Civilization AI's not build coastal cities.

I just started a game with random civilization, and landmass. I rolled Ditto of Carthage on a fractal map. My land mass was long and snaky with four civilizations (including me).

With Ditto's unique unit being the quinquereme I decided to go sailing early and pump out a few of them and perform a coastal invasion, but even with four civalizations each with two to four cities not one coastal cities. I rerolled the game thrice more times with Carthage and fractal each time with the same thing.

Is the only way to make use of a navel civilization to go apparcalepto (small Islands) or large Islands? either of which I lake to play. Very annoying and not very realistic.

I know It's nothing new, but I just had to rant about it somewhere.

So you dislike that the AI was playing smartly and placing cities inland?!

Settling on the coast is rarely the best place unless there are many coastal luxs/fish in range, and even then, it takes much longer and many more hammers to get those producing well.
In MP people will specifically sometimes NOT settle on the coast because of how vulnerable those cities are to capture.

Islands maps are indeed the way to go if you want tons of coastal cities to capture.

In my current continents game, I'm at war with Russia.

All but one of Russia's cities is coastal. I have promoted dromons.

Fun.

yes, you guys are right. I just wish you didn't have to jurry rig the map to make a navy useful in the early to mid game.

Fishing boats are too expensive to build, way too expensive to buy, the tile yields aren't as good as in Civ 4 and the sailing tech path is an expensive early game detour that limits the effectiveness of pretty much every early game strategy (CB rush, NC rush, building the GL, rushing to your UU...).

Makes sense to avoid coastal cities initially.

Slowpoked said:

Fishing boats are too expensive to build, way too expensive to buy, the tile yields aren't as good as in Civ 4 and the sailing tech path is an expensive early game detour that limits the effectiveness of pretty much every early game strategy (CB rush, NC rush, building the GL, rushing to your UU...).

Makes sense to avoid coastal cities initially.

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You summarized it well. You can buy/build a worker who can continue to work tiles all game, or you can buy/build one boat that can only be used once. 4-5 fish/whales/crabs etc... 4-5 fishing boats... zzzz

Also, like you mentioned you have to put off researching other stuff to get the sailing techs early.

There are a few more map types that at least let the AI start along the coast. 'Ice Age' and 'Small Continents' do this. There might be more, but it's dependent on these lines in the map script:
If you really want, you could add these lines to other map scripts as well. It doesn't mean the AI will build more coastal cities, but their capital will guaranteed be coastal.

I do agree the AI puts a lot of cities 1 or 2 tiles away from the coast, and I find that a bit stupid. Maybe against human players that build large navies there's a defensive advantage to it, but on all other accounts it's not so good, including defense against the AI.

Slowpoked said:

Fishing boats are too expensive to build, way too expensive to buy...

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If it's for connecting the first sea lux I will often buy one. Spend 240, sell lux, get 240 back; not much of a loss. But I'm always checking first if the AI has money. If they're poor I'm not paying for a fishing boat at that point, but otherwise it's giving me an improved lux within 1 turn at no cost, and that doesn't happen with a worker.