need some balance of AI power

[DrwHem]

Im playing as rome and im probably on my 50th turn or so. all i have managed to do is conquer all of what is modern day rome. my AI comrade on the other hand have taken it to the extreme and have ruined any real fun in my game. I kept on seeing that factions were being wiped out so i decided to turn off fog of war to see. the only factions left are the Seleucid, the Macedonians, the Carthaginians, and the Gaul. the gaul are only around cause i saw them being wiped out by carthage and i bribed a bunch of cities and gave them to the gaul. the selucids have conquored EVERYTHING east of byzantium which is rediculous...the macedonians are taking everything else and there are scraps of rebels left in northern europe. this is all out of balance. i like the game more when there are more than 5 major factions. that way when i declare war on the seleucids im not declaring war on 50% of the world. i dont know how they got such a boost but how do i slow factions expansions by the AI? i want them to be around the same size as they were historically...i dont want to see greek colonies in freaking north europe...not even the romans ever got all of germany.

[DrwHem]

also is there a way i can enable the AI to take negative gold that dosnt regen automatically? in order to preserve some stability in the world i used the cheatcode for money to remove gold from the seleucid treasury but they were still able to build units and wipe out half the world. this must mean that regardless of how negative their money is that they will eventually get positive on the next turn. i want to start the overpowered factions with a negative that they have to remove naturally in order to slow their growth and let other factions survive.

[silvathegod]

yah, something like that happend my 1st time i played
TSE sent stacks upon stacks to me.and i couldnt keep up with it..and i barly was holding greece. iand is the AI bonus's on or off? and what difficulty are you playing at?

[DrwHem]

i was playing medium campaign hard battle and i believe the bonuses were on. ive reinstalled the game to turn the bonuses off and see if that makes a difference. i also edited the desrc_strat to start the selucids and macedonians off with a 40000 gold debt. i will see if that helps.

[silvathegod]

i dont know about doing that to macedonians, maybe TSE turning AI bonuses off helps ALOT

[Publius Quirinus]

i also edited the desrc_strat to start the selucids and macedonians off with a 40000 gold debt. i will see if that helps.

That wouldn't help much though, it just means that the Seleucids and Macedonians will get crushed by their enemies sooner. For example, instead of Macedonian domination in Greece, it may be an abnormally entrenched GCS or Thrace instead. In the east, instead of a continuous field of silver, you may be facing the Purple Death aka the Parthians instead, or the Armenians.

[DrwHem]

they both still seem to be doing abnormally well in their regions. like i said before the AI automatically gets out of debt on their next turn so all i did was stop them from building anything on their first turn.

[DimeBagHo]

What difficulty level are you playing on? If you have the campaign set to VH the AI will get lots of extra money, and if you have it set to easy then very large factions like TSE will benefit a lot from reduced corruption and increased happiness across their empire.

[AchillesXX]

In my campaigns I have never seen AI Seleucids do particularly well. Macedon on the other hand almost always ends up dominating the center of the map. I think that you should certainly turn off AI bonuses if you are a slow expander. In my experience, they do not do too terribly much in the beginning of the game, but seem to give AI ridiculous amounts of stacks later in the game.

[Lycurgus the Lawgiver]

Playing without the bonusses does wonders for you.
The Seleucids are almost out of men after sending twelve stacks into disaster.
I do not know how many years it took you to reach them, but they just have a massive territory from which to transport troops.