Give settlers, warriors, gold to AIs at giveb time

[BSPollux]

Would it be possible to make a small mod that does the following:

At 1ad (or better: randomly between 500bc and 500ad) each surviving AI gets gifted 4 settlers and 4 archers and 200 gold.

The idea would be to try to trigger the AI to settle all that unused land. Please dont tell me to use a higher difficulty.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Yes, it would be pretty trivial with some Lua. I won't tell you to use a higher diff, but what you are willing to do is basically what incresed difficulty does : give AIs cheasy bonuses.

At least, the idea to give bonus during the game rather than right from the start has merits.
However, i'm not sure you would like the result. If you really want to go this way, i would rather give the free Settlers on different turns, 1 at a time, and less to Tradition civs than Freedom ones. Possibly also make sure AIs don't have plenty of cities already. This will of course involve more coding.

 

[whoward69]

and don't be surprised if the AI just walks the settlers around and doesn't found cities with them - as IIRC the "move settlers and found a city" code in the DLL is only executed if the AI wants to build cities ... and if it wanted to do that it would be building settlers already. Also the AI always wants to escort a settler, so unless it has spare combat units the settlers may not even move but just stand around waiting for an escort.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Settlers can move without escorts occasionally (this was changed some time ago).

So, they won't cycle all their units and try to find a fitting use? I guess this would still be worth testing but yeah just giving them a Settler won't ensure they will settle. I guess they might settle if they were planning to build a Settler but were busy with something else or just had one settler captured by barbs.

 

[whoward69]

Settlers can move without escorts occasionally (this was changed some time ago).

The logic in the DLL will only move the settler without an escort if the path to the destination is considered low-risk, and most early game city plot targets will not be such due to barbarians and/or fog

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Well, i sure won't argue about dll logic with you, but i've seen AI Settlers in barb camps on a few occasions Looks like they have troubles with their logic.

 

[BSPollux]

Yes, it would be pretty trivial with some Lua. I won't tell you to use a higher diff, but what you are willing to do is basically what incresed difficulty does : give AIs cheasy bonuses.

The reason I dislike the higher difficulties is that the AI is better at everything. But I want to beat the AI if I am doing something right and they are doing it wrong. I know how the higher ones work, and I dont like it.

and don't be surprised if the AI just walks the settlers around and doesn't found cities with them - as IIRC the "move settlers and found a city" code in the DLL is only executed if the AI wants to build cities ... and if it wanted to do that it would be building settlers already. Also the AI always wants to escort a settler, so unless it has spare combat units the settlers may not even move but just stand around waiting for an escort.

Thanks for your reply.
The first point: Sure, If they just dont want citys, this wont fix it. But I can imagine cases, where the civ is on just a few citys and builds wonders or military units all the time for some reasin. And those might enjoy the settlers and actualy use them.
The second point: Thats why I asked for just as many archers as settlers. I thought thats at least some way to excort, while those older units wont change the military balance too much, espacialy when everyone gets them. And the 200 gold are ment to help if the AI has problems with upkeep