Smaller maps & Colonial Nats. AI settlement

[Your_ardent_admirer]

I often like to play on small maps (like standard size), with more AI nations than recommended (last time I’ve tried 17 players on standard map, including all possible European colonizers). I understand that it’s not how the game is meant to be played, but I enjoy rush for land, early conflict with other Europeans, quickly deteriorating relations with natives and generally fast-paced action.

The problem: many European AIs in such setting never create their first colony, they just sit on their ships and hardly ever move. And there’s plenty of land for them to settle! Firstly, much land in-between native villages is available, and secondly, they are too shy to build cities next door to natives.
I think this has something to do with limiting the allowed distance when settling close to the existing colonies.
I think AIs became even more passive in this regard.

Maybe it’s possible to allow an option for placing cities very close just for this kind of situation? And maybe also an option to make AIs more aggressive land-grabbers?

Also I think the AIs are maybe too picky when choosing place for settlement. On smaller maps they should go for every available patch of land really.

Update: sorry, just found the option “reduced colony distance” which actually does what I wanted. Oops) I’ll try it now.

Update2: yup, it works much better now! Still AIs settle a little slowly, some are stuck with only one city while I have 4 already (patriot difficulty, standard map, latest (experimental) build, 17 civs with all Europeans. There’s plenty of room on the Pacific coast yet). Maybe that’s because Sweden and Denmark AIs (underperforming civs in my game) were programmed to be non-expansionist.

 

[raystuttgart]

Different Colonial AIs are not explicitly programmed to expand at different speeds.
So in general the Swedish AI does not want to expand less than e.g. Spanish AI.

MapSize however does influence their expansion behaviour.
On smaller maps they have a "lower target value" of Cities to found.
They should however still try to found a new City in a really juicy spot whenever a good opportunity arises.

However if you put more Colonial AIs and also more Native AIs on the map than default setting for the MapSize, this might slow down their expansion further.
Colonial AIs usually only expands if there are places that are really good places for expansion.
So yes, AI is picky about where to settle. There is no difference there for "Small Map" or "Large Map".
Distance to Natives, amount of Bonus Ressources and Yields (especially Food) as well as other factores are important for its decision to found a new City.

And yes, the min-distance to another Colonial AI settlement is a hard limit.
2 Colonial settlements can not be founded closer than that.

Remark:
The complete game play has been optimized (considering balancing and AI) for:

• Gigantic Maps
• 2-Plot-City-Radius
• Standard Settings (e.g. Player Number of a Map)

Other options exist and the game will generally still work - but may not play as smoothly as the above.
We needed to omptimize for something.

Summary:
If you overcrowd the map with Players (Colonial and Natives) you basically risk to reduce AI expansion.
If you play anything else than 2-Plot-City-Radius and Gigantic Maps, balancing might not ideal - game will still work though.