1. The AI can't seem to settle smaller landmasses. In my Earth game none of the civs in Asia (which included the Lanun in Japan) even made one city on the nearby islands or Australia. In my Americas game the Lanun, starting in Hispaniola, refused to settle Cuba or the nearby islands, instead placing cities in Florida and Nova Scotia. This has a severe impact on gameplay and is especially ridiculous in a Naval AI modmod because vanilla BTS AI is more than capable of it.
2. AI seems to barely explore dungeons, even when they're already powerful and have little to fear from hostile spawns. This is especially true when the dungeon is on an island.
3. The AI never ever ever destroys forts or watchtowers. They won't build any other improvements on it and they won't settle it. In fact, they won't even settle another tile over. So, in my current game, there are tons of resources in southern Chile that Beeri simply refuses to claim, having built four forts there already, and southern California has been completely ignored despite having plenty of hills and floodplains. This is near gamebreaking.
Take note of Hannah and Beeri here:
View attachment 369522
And all the East Asian civs here:
View attachment 369521
There seems to be terrible city placement all around, as well.
Thanks for the saves!
1) This really has nothing to do with naval ability but instead is about the AI's choice of city sites. Looks like their cities along the NE seaboard are the result of conquest. The only city they've built besides their capital is Dunwich in Florida. Not really sure why they dont like Cuba. Perhaps the dungeon is occupying the city spot they like? Either way, they should be expanding somewhere.
As for the other map, the AI does prefer to settle land-connected cities first. The two civs who should be expanding into the Indonesia are the Grigori and the Lanun who seem to be at war with each other. The AI seems to rarely settle new cities while at war.
What are these maps you're using? I can use them for testing.
Agreed that in general the city placement for the AI needs work. The code for that is long and messy. I poke at it every once in a while, but it really needs a
full revamp.
2) If an AI unit finds itself on a tile with a dungeon, they will often explore it then.
There is a bug with exploration AI units not seeking out lairs that will be fixed in the next release. As for islands, the AI doesnt understand how to send land exploration units anywhere with boats. There just isn't any code for it in the DLL for it and I havent seen anywhere that anyone else has written code for it either. *shrug* I have it in the database as
feature requests #31
3) Looks like you're playing with Advanced Tactics which makes forts act like cities. Yes, unfortunately, the AI wont ever replace these (just opened
ticket #231 for this issue), but in this particular case, the area isn't really that great for cities anyway and the Dwarves are still getting the resources themselves from the forts (though I dont know why none of the forts have troops).
As for southern Cal, it looks like there were at least two attempts at cities there that were both razed.