Quote:Yes I know how you feel about that sort of thing, but on the other hand without it the game is a mad rush to send out settlers early to grab the best spots. The AI seems to know where they are without exploring the map or is that my imagination?
Yes, AI scouting is not an existing feature.
I usually see "mad rush to push settlers" end with the human player's defeat because they can't build the troops to defend those cities if they spent that much on the settlers instead.
Of course the AI will often lose these small cities as well but it doesn't make a difference from game design perspective if cities change control between two AI players - and if the human conquers them then he is back to square one, he has to defend too many cities, except in this case it is on top of dealing with an ongoing war.
And while being able to conquer cities means you save on settler costs, the war and not being able to select the race is enough of a cost to make this fair.
Quote:This surprises me, maybe I'm just too slow with building settlers, but the AI is always well ahead of me. They have 3-4 cities before I'm even building my first settler.Yeah that's clearly confirmation bias then.
Fortress city + 2 starting settlers = They have 3 cities. That's the number everyone starts on.
You too have 3 cities before building your first settler.
So you're only saying they started building their first settler before you. Which they do because the AI does prioritize building settlers quite high.
By the way, unlike other games, in CoM, pacing mostly depends on spell advancement and if city spam gets reduced then cities built later would simply fail to be relevant - I don't think any cities built after 1415 matter at all, and even cities after 1410 are really late and only relevant if the game is long.
How many times did we hear players say "I can't build new cities due to this Meteor Storm"? Never because by then building cities is completely obsolete.
Relevance of new cities will be slightly better in CoM II due to games most likely becoming longer thanks to higher player counts, no razing, and more map options but even then delaying them isn't really needed.