Every faction turns to enemies

[terrance11]

This is a good forum for a good game. Maybe you can help with my problem. I'm playing as the English on hard level. Eventually every faction turns to waging war on me. What can you do to prevent this? This also happened on normal difficulty. I like playing GA mode but by the end I'm the only faction left. Thanks for helping.

[Zarax]

There's nothing you can really do...
Aside from having strong armies at the frontiers that will slow down the attacks, offence is the best defence.
As you grow bigger the AI will ally and mass against you despite alliances and so on...

[English assassin]

It seems to be mainly a function of the size of your empire. If you can stay small and resist piling up the conquest points on GA it helps. I find that launching no invasions a all gets a bit boring, plus after all you want to stop other factions getting their homeland points don't you, but rather than going on a general rampage if you target a few high value provinces (eg constantinople, Venice, etc) you can stay small, have battles, and take GA points off other factions. Taking constantinople by crusade and then trying to hold onto it against the odds is fun and shouldn't annoy any of your fellow catholics at least.

Plus I think influence helps so get the middle east crusade points as well.

I think eventually you wind up at war with more or less everyone whatever you do but that should slow things down a lot.

[Ash]

The AI develops the "Civilization" syndrome. In Civ1 and Civ2, all factions started hating you more and more as you grow more succesfull.

Eventually you end up at war with virtually everybody. Same happens with MTW.

Diplomacy is a big farce as it is in this game, and it only gets worst (and suicidal) as you grow bigger.
This is probably to compensate the poor, handicapped strategic decisions that the AI makes. So to offer the player some challange in the latter parts of his game.

Only thing you can do is prepare for war once you've conquered more then 1/3 of the map. Don't conquer too quick btw before reaching the 1/3 mark, or you risk attack from other factions almost immediately.

I say this because factions almost always cancel their alliance with you if you attack their own allies, and they will attack you eventually at a weak spot.

[mikkele]

Look at it this way: The ultimate goal for the AI is to make you loose the game. Don't expect each AI-controlled faction to act independently. If you get the feeling that you are being ganged up upon, then that is precisely what's happening.

[bretwalda]

Actually, I think the AI is supposed to be programmed that you don't win the game, but not that you lose the game. So the AI tries to keep you at bay but not neccesarily wants to crush you. (Recall telling this game AI programming trick by one of the Civ3 developers...)