Unofficial BTS 3.13 patch

Bhruic said:

No, I understand that it's working as intended. I just don't see the variation being useful. Basically it seems like a variation for variation's sake, not to actually add anything useful to the game.

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Maybe the variation in placement rules of tile improvements isn't that useful by itself. Although I don't think that every element of a game should necessarily lead to a choice or thinking process. Some are there just for looks or variation while they don't make the game necessarily deeper. It seems logical that a watermill is placed on the river so in this case it's probably based on some sense of realism. I know that this game is not that realistic, but the developers do try to keep some level of realism in the game.

The barbarian city placement routine is the same as the AIs.

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Yes, you're right. That wasn't my smartest remark.

The barbarians of course don't know the placement of every other city build up to the moment they place a city and so their cities often don't fit nicely into the pattern of cities build by AI or humans. Ok, that one was less stupid.

What you've overlooked is that reason for city placement. A lot of the time you place a city based on resources that it'll provide, especially with food. Overlapping a city is fine if there are separate food sources. But if you are overlapping the food sources, then you've got problems. You're basically forming a city under false pretenses. Only one of the two cities can actually use the food, so one of the cities that may have been counting on the food to grow is going to end up expanding much slower than it otherwise would.

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Ah, you mean that under Blake's city founding algorithm a newly placed city would count a food resource (or other valuable tile) inside its big fat cross for the full value even if it is shared with another city? Is that it?

You're right that that is not really correct. A human player can switch the valuable tile between the cities and get extra value out of it by using it by the city which can use it most. However, the AI won't do this and even if it would, the tile is still worth less when shared by two cities than when a city has it all for its own.

Halving the value of such a tile would intuitively seem the right choice. (I don't know what changes you made.) However when you do this you might get unexpected side effects where the AI places cities too far from one another because the city founding algorithm is probably balanced around this overvaluing of overlap tiles. The only way to find out if it works as you hope it does is by testing it like you asked us to. It's too hard to look at the programming code and say: yes, the AI will now place the cities like I want it to. It's a complicated issue and I admire the fact that you're trying to tackle the problem.

So I'm not trying to eliminate overlap completely (although I'm trying to discourage excessive overlap), but I'm trying to encourage each city to have it's own set of resources. Which isn't to say that a city needs resources, but I don't want it to rely on sharing them.

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A city with just 2 fully developed towns can usually easily pay for its upkeep. With a courthouse, bank, market and grocer and the various buildings that improve trade routes, you probably don't even have to use tiles to break even in the late game. So a city using 2 grassland tiles (besides the founding tile) is already useful. There is also an opportunity cost of spending hammers on a settler which doesn't give a lot of return for the investment, so you probably need a little more than 2 grassland tiles. All I'm saying is that if the founding algorithm leads to areas of 3-5 decent tiles in between cities that are not being used by any city, then something is wrong. Then the AI is wasting land. So that is the thing that needs to be tested I think. Seeing if your changes work the way you hope/think.

I try to use almost every tile in my area with the lowest number of cities.

But yes, primarily I'm focused on two things - making the AI more likely to choose a river tile, and making the AI less likely to settle one tile away from the Ocean.

Bh

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Why do you want to let the AI focus more on river tiles? I know they presently get some extra value in the code for founding on a river tile. The in game advantages are a health bonus and the late game bonus from the levee. The health bonus is nice, but seldom needed as happiness is usually the crucial limiting factor until the late game with factories and such. The levee bonus is so late in the game that 80% of the game has been finished already. Is the value for river founding really too low?

By the way, I modded the levee a bit so that it doesn't require that a city needs to be build on a river. A really strange requirement if you ask me. As if levees are only build in the city center and not the neighbouring lands. But of course my own modding is not the issue here, just wanted to say that I thought the levee has a strange requirement in civ4.

Roland Johansen said:

It seems logical that a watermill is placed on the river so in this case it's probably based on some sense of realism. I know that this game is not that realistic, but the developers do try to keep some level of realism in the game.

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My point is that the watermill introduces a completely different concept of "on the river" than people are expecting. I don't see why they felt it was necessary to bring that concept into the game.

It's a complicated issue and I admire the fact that you're trying to tackle the problem.

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The problem will be compounded by the fact that everyone will want the AI to place cities in the same manner that they do themselves. Since people place them differently, that will obviously be impossible.

As for halving the bonus, I didn't think that was a good way of handling it. The first city to found gets the entire bonus. There doesn't seem any reason to give the second city "half" of the bonus if it's not going to be able to use that square.

A city with just 2 fully developed towns can usually easily pay for its upkeep. With a courthouse, bank, market and grocer and the various buildings that improve trade routes, you probably don't even have to use tiles to break even in the late game. So a city using 2 grassland tiles (besides the founding tile) is already useful.

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Well having 2 grassland tiles doesn't automatically turn them into towns, but yes, I understand your point. Still, I want to have a balance between sheer numerical efficiency and player expectations.

All I'm saying is that if the founding algorithm leads to areas of 3-5 decent tiles in between cities that are not being used by any city, then something is wrong. Then the AI is wasting land. So that is the thing that needs to be tested I think. Seeing if your changes work the way you hope/think.

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There's a fine line to walk between short-term and long-term gains. In the short-term, it makes sense to build cities that maximize resources. In the long-term, resources become less important, and base tiles become more important. The nice thing is that the foundation code will adapt to that simply by founding pressure. Right now, Civs will tend to found some of their first cities farther away, or with more space than they would previously (although "tend to" just means they are more likely to, a large percentage of the time they will still favour close locations). However, once they've grabbed all the "prime" locations, they'll start to backfill the spaces inbetween. It seems to be semi-efficient, but I still have to do a lot of special-case handling, so we'll see what the end result is.

Why do you want to let the AI focus more on river tiles? I know they presently get some extra value in the code for founding on a river tile. The in game advantages are a health bonus and the late game bonus from the levee. The health bonus is nice, but seldom needed as happiness is usually the crucial limiting factor until the late game with factories and such. The levee bonus is so late in the game that 80% of the game has been finished already. Is the value for river founding really too low?

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I'd disagree with the value of the levee. Especially when you consider that a lot of games tend to the Space Race victory condition - later game production is critical. The "focus" on the river isn't going to result in purely river settling. What it will do is give extra weight to river tiles based on their perceived usefulness.

Bh

Roland, I disagree with your analysis and example. You're correct that more cities is better by reason of working more tiles earlier, and more trade routes. You also don't mention the ability to build more things simultaneously. However, you miss the disadvantages, such as the requirement to build more infrastructure, and increased city maintenance costs.

Bh, you also mention some other points, such as building simply to get a resource.

Personally, I think the current AI emphasizes building 3 away too much. It builds more cities, and closer together, than I think is optimal.

It also focuses on the immediate benefit (in terms of resources gained) but ignores the long term city placement; e.g., 2-3 nice resources and the AI will plop right down in the middle, despite that 2 cities long term can make better use of the same terrain.

Wodan

Roland Johansen said:

By the way, I modded the levee a bit so that it doesn't require that a city needs to be build on a river. A really strange requirement if you ask me. As if levees are only build in the city center and not the neighbouring lands. But of course my own modding is not the issue here, just wanted to say that I thought the levee has a strange requirement in civ4.

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That doesn't make sense to me because you can use the same logic to say the lighthouses can be built on non-coastal cities that have at least one coast in the big fat cross. Obviously we don't want that to happen so if you want to take advantage of coastal tiles you build your city on the coast. Similarly, if you want to take advantage of river tiles with a levee you build your city next to a river.

Wodan said:

Personally, I think the current AI emphasizes building 3 away too much. It builds more cities, and closer together, than I think is optimal.

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I'm not a fan of the "build 3 away" either. Unfortunately it's very difficult to eliminate because the AI has such a strong "backfill" tendancy. If there is space for it to squeeze in a city, it will, even if it's not a good idea.

It also focuses on the immediate benefit (in terms of resources gained) but ignores the long term city placement; e.g., 2-3 nice resources and the AI will plop right down in the middle, despite that 2 cities long term can make better use of the same terrain.

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I agree, but that's not something that I can really do anything about. The AI is really only able to analyze a single plot at a time, it can't do the sort of "global" analysis that would be necessary to optimize resources like that.

Bh

Yeah, I know. I had some long discussions with the Better AI guys.

About the best I could suggest is to have a factor of each tile that accounts for the total room for expansion. e.g., you have cities here X and here X, and you know that future cities will want to go on the coast, and that leaves room for intermediate cities on tiles Y and Y. So, tiles Y would get a bonus to the analysis for founding a city there.

That's a far cry from the current system which is Y ignores all those factors and simply looks at the "face value" of Y and Y's surrounding terrain.

Wodan

Bhruic said:

My point is that the watermill introduces a completely different concept of "on the river" than people are expecting. I don't see why they felt it was necessary to bring that concept into the game.

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I can't really remember having problems with it or hearing many complaints about how it works. You'll see the occasional question about watermills but not a lot. I've been answering questions in the quick answers/'newbie' questions thread for a pretty long time now and I believe that I only answered a question about this once.

So while it works a bit different, it doesn't seem to cause problems for players. We humans are pretty adaptable.

The problem will be compounded by the fact that everyone will want the AI to place cities in the same manner that they do themselves. Since people place them differently, that will obviously be impossible.

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Sure.

As for halving the bonus, I didn't think that was a good way of handling it. The first city to found gets the entire bonus. There doesn't seem any reason to give the second city "half" of the bonus if it's not going to be able to use that square.

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Oh, just my first thought. Also based on the idea that a new city regularly acquires some tiles previously used by the old city. But you are probably right since the tiles that are being used by your entire empire are not increased by this doubly used tile. I vaguely start to recall some discussion threads with Blake about city placement when he was creating his BetterAI mod. There was all kinds of disagreement about various ways to do that.

Well having 2 grassland tiles doesn't automatically turn them into towns, but yes, I understand your point. Still, I want to have a balance between sheer numerical efficiency and player expectations.

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I don't know what you mean with player expectations in this case. I don't think the AI should start placing its cities in an inefficient pattern because the human player expects the AI to place its cities in that pattern. (not claiming that placing a city to use 2 grassland tiles is a very efficient move, just a general comment)

There's a fine line to walk between short-term and long-term gains. In the short-term, it makes sense to build cities that maximize resources. In the long-term, resources become less important, and base tiles become more important.

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Fully agree.

The nice thing is that the foundation code will adapt to that simply by founding pressure. Right now, Civs will tend to found some of their first cities farther away, or with more space than they would previously (although "tend to" just means they are more likely to, a large percentage of the time they will still favour close locations). However, once they've grabbed all the "prime" locations, they'll start to backfill the spaces inbetween. It seems to be semi-efficient, but I still have to do a lot of special-case handling, so we'll see what the end result is.

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I actually do the same thing. I also claim the prime positions first and then backfill the lesser positions. However, I plan a large section of the continent/island with cities and thus this backfilling doesn't result in bad cities, just lesser ones. I reserved the room for these lesser cities. The problem with the AI could be that it fills in the prime locations without regard for future cities and then the later cities get weird spaces of 8 open tiles in between some great cities. These later placed cities are then pretty poor cities and steal a few tiles from the great ones. It could result in a continent full of size 12 cities after all the backfilling.

This of course depends on how the algorithm precisely works. I'm not saying that this will happen, but it is the risk of 'freely' placing cities on the prime locations without regard for open spaces left between cities and then later filling in the gaps.

Testing the code in actual examples will show if it works like you want it to. Blake also had to fix his city placement code repeatedly so I hope you don't expect it to work perfectly in the first go. Or have you tested it a lot already?

I'd disagree with the value of the levee. Especially when you consider that a lot of games tend to the Space Race victory condition - later game production is critical. The "focus" on the river isn't going to result in purely river settling. What it will do is give extra weight to river tiles based on their perceived usefulness.

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Ok, we'll have to disagree on that one then. I like the levee building, but I don't think it is that important because it exists in the later 20% of the game if you actually go for the space victory. Some games don't go that far, that depends on playing style. Who wins the game is usually decided in the first 80% of the game.

Roland Johansen said:

I don't know what you mean with player expectations in this case. I don't think the AI should start placing its cities in an inefficient pattern because the human player expects the AI to place its cities in that pattern. (not claiming that placing a city to use 2 grassland tiles is a very efficient move, just a general comment)

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I mean that if you spend time reading posts on the forum, you'll note that a lot of people complain about the AI's tendancy to overlap cities. The reason they are complaining is because in their view, overlapping cities is a negative. Now I'm aware that from a strictly numerical outlook, overlapping cities is usually superior. But that doesn't match what people are expecting to see.

So my goal, although I don't expect to hit it, is to decrease but not eliminate overlap. Although even that might not be feasible with the AI's "backfill" imperative.

These later placed cities are then pretty poor cities and steal a few tiles from the great ones. It could result in a continent full of size 12 cities after all the backfilling.

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True, but as I mentioned to Wodan, there's really not a simple way to plan cities in conjunction with each other.

Testing the code in actual examples will show if it works like you want it to. Blake also had to fix his city placement code repeatedly so I hope you don't expect it to work perfectly in the first go. Or have you tested it a lot already?

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Oh, I absolutely don't expect it to work perfectly the first go. I don't expect it to work perfectly the last go. So far I've found that it does a decent job of picking "good" locations to settle, and it has significantly reduced "bad" locations - at least until it has no options left. But I've got a lot of conditional checks to add in still.

Bh

Wodan said:

Roland, I disagree with your analysis and example. You're correct that more cities is better by reason of working more tiles earlier, and more trade routes. You also don't mention the ability to build more things simultaneously. However, you miss the disadvantages, such as the requirement to build more infrastructure, and increased city maintenance costs.

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Yes, there is a slight maintenance increase for the 3 cities on the 50 tile area compared to the 2 cities on the 50 tile area. However, the extra tiles, trade routes and corporations that are being used will more than make up for that. And until the 2 cities start using more than 17 tiles per city, 2 of the 3 cities with overlap are equal to them and the third one is just extra.

You have to build more infrastructure, but on a per city basis, you're not building this city infrastructure slower until the 2 cities actually go above size 17 and then the 2 cities are only a fraction faster at building these buildings.

It also focuses on the immediate benefit (in terms of resources gained) but ignores the long term city placement; e.g., 2-3 nice resources and the AI will plop right down in the middle, despite that 2 cities long term can make better use of the same terrain.

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I agree with that and I also agree with Bhruics response. The AI simply cannot plan and that is the basis of the problem of getting the AI to do good city placement.

oedali said:

That doesn't make sense to me because you can use the same logic to say the lighthouses can be built on non-coastal cities that have at least one coast in the big fat cross.Obviously we don't want that to happen so if you want to take advantage of coastal tiles you build your city on the coast. Similarly, if you want to take advantage of river tiles with a levee you build your city next to a river

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In real life a levee is more like a tile improvement and not restricted to the centre of major cities. So I modded it to work a bit more like real life.

In real life, coastal fishing also occurred in small fishing villages, so you could argue that the cottages on the coast close to your non-coastal city are symbolising these small fishing villages and thus the coastal tiles should also get the extra food output from a lighthouse in a non-coastal city (modded).
You could also argue that a big city is needed to create and maintain shipping on a large enough scale to get the extra food output from coastal tiles. So I could argue this either way.
I left this alone and didn't mod it.

Bhruic said:

I'm not a fan of the "build 3 away" either. Unfortunately it's very difficult to eliminate because the AI has such a strong "backfill" tendancy. If there is space for it to squeeze in a city, it will, even if it's not a good idea.

I agree, but that's not something that I can really do anything about. The AI is really only able to analyze a single plot at a time, it can't do the sort of "global" analysis that would be necessary to optimize resources like that.

Bh

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I see that you know quite well what the problems are with city founding for the AI. I'm now even more interested in seeing what you did about it.

Bhruic said:

I mean that if you spend time reading posts on the forum, you'll note that a lot of people complain about the AI's tendancy to overlap cities. The reason they are complaining is because in their view, overlapping cities is a negative. Now I'm aware that from a strictly numerical outlook, overlapping cities is usually superior. But that doesn't match what people are expecting to see.

So my goal, although I don't expect to hit it, is to decrease but not eliminate overlap. Although even that might not be feasible with the AI's "backfill" imperative.

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I'm happy as long as the AI doesn't have (large) sections of unused land. If it can do that without creating a huge overlap between cities, then that is even better.

PieceOfMind said:

stuge I tried out your save. Ignoring the trade issueI find the game crashes when I hit the toggle event list button. Were you using Bhruic's patch, 3.13 or unpatched?

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That's consistent? It happened to me once but I forgot about it since I rarely toggle the event list. Using Bhruic's patch.

Bh - I have a lot of time to test stuff, except on Thursdays. Sending you a PM with my email address.
Amy

Roland Johansen said:

Yes, there is a slight maintenance increase for the 3 cities on the 50 tile area compared to the 2 cities on the 50 tile area. However, the extra tiles, trade routes

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Don't agree. Increase in cost civ-wide. How much is that ? Say it costs each city 15% more for each city. Thus, you add 1 city and each of your cities is 15% more. In a 50 tile area, that's 4 extra cities, and that's +60% per city, thus that's about, what... 124 cost? That's pretty huge.

and corporations that are being used will more than make up for that.

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Corporations?!?

We're talking early or midgame. If we're talking corps then we have to admit that 20 size cities are the norm, and thus the sheer concept of city spam is invalid.

You have to build more infrastructure, but on a per city basis, you're not building this city infrastructure slower until the 2 cities actually go above size 17 and then the 2 cities are only a fraction faster at building these buildings.

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That's my point. It's not a per city basis.

I agree with that and I also agree with Bhruics response. The AI simply cannot plan

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Why the mohter heck not?!?

That is exactly the question Bh is asking, methinks.

Wodan

Wodan said:

Don't agree. Increase in cost civ-wide. How much is that ? Say it costs each city 15% more for each city. Thus, you add 1 city and each of your cities is 15% more. In a 50 tile area, that's 4 extra cities, and that's +60% per city, thus that's about, what... 124 cost? That's pretty huge.

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Huh, what? Where is that number (124) coming from. That doesn't make any sense.

That's not how city maintenance is calculated. Number of cities maintenance has a maximum dependent on difficulty level. that value is 5 at noble level and you won't reach that level in the early game and every city of yours will have that upkeep once you've acquired a large empire.
City distance upkeep varies based on distance from the capital (Versailles, Forbidden Palace) and size of the city. But it usually isn't a high number either. It's 0 in State Property.
The courthouse halves these upkeep values.
A typical increase in upkeep thanks to one sizeable city is around 5-8 in the late game with courthouses. I wonder how you ever thought it could be anywhere near 124. Really weird.

Corporations?!?

We're talking early or midgame. If we're talking corps then we have to admit that 20 size cities are the norm, and thus the sheer concept of city spam is invalid.

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I wasn't talking about a specific game period. Early to mid game, the 3 cities with overlap won't be limited by the overlap because of their limited size due to the happiness and health cap. Late game, you have huge trade route bonuses, corporation bonuses and the 3 cities combined are using more tiles and thus produce more commerce and production.

That's my point. It's not a per city basis.

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Hmm, building construction is on a per city basis. I don't get what you're saying.

Why the mohter heck not?!?

That is exactly the question Bh is asking, methinks.

Wodan

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It seems that you're getting angry at me for the limitations of the AI. I can't help that. The so called intelligence of the AI is very limited. I would love it if the AI were intelligent enough to plan the cities on an entire continent all at once, but you'll just have to accept that this is not going to happen. And it's not going to happen if you take 20 AI programmers and let them work on it for a year.

The AI is actually simulating intelligence by using well thought through algorithms. Writing an algorithm that searches through all the possible city locations on a continent and picks the perfect set of city locations is totally out of the question even with full information about the continent. The number of permutations would be way too big for even the fastest computer. But usually you don't even have full information because not all the terrain is known.
The AI presently values city locations using a fairly smart algorithm and then builds the city with the highest value. When that city is build (or another civilisation builds a city or more terrain is revealed), the algorithm re-evaluates the city locations and values will change and again the highest valued city is chosen. The AI builds the cities one by one and doesnt' think ahead. This is exactly what makes it difficult for the AI to not be 'greedy' about the settle location. How do you write a valuation code for settling the best city without causing the AI to greedily grab a position of 4 health resources and not sharing them with many cities. That is very hard to do.

Bhruic isn't trying to make the AI plan the cities in a large area in advance. He's trying to improve the algorithm that values the city locations so that the AI makes a better choice about where to build its next city. And he tries to do that in such a way that the final pattern of cities is also fairly good. Since the cities are placed one by one, it's pretty hard to control the final pattern of cities.

By the way, if I was incorrect in this, then please correct me Bhruic.

Roland Johansen said:

By the way, I modded the levee a bit so that it doesn't require that a city needs to be build on a river. A really strange requirement if you ask me. As if levees are only build in the city center and not the neighbouring lands. But of course my own modding is not the issue here, just wanted to say that I thought the levee has a strange requirement in civ4.

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I feel kind of silly, because I thought levees could be built anywhere. It was just a question of whether or not it was worth it. I guess in the past anytime I wanted to build one, it was in a city with a river. I imagine the dutch dikes do not have the requirement?

As a quick side note, how did you mod this? I'm not seeing this restriction anywhere in the XML. Perhaps that's because it's not in the XML.

Bhruic said:

I don't think that I'd change the unit that appears on top. Your own unit should always appear on top of a stack of units for selection purposes. But what I might do is include the "faceoff" units in the Combat Odds box. That should have the same effect you are looking for, right?

Bh

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I was suggesting that when you have a unit selected AND are holding down the right mouse button that spies should be removed from the top of the stack. I could see arguments against this of course... it would look strange that if you have a rifleman selected and you are about to attack a city, you can see your spy on it, but as you press the right mouse botton to hover the spy just disappears! It really doesn't bother me too much. It just seems rather awkward the way it works at the moment.

Your suggestion would do most of the job fixing it. I'm not sure if it would be a problem for some if you just gave the name of the unit, as that would not reveal necessarily which unit it was, especially if there are a number of the same unit type each with different types of promotions.

I just wanted to raise an issue which might have a potentially simple fix - I'm not really one for deciding on the fix though. I'll leave it up to you or others to decide.

By the way, I agree with Roland that it was a fairly early design decision to make watermills only be able to be built on non-corner river squares. Whether this decision was influenced by the difficulty of making a graphic for a corner watermill I'm unable to decide. Not that it's a very important issue to be worrying about, especially in this thread!

Also, again I side with Roland on the AI city placement debate. I do not agree with Bhruic's decision to make minimising city overlap a goal in itself. I would be happy however to have this as a necessary effect of some AI improvement.

Having a majority of players feel uneasy about city overlap I think would be a very bad motivation to alter AI behaviour. Our aim is not to make an AI play like a human player. Having said that, I do agree with your desire to make them less likely to found one tile away from coasts.

Once again I agree with Roland on whether cities should be placed one tile from rivers. That is, I don't think emphasising river cities (as opposed to cities just near rivers) is really necessary. The bonus does come very late in the game, and I think it would be more important, for example, to ensure river cities have a decent number of hills in their radius.

At the moment I'm sure it's possible for AIs to love a city site because it has a lot of resources even if it has not a single hill in its radius. These are the sort of things that as a thinking player I am cautious about.

I think AI improvements for city placement would come more from considerations of the amount of food available to the city (when farmed etc.) and what hammers are available to the city. High priority should be given to securing a new resource I guess. I would argue distance to the palace should be a pretty important factor as well.

Anyway, I don't know how deep you want to go into these sorts of city-placement improvements because they will be very involved, very controversial and possibly fairly frustrating.

I have a Question, is it true that you can win the Spacerace without ever researching the Flight Tech?

If it is then is it a bug? or is a FAD?

Bhruic said:

Well, that's fine for a mod, but I'm not sure it'll fly for a patch, even an "unofficial" one.

As an aside to the public at large...

Help!

Ok, now that I've got your attention (), I was wondering if anyone would be willing to test my city placement modifications? I've done a bunch of run-throughs with autorun on to watch city placement, generally they look good, but I'm going to want more test cases than I can generate myself. So if I can get some people who are willing to try it out, that would help out a lot.

Bh

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I'll test. I've created my own maps and seen some very bad starting location. Also they're made from maps from other games so some areas are far more useful than others. So it might be interesting to see what it does with that kind of terrain.

kniteowl said:

I have a Question, is it true that you can win the Spacerace without ever researching the Flight Tech?

If it is then is it a bug? or is a FAD?

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You can get rocketry with either artillery or flight so yes it's true and I read somewhere that it was a conscious decision to go that way after theorizing that airplanes and rockets are really not all that similar so one could work our ballistic flight on it's own.
What should really blow your mind is that you can build the Apollo program without electricity. How are they igniting the rocket, with a match and a very long wick like in those Bugs Bunny cartoons? Are they using a steam powered lunar lander? Mind, consider yourself boggled.

Roland Johansen said:

I would love it if the AI were intelligent enough to plan the cities on an entire continent all at once, but you'll just have to accept that this is not going to happen.

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No, doing that wouldn't be terribly difficult. But it would also be particularily futile. The other AIs would end up settling spots that would cause problems for the "master plan". The only time it'd be even vaguely useful is when the AI was alone on a continent - and even then things like Barb cities would get in the way.

Bhruic isn't trying to make the AI plan the cities in a large area in advance. He's trying to improve the algorithm that values the city locations so that the AI makes a better choice about where to build its next city. And he tries to do that in such a way that the final pattern of cities is also fairly good. Since the cities are placed one by one, it's pretty hard to control the final pattern of cities.

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The main trouble I'm running into right now is trying to balance practical starting yield with theoretical improvement yield. My current formula over-values water tiles (even without lighthouses in the picture) because they generate 1 and 2 . Leaving aside the food/production/commerce weighting issues, that means that a water tile "looks" better than a normal non-river, non-forested tile (which all generate only 2 food/production/commerce). Obviously the land tiles can be improved, but trying to "value" the improvement potential is both difficult and frustrating. If anyone has any ideas on that front, I'm all ears.

By the way, if I was incorrect in this, then please correct me Bhruic.

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No, that roughly sums up the situation.

Bh