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Trouble with AI cities on big maps

Cheezy the Wiz

Socialist In A Hurry
Joined
Jul 18, 2005
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Freedonia
I have a particular affinity for ginormous maps, my favorite being the 362x326 world map.

I cannot come up with a decent way to limit the AI. I want them to build less cities, but farther apart (like I do), I think it will speed up the game, and it prevents them from doing things like crowding in their own little area, and not expanding, or if they do expand, they have 50 billion cities.

I've tried lowering the optimal city number, but this just makes my cities corrupt faster, and doesn't do anything to the AI at all.

So, aside from pre-placing cities on the map, is there anything I can do to make the AI spread out their cities, colonize, or otherwise not do what it's doing right now?



Oh. I have a similar problem on smaller maps, but it sort of applies here.

How can I stop the AI from just building and building cities, even if they don't do anything (fully corrupt)? On smaller maps, the AI literally settles EVERY AVAILABLE speck of land, even though it obviously has no possible way for them to reap any benefits from it. Is there a way to combat this as well?

Or am I SOL?
 
I've no idea what SOL means, but one possible way to combat this could be to limit settling to only one kind of terrain. Then you place squares of this terrain in the places where you want cities to be buildable. This method avoids the need for pre-placed cities, but of course you're still going to constrain everyone to quite an extent. However, it at least means that you can easily specify large areas of the map as completely unsettlable (no more rushes for Siberia). It could lead to a disadvantage for the player, as it would not be obvious where to find the settleable squares, but the AI would automatically know where they are and head for them. But giving the AI such an advantage might actually be quite good.

Of course you'd also effectively lose a terrain type. And you couldn't do this with random maps.
 
SOL = S41T out of Luck...

and no, as far as I can tell...AI behavior is to settle EVERYWHERE...including the single square of tundra that they wedge between your cities...without making certain terrains unsettlable...
 
Another option is limiting the number of available settlers. They shouldn't be buildable, but provided instead by the palace every x number of turns. Of course it can be combined with Plotinus' idea.
 
Isnt the a distance between cities thing in the editor? I am sure I saw one, will check when I get home...

@Plotinus, good idea man! I might use this :)
@Cheezy the Wiz, a less extreme version of plotinus' idea could be to stop them building cities on hills, mountains, forest, desert and tundra, so that they can only build on flood plains, plains and grassland, this way you can limit thier location in a way that allows them a little choice, although this wont make them spread further in areas of grassland plains and floodplain, it will stop them spreading in stupid areas and will also allow you to limit the locations in certain forrested areas, like siberia.
 
In this thread some parts of my mod are revealed by Plotinus (one kind of terrain for cities), settlers produced by the palace (Yorgos), reduction of corruption (Weasel Op). :D

So here are some additional infos: In my eyes the best terrain for cities(I call it cityspot-terrain) is the marsh terrain. You simply set the graphics to transparency and get nice green terrain as a result of the "cityspot". Than you rename the marsh terrain to "City Spot" (or something like that) and give it the settings of grassland (or like you want it). It´s the only terrain with the "Allow cities flag". The order for the workerjob "clear wetlands" must be set to an era-none-tech that no civ can posess.

Make the citynames resources and set the names for the cities of each civ to "1st Russian founded city, 2nd Russian founded city" and so on. The same with all other citynames of each civ. In this way you get the correct name of each city that is founded and get a name (1st Russian founded city..) that allows it, to easily target spying missions to that city.

Now comes the next step: You can set the city graphics to a lower or higher level (some pixels up or down in the row). Than you place two city names on the resource file in the City Spot Terrain. One city name on the top of that resource file and one on the bottom. For example: At the top of the resource file stands "Constantinople" and on the bottom "Istanbul" Than you set the city graphics for the Turkish civ some pixels higher as normal and the city graphics for the European cities some pixles lower than normal. Now the Turkish city graphic is hiding the European name and you see the name "Istanbul" for that city on the correct place. When North-European civs catch that city, the name "Constantinople" over that city in the correct place is revealed and the name "Istanbul" is hidden by the city graphics. This gives a lot of possibilities for the modder: Per instance an easy change between Roman city names and later city names as you can set the level of the city graphics not only to different culture groups but also to different eras which allows the simple change of the cityname in the same culture group for different eras.:D

This is a big part of my mod with the working title "Civ 3 Revisited" when playing earth maps.

Edited: Here you can see an early version of the city spot terrain and different levels of the city graphics:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=125732&d=1146850237
And here you can read some more infos about it (posts 63 and 66): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=80235&page=4
Here you can see cityspot terrain with individual city resources and city names (in an early "one name version"):
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=181825&page=2 (post 27)
 
Yeah, these are clever exploits of the editor. Unfortunately they work only with preset maps...
 
@civinator

I've two questions:

Which font did you use for the citynames? There isn't much space in these little resource icons, and i have problems finding the right text size and font in order to recreate it.

And did you reach the limit of allowed bonus-resources, or is there none?
 
Wow, these are some great ideas!


I've already limited the AI to no cities on Tundra, Mountain, or Desert, and pretty made all of Siberia and N Canada into pure tundra, to eliminate that rediculous Siberia rush.

I like the idea of the special city terrain. I'm not too concerned with them getting city locations and names right, I just want them to build less cities, and farther apart.

Perhaps I will mix it, have special city terrain, and have the palace produce settlers every x turns.
 
Yorgos said:
Yeah, these are clever exploits of the editor. Unfortunately they work only with preset maps...

Hi Yorgos,
on random maps in my eyes it´s not necessairy , that cities are on the right place and have the correct names as here all is random. :lol:
One thought for my "random map version" of my mod to battle a too fast spread of settlements is, to give the settler the "wheeled flag" and to set some terrains that should be settled (but later in the game) to "not allowed for wheeled units". So a road on that terrain is needed or a later settler without that "wheeled flag". ;)

jatibi said:
I've two questions: Which font did you use for the citynames? There isn't much space in these little resource icons, and i have problems finding the right text size and font in order to recreate it.

And did you reach the limit of allowed bonus-resources, or is there none?..

Hi jatibi,

to your first question: I made most of these resources about one year ago. Doing these citynames was more time consuming as one should guess. I started with the cityname in "MS Word", than tried the best suited size of the city name, transformed this to paint and than reworked the pixels of the letters and the space between the letters. Now I have about 90 different city names in different letter sizes, so it´s mostly only a simple cut and paste job to do new city names on resources. Ad hoc I don´t remember what font I used, I tried several of them. But that´s not longer important as I have my own "letter graphics" now. If you want to experiment with them, I can download my "city resources" to the Civ 3 graphics forum.

To your second question: In one of my links in my last post of this thread, I mentioned, that bevore I tell more about it, I must do a huge test and I don´t know, when I have the time for it. This test is to run the mod with more than 512 different resources (512 allowed cities in Civ 3) and to see what happens. I hadn´t the time for it till today. I made a test with 110 different resources and all run well (may be I have overlooked some of the reported phantom resources). There were no crashes. So I didn´t reach a limit until today. The reported problems for other modders -if I remember well -were not so much bonus resources, but strategical and especially luxury resources. At time we don´t know very much about the true behaviour of Civ 3 resources with the last patch for C3C.
 
ic. yes, that's why i asked for a limit for bonus ressources, because i've never heard of it. thank you, you don't need to upload it.
 
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