I was wondering the samn thing, probable their total tech points that they have researched. It should be hidden from players anyway, so it wouldnt cause panic through out the realm. What difficulty are you playing? The higher levels the more points they will get.

Thanks, folks, for answering and confirming.

@Redindus: I was on Challenging.  That's supposed to add no economic or resource bonuses to the AI as far as I can tell.

I think I'll change the category on this post

there is definitely something wrong there.

there's a couple places where you set difficulty.  is it possible that you set the world difficulty to Challenging but that the AIs are set to Expert or Insane difficulty?

otherwise I'd say it's a bug, and upload the save.

@cselmes

there's the possibility that the AI has been trading tech between each other.  are you playing against vanilla factions or ones you custom built yourself.  I did just finish a game where a custom faction was pumping out catapults way ahead of when I would think it possible.  And they didn't really seem that advance otherwise.  It seems like there might be a bug that allow the AI to bypass some requirements when placing things into the queue.

I go back to a comment I made on another post about tech-brokering... In GalCiv it seems the AI would go wild trading techs with each other, and re-trading them and re-trading them... and it tipped the scales enormously against the human player.  I like the fact that you can't trade "techs" in this game, but I do suspect that the AI is either garnering more tech points per research, or just wildly outpacing the player in the tech-point trading department.

Based on their land holdings, there is no way that Kraxis (in my example) could have had the points they had (or any other of my close neighbors, for that matter).  I think the AI is obviously getting a boost of some kind, and that's fine, except not when the difficulty level claims that they aren't.

@sweatyboatman

EDIT2: Checked again - I was wrong the one with the insane numbers is actually a custom faction. The one I had beaten before which also seemed to have very high tech (city militia with boreal blade?) was vanilla (oracle ceresa).

I don't think it was a queue issue.

One of them was a kingdom player that I was neutral with. When I opened the diplomacy screen they had insane numbers in the tech trading section (some 15000+ in total, compared to ~700 on my side) and when I entered their territory with my hero and opened the shop, I could buy high end stuff that would have taken me a few hundred turns to research (and my research rate had been higher throughout the game and at that point was about 5x theirs, according to the graph when I retired the game). So I don't know where they should have that amount of research points from.

It was on easy difficulty, so it should definetely not be caused by AI bonuses or anything like that. I personally don't see any legit way how the AI could have gotten to those research levels, so I think there is a bug somewhere.

As I said my best guess is the technology trading, as that could also explain why we don't always see it - just when two factions "like" each other enough and are both keen on technology trading (no idea if there is any preferences like that) - so they do it repeatedly over a longer period. 

I haven't yet figured out exactly how tech trading works, but it seems to me that I can only trade the amount of those techs that the other party hasn't researched yet (or something like that).

However if this restriction is not properly applied to the AI, they could just trade all their research points. And they might be able to do this over and over again (with ever higher numbers since the points from previous trades could also be added in). You'd get some exponential growth that could lead to numbers like that.

But again that's just a guess.

EDIT: If there is no such restriction as above, there definetely needs to be one. Otherwise factions could just as well stop researching and keep trading tech points to advance the tech tree.

EDIT3: Some details of the game

Season is 319

On the tech trading screen I see tech values:

Mine:

Civ 216

War 117

Magic 201

AI:

Civ 1942

War 1998

Magic 13068

Their shop sells

Boreal Blades (takes me 200+ turns to research the necessary tech)

Champions Cuirass (another 130+ on top of that)

My current rate of research 59.8 with 12 cities.

Theirs is (estimate from the research graph in retire screen) below 10 and most of the game has been more like below 5 with 2 cities (don't think they ever had more).

EDIT5: Another thing that came to my mind and might be a factor - I was playing with many (9) AI factions, so there could have been more than average tech trading going on. However even if I add up all the research of all AI factions that would not be enough to get those tech levels (9 x 5 (on average, actually rather less than that) x 319 = 14355).

I'm wondering if this is caused by the insta-build bug...

https://forums.elementalgame.com/437577/

@sweatyboatman  Ha ha, right?!?!  It kind of kills the game for me when I try to put everyone on a fairly even keel.  Sovs have their respective race/sov bonuses, and have to fight the world -- what adds variance (or is supposed to) are those bonuses, your starting position, and any luck you may have scooping up parts of the world.  Then I see this, and honestly it ruins the game for me.

I don't save-scum, but I did save a couple times to take a break last night.  So maybe over the course of these 200 turns I reloaded three or four times, including my load this morning.  These are all manual save reloads.  Does it make a difference what kind of save you are loading from?

The only mods I'm running right now are GinsuKnives, and LargerMaps.  This has me intrigued.  I think I'll have to do a playtest with the different saves to see if there's any difference.

[edit]  I also modded blood types to add population costs to them.  I did, however, experience this issue prior to that mod.

Has this been fixed yet?  My current game, which is the newest patch, has all the AI with 15,000 or 20,000 in civics research and hundreds in the others.