Geronimo Finally buys CivIII

[Solomwi]

Nathan, unless I'm remembering wrong, failed espionage missions and nuclear weapons are the two exceptions to the "war happiness" boost.

Geronimo, the two things I find planting spies to be worthwhile for are knowing the other civs' military makeups in detail and investigating cities during a war (which you can't do with just an embassy, since it's closed, for obvious reasons). Once I get a spy planted, I'll hardly ever attempt anything else for fear of losing that information, and when I do, it's always stealing plans.

[nbarclay]

I'm pretty much positive that it at least used to be possible to get a happiness boost from having an enemy declare war after failed espionage. It's possible that that loophole could have been closed without my noticing, though. As for nuclear war, I don't remember ever firing a nuclear weapon in all my time playing Civ 3, so I have no experience with AI declarations of war resulting from such action.

[Solomwi]

I'm going off Oystein's article on WW on CFC. Never checked it out for myself, but that strikes me as pretty easy to detect in testing, so I'm guessing they closed the loophole, though I couldn't tell you when. Btw, until I read that article, I did the exact same thing, so I'm not arguing with you that it was once the case.

[Geronimo]

wow, I just realised that all of the rival AI civs in this game are democracies. no wonder I can't initiate propaganda. Is this game at all typical? so far the AI opponents have been so...civil, with the onerous exception of their grossly unfair and impractical trade philosophies.

It's now 1978 in my first game on warlord difficulty. I played the english with default settings on a really really big map. I established contact with every civ by 3500 bc and in all that time I have not seen one armed conflict break out at all between any of the AI civs or my own.

Furthermore, even when the irritating sobs are placing their colonies right on a continent I'm trying to horde to myself, they even seem to have the decency to carefully plan ahead with the placement such that our city worker radii will not overlap. That has really continued to shocked me, I remember all too well the willy nilly ugly ai city placement in the earlier versions of civ. If this is a really c3 change I'm observing it is one I can learn to live with.

Has anybody else noticed that the AI is less likey to stick cities in places where they are by all measures simply stupid location choices?

[nbarclay]

AIs generally use either Republic or, once they have it, Democracy when they are at peace, switching to other governments only if they are at war. (In the Apolyton University Mod, the use of Feudalism as a peacetime government is also common before the AIs get Democracy because of a change we made in corruption levels.) Also note that AIs don't automatically change to Democracy the moment they get it, or change back to a peace-time government instantly when a war ends, and AIs that get Monarchy before Republic may or may not be in a hurry to change to Republic.

Your game sounds like it definitely leans toward the peaceful end of the spectrum. There is a lot of variation from game to game in how much fighting the AIs do, and there is an aggression setting that is deliberately designed to make the AI play some civs more aggressively than others. (Germany is an example of a highly aggressive civ, and India of a civ with a low aggression setting.)

In regard to city placement, AIs don't like overlapping city radii much even when the cities are all within their own borders. Actually, that reluctance undercuts the AIs' effectiveness to a certain extent because until hospitals become available, a lot of tiles in AI territory go unused. (In contrast, top players tend to pack cities more densely based on the theory that the advantage of doing so in the early game easily outweighs the disadvantages later on. I usually try to rig things so all my cities can reach size 12 but virtually no land or coast, except maybe some mountains if I have a lot of them, goes unused at size 12.) It's certainly not unheard of for AIs to build a city that will eventually have overlap with a foreign city, but given a good alternative, AIs prefer to place their cities in ways that avoid such occurrences.

Incidentally, AIs cheat a bit in choosing where to build their cities. When AIs calculate where to build cities, the algorithm they use knows the values of different tiles, and the values it uses in those calculations reflect the existence of resources the AIs shouldn't know anything about yet. For better or for worse, that gives the AIs a leg up in gaining control of strategic resources. On the other hand, since humans do a better job of using the information we do legitimately have available (sometimes even building cities right next to AI cities to steal away resources the AIs had planned to control through border expansions), it could be argued that the AIs need their unfair knowledge just to compete.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by nbarclay


The reason for the higher corruption is to counteract the phenomenon of, "If your civ is twice as big as someone else's, it's twice as powerful as someone else's." In and of itself, the higher corruption is no fun at all. But in the bigger picture, the higher corruption makes it a lot harder to run away with the game by a huge margin. So even though I find it annoying, I think the game is better off with it than it would be without it.

[joncnunn]

There is however a bug in the AI city placement algorithm, it doesn't know about the food bonsus being canceled if a city is placed directly on top of it.

Actually, the AI placement of the cities allows them to fit nicely into my own empire. Those cities will have rank orders so high that the best thing to do is to allow them all to grow to 20.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Incidentally, AIs cheat a bit in choosing where to build their cities. When AIs calculate where to build cities, the algorithm they use knows the values of different tiles, and the values it uses in those calculations reflect the existence of resources the AIs shouldn't know anything about yet. For better or for worse, that gives the AIs a leg up in gaining control of strategic resources. On the other hand, since humans do a better job of using the information we do legitimately have available (sometimes even building cities right next to AI cities to steal away resources the AIs had planned to control through border expansions), it could be argued that the AIs need their unfair knowledge just to compete.

Regarding making better use of the information:

When you see an AI Settler heading for an area that is both relatively distant from its capital and relatively devoid of any interesting features, you can expect there to be a Strategic resource there that you are unable to see yet. Sometimes it's too late and the AI city is alreayd founded, but it's worthwhile noting it down. This way you can predict with more accuracy where, say, there will be a source of Coal, given that the AI went out of its way to settle a bit too near that Jungle to make any sense otherwise.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by joncnunn
There is however a bug in the AI city placement algorithm, it doesn't know about the food bonsus being canceled if a city is placed directly on top of it.

The AI calculates the value of a tile (for settling purposes) based on a weighted sum of the values (for working purposes) of all the 21 tiles a city on that tile would eventually have access to. This is why the AI will often place a city right between, say, two Cattle resources, that are only accessible once the city's borders expand.

I'm pretty sure that the AI does not include the value of the city center tile when determining the value of that tile for settling purposes; I have never seen the AI rush out to a big patch of Desert only to put a city directly on the only Oasis in sight. However, if there are other good tiles surrounding another good tile (like, say, a patch of four Cattle), it makes sense from the AI's perspective to place a city right in the middle of the patch, even though this results in the loss of a perfectly good bonus tile. This "bug" could be resolved by better coordination between AI Settlers or a planning algorithm for city-placement, but these are not quite as easy to code.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Theseus

2. Doesn't mean jack unless there's a Factory.

Not true. A Hydro Plant will increase production by 50% regardless of whether there's a Factory or not. At least I think it's 50%, could be 25%.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Willem
Not true. A Hydro Plant will increase production by 50% regardless of whether there's a Factory or not. At least I think it's 50%, could be 25%.

AFAIK, Hydro Plants increase Factory production by 50% (25% of the city's base Shield output).

[Willem]

Originally posted by Geronimo
I wonder why the game makers decided that corruption had to be so much higher in c3 than in the earlier versions of civ? it certainly doesnt add any realism, it takes away realism in fact. And I can't imagine they think it's more fun this way!

In the previous versions if you reached a certain size, winning the game was a foregone conclusion. The AI didn't stand a chance, since you could produce so much and research even more. By adding in the current corruption model, you still have to work at a victory even if you have a huge empire.

I think it's an improvement overall, though I think they should have included more way of combatting it, like more things you could build.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Geronimo
wow, I just realised that all of the rival AI civs in this game are democracies. no wonder I can't initiate propaganda. Is this game at all typical?

It's typical having them all in Democracy, but not being peaceful. Generally there's always wars going on, at least at certain times. Your playing level has something to do with that, the higher you set it, the more aggresive they become.

Has anybody else noticed that the AI is less likey to stick cities in places where they are by all measures simply stupid location choices?

The AI is much definitely better in this version of Civ when it comes to city placement, at least for most of the game. Things tend to break down somewhat as the land gets used up and there are less options. Plus, if there's a resource in the area, the AI may appear to be rather out of it. But overall it does pretty goog. Quite often it will build exactly where I would place a city as well.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Dominae


AFAIK, Hydro Plants increase Factory production by 50% (25% of the city's base Shield output).

In the editor, the Production bonus is a stand alone adjustment. You can't tie it into a particular building, it has to work with the base output. The reason people think it's tied to the Factory, is because you generally require a Factory in order to build one, Hoover Dam excepting of course. But the production bonus of all those types of buildings are independant of each other. and they all are calculated by the base output.

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Willem


Not true. A Hydro Plant will increase production by 50% regardless of whether there's a Factory or not. At least I think it's 50%, could be 25%.

The Hydro Plant given by Hoover's won't work until the city gets a factory. I can verify this one, having often built Hoover's before even researching Industrialism. When it does work, though, you're right that it's 50% of the base shield output.

Effectively, production doubles with factory+coal/hydro/solar plant, and goes to 2.5xraw shields for factory+nuclear. Just add another 50% to the multiplier when you build a manufacturing plant.