It is difficult for the AI to cheat in this game, even though they evidently get some bonuses.

That said there are a few things to note :
- The AI is programmed (the thinking algorithm) to favor heavily land grabs, especially building Outposts and Assimilating independent people. If their culture is the dominant one in the territory of the Independent people in question, they (or you if this is the case) get an automatic +3 to relations. Which adds up pretty quickly. I managed to grab 4 Independent peoples mostly because of this in my first game.
- Mercenary armies are easy to hire if you have the gold. When exploring you get curiosities and usually money is the main reward from them. This also allows you to grab more Outposts and curiosities, so it is something the AI wants to do.

What you can do is spread out your tribes and scouts in the Neolithic and Ancient Eras and grab as much land via Outposts as possible. The AI will rarely go to war this early over an outpost and you will have plenty of time to attach those outposts to cities as time goes on.

Resand wrote:

AI know the map through the FOW, so can get all the "goodie huts" it wants

Which is a huge boost, beside the straight up bonuses they get

Are you sure? Where did you get this info from? As far as I see AI also scout the surrounding.

Anyway I'd also appreciate some insight on how the AI works (apart from bonuses known from difficulty levels).

DragonGaming wrote:

trigorin wrote:

Waifu wrote:

Yea the Ai knowing where everything is is pretty much confirmed. It knows so much, that now , on the Neolithic era i just set my scouts to auto explore and they go straight towards curiosities and food. It pretty much killed my enjoyment of exploring in the Neolithic era, since the scouts just do a better job if automated.

Really? That’s disappointing…

The ai has known the whole map since i believe endless legends and ES2, but whats worse in this game is that the traits and modifiers for characters/avatars can only be used by the ai and not by the player.

I've recently tried it with auto explore in Neolithic era. Scouts really know where to go for loots. I don't get why such cheat to AI is still necessary. At least they could just try to emulate real exploration (like an RND on whether to go for known hidden thing or not). But this cheat ruins the immersion of exploration that's one of the key features of this game.

I don't care much about avatar traits. Those are really for driving the AI.

DNLH wrote:

I don't mind it, it lets me focus on the one/two units that I use to actually scout the surrounding lands with (the auto-explore units may be homing missiles for curiosities, but they're really not that good at actually mapping out the terrain, instead rather running laps around three or four territories), but it does feel a bit cheat-y to use it.

Scouts are a bit acceptable, but instead of having smarter ai for the ai nations the higher the difficulty, the devs instead continue to use the repetitive modifiers per difficulty, where the ai gets better bonuses the greater the difficulty. Thats ontop of the already knowing whole maps and the modifiers given to custom avatars (which are bit insane since some are excessive in bonuses, like 50% more stability as well only and ONLY the ai can use avatar modifiers), and frankly its a  bit too much in favor of the ai.