I've been running my first v37 game, and am now up to the early/mid Classical Era. I have to admit, the AIs are doing a much better job of staying competitive with me - they were a little slow off the mark when it came to expanding from their first cities (I had five up and going by the time anyone else established a second city), but once they started, they came on like gangbusters and, in fact, there are currently not one but two empires out there with more cities than I have! It's been a long time since that happened, and even longer since an AI could manage to run a larger empire than mine without crashing the economy. They still aren't fully leveraging their capabilities, since I'm out in front by pretty much every measure, but it's a lot closer than it's been for some time.
I have come up with an incredibly effective - and extremely nasty - tactic, however. I've got a pack of burglars which I keep sending to the nearest opposition city, infiltrating when they arrive, which boosts the espionage points against that empire and sends the burglar back to my capital, where I promptly repeat the process. I also have multiple spies, who I've been sending to cities in that same empire (focusing on one city at a time), waiting until they've built up to their highest preparation bonus, and then spreading my culture to them. In this way, I've taken three out of Red Cloud's four cities before he got annoyed enough to declare war... and since the one city he had left was not his original capital (and in fact, was his last established city, and as a result his least developed) he is at a massive disadvantage in pursuing his war. It looks like it's going to be a toss-up whether I put together an offensive force to take Mound City or it revolts and joins my empire...
I'm fairly certain this isn't a fluke result... and I'm about to put that to the test. I've already got a second burglar pack targeting a second empire on my borders: Frederick's Germany. Yes, I'm gearing up for a second covert offensive before I've even completed my first.
In any case, I've got to congratulate the team here. This is probably the best mod I've seen for modeling some of the sneakier aspects of international competition - no other mod, in my opinion, really comes close for allowing black ops and dirty tricks. And if you guys ever manage to get the AI using tactics like this, I'm going to need to drop the difficulty until I can work out a counter. Eesh.
I have come up with an incredibly effective - and extremely nasty - tactic, however. I've got a pack of burglars which I keep sending to the nearest opposition city, infiltrating when they arrive, which boosts the espionage points against that empire and sends the burglar back to my capital, where I promptly repeat the process. I also have multiple spies, who I've been sending to cities in that same empire (focusing on one city at a time), waiting until they've built up to their highest preparation bonus, and then spreading my culture to them. In this way, I've taken three out of Red Cloud's four cities before he got annoyed enough to declare war... and since the one city he had left was not his original capital (and in fact, was his last established city, and as a result his least developed) he is at a massive disadvantage in pursuing his war. It looks like it's going to be a toss-up whether I put together an offensive force to take Mound City or it revolts and joins my empire...
I'm fairly certain this isn't a fluke result... and I'm about to put that to the test. I've already got a second burglar pack targeting a second empire on my borders: Frederick's Germany. Yes, I'm gearing up for a second covert offensive before I've even completed my first.
In any case, I've got to congratulate the team here. This is probably the best mod I've seen for modeling some of the sneakier aspects of international competition - no other mod, in my opinion, really comes close for allowing black ops and dirty tricks. And if you guys ever manage to get the AI using tactics like this, I'm going to need to drop the difficulty until I can work out a counter. Eesh.