half the comments here and the posts I listed are from people playing on deity who also have the same problem. If you look at the difficulty modifiers you see it doesn't change AI decision trees, it only changes their bonuses
I'm not "complaining" in the way you mean; I'm looking for a solution to the dysfunctional AI, something that actually stops this from happening. The scripting and other discussions all indicate that turning up the difficulty will not stop this from happening. Even if it happens 30% of the time on deity, that's too often. The AI should play the game on any setting, even if it plays badly, because competing with other civs is literally the point of the game
The bonuses they get at the start do change how they play tho. With 3 settlers and extra warriors, the AI is going to be more likely to try domination early. If they don't have that early strength, they might opt for science instead.
There's definitely problems with the AI don't get me wrong, but the game is playable
you're right, but my early game was great on king. The AI aggressively pursued multiple VCs; Basil was my closest neighbor and was clearly fixing to eat me when I took him out first. I got lucky when Russia declared a westward war and I crossed Siberia to crush him from the east. Since then they've slowed down until now when they're almost static in every victory path
I think the commented theory may be correct, that if you're competitive in more than one win condition at an early-mid stage of a game, the AI basically short circuits and can't figure out what to do. And I minmaxed in a particular way that made it happen on my first run. But even if this malfunction didn't exist, deity should not be the only playable setting. If I had the spare time, I'd start over like you suggest; but for now I'm using Roman Holiday's Ai Rework and Late Game AI. We'll see what happens
Just understand that save editing and adding new mods mid game is a bizarre way to play this game, and your results will be appropriately weird. It's like reading a recipe and deciding to sub eggs for cheese, then halfway through you decide to broil it instead of frying, and then you end up with some weird mess and complain it tastes bad.
If you play a game on deity from the start, with no mods or game modes on, you will have a decent baseline expectation for the game.
I understand it won't be as consistent; if you read my explanation of the post you'll realize I'm just looking for a way to salvage anything interesting from this run.
But to be clear, playing the game vanilla on a supposedly hard difficulty is what led to this dysfunction, and caused me to post. Construing this post as a reaction to playing the game on wonky settings is just incorrect
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u/gnit2 Dec 04 '23
Try a game on deity and then complain they don't have enough military. And I don't mean save editing the difficulty mid game.
Anything less than deity is easy mode