Decelerated production?

[Rusty Nail]

Strange thing happened which I cannot explain. I was working on a personal mod and noticed in 2-player hotseat that the AI were falling way behind. Upon checking cities I discovered that the capacity of their granaries had been doubled to 40! Their production boxes were also doubled in size. (settler takes 60 shields). This was preventing them from producing settlers fast enough. It was almost as if a "decelerated production" option had been triggered somehow. Everything was normal for the two human players. I see no way to adjust this in the editor, so what happened? I have made many changes and was working with a longer science route (minimum 20 turns) to slow things down, and wondered if this might be the explanation, but I was unable to duplicate the phenomenon in debug mode with a 20 turn minimum. Any ideas?

[alva]

What level are you playing?
What level is the AI playing?

[Rusty Nail]

I have tried at several levels, Regent, Monarch, and Chieftain with the same result. One thing I have found out now is that it works OK in SP, but not in hotseat under the three difficulty levels tried.

[Rusty Nail]

The default level for the AI is "Chieftain" in General Settings. It has always been there without problems previously.

[Rusty Nail]

Mystery solved. In the editor, "player properties", I inadvertently failed to check any of the players as "human". This results in the AIs in hotseat games getting "decelerated production" i.e. one half the normal growth rate and production rate. If one player is checked as "human" (normal setting), then the AIs act normally. I don't know if this quirk was intended, but it allows humans in a hotseat game to focus on their internal competition at the expense of the heavily handicapped AIs, if that is their wish.

[Rusty Nail]

I was too quick with that solution. Nope. That wasn't it. I am still running into it in my hotseat games even with "human" checked. I once avoided it today but cannot remember what I did differently. It may have to do with which civs are involved. Strange.

[Jamski]

Change the default difficulty setting for the AI, or do it civ by civ in the options for each civ.

Should work.

-Jam

[Jahi]

i've been having the same problem.. i'll have to check that out.

[Rusty Nail]

New insight! I believe what we are seeing is a variant of the problem of always being in "chieftain" mode in hotseat mode as mentioned in several threads. The phenomenon of "decelerated production" is simply the normal "Chieftain" mode in an ordinary PTW SP game! You can confirm this by running PTW in DEBUG mode and start a game in Chieftain. Check out the AIs as soon as they found their first city. They all have "decelerated production" — a severe handicap. The strange thing is that this is not mentioned by Firaxis as a characteristic of chieftain. I have not looked at Warlord. Might be there too for all I know. A known bug forces chieftain mode in hotseat, hence dedelerated production for the AIs. BUT, there is a workaround which I picked up on Civfanatics (and have confirmed works), namely: start any normal SP game and leave immediatey. Now, start your hotseat game, and it will NOT revert to chieftain. You can confirm this from the AIs first score which is +10 if you are playing in chieftain mode, and otherwise higher (+40 for monarch). This sounds crazy but worked for me. This was a tough nut to crack because it had nothing to do with my mod or my settings!

[Jahi]

Thanks for the solution.. i was wondering about this.