capital madness

debeest · July 19, 2000, 02:53

I'm sure many of you have encountered the situation where one of the AI civs relocates its capital five or ten times in the space of ten or twenty turns. I don't think it pays for new palaces, even at the reasonable 100-shield / 200-gold rate. Anybody know how and why this happens?

finbar · July 19, 2000, 03:01

Damn fine question. I once had the Babylonians relocate their capital every turn for about 500 years.

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finbar
Mono Rules!
#33984591

Ming · July 19, 2000, 06:37

The AI Cheats... It totals all of its shield production for the turn, and uses it where it wants to.

debeest · July 19, 2000, 09:40

Ming, I've seen that stated before, but do we have some way of knowing that it's actually true? I've seen no evidence for it. If it is true, then wouldn't even the lamest programmer design it to work better? Rather than partly filling the production boxes in each city on each turn, one city's box would fill up to produce something immediately, and then some other city's box would begin to fill.

In any case, this capital madness can happen very early in the game, when even a civilization's full production would probably not suffice to build or pay for new palaces. Yes, the AI cheats, but I think it's by just not paying for this particular city improvement.

BTW, most everybody knows that the AI needs fewer shields to build something and less food to grow, but I haven't seen anyone note that this is situation-dependent; it only cheats when it's behind, and it cheats more the farther behind it gets. My guess is, in OCC games it doesn't cheat that way at all. Anybody know?

jpk · July 19, 2000, 13:53

Some time ago I was playing a game in which an AI civilization announced it was building the Colossus and not many turns later I got a message saying they were ready to complete it. I went to a saved game, entered cheat mode and watched what they did. As I recall the city workers were situated to produce 6 shields per turn but the box was filling at the rate of 12 to 14 shields per turn. Since I am going from memory the numbers might not be exactly correct but the filling rate was not constant. It didn't occur to me to do a shield count for every city to see if the shields for the wonder were coming from some other city or if they were created out of thin air.

Smash · July 20, 2000, 00:34

The ai starts with a smaller food and sheild box on Emp and deity.It will actually get smaller for SS parts on deity.I don't beleive it cheats on population growth.If it does,it doesn't cheat very well.

Using the cheat menu to reveal the entire map and/or regularly investigating cities is how you can see it in action.