Hi David, I am afraid those are on the settings that you do not like. However, there are additional settings that temper this a bit. Another handicap which deals with just the positions combat odds against Neutral cities is added. You can tweak the AI so that it is immune to drain effects (if you remember what that is), you can set the number of cities the AI starts with, you can give the AI "Buy points" to spend, and then of course you can hack the ugly open source C# AI source code to make him smarter.