So far, I have seen a vast improvement in ai after making some of the above changes. I didn't change the unit costs and support, and I didn't change the diffDB file. I did however increase the UnitSupportPercent to 50ish, and put more percentage in offensive units instead of defensive units. I also increased the siege priority to the highest, and lowered the defensive priority a bit, so the computer won't spend all its forces defending. Oh, I also increased the ai timeslice by 10.Actually, the above changes didn't seem to do much, until I increased the Siege Powerbonus in Goals.txt as someone had suggested in the forums. After changing that, I noticed right away, the ai are actually killing off their weaker neighbors! Before I changed the powerbonus setting, the ai had problems lanching successful sieges, and cities rarely changed hands between the computers.
In my current game, all I have to say is wow! The ai is much more agressive, launching attacks after attacks against my cities. I had to keep a small reserve army behind to recapture back cities. I had cities taken and retaken so many times, I lost count. And when I capture enemy cities, I usually had to recapture it back again, if I leave it too weak.
I did notice that the Chinese no longer had 2 to 3 stacks surrounding each city, so it did make it a bit easier to conquer cities. But the Chinese still launched wave after waves of attacks against my weaker cities, and in my opinion, that is much more fun than wiping out sitting ducks.
Oh, another interesting note, when I invaded the French later, they had a city with 2 big stacks surrounding it. I took the city and was surprised when those 2 stacks moved toward my empire! I lost 2 well defended border cities right away. Took me forever to retake them, but now the French is mad at me. Before, the ai was quite passive, letting me take over their cities without any reprecussions.
By the way, I also increased the SpecialUnitCount to 10ish, and the map was flooded with slavers early on! Enslavements were going everywhere. For every slaver I killed, 2 more poped up. It was quite interesting.
Right now in my game, i'm just into early Modern Era. Can't wait till we get nukes, and see if the ai will actually use them. (oh, I changed the nukecity parameters, so it will consider using nukes, but don't know if the NukeCity goal is implemeneted or not)
One last thing, I reduced the entrechment bonus from 0.5 to 0.1. After all, how can entrenchment give higher bonus than walls and terrain? Its ridiculous. Doing this, also allow ai to successful capture cities. That entrenchment bonus pretty much gave defending units invulnerability...
Wish, the game had shipped with the aggresive ai, the game is so much more fun. My first two game without any text editing, was so boring, I nearly trashed this game. Luckily, I read somewhere that there were ways to improve the ai.
[This message has been edited by BlueO (edited December 24, 2000).]