forum.freeciv.org

What are your settings for a fun single player game? What do you set so that the AI can build big cities and make a reasonable defense?

Unless it's important to the settings, the AI difficulty is mostly not the interesting parameter here. What do you tweak, tech, city size and distance rules? Other ruleset changes?

Some may like rolling the dice with unpredictable results, but I prefer to minimize the random "luck" factor and focus on beating the AI:
Difficulty set to hard
Uncheck Global warming and Nuclear winter (Geological)
Huts to 0 (Geological) because: http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=288
Minimum distance between cities to 3 (Sociological) to stop AI from creating cities adjacent to each other
Length of turns in Revolution to 2 (Sociological)
Select No barbarians (Military)
Turns per auto-save to 1 (Internal)

Then I race against the AI to "win" the short game in a day or two: http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=192

If you want a challenging game, place several AI nations in the same team. The default server options will allow them to share the researching pool, so a team with 5 or 6 AIs uses to research faster than me. If you do not want them to research so fast, disable the shared pool.