AI stays too small, reason?

BSPollux

BSPollux

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Theres a question that I cant answer myself, please enlight me:

The situation is as follows: Theres a big continent. I am in one corner, AIs are spread over the rest. Theres still lots of free space.

Then, the AIs build a few citys each (3?) and stop growing. They declare war on each other over huge distances and sign peace a while later.

They totaly stop growing alltogether and the space between them stays unused. Even with my building/culture-oriented play I outgrow them by far, to a point where its boring. It happeneds way too often :(

Is this related to difficulty? Is there a max size they aim for related to difficulty?
 
I think sometimes the AI gets 'interrupted' in its settling plans and then tends to fail to follow it up later. I have seen them explode across open land just as often. Recent game I had, William founded 7 cities when everyone else had 3 or fewer
 
I get this all the time. I realy hoped the changed AI on GK would fix it, but on my first game I saw it again.

Noone knows how that strange behaviour is triggered or avoidable?
 
I've had the failure to grow problem as well post-G&K. It's probably not as widespread as I had originally thought; I was given the impression it was a rampant issue when it happened in 3 of 4 games I played after buying the expansion. But a lot of others claim it doesn't happen basically at all, so idk.

I will echo nefloyd a bit and say I think it has to do with an AI getting 'interrupted'. They seem to set goals early in the game like capturing a CS or an neighboring civ city and focus their resources to that effort. When their schemes fail, they seem to have serious problems switching gears and going back to growth mode.

As I said before, I don't think it's as widespread as my initial experiences with it suggested. I should also note that in the games that it happened in, not every AI failed to grow. But it is rather annoying to take a game to the Future era and still have half the map being an empty barbarian breeding ground.

And it really, really sux when an AI fails to grow and it is your friend or ally. Because if you want to settle anywhere on their continent to take advantage of the empty land, your going to get a nasty 'I covet your lands so hard' diplo hit.
 
In some situations it can very beneficial to stay small.

But I do know what you're talking about. In my first GnK games on King, I had the feeling that none of the AIs tried to expand.
On Immortal, it definately isn't the case anymore though. The expansion of the AI mostly makes sense.
 
BSPollux said:
I get this all the time. I realy hoped the changed AI on GK would fix it, but on my first game I saw it again.

Noone knows how that strange behaviour is triggered or avoidable?
Click to expand...

It's triggered in my experience by early failed rushes. I forgot to mention that I've begun packing more AIs onto a given map to overcome this problem. Though that can lead to multiple small empires if none of the AIs manage to overtake others.
 
btw i have 850h played on civ5 (steam says so, dont know...) so this is not realy a short time observation.

It was most obvious when I was playing an earth map (fixed starts) and found russia and china with three citys each at 1000ad
 
I think that what tends to happen is AI settlers are captured by barbs or there is an early war between two AIs, the civ on the losing side might maintain their capital but their settling pattern is completely interrupted.

Other times Civs go for a wonderbuilding/culture victory and don't build much at all.

I have seen AIs stay small for 2/3rds of the game then start spamming settlers to take up any uninhabited land.
 
BSPollux said:
btw i have 850h played on civ5 (steam says so, dont know...) so this is not realy a short time observation.

It was most obvious when I was playing an earth map (fixed starts) and found russia and china with three citys each at 1000ad
Click to expand...

Ouch, that's not good. I also just realized that a failed early rush can set the AI back in another way:

If an AI expends a large part of its army failing to take a city, then it has less to defend against the barbarians with. And since it spent all its hammers building an army, it's not building settlers. Without new cities being founded, there is more empty space to spawn more barbarians. More barbarians means the AI has to spend more hammers building up it's ruined army to fight them instead of building cities. Nice little feedback loop there.

I actually saw this in one of the games. Gustav had a whole, Russia-sized continent to itself and tried to take a CS at the beginning of time. It failed. It then spent the rest of the game running around destroying barb camps and trying to capture back it's stolen workers from barbarians while never building more than 3 cities. All 3 of those cities were founded in the Ancient era too.
 
MaximusK said:
I think that what tends to happen is AI settlers are captured by barbs or there is an early war between two AIs, the civ on the losing side might maintain their capital but their settling pattern is completely interrupted.

Other times Civs go for a wonderbuilding/culture victory and don't build much at all.

I have seen AIs stay small for 2/3rds of the game then start spamming settlers to take up any uninhabited land.
Click to expand...

I have yet to see an AI expand after not growing for 2/3rds of the game, but that could just be me.

I was going to say that the AIs in my games didn't wonderspam - then I realized that's possibly because I beat them to every wonder;).
 
I've only noticed this problem post-G&K. Though not everytime, with every Civ.

The AI should be encouraged to found at least 4 cities. Even going for Culture Victory, that number is ideal. Any less, and the Civ is really aching to be wiped out early.

I think part of the reason the difficulty level in G&K seems to be reduced is because the AI doesn't go on the city spamming sprees it used to (taking advantage of the fact that founding more cities doesn't impact its happiness and culture the same way as a human player). You'd think there'd be a happy medium...
 
In my games where the AI for whatever reason 'stalls', they 'unstuck' themselves once it reaches 1900-1950AD. Every game, once it reaches around that time (I play marathon; no win conditions) the turtles come out of their shells and spawn some settlers.
 
I too have seen the late game land grab. I think I've seen it start a little earlier than 1900, but basically late industrial, early modern, some AIs notice that there is land left, and start spamming settlers. In one game, Persia went nuts in the 1800s, putting settlers on every freakin' rock that could hold more than 3 people. That quickly led to 4 other AIs begging me to go to war against Persia, which quickly led to a bunch of ruins on a bunch of little rocks in the middle of the ocean.
 
Well Greece, Napoleon, Rome, Genghis Khan and Russia still settle like mad. Occasionally Ottomans, Iroquis, and Inca. Persia, Maya and Egypt often seem to be small, they never go that big unless they're not surrounded by any civ. They are usually the Wonder hogs. Byzantium is about in the middle. Japan, Denmark and Attila seem to conquer first instead of creating more settlers, so they might be programmed to use their conquer tendencies for more cities instead of settle more. I dunno.

Also a trend: the Wonder hogs are often destroyed by the end of the game, usually by their neighbour warmongers. Unless they're completely isolated. Luckily I haven't yet encountered a completely isolated Egypt, I shudder to think how much Wonders they can build.
 
Zanarkin said:
In my games where the AI for whatever reason 'stalls', they 'unstuck' themselves once it reaches 1900-1950AD.
Click to expand...

dac050 said:
I too have seen the late game land grab. I think I've seen it start a little earlier than 1900, but basically late industrial, early modern, some AIs notice that there is land left, and start spamming settlers.
Click to expand...

That's incredibly silly. By that point in the game, those cities will be worthless...They'll never catch up to any of the previously founded cities. The only reasons to found a city that late in game is for either military strategic value or for a strategic resource. And I doubt the AI takes either of those into consideration when founding a city.
 
Probably they just lose their Settlers to Barbarians. Then the threshold for them to stop expanding comes, and then they focus on other things.
 
bcaiko said:
That's incredibly silly. By that point in the game, those cities will be worthless...They'll never catch up to any of the previously founded cities. The only reasons to found a city that late in game is for either military strategic value or for a strategic resource. And I doubt the AI takes either of those into consideration when founding a city.
Click to expand...

The AI also does not take into account the massive gold pile they are sitting on that they could use to improve their new undeveloped cities.
 
So Tachii said its related to nation: Some settle more then others.

Putmalk speaks about a treshold of exansion, related to gametime?

Is that common knowledge about the AIs behaviour? that each has something like a given timespan of initian expansion and if they get interrupted they just stop?
 
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