How to stop AI from building too many units.

Ok this may seem very bizarre but recently i was playing a game of civilization 3 with the golden hordes mod and i noticed a handful of the AI had very low culture, even in the industrial age.

I decided to investigate using a utility that converts all AIs to players.

Little did i know, the civs were unable to afford any improvements because they were running themselves into the ground on account of unit support debt.

For example, the Aztecs had build over 500 Jaguar Warriors and America was busy building Trebuchets in every single damn city they had. Even the Mayans, who seemed to be somewhat sane, decided to get into a war with the hittites and end up losing 147 gold per turn!

As i flipped through the civs, they were consistently flat out broke and giving up improvements so they can build more units.

How do i keep these freaking idiots from going broke all the time?

LOL ! Thats funny and wierd.... dont have the anwers for it.

Golden Hordes is a graphics-only mod, right? Well, new civs, too, but the civs have standard traits and UUs are just slightly modified attack/defense/movement/cost values, right?

In your game, are these AI civs isolated on islands or locked into an alliance? The way to reduce AI troops is for them to get into wars which they do sooner or later unless they don't have anyone available to attack. I have often seen in a game where one AI civ is isolated and had craploads of ancient units they won't disband even after the meet other civs and start catching up in tech. But I haven't seen several such civs in a game yet.

Puppeteer said:

Golden Hordes is a graphics-only mod, right? Well, new civs, too, but the civs have standard traits and UUs are just slightly modified attack/defense/movement/cost values, right?

In your game, are these AI civs isolated on islands or locked into an alliance? The way to reduce AI troops is for them to get into wars which they do sooner or later unless they don't have anyone available to attack. I have often seen in a game where one AI civ is isolated and had craploads of ancient units they won't disband even after the meet other civs and start catching up in tech. But I haven't seen several such civs in a game yet.

Click to expand...

Nope, these civs are not isolated.

I have decided to try an approach in the editor which involves the "Build Often" feature. What i did was for each civ, i flagged every box except for Offensive Units, Defensive Units, Naval Units, Air Units and Artillery Units. We'll see if it works.

IIRC, the AI will only use 3 of those checkboxes, so if more than 3 are checked, it will ignore them.

So, if i flagged say Culture, Science, and Trade, will the AI build some improvements instead of simply stockpiling units?

dominatr said:

So, if i flagged say Culture, Science, and Trade, will the AI build some improvements instead of simply stockpiling units?

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Yea, I think that would help the AI focus on things better and alleviate the stockpiling problem. I'm not sure it would eliminate the problem altogether though.

I can't remember where I read about this. If I find it, I'll put a link here.

Maybe Antal can look at the code and figure out how the AI decides what to build? That would really be helpful...

Gray Wolf said:

IIRC, the AI will only use 3 of those checkboxes, so if more than 3 are checked, it will ignore them.

Click to expand...

I have noticed that many of the AI civs just build units and all there cities are level 1. Most also have no Culture Growth and have limited, even no Building construction. I added a "monument" building ( 1 culture ) to fix the Culture problem ( cost 1 shield ). This needs to be built before early units can be built. This didn't fix the endless Archers walking about though.

Questions:
If i choose 6 Checkboxes which Boxes will the AI use?
Is there 3 Default Boxes or Boxes that take precedence over others?

PS: is it 3 Boxes in "Build Never" and 3 Boxes in "Build Often" or only 3 Boxes in total?

MPK said:

I have noticed that many of the AI civs just build units and all there cities are level 1. Most also have no Culture Growth and have limited, even no Building construction. I added a "monument" building ( 1 culture ) to fix the Culture problem ( cost 1 shield ). This needs to be built before early units can be built. This didn't fix the endless Archers walking about though.

Questions:
If i choose 6 Checkboxes which Boxes will the AI use?
Is there 3 Default Boxes or Boxes that take precedence over others?

PS: is it 3 Boxes in "Build Never" and 3 Boxes in "Build Often" or only 3 Boxes in total?

Click to expand...

I am pretty sure it was a max of 3 for each set (6 total). But for the life of me, I can't find the thread, so I'm not sure where I heard it. So everyone please ignore what I said. I'm not sure if it is right or not. Sorry about that....

Ok, here is the thread where I read about this. Ozymandias talked about it... and I've always respected his opinions. It sounds like he is basing this on his experience though, so I guess we don't know for sure how the AI uses those checkboxes. Anyway, look at post 3 and post 5.

Also, I just want to say that I never check any of the 'Build Never' checkboxes because it just seems like this would put the AI at a big disadvantage.

It seems that a handful of civs continued to ignore the checkboxes.

I flagged "culture" "science" and "growth", and i conducted espionage on Portugal to find that they were stockpiling catapults and had built 0 improvements.

EDIT: Out of the 15 civs i met so far, only 2 are opting out of building improvements.

I am Not certain but based on tests and experience over the years, there are some CIVs that seem to be Hard Coded toward building or Not building some things, regardless of the Flags in the Editor.
...Probably done that way for Game Play. Sort of "expendable CIVs" that are not really suppose to fare well in the game

Generally, the AI will build Wonders and Improvements that provide Great Perks and especially at the Beginning of a Game... apply Units, Gold and Food.