155.0 AI not building (enough)improvements

[Musashi7]

Two games in row both on marathon/emperor, in first game ~300turns noticed all AI have FEW improvements mostly only on luxury/strategic resources, second game ~150turns noticed they have almost NO improvements at all, only saw one AI have some farms...

I think none of AI had more than 1 worker from what I saw, and I didnt notice barbarian camps full of workers.

Is this behavior WAI? Because for that number of turns and difficulty I'm used to seeing AI have lots of workers and almost all tiles improved. Lack of improvements is seriously affecting AI performance.

Played 154.0 before updating to 155.0 and didnt notice this then.

 

[Thalassicus]

Welcome to the forum!

AI workers have an improvement-building bonus which depends on difficulty level (the "worker rate" row on the AI bonuses chart). In v152.12 I removed the free workers AIs start with, due to feedback. If you think that was a mistake I can add them back. Or I could raise their priority to build workers, if you think that would be better.

 

[Musashi7]

Thank you

Just for comparison in second game by turn ~150 I had 4 cities and 5 workers(without liberty).

Since they are starting without workers they should have priority until they have atleast 2 of them(thats minimum that I would use by then) and since they have so many archers, maybe put them to good use guarding those workers just in case.

I will play on Immortal to see if that works for me, because after seeing AI doing poorly I just lost will to play those games.


Who knows maybe they just had bad luck, it was only two games so far, I'll play more today, or since I'm used to vanilla emperor, maybe right answer for me is to play VEM on immortal. Time will tell

 

[Thalassicus]

I have something like that in place. The AI purchases workers if the number of workers is less than the number of cities. I've changed how it works in v156 so they always purchase workers if they have too few, instead of a random probability, which should help the problem you've identified.

 

[Musashi7]

Tried immortal difficulty(marathon/large/10players) and within 20 turns AI had his 3rd city next to my capitol, I didnt even manage to finish building my first scout.
Difficulty gap between VEMs emperor and immortal is huge. AI started with 2 settlers and 0 workers(and zillion archers ofc), and with 3 cities had 0 workers.

Next I tried emperor again, this time it looked like AI didnt have problems building improvements.
It could be that whole case in those 2 games was AI either losing workers or getting screwed in random rolls to build them(or both).

I belive your change should prevent AI getting stranded with 0 workers in future.

 

[Thalassicus]

Are you certain the AI started with an extra settler on immortal? I've been searching the files to find what might cause that.

 

[Musashi7]

Yes

Btw what are differences in map sizes? I know for certain that bigger map sizes have bigger tech costs. Don't know if its vanilla or VEM effect since I noticed it only after having VEM and higher tech costs...

 

[Thalassicus]

The tech cost thing is a vanilla effect, since I didn't know it existed. It's really puzzling that I can't find what gives that free settler. I don't see anything in the handicapinfos file... very odd! I wonder if it's hardcoded in the game core? That would explain why I had such a hard time when I tried moving up to immortal.