[BUG] "Don't settle nearby"

The AI is repeatedly yelling at me for settling near him as a result if him settling a new city near me. I have 4 cities and haven't settled a new one since the BCs, getting yelled at in 1912 for my settling habits is definitely problematic.

I'm attaching the latest autosave before I was last chastised, but I can't guarantee it will happen the same way. The autosave is 1900 and the message came between the 1912 and 1913 turns.

Thats what the AI does. They settle near you and then think it is heir land and youre too close. If you even try to gobble up some tiles before they can, they yell at you for purchasing land in their territory.

War > Capture city > RAZE!!!, and send them a message to GTFO.

bhavv said:

War > Capture city > RAZE!!!, and send them a message to GTFO.

Click to expand...

This is what I usually do, but even if they just capitulated all their gold and resources, they'll usually refuse to agree not to settle near me again.

Confirmed. I think it might be related to Wu Zetian taking the Iroquois capital on the previous turn.

Steps to replicate
1.) load save, click through the turn.
2.) End turn. Wu Zetian captures Osininka (Iroquois capital)
3.) Click through the next turn.
4.) End turn. Hiawatha contacts you, complaining about you settling close.

My guess is that the "settling close" is tracked by an array of city distances from the capital. When the capital changes, it interprets the change as you settling close.

That could be it. Monty did the same thing earlier in the game, and now I'm wracking my brain to remember if it also coincided with Wu taking his capital. (She was on quite the warpath that game.) Unfortunately I can't remember for sure and I don't have a save that far back, but if I ever see it again I'll be sure to see if that's a factor.

Also I had just paid Budapest 1k gold to become allies and the next turn China conquered them. It sucks but makes it worse when China keeps yelling at me, I see you are gettign close to Budapest adn It pisses me off every 5 or 6 turns when they own the city and I ain't gettign any closer. Its 200 turns later and they are still crying about it.

ainwood said:

My guess is that the "settling close" is tracked by an array of city distances from the capital. When the capital changes, it interprets the change as you settling close.

Click to expand...

In my opinion you are almost right... but not quite: I think that there is some kind of bug regarding distance evaluation in itself, linked to the use of arithmetic means to see what is close of them ( that invariably borks when the maps are too cramped/ too empty ) linked to thinking that a conquest is a settling ( very likely ). It would not be the first time that firaxis uses the distance from capitals for similar stuff ( remember the liberate city in BtS? ... where it even sometimes asked to liberate a city to a unmet civ just because it's cap was closer than ours from the city in question? ) with a similar degree of bugness.

I think that this is not the only place where this is used ... I posted a save two days ago where 2 faraway civs start rambling about me massing troops near their borders while invading other civ in early game ... where I didn't even knew where they were ( and worse, one of them even had a entire civ and almost 20 tiles in between my army and their closest city ). When does firaxis learn that this kind of stuff leads to bugness ?

Could it be the AI's way of asking you not to settle closely, much like you can do with the AI? Perhaps the wording is just off.

I had Suleiman come to me repeatedly over several centuries telling me not to settle closely, when neither his cities nor mine changed. And yet he never got angry over it (I always agreed not to), and he never called me a liar for breaking my word.

I've just settled a city a good distance from the Americans and they immediately complained that I was settling close their borders. They then dropped their pact of secrecy with me against the French. They then dropped their pact of co-operation. They then attacked me, giving me the tech for our research agreement and closing our open borders. A few turns later the French attack me too (although given I did actually settle close to the French so I don't blame them).

This really is exactly the sort of AI diplomatic behavior from the Americans that makes players want to throw their copies of the game out the window. It's impossible to deal with it. Attached is a screenshot showing the space between my city and the Americans - but Atlanta was not present when I settled Yaroslav. The Americans settled Atlanta and another city too (later than this screenshot) in the wide gap between Yaroslav and their empire. The area to the east of Yaroslav was desert btw so I wasn't actually spreading out as much as it appears on the minimap.

Moderator Action: Threads merged.

One thing that I've noticed, is that the AI considers any allied City State to be part of it's "territory", so you might have just settled to close to a CS that was allied to America.

In one game, the Aztecs sent me the warning about massing armies on their borders, however, the Aztecs were on a separate continent from me, and my army was simply on the border of one of their allied CS's.

Wasn't there another thread saying that this, as well as the AI settling cities halfway across the map from their capital, was down to them considering what their exploring unit could see as being line of sight from their cities? Which is known and on the official list of things to be fixed.