How to ever catch up to harder ai

[Brittanian]

Normal-king difficulty is too way easy due to bad ai, but emperor and harder difficulty i never escape dark ages and feel that the catch up game is too hard? How do you guys go about balancing your games and beating harder modes

[Nugz]

The ai isnt up to par in 6 than previous civ games... Its too easy and the ai are just stupid.

[Brittanian]

Originally posted by Nugz:

The ai isnt up to par in 6 than previous civ games... Its too easy and the ai are just stupid.

Yeah the ai are dumb as hell, but if you are in constant dark ages because the ai bonus makes you always 2 ages behind everyone else its a bit hard? Im talking deity/emperor here in non cheese scenarios, sure you can survive but you can't win unless maybe you are a late game turtle but that doesn't seem fun and the ai will probably just science victory by then

[Brittanian]

Originally posted by Mr Eos:

no idea, but I'm a few turns into a 'Prince' game, and just noticed the AI cheating with it's culture values.

was making almost 2x the amount of culture in comparison to all other discovered AI civs.
I Beeline straight for Political Philosophy and somehow a civ making less culture than me the entire time, gets to it 1 turn before me as I see in the gossip that they switched to 'Classical Republic'? Should have been more like 10-15 turns behind me (or more). Sometimes I hate those numbers because they reveal too much info. But Prince difficulty should not be pulling this kind of cheating crap.

What pisses me off about it, is that I chose a pantheon 'Goddess of Festivals' (+1 culture for plantations) specifically to start running away with culture I had 3 banana's, Tea, Dye just around my capital with another 3 more plantations for the 2nd city and then some..... and it appears that was a bad choice if the AI is just going to cheat on difficulties where that stuff is not supposed to be happening.

The only plausible scenario of that AI being able to do that would be to have eureka'd every single thing on the way there. Which is unlikely.

Idk in this scenario, but i just click on the research/civic tree a few in advance of what i want so i don't distract myself from other good but not revolutionary tech, king difficulty and below i seem to get their first 9/10 since the ai focuses on military and religion first mostly

[dbemont]

I think that if you watch a Let's Play video of a good player playing on Deity level, you will see that they are behind for much of the game.

There are lots of little tricks to use, lots of min-maxing which, to be honest, I do not find all that fun. Playing that way really feels nothing like trying to manage a civilization through the ages, and it is all about lawyering game mechanics.

But... the one single thing to keep in mind is that even if the AI civs are leading you, they are still very inefficient about going for the victory. If you keep your eye on your intended path of victory and put everything into that one victory type, you will tend to win on high levels. Even without extreme min-maxing.

[Elric of Melnibone]

I started a game as Sumerian, emperor level and gave up. Germany as neighbor to the south. I tried taking his capital with Oracle wonder. But Germany had a lot of production, it was in renaissance era or close (i was in medieval i think), it had pike and shot while my best unit was a swordman.

Tried a second game at emperor level with Aztecs, lost the second war with France near me north. France fielded 6 horseman, archers, etc. I was only producing my first lancer, my eagle warriors were no match for France's horsemans. I gave up in classical era.

Trying a third game, emperor level, with Sumer, i am in the south, only neighbor is Zulu but far. I have time to prepare, i may do something good in this game.

Basically, at emperor level, if a civ is near it attacks you almost immediately. It has many bonuses, that's hard.

[Kimmaz]

I think the key is Science, and Cities/population gives science. It varies when I go to war, usually when I get a upgrade/new type of unit. But the war never ends. Why should I end it? id have a army that costs upkeep but nothing for it to do.
This is a game on Emperor difficulty with 12 players (11 AI) on Marathon speed. If you divide the turns by 4 you get normal speed. Good luck getting this many cities by the same year in normal speed, too few turns, you can do a lot more warfare on marathon.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1673178867

In this example I killed my neighbour before creating settlers, as I Founded my capital right next to the AI. Then I made settlers and expanded while attacking the next opponent. It is also on Emperor Difficulty:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1783405532