DaviddesJ
Deity
Beamup said:Short version - the AI knew about the increased tile yield that undiscovered resources would eventually provide (though not the resource itself per se), and placed cities with that knowledge. Probably the blue-circle algorithm did the same.
What evidence do you have for "probably"? I don't know if this particular bug did or did not affect the suggestions as well as the AI behavior (and Soren doesn't say one way or the other so I don't see what evidence you could have for your opinion), but even if it did, as Soren says, this factor would be so minor that it would almost never make a difference in practice. Calling this a "theoretical" issue seems pretty accurate.
Beamup said:Soren said that this would be fixed, so maybe this is no longer the case in 1.52. Or it may have been too late for 1.52 and will be in the next patch. But it is an established fact that the AI did (approximately) know about unrevealed resources before that.
He said it would be in the upcoming patch, so I assume it was in the 1.52 patch, that came out more than a week after that posting. And the 1.52 documentation does have the comment "Fixed AI city targeting bug", which seems likely to be this problem. In any case, I think your last remark is very misleading: the effect on targeting of just one extra shield from a hidden resource is going to be much, much less than would be the effect if the algorithm knew about the resource itself, so it's misleading to suggest that it would ever have behaved as if it knew where the resource was.