution - only nukes and meltdowns cause it. So, for an actual game we'd play, like you said - suffice to control all Uranium sources on the map before AIs start building nukes and nuclear plants. And for your kind of full-auto AI Eternal Peace attempts - suffice to use a map with no Uranium sources at all (or, possibly, mod some map to not have any? No idea if it's easy to do, but i think you're tech savvy enough even if it's not).

f1rpo · Dec 8, 2024

I see, I was probably too optimistic about how attainable 40% forestation is. Some statistics I have for Fractal say that about 20% of the land is forested initially. But those are from a mod, so this is at best a ballpark figure. Sometimes, come to think of it, BtS will fill almost the entire city radius around a player's starting tile with forests. The map generator then believes that the site needs to be sweetened for balance reasons but also thinks that more forests don't actually improve a start much, so it's typically either all forests or no extra forests. Conspicuous holes in the forest cover can hint at unrevealed resources that block forest placement. Having such a start would be nice for your game (which I realize is already well underway). But, then, on a Huge map, extra starting forests are probably not a big factor. And all the better if health on buildings is relevant; more interesting that way.

Inflation: I wanted to pose a quick, offhand question like, "what would actually happen if we just disable some inevitable victory conditions" – the "just" implying minimal tweaks to settings - and modding at most as a last resort. That's one reason why I'd rather leave inflation alone, but I also like how absurd it is without being highly disruptive until the game is stuck in a rut anyway. And it pairs nicely with Global Warming eliminating the food surpluses; a theme of degeneration. I'll grant that the engineering of settings also is an interesting challenge. Perhaps an extremely densely packed map won't give the map generator enough room to place any Uranium (though, as a strategic resource, it does have a high priority). May also make inflation much less relevant. (Just running a lot of automated games while looking for a lucky run isn't exactly a challenge at all.) Crashes: Could also have had to do with the autorun mechanism. Can't expect a developer feature to be entirely robust.

The Future Tech numbers. Those are turns to go, so the low number for Peter (the human) could just be a fluke. But other screenshots show that Peter consistently has fewer turns to go, i.e. is researching much faster. Not too odd, I think, given that Montezuma's gold rate dips below Peter's already in the early 3rd millennium. Montezuma is bigger and has cities spread between two continents, so inflation hits him much worse. Toward the end the difference is harder to explain as both research sliders are at 0. I didn't check the civics, but Montezuma's favorite is Police State, so that civic vs. specialist research from Representation for Peter seems like a good explanation. Hm, though the UN usually enforces Universal Suffrage for all. Maybe not with just two member civs. Edit: Oh, Peter's favorite is Police State too. Peas in a pod. More settled Scientists then perhaps; he has 5 points of Science flavor in his personality profile, Montezuma 0.

Fins · Dec 8, 2024

I found detailed description of how GW is calculated in 3.17 - here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/3-17-global-warming-mechanics.280111/ . And regarding our above discussion, two things are worth mentioning.

1st, the cap for total amount of pollution (green faces) - scales linearly with map size. What i said above about ~100 pollution total from buildings - is only true for smaller maps! It's actually ~220 (precisely - 218.4) pollution for Standard map size (4368 tiles). Obviously, if you run your auto games on smaller maps, then it will be correspondedly lower: ~109 max pollution for no-GW-chance on a map with twice lower number of tiles than normal size, 48 pollution for some Duel sized map with 960 tiles total, etc. While for my Evergreen game (which i do on the huge Earth2 map) - the pollution cap is increased by a factor of ~3.165, i.e. to seemingly large 691 pollution max. But it's not large: with up to ~17 building pollution from any late-game AI city technically doable, this 691-green-faces-from-buildings-total limit - is passed by merely 40 cities. While the map easily allows to have some 150+ cities. Same for duel-like map: 3 fully late-game developed cities would already create enough pollution for GW to start happening, but at some usual 1:1 land-water tiles ratio, it'd be ~480 land tiles - sufficient for well more than a dozen cities, possibly even two dozens.

2nd, then i realized one most simple simple thing: it's not the map's _size_ itself which allows this or that many cities to exist, you know? Rather - it's total amount of "land suitable to have cities on it"! Conclusion: one more method to run a world where no GW-due-to-pollution would ever happen, in BtS - is simply to have a game on a relatively large map with relatively little land mass available. I.e., "vast oceans, little land". If the ratio of water to land tiles is high enough - then there will simply be not enough space to build many enough cities which could create enough pollution for the GW to ever start. Provided no nukes are ever exploded, of course. Any other circumstance which would result in "less cities built" by AIs - would also help: large amount of mountains, ice or somesuch on the map.

I'd say, it should be total safe, in this regard, if land-water ratio of the map - would be as low as 1:20. I.e., if you can run your full-auto games on any "Huge-sized" map (some ~12k tiles) with so much water that only ~500 tiles of the map are landmasses (few small continents) - then i bet no GW due to AIs polluting would ever happen.

P.S. Less extreme cases of "extra much water" map being used which do not prevent GW entirely - will still inevitably and massively "ease up" GW, too, by reducing amount of pollution which goes above the cap. I.e., overall, the higher percentage of the map is water (or otherwise not-available-for-cities areas) - the later GW begins, and the slower it happens, with everything else being equal. Knowing this - gives me quite a perspective about why some players hate GW so much while others see no big trouble about it: simply, both timing and severity of it are much dependent on what kind of maps people play, and they do play wildly different kinds of maps...

Fins · Dec 18, 2024

f1rpo said:
I thought they'd at least want to keep eyes on all rivals, but the function names in the AI code (edit: AI_sabotageSpy, AI_destroySpy) already suggest that the AI indeed only sends out spies with an intent to sabotage improvements or to destroy production. And both of these functions indeed have checks for attitude being Annoyed or worse. BtS, however, has added a function AI_reconSpy, which does not have an attitude condition. So I fear your Evergreen game is destined for perpetual redness of diplo modifiers on the (BtS-introduced) "Glance" overview tab of the Foreign Advisor. ...

There seem to be one practical solution to it in BtS, though: don't get caught and/or just don't practice (any many) active espionage. I made it to 1900 AD in my Evergreen game today, and there is so far zero spying-related modifiers in the said tab. What i did - is pretty simple: only took very vew (about a dozen, so far) active espionage missions, and only took 'em when it was 99% chance to succeed - waiting in an AI city a turn or few helps to up the odds, as does having massive lead in espionage points over the target AIs. The latter, i have to the extent of having ~10 times more espionage points than any AI i did any active espionage mission against. And, this same massive lead - also means their spies are getting caught in well over 90% of their attempts to do anything in my territory; some hundred or so turns ago, they managed to pull off a few missions against me - poisoned water supply once, destroyed few improvements, etc, - but after ~1800 AD, as my lead in espionage points continued to grow, those succeses became very rare. And, neither these few succesful espionage actions they did nor all their failures - quite many of them are even revealing which exactly AI's spy was caught in my territory, - resulted in any diplo modifiers from any of them. I thought that maybe a couple of "past events proven you're bad" red modifiers could be somehow related to their failed attempts at espionage against me, but now, in 1900 AD, i checked all 9 surviving AIs and all those modifiers are now gone: expired, i think. From some random "marriage" or such event, i think.

P.S. So, yeah, seems to be my Evergreen won't be having perpetual complete redness in that "Glance" tab. Except the three AIs, who got between -5 and -20 for razing their cities - did that intentionally in mid-game wars to place my own cities better. I'm planning to not piss off the rest of 9 AIs who are surviving so far in this same way, though. So i should be having two "real pissed off for cities razed" AIs, one "somewhat pissed off and hard to deal with" - the one with -5 for razed cities, - and four...six more with no permanent diplo modifiers, once my Evergreen reaches its late game state. I'll be, at worst, 2 other AIs with a single "declared war on us" permanent negative diplo modifier; other four - i won't need to even ever declare war on them myself, even. Because I already got four AIs minimized to a single city which is surrounded by my high-culture cities, and with closed borders to everyone and no chance to lose militarily, those four will definitely remain forever: i won't allow no other AI to do any harm to those. And my plans to do the same to the other five AIs - so far proceed very well; by 1900 AD, outta 9 surviving AIs, only 3 still have Uranium within their territories, and one of them will have his only Uranium source flipped to me via culture without any need to do war. And with all the "still strong" AIs being some full 3...4 tech tiers away from getting the tech for Manhattan and nukes, i still have ample time to hope one or both of AIs who got some Uranium deep within their territory - will end up declaring some war on me before i'd need to attack them myself to capture their cities with Uranium nearby and make sure they won't start building nukes.

a pen-dragon · Dec 18, 2024

From your text I gather that you think that catching spies gives a negative diplo modifier from the player who owned the spy. AFAIK that is not the case and the diplo modifier only comes from spies being caugth.

Example to clarify:

Player1 has a spy getting caugth (maybe only during a mission, idk?) in Player2's territorry. Now Player2 will have a negative diplo modifier towards Player1.

That means that you cathing AI spies does not negatively influence relations.

Edit: corrected typo

Fins · Dec 18, 2024

a pen-dragon said:
From your text I gather that you think that catching spies gives a negative diplo modifier from the player who owned the spy. AFAIK that is not the case and the diplo modifier only comes from spies being caugth.

Example to clarify:

Player1 has a spy getting caugth (maybe only during a mission, idk?) in Player2's territorry. Now Player2 will have a negative diplo modifier towards Player1.

That means that you cathing AI spies does not negatively influence relations.

Edit: corrected typo

Thanks for trying to help, but no, you gathered wrong. I did not think that. Merely, i suspected such a thing may happen in some usually uncommon occasion, which for a _very_ long game - would mount up to some big negative modifier. And i suspected that not because i've seen such a thing happen myself, but only because f1pro's text, which i quoted in my previous post, implies such a possibility. And once i found that this suspicion does not seem to be any valid - i gave him detailed report about it, in my previous post.

f1rpo · Dec 18, 2024

But the relationships between the AI civs? I imagine the ones reduced to city states have too few spies (maybe just 0 or 1) to keep sending them everywhere, but, the others, I'd expect to use spies for recon and not only against you. If you're able to limit your own spy activity, then, sure, the AI won't hate you.

Fins · Dec 18, 2024

f1rpo said:
But the relationships between the AI civs? I imagine the ones reduced to city states have too few spies (maybe just 0 or 1) to keep sending them everywhere, but, the others, I'd expect to use spies for recon and not only against you. If you're able to limit your own spy activity, then, sure, the AI won't hate you.

Ah, between AIs - well that's the most interesting part indeed!

By 1905 AD, between 9 AIs on my huge map, there are 9 x 9 - 9 = 72 "between AIs" diplomatic stances, but only 3 of those are, so far, red (e.g. "Furious") - while no less than 14 are green (i.e. "Friendly"):

Spoiler Evergreen - 1905 AD Glance tab :

Now, i took the time to mouse over every last one of those 72 between-AIs stances, and i found 5 instances which have that "your spy was caught" modifier. Of those 5, 4 stances had merely -1 for it (so, a single spy caught so far), while 5th had -4 (so, 4 spies caught). Meaning, in total, by turn 325 (normal speed), those 9 AIs ever caught the grand total of 8 spies. Not very many indeed.

So, yes, they do it, but they do it very little to each other, and/or do it only when having very low odds to get caught. At least in a situation where most of their spying efforts are spent against me. Which, it most likely is, given how big a threat i am to them all merely by the size and far leading development of my empire (see the score and minimap on the right of the screenshot above). And now that i have England (brighter white), who's the 2nd most-active spying nation for some 100sh turns, separated by my territory from all other AIs, and Babylon (purple) with its vassal Germany (a bit darker white, to the west from Babylon) only having Greeks (light-blue) as a possible AI target for babylonian spies - chances are they won't ever do any much more spying among themselves.

They sure keep trying against me, though. Right now, babylonians devote 20% of their commerce to spying. They also had some spying specialists active in their cities, which accumulated enough chances for a great spy to be born by the same turn - 1905 AD:

Spoiler Evergreen - 1905 AD, Babylon :

Which you can see in the log on the right - together with a message about Zulu spy caught, too.

Zulu - is yellow AI, he has last city in south Africa, currently size 2 with all its lands plundered, all its troops wiped out, and 3 coastal cities of mine pushing culture into his remaining lands with Sid's Sushi and stuff. I was done beating him some 8 or so turns ago, then made peace with him. So now he is, pretty much, 4th city state already, for some dozen or so turns - and for few dozens turns more, he was being beaten by me so bad that he had absolutely no time to build any spies. All i've seen him building - was troops, in all cities. So this Zulu spy, i think, was a survivor from way earlier: most likely managed to do a long trip in some caravel to some other AI, and now returned to his last city and got caught by me, because sending spies against me is the only thing he can now do with any of his spies; from now on, he can't build any ships anymore, and since it's closed borders - even if some caravel of his still lurks somewhere, it won't be able to pick up a spy from his territory once my culture completely landlocks his last city.

So, i think, while you're right that never-expiring diplo penalties for spies caught between-AIs - could accumulate in "a" very long game to some ugly amount, it's clearly not the case in my Evergreen. I'll still make proper _nice_ people outta all those dorks, you'll see!

Qgqqqqq · Dec 20, 2024

Isn't there a 'No Espionage' option?

Fins · Dec 21, 2024

Of course there is. There is also "No Civilization" option, and it's even easier to use than "No Espionage". Because to use "No Espionage", it's required to do a few mouse clicks to enable it. While "No Civilization" works all by itself: as long as you simply do not start the game, it's always active.

The Eternal Peace

s.bernbaum

Mostly lurking

Fins

Warlord

f1rpo

plastics

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