Letting the computer build the spaceship

[Renergy]

After finding out recently about "master builders" (and loved presidents ) able to send own spaceship in BC, it crossed my mind - has anybody tried to minimize the amount of time when the AI builds the spaceship? I.e. "helping the AI ad absurdum" "Loosing by spaceship the earliest". I do realize that this would probably depend a lot on randomness. Anyhow, perhaps "something different" for a seasoned player.

Rules: play on Earth or legitimately generated ladmass. Choose any civs you want as opponents (by hacking initial save). You can hack their starting positions too and use any (in-game) cheat you want (this includes save-load cheat). So, no further hacking allowed. The goal is to force the AI into building a spaceship and staying alive to see it land. Civ v474.05

Edit: AND, to actually make this even a bit interesting - you are not allowed to build Apollo Program yourself.

Well perhaps this can be reduced to the question - will the AI ever start building spaceship before say 1750, i.e. is there some hard-coded time before which the AI itself definitely would not start building a spaceship? If this is true (and I have some feeling it probably is) then sorry for this pointless thread.

 

[Mize]

If you give it the tech. and it has the production capacity the AI would certainly start building the spaceship and launch it as soon as it can. But here you run into another problem, the 'lost spaceship' bug. There's lots of info on that floating around in the forum, but essentialy it means that a ship launched really early has to have the right configuration of parts for an estimated arrival time of 20 years. Else it would just be lost between turns. The SS menu would show you it landed, but since this occured outside of a game turn victory is not recorded. The AI would not be able to 'time' it's spaceship right probably up until the 18th century (or whatever) when turns become 2 years. And even then there's still a risk.

 

[CivZ]

From what's in the thread Renergy linked to, it may work in CivWin.
Would anyone be willing to give it a shot?

 

[Renergy]

I think that the lost spaceship bug doesn't prevent the challenge even in civdos. Sure, you won't see the losing screen (palace with cloudy sky). But, as far as I remember, the game notifies the player when te AI launches a ship. To see other spaceships status (on higher difficulties - emperor for sure, perhaps anything above chieftain), it is iirc necessary to have Apollo program built. Otherwise, the computer just fadeout - fadein. So perhaps "edit of an edit" - you are allowed to build Apollo program yourself. Also, you can choose (if you want) other terrain (civ generated) than Earth.

The outcome would be a save of the game right after AI launches the spaceship. The earlier the date, the better.

 

[Renergy]

For a completely laughable start, attached is a save after Babylonians launched a spaceship in 1873. I withdrew from a continent to a small island nearby.

Interestingly, the AI was not very eager to take over my cities. Babylonians sent two diplomats twice to stole techs. That would be smart, if only they took the cities afterwards, which they didn't.

Second save: 1804, shortly after leaving my main continent "to the tigers".

Played at prince difficulty, perhaps at Emperor the AI would take the cities faster?