City Governor AI Problems- ATTn: soren johnson

[dexters]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis


I am assuming that your issue in this situation with the city governors is that they are recommending building swordsmen instead of riflemen...

Soren, I actually had thought about that. You can quickly check with the link on the first post of this thread (it links to my original thread fully documenting my attempts to get the governors to work) and I did tell the city governors to produce defensive units only, and then i tried to have it produce offensive units only, with the same result--which is it continued to produce the same old units.

There appears to be a pattern here as the city govs are somehow stuck in the early middle ages producing swordsman, longbowman and privateers. Many other posters have attested to the same thing.

P.S. the post I'm referring to is fourth post down from that other thread. I'm sure youre busy dealing with bugs and all, so I appreciate the time. I've cut and pasted it below for your convenience.

.

Thinking the AI might mistake riflemen for defensive unit (it is afterall a successor unit to pikeman -one of the best early defensive units) I gave it the order to contruct defensive land units, but the AI still kept getting longbowmen instead of the unit I wanted.

I remember playing an earlier game where I had the knight, and the system seemed to recognize that was the best unit all around and built that automatically without me forcing the cities to do so. I'm not sure why in this game, the AI is so stubborn it refuses to learn from my action. Even on cities where I'm building altillery, it is still churning out longbowmen. I'm suspecting that because I'm fighting the Aztecs who only really have spearmen, longbowmen , jungle warrior and pikeman that the AI is trying to pump out weaker units? or is it going by a attack/defense ratio and somehow decided longbowmen had to be the best offensive unit given it has a 4 to 1 ratio, but of course, it has only 1 defense point, which makes it woefully inadequate....

any insight into this?

[dexters]

bumparoonee

[Wexu]

SOREN: One easy fix to many problems. Let we have a list of all units which we can produce and mark the ones we don't want NEVER to be build and they would disappear from production list and the governor won't suggest them. This would help the governor problems and the production list would me smaller. It's quite annoying when you are changing production in modern days and there's units like warriors and spearmen, so you must scroll that big list.

I think this would a great idea. What do you think guys?

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by dexters


Soren, I actually had thought about that. You can quickly check with the link on the first post of this thread (it links to my original thread fully documenting my attempts to get the governors to work) and I did tell the city governors to produce defensive units only, and then i tried to have it produce offensive units only, with the same result--which is it continued to produce the same old units.

There appears to be a pattern here as the city govs are somehow stuck in the early middle ages producing swordsman, longbowman and privateers. Many other posters have attested to the same thing.

P.S. the post I'm referring to is fourth post down from that other thread. I'm sure youre busy dealing with bugs and all, so I appreciate the time. I've cut and pasted it below for your convenience.

The AI defines "offensive" units as

Warriors
Archers
Swordsmen
Longbowmen
Chariots
Horsemen
Knights
Cavalry
Marines
Paratroopers
Tanks
Modern Armor

Thus, if you allow the AI to suggest offensive units, it will always try to find the best unit from the above group to build whenever it determines that you need more offense. And if you don't have the right assortment of resources, this might mean that it suggest build Longbowmen because that is the "best" offensive unit, even if Riflemen are available.

btw, the whole Privateer thing is a bug. (it actually has to do with the fact that the Privateer is the last unit in the units array. If you find a city experiencing this problem and you are getting annoyed, just put a defensive unit (spearman, pikeman, musketeer, rifleman, infantry, mech. infantry) in the city. At any rate, I am working on a fix...)

[dexters]

OMG Soren, I'm all red in the face you're right (how could you be not)

ok, i got the AI governors building riflemen now and I understand now how to give my governors parameters so that it would build the unit i want.

Just a question. In your interview with Apolyton, you mentioned that the governors will actually learn. I'm interested as to how they learn. What can we do to help that process along?

Thanks

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by dexters
OMG Soren, I'm all red in the face you're right (how could you be not)

ok, i got the AI governors building riflemen now and I understand now how to give my governors parameters so that it would build the unit i want.

Just a question. In your interview with Apolyton, you mentioned that the governors will actually learn. I'm interested as to how they learn. What can we do to help that process along?

Thanks

well, the governors take into account three factors:

1) You specifically set a city to build X (strong positive factor)
2) You tell a city to stop building X (moderate negative factor)
3) You allow a city to finish building X (weak positive factor)

These simply get added up across all you cities, and that value gets factored into the mix when the governor decides what to suggest.

Of course, sometimes the learning gets overweighted by other factors. For example, the Privateers problem comes from a test in the AI which basically says "never build a city improvement if the city has no defensive unit (Spearman, Pikeman, etc...)" Thus, if you have a city defended with Cavalry (not considered a defensive unit), and you have the governor set to not build any units, the govenors literally cannot suggest either an improvement or a unit, so it ends up suggesting the last unit in the units array (Privateers) because the "value" of all units and improvements is 0. (This will get fixed, btw...)

[Wexu]

Soren, no comments to the list-idea? Would that be too hard to implement? I think every player would like to see that. I can't see why not.

Well, I guess there's more important things to do now, but maybe in the future?

[Earthling7]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
btw, the whole Privateer thing is a bug.

Thanks for clearing that. It was driving me nuts, as stated in the original thread...

Looking forward to the patch

btw, is there no way to turn the Governors off, anyone?

[adaMada]

Originally posted by Wexu
Soren, no comments to the list-idea? Would that be too hard to implement? I think every player would like to see that. I can't see why not.

Well, I guess there's more important things to do now, but maybe in the future?

Not trying to add to to the clutter, and this isn't the most important issue to address, but I'd also really like to see this feature. I'd also like to be able to temporarially tell all of my cities to concentrate on one or two units -- not exclusivley, but have them build a bunch of those. That way, I can crank out tanks for a few turns, crank out marines for a few turns, crank out bombers for a few turns, etc... this would be practically like going in that other list and dechecking everything except two units, except it'd be reversible a few turns later when you decided you had built up enough.

This is just what I'd personally like to see (make playing the game easier for me) -- I understand that there are other things more important than this right now -- either way, great game!

-- adaMada

[Wexu]

Yep, there are definetly more important things to do now, but this would be a great addition in the future I think.

[Lorteungen212]

Maybe im just an idiot but i dont get this at all. I set all the options to NEVER and in ALL CITIES. Shouldnt that stop the governor from building more units automatically??? Yet still im producing privateers and jet fighters at an alarming rate in ALL my cities that produce units!!!! Someone said it was just one or a few cities. Its really a pain to go through all your cities every single turn and check if the freakin governor changed the production...which he will......EVERYTIME. Since everybody is happy with the answer I must have missed something.