Jon Shafer Details Upcoming Patch
Jon Shafer, leader designer of Civ5, announced on the site Quarter to Three about the status of upcoming Civ5 development. In short, Shafer expects a "big update in a few weeks" that will address the interface and diplomacy, to name a few things. Here are some of his comments:
AI abilities
Hey guys. Just a quick update. Sorry for the recent absence, I've been traveling quite a bit lately.
There are several things which we are looking at improving with Civ 5. Most of my time since getting back has been spent working on the interface, particularly with making more information accessible. These changes will go out with the next big update in a few weeks. The plan is also to make major revisions to the diplomacy system, and while I can't talk about the details yet, I think you all will find them an improvement. That will be added with an update later this year. Also included will be a number of AI upgrades.
Thanks to all who have purchased the game - the plan is definitely to continue improving the experience for everyone playing. The game isn't perfect, but we feel good about the foundation laid so far, and expect Civ 5 will stand up with every other game out there and continue to get better over time. I can ensure that I'll be working on Civ 5 as long as I'm able to.
Jon
Just to clear some things up - on Prince the AI plays by almost the exact same rules as the human. It receives a marginal discount to unit gold and supply costs, but that's pretty much it. There's no cheating with construction, gold production, happiness, puppet rules, research agreements, visibility, combat odds or whatever else. It has basic insight into the total military strength of other players, but no more so than what's available to the human via the demographics screen.For anyone digging throught the XML files: there's actually a number of fields from Civ 4 which we never cleaned up, and some of them misrepresent what effects there are on various difficulty levels - so don't take all of those numbers as gospel. The values in the AI strategy files are for steering AI preferences, and have nothing to do with bonuses.
If it seems like the AI has a lot more cities/happiness/units than the human at that level, it's merely that the AI focuses much more on those aspects of the game than a human does (perhaps too much so, in fact - at the expense of buildings and gold, in particular). One of our goals going forward is to shore up some of the biggest and most obvious AI deficiencies. The new rules added to Civ 5 pose a pretty big AI challenge, so we're spending as much time as possible working on this part of the game.
AI "cheating"
On higher levels the AI gets bonuses to the production and generation of things like units, buildings, etc. and discounts to costs like maintenance, but it can never "snap its fingers" and make anything appear under any circumstances. How closely it has to obey the game rules does not change based on difficulty level. If an AI signed a RA agreement with someone, it meant they had the requisite gold (for at least one turn) - it may have gotten it from another player, from a goody hut, from disbanding something or even from losing out on a wonder (which they like to build). But it's always legit.
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