Offshore colonization madness

[skallben]

So, the patch made the AI expand offshore...
That's great and I don't know if what I'm getting is commonplace but in my game Hiawatha have settled at least 7-8 single-tile islands, pretty much useless cities because A): There are lots of other, better islands.
B): Even if some of them contain resources, there are better alternatives.
C): Policy cost.

Of course AI doesn't play the happiness game as we do but still. Hiawatha always was crazy like this but the offshore expansion have taken ridicilous proportions in this game.

So have anyone else observed this?
Does it happen with other civs aswell?

 

[joncnunn]

So far I've noticed Spain & Dutch with a bunch of overseas useless cities.
There's others as well.

Still if you don't yet have all techs that reveal all resources, it might be worthwhile reserving judgement if the site is terrible. (Maybe there's a hidden strategic resource; I don't know about civ 5, but some previous versions of civ had the AI knowing where all the hidden resources are)

 

[Civking5]

I would do the same if I had no happiness problem. There is no such a thing as useless city in my book.

 

[RedFuneral]

I noticed this happening pre-G&K as well. I tend to think of such cities as military bases rather than cities. They tend to make good strategic cities to park planes in, as well as being good for bombarding enemy navies/letting you buy armies in them closer to your enemy's cities.

Like during WWII the islands were just stepping stones used to get to the real objective. A good place to rest the troops and refuel the plains, but not very useful otherwise.

 

[Cedbird]

I noticed this happening pre-G&K as well. I tend to think of such cities as military bases rather than cities. They tend to make good strategic cities to park planes in, as well as being good for bombarding enemy navies/letting you buy armies in them closer to your enemy's cities.

Like during WWII the islands were just stepping stones used to get to the real objective. A good place to rest the troops and refuel the plains, but not very useful otherwise.

Some good observations on the pro side for the Ai with these ' useless island cities ' . One thing I would add is the more population the more tech , tech buildings , and money .
I too love that the Ai have expanding out . Gives them more power to overtake other Ai Civs and give me a bigger task to win the game . I enjoy it .

 

[gozpel]

Let them expand to the islands, and you take their core.

Problem solved!

 

[Matthew.]

AI don't care about policy costs. Even the supposed "culture civs" tend to favor domination style play. In which case, they are never useless. As long as they are generating a surplus of gold or breaking even, then it is worth it for them. They already have infinite happiness.

 

[ense7en]

They did this is vanilla at higher levels.

Then in G&K initially, their tendency to settle every existing tile of land was nerfed somewhat and their rampant city spamming was a bit less ridiculous. (A good thing.)

Apparently it was determined that they needed to be spamtastic again, and with the latest patch they became city spamming monsters again.

 

[Syntax Error]

Let them expand to the islands, and you take their core.

Problem solved!

Gives them the perfect spot for diplomatic exile because THEY CHOSE UNWISELY for declaring war on you.

 

[skallben]

Still if you don't yet have all techs that reveal all resources, it might be worthwhile reserving judgement if the site is terrible. (Maybe there's a hidden strategic resource; I don't know about civ 5, but some previous versions of civ had the AI knowing where all the hidden resources are)

Got all but Uranium and about half of the offshore cities have 1-2 fish and nothing else.

Some good observations on the pro side for the Ai with these ' useless island cities ' . One thing I would add is the more population the more tech , tech buildings , and money .
I too love that the Ai have expanding out . Gives them more power to overtake other Ai Civs and give me a bigger task to win the game . I enjoy it .

The problem is that they pick lesser good spots than available alternatives.

They did this is vanilla at higher levels.

Then in G&K initially, their tendency to settle every existing tile of land was nerfed somewhat and their rampant city spamming was a bit less ridiculous. (A good thing.)

Apparently it was determined that they needed to be spamtastic again, and with the latest patch they became city spamming monsters again.

Played since launch on Emperor/Immortal depending on my mood.

Gives them the perfect spot for diplomatic exile because THEY CHOSE UNWISELY for declaring war on you.

It is going to happen.


Bottom line;
I think what annoys me is that the AI has an advantage in claiming strategic offshore locations and resources due to their happiness free ticket. Maybe human player needs some kind of special base/settlement/colony option for claiming land/resources. I mean, I can puppet those tropical paradises but I can't do anything preemptive before their spam starts and I can already see this pattern repeating itself in future games, especially for anyone who likes to play big/terra maps.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Polynesia is in a lot of the games I play and they usually go for the tall, culture empire, except one game where they were hypercolonizing random islands and even part of the opposite continent and mostly before Caravels. They eventually lost their cities on the other continent to the Koreans, but I was happy for them that they at least took advantage of their UA and gave it a shot.

 

[strijder20]

Like during WWII the islands were just stepping stones used to get to the real objective. A good place to rest the troops and refuel the plains, but not very useful otherwise.

Interesting idea to see trenches as islands. But then again, the terrain was very muddy.

 

[Light Cleric]

It's both hilarious and sad when you see cluster f-bombs like this:

Spoiler :

 

[smallfish]

Polynesia is in a lot of the games I play and they usually go for the tall, culture empire, except one game where they were hypercolonizing random islands and even part of the opposite continent and mostly before Caravels. They eventually lost their cities on the other continent to the Koreans, but I was happy for them that they at least took advantage of their UA and gave it a shot.

Kamehameha loves to ICS other continents even in "ancient eras" - it gets kinda funny when you have a lonely spot on your continent that suddenly turns Polynesian from another continent... when you haven't even researched Bronze Working yet.

 

[Arachnofiend]

Interesting idea to see trenches as islands. But then again, the terrain was very muddy.

He's talking about the war in Asia and the island hopping strategy employed by the Americans against Japan.

 

[Biologist]

I played on a Terra map recently, and for the first time I noticed the AI actually expanding aggressively to the New World. Prior to G&K I almost never saw the AI put even one city on an unoccupied continent. Granted, I have still seen some one-tile or two-tile island cities, or cities built in wasteland areas. Some of those were used as stepping stones to reach a far away continent; I guess the AI wanted to control the sea lanes between its colonies and homeland.

That said, I think the AI is much more selective and competetive about overseas colonization than it once was. AIs from other continents do have an annoying tendency to want to spam cities on the human player's home continent, but at least this means they will actually conduct overseas invasions now, which was another thing they almost never did pre-G&K.

 

[Jewman]

i don't know why you guys think its so useless to have a one tile island colony. If you go Liberty -> Commerce you should be swimming in money and you can turn island cities into fast-growing mildly productive cities pretty quickly. And since the AI doesn't really need to worry about happiness, it makes sense that they spam cities everywhere. Between the +1 production, happiness from liberty and the +3 production in commerce these island cities have a formidable starting bonus granted that you buy a harbor and a maybe a few work boats right from the start.

 

[Light Cleric]

i don't know why you guys think its so useless to have a one tile island colony. If you go Liberty -> Commerce you should be swimming in money and you can turn island cities into fast-growing mildly productive cities pretty quickly. And since the AI doesn't really need to worry about happiness, it makes sense that they spam cities everywhere. Between the +1 production, happiness from liberty and the +3 production in commerce these island cities have a formidable starting bonus granted that you buy a harbor and a maybe a few work boats right from the start.

The screenshot I posted was from a Pangaea where the AI settled crappy cities to go for resources that they shouldn't be able to see yet or to try and get resources I had already into my borders, like Russia settling a city for Iron on T200. THAT'S dumb.

Or when they settled literally in the middle of the ocean with absolutely no resources near them and they're just sitting there useless.

 

[joncnunn]

i don't know why you guys think its so useless to have a one tile island colony. If you go Liberty -> Commerce you should be swimming in money and you can turn island cities into fast-growing mildly productive cities pretty quickly. And since the AI doesn't really need to worry about happiness, it makes sense that they spam cities everywhere. Between the +1 production, happiness from liberty and the +3 production in commerce these island cities have a formidable starting bonus granted that you buy a harbor and a maybe a few work boats right from the start.

Happiness actually isn't the only disadvantage of founding marginal cities in Civ V;
nor is the cultural slowdown.
One that takes a few games to fully understand all consequences of is that every single city (except puppets) needs a copy of structure X to build national wonders.
With G&K, having good spies are important (perhaps overpowered) so the last thing you want to do is slow down construction of the national wonder that requires Police Stations everywhere.

Things you do with your spies:
1) Maintain a given city state as an ally for free / or even become an ally via coup
2) Slow down enemy spies stealing your tech / or even steal someone else's tech yourself.

But cities founded so late that you already have that national wonder built are so late they aren't going to bring in enough science to significantly speed up a science victory as they won't have time to grow.

Vanilla was even worse where you could be bringing in more science via RA agreements than natural.

 

[skallben]

i don't know why you guys think its so useless to have a one tile island colony. If you go Liberty -> Commerce you should be swimming in money and you can turn island cities into fast-growing mildly productive cities pretty quickly. And since the AI doesn't really need to worry about happiness, it makes sense that they spam cities everywhere. Between the +1 production, happiness from liberty and the +3 production in commerce these island cities have a formidable starting bonus granted that you buy a harbor and a maybe a few work boats right from the start.

That's a potential scenario yes, and you have a point that it would be a potential strategy. But that's not what's being discussed, Hiawatha does not utilize Commerce policies in my current game. It does make sense from the AI:s POV aswell but it's not really nice how it plays out in gameplay, I think this is an unintended consequence of the patch and it's changes to offshore settling. I also noticed AI:s lose loads of settlers to barbs. I'm sure Firaxis will correct these issues in time but it's still annoying.