Arkenor
Warlord
I'm currently playing a game on Emperor level, and have discovered that the AIs seem completely immune to revolutions, and thus also completely unconcerned with city limitations. Bit of a shame, as I like a bit of churn, and revolutions usually stop the AIs from amassing ridiculously large numbers of cities early on. The Celts (on a different continent to me) are taking over the world with 38 cities right now (still in the Classic period), and no real instability. I suspect they only stopped getting bigger because they ran out of people to conquer over there. The game is a bit of a lost cause at this point, with them running off into the distance. I'm guessing they're avoiding revolutions because they have crazy numbers of town watchmen in every city, (and no money concerns at all at that difficulty level that would otherwise prevent having so many watchmen. They're sitting on about 50K gold at the moment.) and the built in stability points they provide are making revolutions implausible. Perhaps having Town Watchmen (or rather their policing promotion upgrades) reduce crime (which reduces instability in and of itself) AND reduce revolt chance makes them overpowered for their time period.
In addition, my nearer neighbours, who are also far bigger than I could risk being without bankruptcy or rebellion, are absolutely terrible at invading me, even though they have the technological edge from having so many cities. So many of their forces are town watchmen (which cannot attack, and aren't actually that great at defending after a while) that they just don't have the muscle to invade me properly, or defend against my counter-attacks. The AI seems to be following the logic that if 1 (non-upgraded) Town Watchman reduces revolution chance by 10%, then having 10 of them per city is a brilliant plan. Which it is, if you can afford it, until you want to fight someone with a proper army. Anyways, I suspect that Town Watchmen are at the core of several strange/annoying C2C issues.
The policing promotion line seems to trivialise a vitally important limiting factor on growth, especially for the AI, who have rather less money issues. Actually, I might try to remove the revolt reduction from the policing line completely for my next game. I suspect it might make for a better overall experience. Would be interesting to see.
In addition, my nearer neighbours, who are also far bigger than I could risk being without bankruptcy or rebellion, are absolutely terrible at invading me, even though they have the technological edge from having so many cities. So many of their forces are town watchmen (which cannot attack, and aren't actually that great at defending after a while) that they just don't have the muscle to invade me properly, or defend against my counter-attacks. The AI seems to be following the logic that if 1 (non-upgraded) Town Watchman reduces revolution chance by 10%, then having 10 of them per city is a brilliant plan. Which it is, if you can afford it, until you want to fight someone with a proper army. Anyways, I suspect that Town Watchmen are at the core of several strange/annoying C2C issues.
The policing promotion line seems to trivialise a vitally important limiting factor on growth, especially for the AI, who have rather less money issues. Actually, I might try to remove the revolt reduction from the policing line completely for my next game. I suspect it might make for a better overall experience. Would be interesting to see.
