AI+

News: Now updated for Gathering Storm. (It should also still work on vanilla + R&F)

AI+ improves the AI without changing anything about the game itself nor the bonuses the AI gets. There are improvements in many behavior areas such as settling, building/district choices and tile improvement. But the biggest improvements are found in the AIs ability to wage aggressive wars. Expect to see games where an AI wipes out multiple others without any help, sometimes even in the later eras.

On top of ability improvements, leaders have been given more distinct personality styles that match their flavor/abilities such as warlike civs (like the Aztecs/Norway) building more units, expansive civs (like Rome/Russia) grabbing more land, religious civs (like India/Norway) focusing more faith. This makes the game feel more alive, and makes leaders more focussed and thus capable.

The overall difficulty of the game should increase on average. This may make the game too hard for those who like playing on the very lowest settings. Deity will be hard to beat, though perhaps not as hard as modded Civ V.

Notes:

• The modding tools provided don't allow coding, nor in-depth changes in all areas of the game. This means I'm really limited in what I can do, and there are many known issues with the AI overall. I'm also no longer continously developping this mod, since there's just not that much I feel I can still do.
• AI+ works on both singleplayer and multiplayer (as long as every player has the mod)
• This mod won't work with previously saved games, you'll have to start a new game to use it
• Compatibility wise, this mod works well with most non-AI mods, even those that add units/buildings etc. In some mod combinations that change production costs etc, you may see strange behavior though, such as extreme unit spam, AIs doing a one city challenge or districts that are completely ignored. If you see any of these, and you're on the latest version, try checking whether there's such an issue going on
• I strongly recommend you don't use AI+ in combination with other big AI mods, unless the author states these mods are compatible. Other AI mods tend to make changes to the same parts of the game, which can lead to crashes or other unintended effects.
• Compatible up to at least Rise & Fall.

Known Issues Unfortunately, I don't have access to the actual AI code, so this mod is mostly based on changing things in the few XML files that control AI behavior. Quite a lot could still be done, but the basis is still the same. So there are quite a few issues remaining that I unfortunately can't really touch. These issues also exist in vanilla, but sometimes become more prominent here due to bigger cities and more wars. Some of the bigger ones are:

• The AI sometimes refuses to take 0 health cities, civilians or empty barb camps.
• Sometimes civs barely expand, most commonly on maps with many barbarians, or on tiny island starts
• Archers/cities not firing when they could

See https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ai.603494/ for more info on this mod, this is also the best place to get more detailed help.