AI one city (not) wonder

[guspasho]

I was hoping someone could explain this to me. I had the fortune of being paired up with an incredibly easy AI on my archipelago island to start. They never built anything other than spearmen. I even gave them right of passage. I took over the whole island but for their capitol. After leaving them alone for a while I wiped them out.

WTF? Why do they do that?

 

[Elponitnatsnoc]

maybe they didnt have any resources so they couldnt build anything else but spearmen

 

[guspasho]

A lot of times when I play a map with five or seven AI I'll find one rival, somewhere, who refused to grow, or send out any units except the worker they start with. What happened in this game seems to occur a lot. They never send out settlers. I established an embassy with them and found they had no city improvements. They built a few mines and roads around their capitol, but that seems to be it. They just build and fortify spearmen.

 

[chunkymonkey]

Are you patched up to the most current version?

I thought the AI was supposed to be hard-coded to pump out a settler as its first build, but I may be wrong. It seems odd you've experienced many games like this. I never have.

 

[Mathias]

Often on archilelago maps, especially with 80% water, one or two AI will get a spot that is unable to grow to size 3, and therefore the AI is unable to produce a settler.

It's not just the AI, we can get those kind of starts too, but we'll move either our settler or get a new map.

EDIT: See MadV2 succesion game for a map with two such locations. (Link to page 4, see posts #78 and #80)

 

[Himalia]

Really hard coded to build a settlers as there first build ? I would say it was a failry common occurence but certainly not hard coded by any means.

A key factor of when the AI tends to do this is often dictated by how good there starting location is. If its little more than tundra and prehaps a plains its going to be a poor start but this often seems to change the AIs priorities in the game. Also what level was this being played on ?