AI behaviour oddities

[[to_xp]Gekko]

not sure if these are vanilla bugs, WAD or whatever, anyway I've noticed my neighbour Bismarck doing this:

1) continously shuffling military units back and forth near my border: move a warrior forward and a catapult backward, next turn warrior goes backwards catapult goes forward, rinse and repeat. this seemed like a useless waste of AI cycles.

2) he had a couple good city locations north of him ( say 3/4 tiles ) , yet he ignored those to send a settler further up north ( say 8/9 tiles ) to settle next to a korean city, and this wasn't some uber city location. small map size so this was a good trek on the continent. weird choice...

 

[Ahriman]

Sounds like vanilla issues, these sorts of things happen all the time. The AI likes throwing cities in the face of its enemies, which can be a not-bad strategy if you're trying to hinder AI development or prepare for an offensive war against them.

 

[Thalassicus]

1) The first part is probably not something we can fix, because most unit movement is done in the game core only Firaxis has access to.
2) This is something we do have control over with this variable:

SETTLER_EVALUATION_DISTANCE
in
/Gem/AI/GEAI_Cities.xml

I have it set to 40 right now. It's not 40 tiles... just some arbitrary 40 number. I don't know exactly how it works. The vanilla game has it set to 20, which seems to prevent AIs from settling aggressive city sites at long distances.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

notices some more bad AI city placement yesterday:

I've got a game with germany going great, PerfectWorld3, small size, all the rest default.

I REXed with 2 goldrushed settlers ( it's possible their goldcost needs to be raised a bit, they seem very competitive right now or maybe it's just my playstyle ) , pyramids and liberty. 2 of those 5 cities I've settled a short distance ( 4 tiles approx ) north of Boudicca to keep her from expandind too much. still she had room for a couple decent cities left and right of her capital.

instead, to my surprise she chose to settle her 2nd city ( very late ) across a small sea south of her capitol. unfortunately her 2nd city has no nearby resources and no atolls. the real bummer though is that it's got like 3 tiles of flat grass and is then separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain range .

I think they chose that because there's copper beyond the mountain range, but they had a much better city spot left of her capital with marble, iron and cows.

unfortunately screenshots don't work, I think it's because I'm using a SMAA injector

 

[Thalassicus]

@[to_xp]Gekko
I only can take screenshots if I disable "fullscreen" in the game's video options. It used to work in fullscreen mode, but about half a year ago it stopped working. I can't have the world builder and game open simultaneously anymore, either, though that is more Steam's fault than Firaxis.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

thanks, I'll try that.

would you like a screenshot of the situation described above or is it useless cuz it's all handled in the DLL anyway?