Hello, just finished my first playthrough at empire difficulty slow pace. It was great but I noticed one thing that bothered me with the ai. It does seem to have difficulties managing city stability.

Story:

End of classical age one of the ai conquer its neighbor on another continent and start rolling through the era-stars taking the lead of the game. This forced me to push towards him since I wanted to create a mess and sow chaos in his land but once I reach the continent late medieval time I found out that this ai empire has stagnated and their cities are spawning rebels on a regular basis. After some exploration I found out that the ai cities where WAY too numerous, a result from the previous conquest, and probably above the city cap limit. The AI did not merged/ransacked cities (maybe did not have tech or influence). Instead it opted to cover most of its province in common quarters. We are talking provinces with almost 0 other type of districts. This did not solve the underlying empire stability problem and pretty much cut its progress since common quarters does not provide the other important resources (food/industry/research/money).  The ai would have won if only it thought of a way of getting rid of cities either through merging/ransacking/liberating cities.

Also while conquering its cities was  very easy, managing them was not a fun experience. The province being covered in common quarter its a real chore to replace them individually by ransacking/clearing ruins

Thank you for the great game, I see very interesting potential and an already fun experience

Cheers  

Hi BobBob,

We did notice the issue and I addressed it in another thread.

Long story short, you're absolutely right, the AI does not properly manage its City Cap. Even if it already has too many cities, it will invade Independant People and Empires to get more, leading to an Influence upkeep it can't possibly manage, which leads to an influence deficit, which leads to an increasing malus to its cities' public order.

We are working on a fix that should prevent this situation from happening (prevent conquest when the AI has already too many cities, provide more incentive to merge cities, use the liberate action in desperate situations...) Hopefully, this should help the AI remain competitive through the entire game.

I'm glad you appreciated your experience anyway, that means a lot to us :)

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Alex.