Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go...
Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
I remember trying this when I was younger (with the Cheat menu). The primary issue is that while it is quicker, it is difficult to figure out the details of what is happening in the game when there is no pause at the beginning of your turn. Since the AI "personalities" of the different computer players cause some of them to be more aggressive than others, all of the games I tried to simulate in this way ended up with one military aggressive AI player dominating enough of the world that they did not need nuclear weapons.
There was a significant amount of variance among AI personalities and winning strategies in the various versions of Civilization I played, so I suspect that your success would vary depending on which version you were using. For example, if you were using CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original game, the anemic AI in that game might very well lock into some sort of peaceful stalemate, but the contentious resource model in Civilization III would probably produce different results.
I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me
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It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.
I did this, more or less, in the original Civ. I was a player in my own game, I built a city in the Arctic, built a military unit in it, then disbanded the rest of my civilzation. The AI doesn't ever go there.
You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.
Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?