Forcing the AI to Farm?

[WarVoid]

Is there a way to force the AI to do a considerable amount of changing irrigation to farmland?

Give them a lot of settlers and the tech (rfg)?

Change the land values?

Both?

I don't have a bloody clue... Help!

[Dr. Nick]

They do it all the time in the regular game. I think.

[Exile]

I seem to recall . . .

That the AI doesn't irrigate and farm in the same way that human players do. IIRC, squares around AI cities "become" irrigated, then later, with Rfg, farmed, at certain intervals--every so many turns. I do think that the AI must mine in the same way that we do, but their irrigation and farming is different. It happens automatically. If that's the case, then there probably isn't a way to speed up the process.

And I can't recall where I got this info from.

Can a more authoritative voice chime in here?

[ravagon]

I did a bit of testing along these lines but it wasn't nearly comprehensive enough I'm afraid. A few generalizations though:-

(a) Settlers/Engineers, when given to the AI in copious numbers (and NONE support) tend to build copious numbers of cities rather than irrigate/farm the ones they have.

(b) When this isn't possible (ie: because of 255 cities present already or no available terrain types in either the grassland or plain slots) they do tend to try and irrigate everything in sight except for terrains in the hills/mountains slots. I think they keep this up until they've done pretty much all the irrigating they can around a city before starting to farm (for which they do indeed require the refrigeration tech).

- at this point I moved on to changing the options to transform grs/pln terrains upon irrigating so that farming wasn't as much of a problem, but I did also try changing the resources available from other terrain slots to make these much more attractive and found that it made NO difference whatsoever. Give tundra 80 food, 90 production and 100 trade and the silly AI will not try and change standard grassland into tundra unless this can be done via irrigation which it does madly anyway.

[ravagon]

Exile,

This sounds like the AI for Barbarian civs. These don't build settlers and have some sort of auto-improve that does it all for them. I don't know if it does this for regular AI's ...

[hardjoy]

It DOES apply to the standard AI. Once I tested a scenario where one tribe had no settlers whatsoever, and when I revealed the map in the end, their one city had lots of irrigation. The only solution I can think of, is give them lots of non-agrable land to prevent this.

To make it the other way around isn't very hard, I imagine, especially if you make the civ in question a perfectionist and isolationist type civ etc in the tribe/leader attributes in the rules.txt. Also, I experienced, is that perfectionist etc civs will often produce more trade role units.

I have NEVER seen the AI actually change terrain ["o"] with engineers. Anyone who has experienced this? The only way to do this, in my limited experience, is to make the desired terrain the one transformed to, when irrigated or mined.

[Gothmog]

Let me join the consensus that there isn't much you can do about this. Now I don't know if this will have any effect, but you could try playing with these cosmic values:

1 ; Settlers eat (govt <= Monarchy)
2 ; Settlers eat (govt >= Communism)

Maybe if settlers 3 food, that might help get what you want or maybe the AI would just starve.

[WarVoid]

Here's the thing.

The scenario is an adaption of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds crossed over with Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds, creating a unique median which I hope will be a very interesting Verne-esque scenario.

Now as the Martians expand across the map, I want them to plant Red Weed (Farmland) like they did in the original book. The Red Weed is special and will provide an immense amount of food to the Martians facilitating extensive growth on their behalf and hence pumping out more units and a greater advantage against the Human players, just like the book/musical.

So I need to figure out a way to make that happen.

[Gothmog]

That's a real stretch! Good luck

[Mercator]

Do you want the AI to build any cities? If not, you could use MapCopy to render the entire map infertile, and then give them lots of settlers. That would at least eliminate the city-building, although I'm not sure how it would affect the rest.

[ravagon]

Originally posted by WarVoid

The scenario is an adaption of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds crossed over with Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds, creating a unique median which I hope will be a very interesting Verne-esque scenario.

I think somebody's nicking my idea!


I did a fair bit of testing for much the same thing and came to the conclusion that the only good way to do it was to have the AI irrigating plain/grassland (I was calling them undeveloped/developed) terrain types to change them into another (ie: red weed). To change it back again the humans would have to mine it (something the martian AI doesn't seem to want to do to anything but hills/mountains).
That way the "new" martian-only terrain could have big production bonuses as well...