Grasslands and City-building by AIs

[Exile]

Can someone tell me how and why AIs respond to grassland squares in terms of city-building?

John, I get the feeling, after playing Colonies IV a few dozen times, that you know aaaaaallllll about this. Am I right?

Anyone else know anything?

[POTUS]

Re: Grasslands and City-building by AIs

Originally posted by Exile
Can someone tell me how and why AIs respond to grassland squares in terms of city-building?

John, I get the feeling, after playing Colonies IV a few dozen times, that you know aaaaaallllll about this. Am I right?

Anyone else know anything?

The AI only builds cities on grasslands and plains, unless you hex-edit it, IIRC.

[Exile]

So then, if one were to use Mapedit to switch terrains, switching grassland & plain to mountain & icecap, and then switched the terrain values, the Ai WOULD NOT BUILD CITIES?

[duke o' york]

The AI will calculate the food production of areas before putting their cities down. I don't think that this will take harbours or specials into account, but it does generally mean that their cities are by grassland squares or others that can be easily irrigated to provide grassland levels of food (plains and hills). I reckon that there's a hard-coded minimum amount of food production potential in an area before settlement will happen. That's why the AI never builds production powerhouse cities in the same way that human players.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by duke o' york
The AI will calculate the food production of areas before putting their cities down.

No it doesn't. The AI strictly goes by the square's "fertility" value. This fertility value is hidden inside the savegame and has nothing to do with the rules.txt values. Civ2 only ever gives Plains and Grassland high enough values for the AI to build cities on it, but this can be hex-edited.

So, yes indeed, Exile, that would do the trick... Provided you're not using the mountain/icecap terrains, obviously. Otherwise the AI will start building its cities on those terrains instead (no matter how rough the terrain is).

If you don't have any terrain types to spare, you will have to use MapCopy. Presuming you want to prevent the AI from building cities anywhere, type in the following at the DOS prompt (this assumes you are already in the scenario directory, and both mapcopy and the savegame are located in that scenario directory):

mapcopy your_savegame.sav -f:ZERO

You can download MapCopy here, by the way:

http://home.san.rr.com/dustyr/proj.htm

(and at my utility site, of course... see sig)