AI Social Policy Choices

[Beefie]

Recently I played a variant of the "Seven Cities of Gold" game I seen somebody post up here (sorry can't remember who, come claim credit!) where you play as Spain and play to acquire all natural wonders in your game in to your borders, and the only other cities I could found must be to get a natural wonder.

I had turned off City-States so that they wouldn't start right next to my desired natural wonders, but forgot to disable Diplo victory. Some time into the game, I got the notification that my influence with city states would decrease quicker due to Japan finishing Patronage

What in the name of Sid compelled Oda to not only open Patronage, let alone complete with NO city states in the game???

 

[FeiLing]

A dice (t)roll.

 

[Optional]

The developers haven't done the extra mile to code in all these dependencies.
You can also see civs that stay small and are building wonders, but are developing the Honour tree...
They're probably also building happiness buildings when they're already very happy, I never specifically checked for that, but I wouldn't expect too much fine tuning there either. And the AI is gathering hoards of money without doing anything with it...

It's just hat the Patronage tree, with its 100% dependency on City States, makes the less refined code writing more apparent.

 

[Beefie]

Fair enough, just thought ignoring Patronage if there's no city states would be obvious even for the ai, at least with Honor they gain some benefits even if it doesn't correlate with their victory goal.
Then even if I had disabled the Diplo victory, there's still the chance of them taking Patronage??

 

[Gucumatz]

Yep sadly

 

[CoolLizy]

You can also see civs that stay small and are building wonders, but are developing the Honour tree...

To be fair, getting culture for killing barbarians from the Honor tree can be pretty useful when going for a cultural victory, especially if there's going to be a lot of empty land on the map in a given game. That said, no I don't think the AI had that strategy in find when they picked it. :/

 

[joncnunn]

Fair enough, just thought ignoring Patronage if there's no city states would be obvious even for the ai, at least with Honor they gain some benefits even if it doesn't correlate with their victory goal.
Then even if I had disabled the Diplo victory, there's still the chance of them taking Patronage??

Yup; because the policy isn't really needed for Diplomatic victory. You just get one or two allies for most of the game and save your cash; then build the UN and then spend your cash buying out enough City states to win the turn before the vote and DOW everyone.

The policy is only useful when you want several CS allies for most of the game.