Why Does the AI Spam Stupid Cities on Higher Difficulty Levels?

[rover6695]

This happens like every game, mores as you play above emperor, that the AI will just colonize, colonize, colonize.
They settle countless cities all over the globe, and many times, RIGHT next to me on my continent.

Few things come to mind:
1) WHY do they do this...it serves no purpose to help when you settle next to a tundra 5 tiles from me with NO luxury resources. Is there any purpose other than to annoy?

2) How can you "cock block" the AI from settling near you? What I have found I have to do is build excess military units and station them in unclaimed areas outside my territory.

Just a pain in the ass that is senseless.

 

[LordBalkoth]

Because it's there! And the AI gets massive happiness bonuses which mainly just means they run into Science issues. But even a bad city is a net gain in hammers fairly quickly, especially for higher level AI.

 

[historix69]

I always wonder why human race spread over the planet in the past tenthousands of years instead of staying in africa where they originated ... we all know that 4 cities are enough to win the game (even on deity) and to launch the spaceship ... so there really is no need to settle planet earth ...

 

[docbud]

^^

Real life history really doesn't apply to a game where we launch a spaceship to another planet to colonize. Or we can shoot hundreds of miles with an archer. Or where a fighter jet takes damage from cavalry.

I'll have to look it up in the history books, but I'll try to find a recent example of keshiks having battles with rilfemen.

The point of the OP was about how the AI settles, not that they did. And where they settled.

It had nothing to do with regular expansion.

 

[poxpower]

2) How can you "cock block" the AI from settling near you? What I have found I have to do is build excess military units and station them in unclaimed areas outside my territory.

Basically this yeah.
Generally they won't settle near you until very late. How the AI seems to work is that they will move 4 tiles away from their nearest city and if that spot can be settled and it had a luxury, they will settle there. If there's a better spot 1 tile away, they will take that. But generally all their cities are exactly 4 tiles away from each other because that's the minimum distance.

So if they are landlocked by you, they will send a settle across your land and settle the nearest possible spot, so you have to block them with units /border or declare war and steal the settler.

When you play on continent on deity, you can see the AI aggressively forward-settling everything and once they run out of space near each other, they have leftover settlers that they send everywhere to find any possible spot lol. They're insanely stupid and suicidal and play in a way as to handicap themselves just to piss you off. It's like playing with "that guy" who just hates you and who doesn't even try to win the game, he just tries to make you lose.

 

[historix69]

2) How can you "cock block" the AI from settling near you? What I have found I have to do is build excess military units and station them in unclaimed areas outside my territory.

In real history, borders would be negotiated and when not at war would (in most cases) keep foreign settlers out of your land or make the new founded cities become your cities.

In Civ5 borders are formed by
- culture production
- buying tiles
- building a citadel
So you need to either increase culture production or rush buy critical tiles near the "intended" border or place citadels ... or as you wrote guard/block critical regions with military units.

The following code for a simple mod allows the Great General unit to build multiple citadel-improvements (without being consumed). This might make your situation easier since you have more realistic options to establish borders. (In the modern era France used fortresses successfully to claim their neighbours' land ...)

        <Improvements>
		<Update>
			<Where Type="IMPROVEMENT_CITADEL"/>
			<Set NoTwoAdjacent ="true"/>
		</Update>
	</Improvements>
	
	<Builds>
		<Update>
			<Where Type="BUILD_CITADEL"/>
			<Set Time ="1000"/>
		</Update>

		<Update>
			<Where Type="BUILD_CITADEL"/>
			<Set Kill ="0"/>
		</Update>		
	</Builds>

	<Units>
		<Update>
			<Where Class="UNITCLASS_GREAT_GENERAL"/>
			<Set WorkRate ="100"/>
		</Update>	
	</Units>

(I saw the AI successfully using this although the AI is probably not aware of the strategic possibilities of "free" citadels.)

 

[miaasma]

because AIs aren't programmed to be smarter at higher difficulties, they're just given larger advantages

this means that an AI with a high flavour for expansion (hiawatha, shaka) can spam cities of any quality at higher difficulties with much less drawback

there's a point where even at the highest difficulty the AI will only be affected negatively from some cities (those built in the snow or on flat non-floodplain desert for example) but the point at which a city becomes not worth it is way way further down the line of quality for the AI at high difficulties than it is for a human player

the short answer is that there is no purpose, it's just the way the AI was designed. it expands because it can