Great person - gone!

[Halcyan2]

The AI will usually buy a Great Person if they can afford it. It's not really based on where the player is. There seems to be a simple calculation if that it has sufficient faith/gold to buy a Great Person, it will do so. Usually they heavily prefer using faith. If a civ has lots of gold, they usually use it to buy buildings/unit rather than gold.

On a few rare occasions I've seen cases where a civ with lots of faith but no great person points gets enough to buy a great person. In such cases, they seem to start from left (Great General) to right (next is Great Admiral, etc). Suppose they do this and buy a Great General. If you load an earlier save and on that turn buy up all the Great Generals at that given cost (so they can't afford the more expensive ones), they will instead just buy the next Great Person in line (which would be a Great Admiral, assuming they have a legitimate location). That seems to imply the AI algorithm isn't being too picky about specific types of Great People, let alone specific individual Great People. It is just crunching the numbers.

I've also never seen the AI pass on a Great Person. They'll happily recruit useless ones.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

The AI will usually buy a Great Person if they can afford it. It's not really based on where the player is. There seems to be a simple calculation if that it has sufficient faith/gold to buy a Great Person, it will do so. Usually they heavily prefer using faith. If a civ has lots of gold, they usually use it to buy buildings/unit rather than gold.

On a few rare occasions I've seen cases where a civ with lots of faith but no great person points gets enough to buy a great person. In such cases, they seem to start from left (Great General) to right (next is Great Admiral, etc). Suppose they do this and buy a Great General. If you load an earlier save and on that turn buy up all the Great Generals at that given cost (so they can't afford the more expensive ones), they will instead just buy the next Great Person in line (which would be a Great Admiral, assuming they have a legitimate location). That seems to imply the AI algorithm isn't being too picky about specific types of Great People, let alone specific individual Great People. It is just crunching the numbers.

I've also never seen the AI pass on a Great Person. They'll happily recruit useless ones.

Thanks for this, @Halcyan2

This is the type of behaviour that might get tuned by the development team after the final rules are set (i.e. after the last expansion). The various victory conditions reward such disparate gameplay decisions that a generalist strategy by the AI can really put it behind a more focused human player.