In setting the Handicaps for the AI it occurs to me to wonder how the AIs 'adapt' to various settings.
For example, if I were to double (or triple) the cost for city maintenance for whatever reason, would the AIs slow their expansion or would they expand at their normal rate and choke their econs?
Do the AIs adapt to their economic status?
Thanks!
It is
somewhat adaptive, but certainly could do a lot better. I would recommend you try such a change, and report on your results.
The main trigger an AI has for this sort of thing is a true/false,
"Am I in Financial Trouble". Prior to BetterAI, this was true whenever an AI's gold rate was higher than about 40%, with BetterAI it is slightly more sophisticated, but not that much more.
Being in financial trouble means some buildings are more likely (Markets, etc), building things like settlers is less likely (although already existing settlers will still found cities, something that could potentially be improved).
In the past, building units was based on financial trouble, now it also looks at what percentage of the total costs are based on unit costs.
BetterAI adds a feature where warlike personalities will consider going to war to solve financial trouble (prior to BetterAI, an AI in financial trouble would never declare war). The percentage of unit costs to total costs is also a factor in declaring war. (A civ with a huge idle army is more likely to declare war).
Financial trouble has an effect on whether an AI will raze or keep a city it captures.
Using
chipotle, financial trouble is indicated by
($$$) after the leader name when holding down alt over the scoreboard. In this picture, just the barbarians are in financial trouble (they usually are):
Going back to your original example, the AI would not know in advance, that more cities are going to cost more. But once it started having huge costs, it would stop building settlers, so would stop expanding for a bit.
It would not be smart enough to know that it should, say, try to found fewer, better, greedier with resource cities, which have a higher top size, than more smaller cities. It would have to find that out as it went along. (Having some traits will do this, but not changing the hadicap settings).
Note, if you do this, remember the AI uses the noble setting values for many things, so you will have to change the noble difficulty (and the difficulty you are going to be playing at), to catch everything.
-Iustus
