Option to regulate AI Expansionist tendencies

[rid102]

Forest is never an improvement

Ummmm....

In Civ3 you have 3 improvements: mine, irrigation, and road or rail.

Well I count four there but anyway, in Civ2 you only had Farmland as well. This was good for providing a late-game food boost to get those cities up into the 30's. What else would you like?

means that a given city's production is fixed and the only optimising possible can be done by a butt simple worker algorithm.

This has pretty much always been the case with Civ games though. Even with Civ2's terraforming, it only became viable later in the game when you had a whole load of Engineers to throw at it, and then it could get a bit silly as you could transform a barren wasteland into lush grasslands and mined hills, meaning every city would end up being very similar.

There is no room for quality in developing cities.

Correct. More accurately; if you do try and go perfectionist you will find that you are limited in resources and have size 12 cities which can't grow for another 50 turns... apparently though this is an advancement because it means you have to fight more wars.

The corruption model does stop this from being a geometric expansion

It prevents ICS, but you can build The Forbidden Palace which helps reduce corruption in order to build that really huge empire. The problem is that generally the city you want to build a Forbidden Palace in is itself so crippled by corruption that it'll need 200 turns to build it. So, you need a Great Leader, which means war. So the player ends up getting rewarded twice (captured cities plus Forbidden Palace) for what the game sees as "good" (read: boring) gameplay and punished (crippling corruption) for "bad" gameplay.

End result, you either accept the AI is going to "pollute" your kingdom with its suicidal cities or you expand everywhere you can as well.

Or you just ensure that cities near gaps build lots of cultural improvements ASAP. This serves both to "close the gaps" and also gives a reasonable chance of that little AI city defecting to your Civ.

One thing I have noticed about the AI's expansion though is if you look at its pattern of city deployment it never leaves any gaps and it always has a full border (i.e. without any landing points) along all its coasts.

[Thrawn05]

If you really need to stop the AI from exspanding too much, consider using the editor to increase the cost to build units.

[Moraelin]

Personally I can't see anything wrong with having a difficulty setting for that aspect. Basically with a less expansionist AI you'd have an easier game, while if you want more challenge, you could jack the expansionism up. Why is it a problem? Sure, an experienced player could exploit it in countless ways, but then an experienced player could already play on Chieftain if he/she/it wanted an easy conquest. On the other hand, it might make life easier for newbies. Beats making them have to download a cheat, if you ask me.

[Ecthy]

Thanks to Ming for editing the thread title

Keep on discussing, folks

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
If you really need to stop the AI from exspanding too much, consider using the editor to increase the cost to build units.

Increasing the cost of settlers, I suppose could be a solution, but it remains to be seen whether the AI will react intelligently to that change. It already severely neglects its existing cities, in favour of expansion. Most AI cities have no culture whatsoever until the late middle ages, because, you guessed, it keeps trying to make settlers. Or to wage war with everyone in sight, when it no longer has suitable space to expand. So if it still keeps trying to produce settlers, only more expensive ones, probably it will just mean even less time and resources left for improving the cities.

[Deornwulf]

The number of cities and distance they can be established from the capital could and should be limited by the government of the civilization.

This might make it necessary to increase the number of possible governments (or use the SMAC social engineering model) but that is a topic for another thread.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Moraelin


Increasing the cost of settlers, I suppose could be a solution, but it remains to be seen whether the AI will react intelligently to that change. It already severely neglects its existing cities, in favour of expansion. Most AI cities have no culture whatsoever until the late middle ages, because, you guessed, it keeps trying to make settlers. Or to wage war with everyone in sight, when it no longer has suitable space to expand. So if it still keeps trying to produce settlers, only more expensive ones, probably it will just mean even less time and resources left for improving the cities.

I was actually thinking of changing the AI building bonus in the difficulty part of the editor, that way it would be stuck making a settler for 50 turns or so. But you got a point there Morælin.

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by rid102


Ummmm....

Forests are never an improvement because there is no terrain that cannot be matched or bettered with mines and/or irrigation. Mined and railed tundra will produce 1f/2s or 1f/3s depending on underlying terrain. Desert will produce 1f/3s with irrigation and rail. Grassland can be made to produce up to 4f/1s or 2f/3s. Plains produce 1f/3s - and so on. There is a brief period between when you get engineering before steam power is available that a forest can outdo some terrain-improvement combos but that's a relatively brief span in the game.

In SMAC, you could go the tree farm route and turn forests into excellent production squares at the cost of city development or you could just use your terraformers to tweak the existing terrain. It provided a genuine place for forests in the game besides something you might build a handful of in the mid game just to cut them down 30 turns later and never replant.

[Comrade Tribune]

A simple rule change could fix that:

Any new city has to be within x range of an already existing city.

x depends on map size, increases with Mapmaking and Steam Engine, and becomes unlimited with Flight.

And, of course: Make the Settler more expensive! (Initially forgot to mention that, because it is so obvious.)

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
I was actually thinking of changing the AI building bonus in the difficulty part of the editor, that way it would be stuck making a settler for 50 turns or so.

It already gets stuck making a settler for 50 turns on Chieftain. Well, maybe not exactly 50 turns, but 20 anyway. That doesn't stop it from trying to make them with all cities, even if it keeps their population at 1 in the process.

Now I can see the point with expansionism, too. But if we're talking an option to turn expansionism off, IMHO the option should really be whether you want it to go for quantity or quality. I.e., if you turn AI expansionism off, it shouldn't just take more time between settlers, it should actually go for quality instead. Make more workers, build more roads and mines, build more improvements, and stuff like that.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Moraelin


It already gets stuck making a settler for 50 turns on Chieftain. Well, maybe not exactly 50 turns, but 20 anyway. That doesn't stop it from trying to make them with all cities, even if it keeps their population at 1 in the process.

Well, for fun, I changed the AI's build bonus from 20 to 100 at chieftain, and the game reached 2050AD before most of the other civs managed to pull out a second city. When I made a embassy in one of civs capital (i think it was the Aztecs), it said on their build screen that it will be completed in 9999 turns, and it was already circa 190AD !

[Comrade Tribune]

Of course the Settler should be more expensive for the player, too. That will curb everybody´s expansionism. I am just creating a Mod where Settlers cost 60 shields. No more masses of crazed Settlers running around the countryside!

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune
Of course the Settler should be more expensive for the player, too. That will curb everybody´s expansionism. I am just creating a Mod where Settlers cost 60 shields. No more masses of crazed Settlers running around the countryside!

Or an enemy civ building a new city as soon as you destroy all of the ones you know of! That always happens to me, that really me off

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by Deornwulf
The number of cities and distance they can be established from the capital could and should be limited by the government of the civilization.

This might make it necessary to increase the number of possible governments (or use the SMAC social engineering model) but that is a topic for another thread.

Go SE

[Ecthy]

bump