Frequently Asked Questions

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How can I disable "idle" in city's production options? I'm playing my slightly modified AND game (I only created new, much slower game speed) and on prince all civs are way behind me while they should be almost as developed as me. In WB I noticed some civs using "idle" too frequently, for example I have 3 cities already and small army of archers while Washington has only 5 warriors, one 5-sized city and for many turns in a row has "idle" production. I hope that forcing civs to build something will make them more developed.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
How can I disable "idle" in city's production options? I'm playing my slightly modified AND game (I only created new, much slower game speed) and on prince all civs are way behind me while they should be almost as developed as me. In WB I noticed some civs using "idle" too frequently, for example I have 3 cities already and small army of archers while Washington has only 5 warriors, one 5-sized city and for many turns in a row has "idle" production. I hope that forcing civs to build something will make them more developed.
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This puzzles me because IIRC Afforess said that AI don't use Idle.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
How can I disable "idle" in city's production options? I'm playing my slightly modified AND game (I only created new, much slower game speed) and on prince all civs are way behind me while they should be almost as developed as me. In WB I noticed some civs using "idle" too frequently, for example I have 3 cities already and small army of archers while Washington has only 5 warriors, one 5-sized city and for many turns in a row has "idle" production. I hope that forcing civs to build something will make them more developed.
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I recommend you enable BBAI (Better AI) logging in the BUG logging tab, and then upload the BBAI.log from your Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword/Logs folder after playing a few turns in that game. The AI should not use idle, and this hints something is wrong.
 
Ok, here's log file you requested. I consider this mod to be the best of all available right now (I've tried plenty of them so far) but unfortunately there are few things I don't like that much and decided to tweak myself. I love longer games, just like "eternity" game speed. I decided to add such speed so I meddled with gamespeedinfo.xml. Later I decided it's too slow, so I sped it up a bit. Then I noticed AI is not building settlers as fast as they should, so I worried that maybe it's because I made settlers rather slow to build, so I sped up their production (I love slow, realistic IMO, city growth - in unchanged AND version I saw AI cities of size 10 or more in ancient era and it felt wrong for me so I made them grow slower. Unfortunately this made settlers production really slow, so I've found a way to have a slow city growth and normal settler production speed).

Right now there are only two things I'd like to fix:

1. Make AI build things and expand properly - create settlers and units as usual, because right now somehow they decide to focus on buildings or (some civs at least) being "idle". On prince I have without any problems very good strength ratio with almost all of them because they choose to build buildings while they have only few warriors for defense. In previous games AI was also able to settle new cities as fast as me, right now I have 3 cities already while they have still only one. And this is a problem, because some time ago I noticed that AI is not using settlers even when I gave it to them - settlers were just sitting in their capital cities doing nothing. Eventually they expand and build new cities, but they're doing it very slowly (and not all of them, some civs in my previous games were stuck with one city when others had about 15).

2. Change AI's defensive strategy. I don't really like the idea of "two units as city defenders, huge army wandering the country". This makes war too easy. With one swift and carefully planned attack I can capture half of their country without any effort and garrison them for counterattack. I'd like to make AI use more units for city garrisons (at least 5-6 units per city).

And as a bonus - video (takes some time to load WB, and this song's from my playlist, don't worry about it ;) ):


Link to video.
 

Attachments

1st- thought is its a G.E.M. map (Giant Earth Map) and there aren't many ideal settling locations.

2nd- Defenders more or not, they are still Vulnerable to a stack of Doom.

I myself, don't find you problems with 2 defenders per city, I find they have 10 or more, but once I've cracked that heavily defended city, they only have the skeleton guard.

I myself, keep 5 per city no matter where it is. But that's me, playing to my rules I set for myself.
 
Ah, nevermind. I finally decided to accept this SVN thing and downloaded the latest version of AND. Now I'll have to tweak all necessary settings again, but maybe this version will be better.
 
Funny thing, I downloaded the latest version via SVN. Right now it seems AI knows how to develop properly (they are building settlers, I hope they'll know how to use them) but I still noticed one civ using "idle" production option. So it seems AI can use it even in the latest release. I, as I mentioned, did small changes to xml files but I doubt it can be related to this, because I only changed growth threshold to make cities require more food to grow and changed culture levels to match lower game speed.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
Funny thing, I downloaded the latest version via SVN. Right now it seems AI knows how to develop properly (they are building settlers, I hope they'll know how to use them) but I still noticed one civ using "idle" production option. So it seems AI can use it even in the latest release. I, as I mentioned, did small changes to xml files but I doubt it can be related to this, because I only changed growth threshold to make cities require more food to grow and changed culture levels to match lower game speed.
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I also noticed civs using idle production.In my instance(rev834) most developed nation, Germany, has about 30 cities and in only 4-5 is building something.They have researched everything and are currently at war, so they should build military units.
 
Stacks of doom still occur with 15 units limit per tile.

Trouble is the defenders tend to be static, though the horse units will commit offensives against you.

The Rev dcm option of Archer bombardment, certainly helps defenders, as if they have siege with them, they will 'bombard' the offensive units each time they attach, blunting them substancially. Though the same goes for offensive siege when they attack, so a mexican standoff, or who kills 1st, wins.
 
Ok, can anyone tell me how to get rid off this "idle" thing at all? Devs are silent, and it seems that, unlike someone said it, AI uses it quite often. Right now I have almost half of AI civs on "idle". I tried to find it myself (looked under projects, buildings etc.) but it has to be hidden somewhee else, maybe even outside xml files and I didn't dare to venture into this unknown territory yet.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
Ok, can anyone tell me how to get rid off this "idle" thing at all? Devs are silent, and it seems that, unlike someone said it, AI uses it quite often. Right now I have almost half of AI civs on "idle". I tried to find it myself (looked under projects, buildings etc.) but it has to be hidden somewhee else, maybe even outside xml files and I didn't dare to venture into this unknown territory yet.
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Maybe we're silent because we're working on it? I haven't been able to debug it yet, and definitely it's in the dll, nothing that can be solved in XML. ;)
 
Of course I was almost sure you started to work on it, I'm just having a nice game right now after returning to Civ IV and I'm probably a bit impatient, sorry ;) I only hoped for a quick solution, something like "it's in xxxx.xml file, find proper section and delete it" :D But right now I think I'll have to rethink it. There's no "wealth" or "research" production option AFAIK in AND (at least not in early stages) so without "idle" option AI would have to produce something all the time, buildings or units. If it run out of buildings it'd have to produce units and I don't know how it would impact their economy...

But nevermind, now I have a clear statement that you're working on it so I'll have to be more patient and wait for results. Too bad my modding skills are not good enough to help you, because AND is definately a worthy project ;)
 
Aquila SPQR said:
Ok, can anyone tell me how to get rid off this "idle" thing at all? Devs are silent, and it seems that, unlike someone said it, AI uses it quite often. Right now I have almost half of AI civs on "idle". I tried to find it myself (looked under projects, buildings etc.) but it has to be hidden somewhee else, maybe even outside xml files and I didn't dare to venture into this unknown territory yet.
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To follow up with 45*, the FAQ thread is not the right place for a bug report. I don't check this thread when I am fixing bugs. If it's not posted in the bug thread, it's not going to be investigated.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
Actually I was never considering it a "bug", just a feature I'd like to turn off ;)
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Then this thread is doubly the wrong place. Feature requests should be in a separate discussion thread, created by it's advocate.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
Of course I was almost sure you started to work on it, I'm just having a nice game right now after returning to Civ IV and I'm probably a bit impatient, sorry ;) I only hoped for a quick solution, something like "it's in xxxx.xml file, find proper section and delete it" :D But right now I think I'll have to rethink it. There's no "wealth" or "research" production option AFAIK in AND (at least not in early stages) so without "idle" option AI would have to produce something all the time, buildings or units. If it run out of buildings it'd have to produce units and I don't know how it would impact their economy...

But nevermind, now I have a clear statement that you're working on it so I'll have to be more patient and wait for results. Too bad my modding skills are not good enough to help you, because AND is definately a worthy project ;)
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FYI, I checked and I was correct, it is impossible for the AI to select the Idle process. The AI only will select a process that generates a non-zero amount of gold, culture, science, or espionage. Because the idle process generates nothing, the AI assign it a value of 0, and processes with a value of 0 are never chosen. If an AI city has no options left, it will build nothing (no items in the build queue) and not the idle process.
 
So when I open worldbuilder and see AI cities on "nothing" (not producing any units or buildings, icon the same as "idle" in player cities) it still means they are not building anything. I wonder what really makes them choose this option. In my recent game quite a lot of AI civs in the beginning used it. Some civs had already 5 cities but other still waited on this "nothing". Their capital cities had size 5, they were weak and had weak army but still did not train any additional military units or settlers. After a while they also woke up and started building settlers, but they have now 2 or 3 cities while leading powers - 8.

I wonder if mechanism responsible for this is working ok. Why that AI civs decided to wait so long on "nothing" before building additional settlers. Their starting positions were quite ok, they had resources, their cities were quite large at that time...

Oh, and thanks for your time investigating it.
 
Aquila SPQR said:
So when I open worldbuilder and see AI cities on "nothing" (not producing any units or buildings, icon the same as "idle" in player cities) it still means they are not building anything. I wonder what really makes them choose this option. In my recent game quite a lot of AI civs in the beginning used it. Some civs had already 5 cities but other still waited on this "nothing". Their capital cities had size 5, they were weak and had weak army but still did not train any additional military units or settlers. After a while they also woke up and started building settlers, but they have now 2 or 3 cities while leading powers - 8.

I wonder if mechanism responsible for this is working ok. Why that AI civs decided to wait so long on "nothing" before building additional settlers. Their starting positions were quite ok, they had resources, their cities were quite large at that time...

Oh, and thanks for your time investigating it.
Click to expand...

I already told you 2 weeks ago how to find out exactly why the AI do what they do:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13497543&postcount=343

The BBAI logs are incredibly useful, they log exactly why the AI makes each build choice (or lack of a choice, in your case).

If I had to guess, I would guess the AI is in financial difficulty and has no buildings available. All units would worsen financial difficulties.
 
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