[Civup v2.3, Gem v1.12] AI negative GPT

[Silpion81]

Hi there,

I haven't played in a long time, tried GEM over the weekend and I have trouble understanding the AI gold management. I'm playing on prince difficulty on a large pangaea plus map.

According to InfoAddict, most Civs in my game survive at minus dozends or even hundreds of gold per turn. Especially Nobunaga, who wages war against the whole world, pays his army with a balance of -4491 GPT. This also makes trading luxuries for money impossible.

As I have never seen this in vanilla, is this a wanted AI behaviour?

 

[AnthonyG]

Yeh, I need to play gem more, a lot more, and I will and it's great, but the AI in my latest game - Songhai - was doing the same thing for a long, long time. I was hoping he'd have to disband some units, but from what I could tell he wasn't. So at times I was running at -200 gold to keep an army in place to counter him as it was down to us two in the game.

When we did periodically go to war huge groups of piranhas, erm, galleons etc. would swarm from everywhere, heh.

 

[Thalassicus]

InfoAddict shows only vanilla sources of gold, because it is a different mod. Gem adds new sources of income. The Trade screen (F4) shows accurate Gem gold income for each leader.

 

[Silpion81]

Thanks! I haven't used that screen before and it looks very helpful.

Unfortunately the leader incomes are even worse on that screen, Nobunaga is at -6715 GPT and only one leader manages to avoid a negative income by having exactly 0 GPT.

I do use some other mods but I don't think that they affect leader behaviour:
- InfoAddict (seems to be read only)
- R.E.D. Modpack (graphic unit variants)
- Custom Advanced Setup Screen (more options on map generation)
- Ingame Editor (used it to get a one time 1000 gold bonus)

 

[Thalassicus]

That's strange. Could you attach your lua.log file?

I think the first three mods you use shouldn't cause any compatibility issues. I'm not certain about the last one. The Firaxis tuner can edit anything ingame without the risk of compatibility problems between mods.

 

[Silpion81]

Unfortunately I updated Civup and Gem a day ago and loading the save causes the game to crash. I enabled logging and I'll try to replay a similar game during the next week using only Civup & Gem.

Thanks for the link to the Firaxis tuner, I still have trouble surviving the first AI attack on prince.

 

[Silpion81]

I had some time today and replayed a similar game using only Civup and Gem. I used the Tuner for lots of gold and basically occupied myself with missionaries until Nobunaga conquered several cities. During the whole war he maintains his negative income.

The lua.log contains the turns 84 to 150, it seems the file gets cleared when restarting the game. The screenshot shows the AI income on turn 150.

 

[Thalassicus]

Thanks, that log is helpful!

 

[Kivin]

Thal - I always just assumed that this was either (A) a feature or (B) due to me playing on lower difficulties (and thus rewarding the AI with lower gold incomes). Literally 100% of my games result in most leaders reaching sizable negative balances, and it's always been this way, even going back to VEM.

edit: see this. The computers are bigger than me in land but can't figure out how to scrape two gold coins together.

 

[mystikx21]

A chunk of it seems to be unit cost inflation is/was very high, especially as the game gets later on.

But how that affects the earlier game is less clear, from that log, it looks like Japan just had zero gold buildings.

 

[Kakafika]

Just saw this thread and thought I'd make a post about my experience with this.

I just finished a game on Standard Earth map, standard turns, emperor difficulty, as Gandhi. I was alone in N America (well, Gustavus in Alaska/Siberia) and Wu was in S America. I expanded through N America and then started settling rich islands. I had 500gpt fairly early on, with 1500-2500gpt in the final 30 turns or so.

Once I started getting extra copies of resources in Australia, I noticed I could no longer sell them off to other leaders. Every leader had under 100g each turn, and -15 to -90 gpt. This, despite me giving everybody mutual open borders.

I had the highest score most of the game due to wonders and tech, but Byzzies kept a positive gpt for almost the whole game and had a ton of cities.

This is definitely a strange case as I was Gandhi with my own continent to grow tall on and was only DOW'd once by China in the Renaissance era, which ended in a stalemate (couldn't push back against Cho-ko-nus in S American hills/jungle), so I wasn't sure I should report it.

---------------
As a side note, I saw Thal's post about encouraging barbarian-hunting in the early game, so I built a barb-hunting force for the first time. I'll admit, though I usually forego building many units that I then have to manage, that was fun, and POWERFUL. With the frequency that barb camps sprung up, the fact that they were isolated from others, and since I had a ton of Canadian arctic fog of war for them to spawn in, I more than made up the gold/culture cost for the units/policies. And, yes, it was more fun than just pressing 'end turn' a dozen times... I got excited whenever a new camp sprang up!