What is this?

[Mickeytrout11]

OK, so I'm my favorite civ: England. Got a huge lead on everyone (still playing on Warlord - I'm a newb) and I've cut off the Koreans at the top of a continent. I've got them in techs by five or six and gold by 350. It's about 15 cities to 4 cities. Then, all of a sudden, he declares war on me and sends in all five of his knights to take on my musketmen. It's like he has a deathwish or something. I wiped him out in 5 or 6 turns. My question is, is the AI really this bad on Warlord? If so, if I push it up a couple what other differences will the difficulty make? By the way, I'm running Conquest Ver 1.00.

-The Disney Trout

 

[vmxa]

Well I am not going to answer the question of weither it is bad or not. Even if it was much better it may still have to act this way to one degree or another.

Consider you are playing hearts and are at 99 going to 100. You took the first heart, what do you do? You have to attempt to run them, nothing to lose.

You more or less put the ai in the same boat. True it was not in quite that much trouble, so I guess you could say it is not able to distingiush ill from deadly sick, but did it really matter? IOW was the ai in a position to win anyway?

So in short at every level you can see the ai go for broke, often prematurely.

Now the difference is that it will be harder and harder to put it in that positon as you move to the top levels.

 

[ainwood]

Slightly off-topic, but you really should upgrade to 1.22f (although wait until you finish your current game, because the saves aren't compatable IIRC)

 

[Rohili]

Slightly off-topic, but you really should upgrade to 1.22f (although wait until you finish your current game, because the saves aren't compatable IIRC)

You can continue playing your previous saved games after patching it, it's just that the patch updates will not apply to them. At least that's what happened for me.

 

[Zakharov]

I don't think the problem is that the AI is worse on Warlord, it's just that they don't have the productivity they have at higher levels. For example, at emperor you would be facing a lot more than 5 knights because the AI can build units faster.

I also agree that you should patch up to version 1.22. Here is a LINK

 

[Scuffer]

OK, so I'm my favorite civ: England. Got a huge lead on everyone (still playing on Warlord - I'm a newb) and I've cut off the Koreans at the top of a continent. I've got them in techs by five or six and gold by 350. It's about 15 cities to 4 cities. Then, all of a sudden, he declares war on me and sends in all five of his knights to take on my musketmen. It's like he has a deathwish or something.

As has been said, the AI has nothing to lose - and it is possible to come back from a terrible position. Check out this thread to see tr1cky performing miracles from lousy start.

 

[Civ3man]

I'd have to agree with what Scuffer said. If the AI has nothing to lose it will to "stupid attacks". You can find this on any difficulty level - a weak cornered AI declares war on it's big neighbour which often time will be you (hopefully )
But what should it do anyway? If I where you I'd have wiped the Loreans out already and I think that's excatly what the AI anticipates.

 

[The Fjonis]

Attacking to get out of a hopeless situation is one thing - doing it without preparing an army first is something quite different. At the lower levels, all the AI attacks seem to be poorly planned, and they hardly ever use enough troops in a coordinated strike to take out any significant cities. Seems like the AI is more busy building crappy ships than waging effective war.

 

[Hirachi Dinavo]

The AI sucks at attacking. I have had wars where the AI just fortifies its offensive units on random roads in their territory and sends defensive units to roam my territory and die, leaving a single unit defending their cities. If you play on higher difficulties, they can build units faster and will actually have something to send after you.

To answer your question, if you do move up a couple levels, the AIs will trade techs with each other like crazy, build lots of units early in the game, and beat you to almost every ancient age wonder.