3.19 City governor rushes buildings using gold!

I have noticed that, in oddly cases, when production automation is turned on in a city, the city governor uses gold to rush the building!

I have attached a savegame. You can see that factory is 10 turns from completion in Hurrian, which has production automated turned on, and empire gold is 600. Next turn, the factory is finished and empire gold is 26.

Turning off production automation in this city solves the problem in this particular case. Another cities with production automation turned on behave normally.

A very odd bug indeed...

Edit: Removed the savegame due to quota issues.

It is not a bug IMHO. You will notice that it too ....

It's no bug. It's been this way a long time.

The production auto governor will also whip. When I have units looped in the early game and I'm just going mass war I often let it do so.

r_rolo1 said:

It is not a bug IMHO. You will notice that it too ....

Click to expand...

I think it's indeed a bug. If you have loaded the savegame, you can see it's nonsense that the city governor can spend almost all your civilization gold in a single building.

I have searching the code and found this in function CvCityAI::AI_doHurry:

//this overrides everything.
if (bGrowth)
{
int iHurryGold = hurryGold((HurryTypes)iI);
if ((iHurryGold > 0) && ((iHurryGold * 16) < GET_PLAYER(getOwnerINLINE()).getGold()))
{
hurry((HurryTypes)iI);
break;
}
if (AI_countGoodTiles((healthRate(0) == 0), false, 100) <= (getPopulation() - iHurryPopulation))
{
hurry((HurryTypes)iI);
break;
}
}

It seems to happen when the city has enough population to pop-rush the building, but you aren't using slavery civic and you are using universal suffrage. The hurry function in black should execute only to pop-rushing but it executes to gold-rushing too, without checking the gold requeriments for gold-rush.

Could be this portion of code the responsible of the low reserves of AI Civ gold in certain circumstances?

Well, I definitely agree that the $rush code could use a redo... the issue is that the code for hurry a build is the same for slavery as to US $rush, as you pointed. Slavery is city limited ( you can't slave people in a city to get prod in other.... ) and $ rush isn't, but the code treats both in the same way.

Well, more code for jdog to do

this sort of behavior has been in their ever since Blake taught the AI to actually hurry things at all in one of the early BetterAI builds - it pretty much makes using the city production manager under Universal Suffrage a no-go - but in its essential parts it was intended - it just seems to not be easy to actually make it work well

ori said:

this sort of behavior has been in their ever since Blake taught the AI to actually hurry things at all in one of the early BetterAI builds - it pretty much makes using the city production manager under Universal Suffrage a no-go - but in its essential parts it was intended - it just seems to not be easy to actually make it work well

Click to expand...

I think it can be fixed with this code:

if (iHurryPopulation > 0)
{
if (AI_countGoodTiles((healthRate(0) == 0), false, 100) <= (getPopulation() - iHurryPopulation))
{
if (iHurryPopulation > 0)
{
hurry((HurryTypes)iI);
}
break;
}
}

The value of iHurryPopulation is established by:
iHurryPopulation = hurryPopulation((HurryTypes)iI);

hurryPopulation calls getProductionPerPopulation(), which reads the XML tag "iProductionPerPopulation" in Civ4HurryInfo.xml. Its value is 0 for HURRY_GOLD and 30 for HURRY_POPULATION.

I agree Pep, that's exactly the solution. There's a check that iHurryGold is > 0 for the gold half, there definitely needs to be a similar check for the population side.

As it stands, when the AI is evaluating whether to hurry using gold under Universal Suffrage, it thinks hurrying by population is a fabulous idea because it will cost 0 population ... but then it actually does a gold hurry

Will be in the next UP.

jdog5000 said:

I agree Pep, that's exactly the solution. There's a check that iHurryGold is > 0 for the gold half, there definitely needs to be a similar check for the population side.

As it stands, when the AI is evaluating whether to hurry using gold under Universal Suffrage, it thinks hurrying by population is a fabulous idea because it will cost 0 population ... but then it actually does a gold hurry

Will be in the next UP.

Click to expand...

Related to this bug, there are two different criteria to gold-rush in CvCityAI::AI_doHurry:

- First:

if (bGrowth)
{
int iHurryGold = hurryGold((HurryTypes)iI);
if ((iHurryGold > 0) && ((iHurryGold * 16) < GET_PLAYER(getOwnerINLINE()).getGold()))
{
hurry((HurryTypes)iI);
break;
}
...

- Second:

int iValuePerTurn = AI_buildingValueThreshold(eProductionBuilding, BUILDINGFOCUS_GOLD | BUILDINGFOCUS_MAINTENANCE | BUILDINGFOCUS_PRODUCTION);

iValuePerTurn /= 3;

if (iValuePerTurn > 0)
{
int iHurryGold = hurryGold((HurryTypes)iI);
if ((iHurryGold / iValuePerTurn) < getProductionTurnsLeft(eProductionBuilding, 1))
{
if (iHurryGold < (GET_PLAYER(getOwnerINLINE()).getGold() / 3))
{
hurry((HurryTypes)iI);
return;
}
}
}

I don't know if this is intended or not, but I think spending 1/3 of your gold to rush a building isn't a good strategy. 1/16 makes more sense...

Well, that gets away from clear bugs to AI improvements, I'll keep it in mind for BBAI though.

There is a second instance of the gold hurry bug though, just a few lines below the first one you pointed out. Again, the AI will think a population hurry is a great idea when it's actually doing a gold hurry ... these bugs have a big effect.

There's also one which works the other way, where the AI might whip population because the gold cost is 0.

Jeez ...

jdog5000 said:

There's also one which works the other way, where the AI might whip population because the gold cost is 0.

Jeez ...

Click to expand...

That you and Pep are finding these bugs is music to my ears! These bugs are pretty amusing.