AI City Placement

What is wrong with the AI city placement?



This is from my latest game. I'm just running through all the achievements, trying to give the game a chance, and I get stuff like this. The Iroquois sent their first settler across an entire continent to place it right next to my capital, and several turns later complain about my city placement. C'mon, I haven't even used my first settler yet.

On a slightly related topic, what the heck is the *.tga file format? Having to convert all these in PhotoShop so I can use them isn't exactly economical.

LegioCorvus said:

What is wrong with the AI city placement?

This is from my latest game. I'm just running through all the achievements, trying to give the game a chance, and I get stuff like this. The Iroquois sent their first settler across an entire continent to place it right next to my capital, and several turns later complain about my city placement. C'mon, I haven't even used my first settler yet.

On a slightly related topic, what the heck is the *.tga file format? Having to convert all these in PhotoShop so I can use them isn't exactly economical.

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Yeah, I've seen that also, perhaps its an attempt at squatting I believe the term is, or maybe its provacative. Of course it could just be the idiotic AI doing something stupid yet again
I don't know why they used tga, I don't have photoshop so I guess I won't be posting screens.

I'm playing a Huge map game on Great Plains, and the Ai has some messed-up city placement, as well.

For example, Catherine is in the far upper right, and she has 3 cities there, but then decides to plant a city in the bottom left. Also, Hiawatha has a big empire right next to Catherine, and has a single city down at the bottom center.

I'd have screenshots, but i'm at work ><

Obviously, he wanted those gems. And wait for culture bomb first chance he gets.

Well it is not bad city placement, it is agreesive city placement, it is a big diference. it seens to me he is trying to dificult your expasion... the Persas are the ones who do it frequentilly.

the only problem is the military expertise of the ai to correctly defend this citie... in multiplayer i had done things like these with sucess many times

The annoying thing is that there is no mechanic to ensure founding cities close to existing cities. This kind of gaminess just kind stomps on the fun and immersion factor of the game for me.

I don't have a screen shot but the same thing happened with me last night. Maybe it is an Iroquois thing?

Really annoying thing... you see the distance between his capital and Tombouctou ? I dont see where is the logic... and there is no horse or iron here

Hailas said:

Obviously, he wanted those gems. And wait for culture bomb first chance he gets.

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I know you're joking, but there are gems to the SW that would have had better city tiles surrounding it and no overlap. The city placement is just bonkers. My army was massively larger than his and I ended up wiping him out and quitting the game (early boring game made worse by no neighbors).

galahadba said:

Well it is not bad city placement, it is agreesive city placement, it is a big diference. it seens to me he is trying to dificult your expasion... the Persas are the ones who do it frequentilly.

the only problem is the military expertise of the ai to correctly defend this citie... in multiplayer i had done things like these with sucess many times

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Yeah, that would be fine....if the AI didn't then complain about how YOU'RE expanding on THEIR territory, even though you were settled there since Turn 1. I had this happen to me, I had 4 cities slightly spread out and the Arabians drop a city in between my Capital and second city, and then they complain every single time I buy land nearby. Eventually they flipped out and went to war with me, and I ended up taking their intruding city over so I didn't have to deal with it anymore. You can tell them to not settle near you, but they always take it harshly, so it's a wash basically.

BobDole said:

Yeah, that would be fine....if the AI didn't then complain about how YOU'RE expanding on THEIR territory, even though you were settled there since Turn 1. I had this happen to me, I had 4 cities slightly spread out and the Arabians drop a city in between my Capital and second city, and then they complain every single time I buy land nearby. Eventually they flipped out and went to war with me, and I ended up taking their intruding city over so I didn't have to deal with it anymore. You can tell them to not settle near you, but they always take it harshly, so it's a wash basically.

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Again, I think the problem is that there isn't a mechanic that guides city placement to be close to existing cities.

Ddude97 said:

I don't know why they used tga, I don't have photoshop so I guess I won't be posting screens.

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Dude, I'm off topic, but I can help you with a solution I found.

Download Nero StartSmart Essential's for free.
With it open, click on Create and Edit at the top.
Click on Edit Your Photo's option.
Click on yellow Open Folder icon at top left. Here will be a list of your screenies. Choose which one to open and it will be displayed.
Click on Save option, then Save As.
From there you can rename it, and under Save as Type change it to a JPEG file. Then get Image Shack or something to host it.

Hope it help's. We don't want to miss sharing the eye-candy!

mrt144 said:

Again, I think the problem is that there isn't a mechanic that guides city placement to be close to existing cities.

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The problem is not only that, but the odd choices the AI is making when choosing city placement. Right now, even if there were limitations based on distance to capital (or what-have-you) the AI would likely still be making these very odd choices because there aren't taking other things into consideration, such as: logistics, building roads, unit support, or even resource acquisition.

It almost seems random.

Dumb city placement (Catherine squeezes size 1 towns in desert with no resources next to them that never grow) is one thing, but I am really annoyed by the fact they settle next to me and then complain about me encroaching on their territory. The nerve!

I think someone in the strategy forums mentioned that there seemed to be some kind of a bug/strangeness involved with scouts when identifying city spots... In certain situations, the computer would march out a settler to settle wherever its scout happened to be, regardless how ridiculous that position might be. I can't find the post for the life of me, though.

There was some other really strange stuff involving the scouts and the detection of 'building up troops on my borders' as well.

EDIT: Here's something.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9736852&postcount=15

I'm seeing the opposite right now on my continents map. The Americans and the Japanese are building ultra dense clusters of cities. I find it peculiar given the amount of space still left in the continents.

Example - Washington
Early in the game I had dominated my own continent and found a convenient crossing onto Continent2 (henceforth C2). C2 was populated by Americans in the far south, with Egypt and Arabia competing for the middle and north. America solicited my aid in crushing these two empires. In so doing I secured two choke point cities on opposite sides of an inland sea which prevented America from expanding.

To compensate, Washington has packed more cities into the bottom 1/3 of C2 than I have in my entire empire (now spanning 3 continents). He's really pissed off about it too. The weird thing is I only have 2 cities on C2 and the rest of the continent is wide open. If I were in his shoes I'd embark a settler, scoot across the inland sea of C2, and start expanding.

Example - Oda
After I had "fenced in" the Americans, I crawled my way to Navigation and finally brought my units across the fearsome ocean to Continent 3 (C3). This was a behemoth landmass populated by the English, Songhai, French, Ottomans, Persians, Siamese, Japanese and no less than a dozen city states. Even with all 7 having tidy little empires, the C3 still had some vast open spaces. The west of C3 had Ottomans pressed against the coast, The east of C3 was Japan resting on top of England, down to a choke point from which the southern half of C3 was a hodge-podge of every other empire from east to west. The north of C3 between the Ottomans and the Japanese/English was nothing but wide open land and resources galore.

But even with the vast expanse on his western border, Oda is intent to make Japan one massive concentration camp. Maybe he's agoraphobic or something. Though I haven't counted, I'd say there's no less than 20 cities in "sardine formation" crammed into the upper north east of C3. I can't wait to go to war with him.

Saldana said:

Really annoying thing...

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Maybe the plan is to block you by culture and backfill later.?

LegioCorvus said:

What is wrong with the AI city placement?

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Absolutely nothing. That is also where I would build my summer home.

LegioCorvus said:

It almost seems random.

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It's unfortunately all too not random. If you have settling suggestions off, turn them on and make note of where the AI tells you to build. In about 3000 years, you'll learn the AI was an ancient Coal or Oil prospector.

JP1 said:

I think someone in the strategy forums mentioned that there seemed to be some kind of a bug/strangeness involved with scouts when identifying city spots... In certain situations, the computer would march out a settler to settle wherever its scout happened to be, regardless how ridiculous that position might be. I can't find the post for the life of me, though.

There was some other really strange stuff involving the scouts and the detection of 'building up troops on my borders' as well.

EDIT: Here's something.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9736852&postcount=15

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Oh, it's actually a bug? Well thank God, that means it'll probably be fixed someday. I just assumed the AI (as far as it knew) had no incentive to build close to its empire since there's no longer maintenance costs determined by distance. The Civ II-esque strategy of "drop cities wherever you want, including gaps inside another civ's boarders" was one of 2 things making me unsure of whether or not I even wanted the game at all anymore. It's not much fun when peace is never an option because the people you try to be friends with force you to wipe them out because they settle like morons and act like you're the bad guy for it.

This is probably the best news I've heard about V since it was released.

But as for that whole "they think you're the bad guy" thing, yeah, that's another issue and something needs to be put in place so that the person who settles 2nd doesn't keep accusing the person who settled 1st of being the intruder.

Well, we're assuming it's a bug, if the description in this forum post is to be believed. The fact that an AI tries to plop cities in any nice spot it can see on the map is odd, but it might not be a bug... But the fact that it seems to count any unit it can see anywhere in the world as being close to its borders is almost DEFINITELY a bug. And they both seem to be related to the same section of code.

Well i have played a lot of games and put cities at random does not seens to be the case... most of my games there is even a non populated area between mine and AIs borders, if the terrain is not good for cities, and on big maps theres much terrain unpopulated as the ai does not expand beyond its capacity (and i play on emperor they have a lot of bonuses)... the city placement as far as i had seen is the best in all civ games.
The behavior of getting a city near you for me is an agressive placement and it had happened 2 times only in my games and my neighbour was the persians theses 2 times, and in the 2 times they got a very god spot near my and gave me trouble expanding, i had to change to military production and get the land that belongs to me... and in one of the 2 games i got beaten becouse of it.


As far as i see the only problem in the ai city placement for now is they keep telling you to not expand near their borders when they are the ones expanding agressivelly (wich is a diplomatic problem, not a city placement one) . and maybe the bug cited above that i was luck and never had trouble with it.
Civ 5 has a lot of bugs, but city placement does not seens to be one for me