Introducing ROMULUS: the Total CIV4 Tile Optimizer. Know what to build, and where!

[Mec AntiKythera]

It is, after all, entirely obvious how to grow as quickly as possible to size six; build farms on the six best farm spots.... we're looking at a much harder problem.

Not the first, yes the second. Which is why a player would want help solving the problem, it is difficult.

 

[damerell]

Not the first, yes the second. Which is why a player would want help solving the problem, it is difficult.

It is, but I fear it is also an enormously harder problem than ROMULUS sets out to solve, and one deeply intertwined with human judgement - in particular, the question of how much commerce is worth now versus commerce later is a sticky one.

 

[damerell]

But... even in vanilla, one might have had bonus food from tile events, so supporting bonus food also helps vanilla players.

... or settled GMs. Yes. Even for vanilla, there's a need to know how much "free food" is available.

 

[j_mie6]

this is very simmilar to my optimiser (see my signature) guess I posted mine in the wrong sub forum haha (strategy and tips) I would suggest instead of running through all possiblilities use a weighting system... I am currently developing mine for the optimiser version 2 (the optimiser part of it isn't finished but the ability to see the total yield of simulated cities and other features are finished) I run through all improvement possibilities for a given plot and then assign based on weighting, the more food needed to work all tiles in city the more food improvements are valued etc. the first draft of it works very well! It is sensible and gets the food near to min working food and the hammers high as possible it sort of ends up with a food, hammer, food, hammer, food, hammer, food, hammer pattern running through the plots though haha

edit: but it takes less than a second to calculate (though in practice longer as it has to update the gui, so about 2 seconds using a weighting method...