A follow-up on the topic of Europe queue and weighting of AI purchases:
In my current game (gigantic map, marathon, ~1714) I have just conquered all cities of AI France.
They have 5 transport ships left and a Europe queue of ~200 units waiting with at least 10 settlers (I cannot exactly count as there are so many units on the docks).
With the changes I commited to Europe queue sorting (
part 1 and
part 2) they will now - hopefully - send their transports back to Europe, load those settlers and then return to the map, taking at least 12 turns. I will have to search for the new settlements they will probably distribute all across the map and send my army there, probably taking at least another 10-20 turns depending on my success discovering them. If they manage to make any profits from any of these settlements, they will probably buy another settler in Europe, so in the moment I conquer all the new settlements, they will again send their transports and take another 12 turns to get that settler.
That is what I meant by "Colonial AIs are hard to kill" (my original complaint that made me start the thread). My personal opinion: I really don't like that mechanism, it is not fun at all, just annoying if I have the aim to eliminate the AI player from the game. It effectively makes an AI player almost unkillable without cheating to find out where their new settlements are (because otherwise that realistically takes even many more turns, enough for them to buy more settlers in Europe). There is no strategy in this, but only hide and seek (or "whack-a-mole") with a lot of randomness.
For me, if we want to keep it like this, it would actually feel more honest if we just admitted we don't want AIs to be killed at all and made that a game rule.
The alternative I am suggesting would be something like a diplomatic offer by the AI "retreat from the new world" together with the peace treaty, which would only be offered after losing all cities, losing many units and having an overwhelming power difference (like e.g. 1:20). (I know that won't be realised for 4.0 - but if some of you agree, we could make it an open task for 4.1 or 4.2)
The other aspect of the situation mentioned above is that somehow the balancing of AI purchases in mid- to endgame seems off. They are apparently focusing far too much on buying units in Europe when they have no use for them and cannot even transport them to the map. And if they can, they will then uselessly wait in their cities because they cannot be put to work.