AI City Placement Q

[Maquiladora]

Is there anyway to instruct the AI to lay out its cities in a perfect pattern for one border bump? I really wish i could just see its map one time and see no borders overlap in a nice jigsaw effect, am i dreaming?

I realise that the AI cant adapt and change each city to its own needs, with tile imps and specialists etc but is it possible to tell it where *exactly* to put each city relative to another?

[HuangShang]

i'd like that too

[Martin Gühmann]

Here is something from the strategies.txt, that influence the expansion activity of the AI:

	// minimum distance between settled cities 
	// (eg. new cities must be founded atleast 2 cells from nearest cities collection border)
    MinSettleDistance   4

    // cells with settle scores below this threshold will not be used
    MinSettleScore 600

MinSettleDistance should be clear, I am not shure how the SettleScore is computed one possible would be to take the terrain score value of the target terrain type found in the terrain.txt and add the score of the surounding terrain. But this is only speculation.

-Martin

[Maquiladora]

Thanks Martin, i knew something like that was there somewhere. I guess that "MinSettleDistance 4" already defines that they should be enough space for one border bump for each city, but doesnt really tell it to "weave" the cities together to save terrain space.

[Maquiladora]

I noticed that the MinSettleDistance 4 isnt definate. In that it doest definately mean there will be 4 cells between each city.

I also experimented with using a very low MinSettleScore of 100, but didnt notice any difference. As you said, they only influence the expansion of the AI.

[Peter Triggs]

Yeah, I thnk the MinSettleDistance is the ideal distance it would like to settle at. But it will settle for less (groan) if there's not enough space.

[Maquiladora]

Yeah exactly. I set it at MinSettleDistance 6 and was getting some really impressive spread of cities, but when i tried an islands game there were 4 or 5 squished together on their island. I think 6 might be a little too much though, without road/railroads especially for backup in spread out areas.