They should be doing better at surviving the journey now. I THOUGHT I'd seen them send out a settler with more than one escort last I checked but it could use some more review. It would be nice to be able to enforce what I was attempting before, to have a counter city AI type accompany them and to enable them to pick up this assistance much faster. I was thinking of looking into that this weekend and seeing if it could be done. I can see how one city defender type might be a problem still for settler survival, especially with the first ones that would tend to bring a throwing unit with them as their escort. They were told to consider leaving larger spaces at this point because the 3 tile ultimate limit allows cities to grow much larger than standard BtS. They don't always do so but then even as a player I won't ALWAYS space cities out to the max... just depends on a lot of factors.
It would be cool if some leaders tend to leave more space between cities while others pack their cities closer. Or at least consider founding cities between the spaces of ther first once later in the game. A different thing: I want to set up a map where I just wanna defend my city at a bottleneck. What I want the AI do is attack mit with HUGE stacks, even though their chances are pretty low. Would this easy to adjust by my self?
That is just one piece of the whole game. Even a few more hunters killed in the early game can have an effect. It might not be alot but it adds up with many other things.
Playing with ruthless and aggressive off has helped the ai on my game somewhat. They all have at least 2 cities now, with many having 3 and 1 of them with 4. I have yet to find 8 civs though to see how they are doing. I have negative traits off and am using developing leaders. I have 7 cities right now and am a good bit ahead in tech and in first place in scoring by around 50 points. Not sure which SVN version it is, but it's from around 1 week ago.
Just a general remark - in the bottom right of the screen you can see the number of cities an AI has. This number is not always reliable. IF you both have writing AND the AI is not a vassal, the number of cities is the actual number of cities. IF either you or the AI has not researched writing yet, OR the AI is a vassal you see only the number of cities of that civ your units have discovered on the map. The actual number of cities may be a lot higher. This is not a bug, but a feature of BUG (which stands for BTS Unaltered Gameplay) which only counts the cities you know about - either through exploration or the diplomacy screen.
Yeah that is an issue as well. In general anything that makes the game harder for the player is also going to make the game much harder for the AI UNTIL the AI has been taught to properly handle it which at that point may well make it only harder for the player. Good reminder on the early hunting issue. That IS a major problem for them at first.
I'm playing v35 and I had some mixed AI growths. While my 2 neighbors are building cities and growing, My little pal stalin never built any cities or grew in points in comparison. On turn 220 in epic me and 2 bots are 100-150 pts, while stalin sits at 24. His land isnt complete crap either, so I'm not sure why he cant grow and the others are.
Couple of observations: The AI really is slow to develop its resources. Anecdotally they might develop one and then wait until they reach pop 2 before developing another one and so on.....
If the AI's city is 1 pop it will only improve the tile that gives it the best benefit (in it's estimation). It will start developing the next tile when it gets close to having the next level of Pop. The AI does not "know" or "have the need" that it should develop all it's tiles like a Human player might think it should or that player would do. If the AI doe Not have the Pop to work a tile, then working tiles improvements is not a priority. JosEPh
Yes that's what it looks like which of course ignores the strategic use of resources like Horses and Elephants or Copper.
The AI has alot another problems so it is possible it doesn't even see the real value of those resources or sometimes that they are required for other things.
If it's early game and it can't use those resources because it does Not have the tech to do so, then those are not important to the AI at that point in the game. Nor even later in the game, if it's a new city for the AI, Pop is of greater importance than these "strategic" resource developments at pop levels 1 or 2 or even sometimes 3. JosEPh
Observations I've made on autoplay support your earlier assertion that they are simply reluctant to BUILD gatherers, not reluctant to use them btw... been meaning to mention that for a bit here. I'm not sure this is a bad thing... it can keep them from wasting time on disposable worker units that aren't going to earn them more development than they actually need until they can get workers that aren't disposable. However, if they can, they probably should build the route first in THIS and only THIS case, purely because they are sacrificed once they build the improvement. There's some other issues in worker AI I'm thinking of trying to address soon so when I do that I'll look into this - I remember telling them to build the improvement first a while back and see now that this is a problem for disposable workers.
In the previous reports and discussions not using gatherers even if they build them was also a problem. Working on the AI code makes me depressed because it's filled with possible issues or missing code for other things. It just never ends once you start looking. Making small changes often doesn't show any impact or breaks the whole thing because of other issues.
Keep in good spirits Alberts In past you resolve many problems and I belive stupid AI is not match for you!
1)I remember that but I'm saying that the autoplays show that they do very quickly go out to develop resourced tiles in the city radius so I think you were right that they are only reluctant to build them. If there's another issue with naval workers it may well be something directly related to them somehow. 2)I KNOW RIGHT???? How frustrating can it GET? Surely there must be ways to redesign some things so that it doesn't contain so many traps and pitfalls! It's like a tangled ball of yarn - soon as you tug on one string you screw up the perfect positioning of something else somewhere else. There MUST be a better way to approach some of these things from the ground up. But I've been thinking a lot on that and I'm not sure about some of it. All I can say is its a trial and error process with vague ability to test adjustments directly and when you learn something you'd better not forget it or it will come back to bite you later and make you feel stupid for forgetting rule #50003692. I'm sure once we're a bit more practiced with the system it will get a bit easier since many of those mistake spots start getting a little easier to sidestep. But at the moment I'm feeling a bit like Helen Keller in a new house. Maybe you and I should work on these kinds of things with branch commits so we can help each other here before it's committed to the game framework? For example, I'd like to get in and work on say, the promotion side, of the project we were talking about last weekend.
