The harder A.I. always goes for Domination victory?

[V]

I've been playing on Emperor now, trying to move up the difficulty ladder one by one, and the one thing I've noticed is that no matter how many computers I play with, there are always some warmongerers. Is this some sort of a default setting that the A.I. always goes for the Domination win and doesn't even try to get any other type? I mean even if you play one-on-one, the computer just keeps on attacking you ad infinitum. Yes, I blast their units away, they make peace, but after a while it's always just back to war, an endless cycle. Doesn't matter how friendly you are with them, they'll end up fighting you in the end anyway. Kind of flattens it down a bit.

So how do you deal with that? Is it just a matter of bribing them to be your "friends" ( I hate this and never do it), making defensive pacts with others or what? I mean a single enemy you can counter with higher tech units, but especially in larger games it gets much harder as the comps can just gang up on you! So is the diplomatic option even possible, or do you always just have to have a huge defense force ready?

Also, anyone tried the game with the Domination victory switched off? Now I like to keep the option available, but just out of curiosity, does it limit the fighting somehow?

[Strategikal]

If you use the advanced setup you can choose which civs you play against, but even the peaceful ones will probably end up going to war. Seems to be unavoidable.

I just won a domination victory on emperor, but I was the main warmonger. In the end only Morocco was left and they were clearly going for a culture victory. Only once did they attack me and it was obviously a defensive move because they thought I'd become a warmongering threat to the world and were trying to cut me down to size. They'd never started any wars with anyone else. It failed of course and I annihilated them.

Yes, a diplomatic victory is not only possible, it seems to be unavoidable with me. I "accidentally" won a diplomatic victory 10 turns before my domination victory, simply because I had so many votes for myself in the world congress, courtesy of all my city state allies.

I never made any friendships with the other players, everyone else hated me. I just made friends and allies out of the city states. It's really not hard to do. If you want a peaceful victory, just make alliances with all the city states and keep a strong defensive army to keep the jealous AI civs at bay.

[Burbot]

No, they do not default to domination. But pursuing other victory types does not mean they will not go to war. The easiest way to improve an empire is to take what others have already built. Removing resources and cities from an opponent is always a viable way to secure a victory no matter what victory is being chased.

All civs trying to win through domination go to war, but not all civs who go to war are trying to win by domination.

Duel maps leave only one option for the AI if they decide to aquire through force. You.

You always have to have some defense. If you don't the AI will decide it's easier to take than make. I rarely try to achieve a 'peaceful' victory without resorting to some military action myself, so I guess I relate to the AI.

Personally I find 8 player maps the easiest to make friends on. Less and you can get shut out of the alliancies easily. More and it becomes very difficult to keep track of AI's relationships.

Civ 5 is not a one to one relationship between an AI and the player. Every relationship the player has impacts the other relationships. Carefully picking your friends and enemies will usuallly lead to some good alliances through most of the game.

[Sohei]

The AI tracks your military power ranking relative to theirs. Check the demographics. If you are above average for military you will have few problems. If you are the bottom expect an attack. This ranking is mostly about how many units you have built - not so much about where they are or what the quality of the units are. Lots of low tech units however can also provoke an attack.

Actually, I often leave my military weak intentionally but have a unit nearly built then pushed to the bottom of the build queue in each city. Also have military buildings built all over. This is to provoke an attack by the AI so I can save on a bit of warmonger status. This then lets me respond quickly to the attack and take down one or two civs to their last city but still keep an ally or two for trading.

The AI civs will make attempts at other victories but unless they are very isolated those that choose domination can keep them busy enough that such attempts fail to make much progress. If they are making good progress with some other type of victory, you should probably attack them too.

[stanitw]

My next game I am going to play, for the first time, with domination turned off. Also, I disagree with one part of the above post by Sohei. It does matter what kind of units you have and not so much how many units you have. The AI will likely attack you if it feels it can beat you. If it has tanks and you have 20 pikeman it won't really care about your power ranking or number of units, it will attack knowing it can crush you. You can, and should, have a fair number of units, comparable in strength or better, than what a neighboring civ has, sitting at your shared borders. This will often hold them back from attacking and you can leave your cities on the interior virtually defenseless. My current level 7 game is being played like this and I have 3 shared borders against 3 different civs and my technique is working. Basically you want to let the AI visually "see" your troops. That will give it pause to think about attacking you.

[Warwick🐺]

I play emperor on huge map size all the time and win.

AIs are stupid, and yeah they always attack people.
There is always that one AI in the game that took over an empire and has so many cities.

In the higher difficulties you should worry more about how AIs are wonder shores since they get massive handicap.

[billy]

Diplomacy is defintly possible. The AI very rarely actually tries for a domination victory , it just goes to war and crushes people while going for another victory condition. I'm not talking about one on one though i wouldnt play CIV like that, i play emperor large/huge with 10 AI's.

If your military is weak they wont respect you , doesnt need to be big just bigger than the weakest nations. The best size army is the smallest you need to defend yourself.

Trade seems great for friendships , not conquerig loads of cities or wiping civs out , and avoid conquering city states. Most people ignore diplomacy then moan its not working . If you want to be friends or avoid war with a specific CIV its ususally possible. Dont do deals with there enemies . Keep doing all the diplomacy options that give green positive results on the diplomacy sreen.

Ideology becomes a big factor towatds the later stages. Never bribe them though thats a waste of money.

The AI tends to form little groups at the start , lets say there's 4 AI's and you. They will form a little group that will decide to wipe out a CIV , you want to be on that team. Even if you dont join the war try and form trade and deals with that group.

Upgrading units and attacking as soon as you hit a key tech is the key to victory for me. For me its trebuchets and longswordsman or muskets and cannons . Soon as i hit one of those i upgrade every unit and attack that turn. Have your army in position just close enough to not let them force you to declare war or lie about declaring war. Build a road towards were you will attack makes a big difference.

The ideal start is they declare war on you , you kill all there units while defending, you hit your key tech upgrade and take all there cities without losing anything or very little. Now you have an upgraded army and double the cities and lost nothing.

When you building a few extra units to do your attack after defending, dont just build them in advance , have them built and on the que with 1 turn left , then when your ready to attack a couple of turns before your tech build them and then upgrade them next turn when your tech pops.

[Sohei]

Be careful when builiding up military near borders. This can provoke an ultimatum by the AI to either go to war immediately or make a promise not to go to war for a long time. I got hit with this before even though I was on my own continent just building defenses.

Domination turned off is really the only way to help the AI. The AI is not going to get my capital so it can't win domination but I can capture theirs without much trouble. Turning it off does make the game somewhat more challenging but not that much fun for me since I find the other vicotry types pretty boring to play. I don't play this game much anymore because of this.

If you want to have units hang in the queue they will usually upgrade themselves automatically before they are built and just add any extra required production to the build time. This depends on the upgrade path though. You might want the older units in some rare cases so may have to switch to a different tech branch to delay.

[Yawzheek]

I always notice them going for what appears to be a domination victory, but I also theorize that since I'm a science player early on, while also dumping money into production to speed culture buildings which inevitably outmatch their culture attempts, they realize they have little choice BUT resort to domination victory.

That being said, I also suspect that the gap between other conditions must be quite large and never bridged, since they seem to have zero qualms with reverting back to domination at any given moment and with the slightest provocation, i.e. they could be 5 sciences ahead and begin mass production of tech, you use two great scientists and slowly bridge the gap, they'll likely go directly back to domination.

Granted, I don't know any of this for certain, but that's the behavior it seems to follow, since I can see their early attempts at science pumping rapidly cease once my own science begins flowing like Niagra Falls.

[V]

Hmm, I played my first Deity game yesterday (4 players), and the computer (Pedro) actually won by culture. No attacks on me this time, but maybe it was due to me being so behind all the computers and with no religion of my own. No chance but to go with their decisions. However, as soon as Pedro got closer to winning, suddenly all the others turned sour on him. It seems that if you pose any kind of a risk, be it scientific / military / cultural etc, the A.I. will jump on you pretty damn fast...