Why did England let me win?

[Brysos]

Prince difficulty, playing as Washington Normal settings for everything else. The world ends up being three continents. England takes the biggest one, The Ottomans and myself split the next one, and I have the smaller island I started on. I have 7 controlled cities (3 purely for resources I needed) and 3 puppets from a weak Babylon.

Now I have barely any military, and I have been just building everything and growing my cities, just testing things out. I get pretty far ahead of the Ottomans in tech, so I am guessing that they aren't attacking me because of the disparity, but England isn't far behind and their military is 3 times stronger according to one of the survey pop-ups.

I figure I was going to lose anyways so I decide to just focus on tech and see what the later techs look like and try to go for a space race. It takes me more than 50 turns to build the parts, and the whole time England does nothing other than trying a few times to get me to war with Askia (who has maybe 5 backward cities). She just lets me build the parts and assemble them, when she could invade me and take all my cities in just a few turns.

Why? I had decent diplomatic relations with Elizabeth for most of the time. We traded resources etc, but I don't see why the AI wouldn't make at least some attempt to stop me.

 

[Kietharr]

Because the AI in this game plays to survive instead of playing to win, which is why it's so easy.

 

[baberg]

I personally think there's a bug in the AI when it comes to overseas wars. In the first game I won on difficulty 3 (can't recall the name) Washington had his entire continent to himself and England and I shared a continent in the late game. They both declared war on me at the same time just as I was finishing conquering the last City-States on my continent and I was very resource poor. I mustered the last of my troops to meet the rush of English forces at the border and managed to hold them off all while waiting for Washington to come and invade.

He never did.

I conquered all of my continent and then some while still "at war" with Washington and I never once saw his troops. I sued for peace with no conditions and he accepted. His tech was on par with mine.

I'm considering playing only Pangea until I hear of some AI fixes. It's only somewhat affecting my enjoyment though - I played until 8:00 this morning.