AI places cities badly due to barbarian camps spawning in better locations

[alchx]

As far as I noticed, back in vanilla the preference for barbarian camps was in the same places that are recommended for players to found cities. Now when playing with raging barbarians, the AI is late in order to effectively clear places for the settlers. And if a settler sees a barbarian or a camp, he often runs back, although he is accompanied by a spearman. As a result, the AI puts cities in less preferred places and sometimes delays the founding of a city for 30 or more turns if the settler returned, frightened by the barbarian.

Tokyo and Satsuma stand poorly and overlap each other, the city's far radius will never get fish. But for Satsuma, there is an excuse that the AI could quickly need a horse.

Osaka is doing well in this case, but in 90%+ percent the AI placed the city on tiles marked with green stars. Although in this better area the city becomes less protected, because. warriors travel far, and one day Osaka was captured by a city-state. The worst placement was again caused by a barbarian camp spawning or a wandering rogue.

I see a solution to the problem to prohibit spawning camps in the best places, because the frequency of appearance has increased many times and the AI does not have time to clear the place, reach the settler and found a city until a new camp appears in the same place or very close.

Spoiler :

 

[Rekk]

Barbarians spawn advanced units based on their camps' proximity to strategic resources.

 

[looorg]

I don't really see any issue with the placement of either Tokyo or Satsuma. They are in range of the resources and in locations with good terrain. Moving Tokyo or Satsuma one more step would only have gained you one fish each, in ring3. So it's not really better or worse in that regard. Moving them would have exposed their cities to more undefendable sea tiles. Yes you would have put a little more distance between them but the overlap now isn't that bad, also Satsuma shouldn't have been placed on the star but the tile next to it and the bison (it would have lost the r3 iron tho in the north). The minimum distance thing is a thing the AI does to often. In that regard those placements seem overall fine. Similar with Osaka, even tho it's a bit harder to see since you cut off what is above it. But it seems to be in range of most things out to ring3. So all that it's missing is a lot of farm and banana land in the south. Yet there is room now in there for another jap city if the Zulu doesn't get there first.

It's not that the barb camps doesn't change their positioning, but their placements isn't bad overall due to them I would say. Doesn't seem worse then normal placement for the AI really.

 

[Urzamax]

Yeah, AI city placement has never been perfect, but it's a damn sight better in VP than in vanilla. The above seems pretty normal for AI behavior, at least based on my own purely subjective experience.