ayronis
Chieftain
I agree that the AI appears to be playing more cautiously, but I have also seen much fewer suicidal wars where a dozen units march harmlessly up to the gates of a defended city.
I have played two games so far on Standard/Standard-Perfectworld3 (one king, one emperor)
The first game, Isabella and Kamehameha shared a long border and fought a total of six wars in the course of the game. No cities exchanged hands until the modern era, when Kame went Freedom and turtled so Isabella went Autocratic and starting eating her neighbors. She eliminated one and would have eliminated another if I hadn't won the UN vote. All the while this was happening, the rest of the world was exceedingly peaceful because the random civs were all peaceful and had sufficient room to build a decent start with 3-4 good cities.
In the second game, I added 2 civs and 3 CSs to a standard map and pushed the difficulty up by one. The game is still underway but it is playing very differently. Haile got a tough start next to a superior Gajah, who boxed the Ethiopians in. In the Medieval, Haile asked if I would join a war against Gajah, which I agreed to because I was on the other side of the world and Haile seemed to have a stronger military (Gajah had expanded quickly). The Indonesians went on to take one of Haile's only three cities, driving him further into a hole. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is coalescing into three friendly trade-blocs, but I have seen two invasions of CSs (Denmark and China), and an opportunistic war by Isabella on the militarily weakened Ethiopia. It's still the late Renaissance so I cannot make any conclusions, but the limited space definitely increased the level of violence in the world.
I understand why people are complaining. The old strategies definitely don't work, and I don't understand the economics of the new game well enough to judge if the AI aggressiveness is broken or not, but I can say that the macro-level, strategic AI seems to have a much better awareness of its actions now. They fit into a much larger diplomatic and political world in a way they never did before.
I have played two games so far on Standard/Standard-Perfectworld3 (one king, one emperor)
The first game, Isabella and Kamehameha shared a long border and fought a total of six wars in the course of the game. No cities exchanged hands until the modern era, when Kame went Freedom and turtled so Isabella went Autocratic and starting eating her neighbors. She eliminated one and would have eliminated another if I hadn't won the UN vote. All the while this was happening, the rest of the world was exceedingly peaceful because the random civs were all peaceful and had sufficient room to build a decent start with 3-4 good cities.
In the second game, I added 2 civs and 3 CSs to a standard map and pushed the difficulty up by one. The game is still underway but it is playing very differently. Haile got a tough start next to a superior Gajah, who boxed the Ethiopians in. In the Medieval, Haile asked if I would join a war against Gajah, which I agreed to because I was on the other side of the world and Haile seemed to have a stronger military (Gajah had expanded quickly). The Indonesians went on to take one of Haile's only three cities, driving him further into a hole. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is coalescing into three friendly trade-blocs, but I have seen two invasions of CSs (Denmark and China), and an opportunistic war by Isabella on the militarily weakened Ethiopia. It's still the late Renaissance so I cannot make any conclusions, but the limited space definitely increased the level of violence in the world.
I understand why people are complaining. The old strategies definitely don't work, and I don't understand the economics of the new game well enough to judge if the AI aggressiveness is broken or not, but I can say that the macro-level, strategic AI seems to have a much better awareness of its actions now. They fit into a much larger diplomatic and political world in a way they never did before.
