AI Expansion

[[AL] Ato]

Hi, I am not sure whether this was discussed before. Ever since I got the Rising Tide DLC the AI seems either very slow, or not at all able to expand beyond 3 cities in a Multiplayer game. I am playing on second hardest difficulty lvl. I also see this thing happening in single player, whereas few AIs seem to develop normally, while most others stuck with 3 cities. It was suggested this is difficulty-related, but I cant imagine this for the second hardest lvl. After some time and founding about 5+ cities, I am totally overpowered by affinity and also outnumbering the AIs military.
From what I remember, I played the game before w/o the RT DLC and even on the normal difficulty level, AIs would expand as much as possible.
Any suggestion? I will try hardest diff. but it seems strange that the AI is that bad ...

[Gonzo_o0]

From what i have observed, it depends every game and appears to be working as intended. On a standard, Soyuz game (from what i have observed, i could be wrong), you often have 1-2 "OP" sponsors compared to the others, the rest falling behind.

It can depend on a lot of things too, and i suspect Diplomacy having a much higher influence on AI growth and expansion than players would expect. A snowballing AI player can expand to the point where it cannot be stopped from winning in the end. Rarely since an experienced Civ or strategy game player will more than often pulverize the AI, but i have seen it a few times. Again, it depends on the situation.

[[AL] Ato]

I must react to this another time: after finish off the 2nd lvl AI, we went for 2 games against heavily cheating 1st lvl AI (2vs2). The first game we were overrun after like 80 turns and aborted. The 2nd run we keept up with Affinity and were able to defend ourselves. Anyway, same ♥♥♥♥: AIs are NOT expanding beyond 3 cities! We were able to capture one of their capitals which rendered that AI basically unable to defend and left it with 2 bad colonies. We could have easily captured the other capital aswell, but wanted to see if they build up again, none of them added any new city despite having tons of space to settle. We played Small map (for 6 players) so a lot of rich places were free to settle. This must be some kind of bug! I presume they somehow told the AI to do that on higher lvls, maybe otherwise they could cheat in too many cities at a time which makes them impossible to defeat. I cannot recall experiencing this on a lower difficulty lvl.

[Operative 11]

The problem is Health. The AI hates being unhealthy, and anything beyond 3 cities is tough to keep healthy, unless you min/max everything. Keep in mind too, that they are coded to build up armies and stuff, so while you are building clinics and stuff to regain health, they are pumping out more ships instead.

On standard speed it can literally be about 200 turns in before the Ai thinks "okay, my army is big enough, and ive built all these buildings now, time to expand". Kind of like how the civs do in civ 5. There is always a big late game settlement explosion when they get over whatever hurdle was keeping them back.

Dont forget though, especially on higher difficulties, 3 cities is MORE than enough to win any condition. With spies and the power of airforce, city quantity is not a vital factor like it was in civ5. Just my thoughts.

[[AL] Ato]

Alright, havent really thought about that. It seems strange, I just started another game and here AIs are all expanding right from the beginning ... Maybe some setting or whatever is making this more likely or not. Lets just say its strange^^