v139.2 = Cultural Bonanza for the AI?

[Torvald]

Just finished turn 232 of my v139.2 game, and it seems that some of the AI civs are getting an awful lot of culture, especially Polynesia.

My focus was primarily on science and building military units, as I was engaged in constant warfare as China against Rome & Japan. However, I did also keep building culture buildings whenever possible.

Well, I've successfully completed four trees of cultural advancement so far, but although the Polynesians show they've completed only three trees, I think they are actually almost ready to build the Utopia project. (This info was gleaned from those periodic pop-up comparisons of cultural advancement of all civs, and the Polynesians are WAY ahead of everyone else.)

Am currently allied with Polynesia, so sailed a ship around their terrritory to get a clue on why they were so far ahead culturally. Well, according to what I can see, they have not built ANY Moai heads on their coastal hexes.

This seems rather strange: Are the Moai heads really there, but simply not visible for some reason? Or, are the Polynesians the surprise beneficiary of a random hex that produces bonus culture instead of the random 210 bonus gold that has been separately reported?

 

[Thalassicus]

Does he have any citystate alliances? AIs do not receive any cultural bonuses.

 

[wobuffet]

Ah, I didn't realize the AI's Culture discount on Social Policies had been eliminated. I wonder how they're doing it then... flooding with CSs with gold, I assume.

 

[Thalassicus]

There's no variable for an AI culture bonus in the handicap file... if they ever did have such a bonus, I'm not aware of it.

 

[Torvald]

Mea culpa.

OK, need to make a confession. Quit the game for a few hours to have dinner with my wife & sister-in-law, then had trouble loading my saved game file.

Have finally got it working again, so checked out (as requested) whether Polynesia was allied to any city states; determined that they had no allies, as the Aztecs monopolized ALL of the known city states, with multi-thousand points of influence with each one.

However, got to poking around a bit further tonight and found a game menu feature I'd not noticed before, which provided more detailed info on how many social policies Polynesia had earned to date. Turns out they had NOT completed 28 policies like I'd mistakenly thought, and instead had completed just 22 policies, which is only slightly ahead of my own 20 completed policies.

Therefore, it looks like this was a false alarm. Am still puzzled, though, as to how the Polynesians earned so much culture without my spotting any Moai head statues on their coastline.

 

[Seek]

Kame did very well in my recent 137 game (slight tech lead and second in culture to me and my extensive Persian GAs) but I saw zero Moais also. They're usually a dud AI.

 

[orangecape]

I know that Kame does in fact build Moai statues but very, very rarely. He and Monty have the unfortunate distinction of having warrior UUs which usually means they spend the entire early game building a huge army of trash and then spend the rest of their (short) lifespan in a series of wars with undertech units. By the time they stop building warriors everybody hates them and they have failed to expand or collect early wonders. I don't know that there is much we can do about that though, aside from just reducing the flavor on the UUs so the AI builds fewer of them.

 

[Thalassicus]

The AI does not build Moai statues because of Firaxis' poor yield design... the old "culture is not a yield" thing. I added culture to the yields table a long time ago, but don't have access to the AI code to value culture. It would probably be just 1 line of code.

 

[albie_123]

Is there anyway to automatically place Moai on coast owned by an AI Kame? While it may be a bonus, since he won't need to waste workers, I think Kame is currently so weak an AI it's probably a good thing.

 

[Thalassicus]

Good idea! I could do that easily. After Kame researches the tech, add a Moai to an owned coast tile once per turn? I could prioritize plots near cities of high population. Since it would be delayed until the tech, I think I'd override any non-greatperson improvements the AI did make on the tile. I think it will take me about half an hour to code and debug. I'll do it tomorrow.

 

[albie_123]

That sounds great! If it could be a little more spaced out - maybe once every three / five turns - that might be a bit better. Just to stop Kame going from no culture to huge culture in five or so turns.

Hopefully this makes Kame that little bit more successful as an AI. He's usually at the bottom of my games, along with Monty, Temujin and Isabella.

 

[Thalassicus]

Since he's already at the bottom in most games, I'm curious to find out if once-per-turn could jump him to the very top. If it does, we can tone things back down again later.

I also added a check to make sure the selected tile is not visible to any human player, since it would look weird to have improvements appear out of thin air while looking at it.