The AI still has unused land on its home continent so this is unlikely to be a ship issue.
Maybe the difficulty is too low and the AI didn't manage to build any more settlers than this yet?
It would be useful if you looked at the autosave files from earlier turns to see what actually happened.
There are several possibilities :
-Raiders eating too many settlers or outposts (not a bug but bad news nonetheless)
-The AI conquering a low population neutral city of a superior race and switching settler production to there which is slow (seems like he started with dwarves but now builds beastmen cities, also has a dark elf one which should take over now)
-Settler attacking/disembarking into lairs or other targets (bug, but should be already fixed)
-Difficulty is too low so the AI never managed to build more than this in the first place
-Dwarves are that bad for the AI due to the slow growth or other reasons
-Something completely unknown like a production bug that only affects special cases.
The difficulty is one step below expert, advanced.
As I said, I did look through the whole game. Strong raider cities (almost full stack of warlocks, 5 steam cannons) and rampaging monsters did hinder purple expansion a bit on its main continent and the biggest nearby island. However, the biggest issue was and is sloppy settlers building, very rarely the AI built any settlers. Also, there was nothing to hinder sending settlers or any other units to the other continent with boats but AI didn't do that.
Also on the other plane only yellow ever used boats to move settlers which resulted in quite slow island expansion and still yet unclaimed island which only now has yellow settlers.
EDIT: Also I might mention that purple built a few boats very early and units just moved back and forth into and out of the boats for many turns. Purple didn't really do anything useful with boats ever except now it _seems_ to be moving some army stacks to the unsettled part of its continent.
The AI can only build settlers in their highest priority race cities.
If that city happens to be low population/production, building them takes a while - A city with 10-15 hammers will take an entire year to produce a single settler and it consumes the population which keeps the production rate low.
Beastmen have the highest priority for a Dwarf leader, so once the AI conquers a Beastmen city, they can only produce settlers there. If the beastmen city is too small, this can be significantly slower than usual. It's still better on the long term than having the AI stuck with only Dwarf cities (which means horrible magic power, no amplifying towers and a ton of powerful but easy to counter units.). If the city they conquered was small (or got wrecked in the battle) this is a likely reason for the slow settler production.
The AI sends all their non-settler units to the chosen Main Action Continent. This is chosen at random but is usually the largest and nearest landmass. In this case the starting continent is very likely to get chosen. Until the AI picks another continent either because it has nothing left to target on that continent (all lairs and neutral cities cleared or too difficult), diplomacy changes (can't for the Myrran wizard), or the timer expires, the transports will keep going back to the city. However even when a new continent is chosen it can and often will be the same one.
Looking at the map there are at least 3 reasonable targets left : The werewolves lair and the Chaos Spawn node seem weak enough as well as the Giant Spiders node. Once the AI cleared all 3 of these, it should pick a different continent, until then it doesn't really have a reason to. Considering Dwarven units aren't exactly fast and the continent is extremely long, this also might take longer than usual. Stacks seem to contain steam cannons, so it can easily take 20+ turns for one stack to reach one target.
I tried this again with reveal cheat and something is definitely bugged with AI sea based expansion.
Myrror AI expanded ok to what is available by land and then stopped expanding. When it finally built a new settlers unit, that settlers unit stayed put for 5 turns and then started moving back and forth into and out of a transport.
I found the settler. It boarded the ship then went back to land. However the second or third time the boat finally started taking it elsewhere.
There is still unsettled land on this continent and in the turn of the save file, the continent is still selected as the settling continent. It's cut off by a node so the settler can't reach it, thus it will board the boat and the AI will redo the settler continent selection process.
Next turn the AI picks the same continent again : it does, after all, have unused land available. So the settler leaves the boat.
This repeats until the AI chooses a different continent - it's chosen at random from all available tiles.
However there seems to be a catch - the AI will never pick a continent that is classified as type 3 (which basically stands for a continent the has no cities on yet) if the continent has over 1200 total cost of enemy forces. This doesn't include neutrals though so it shouldn't matter in this case.
I actually have no idea why the same continent gets chosen despite it having only 4 habitable tiles vs the rest of the world having hundreds, but random chances do work like that. Even if it's a 1% chance it can sometimes happen.
If it happens more than 1-2 times in a row however then we can suspect there is a problem with the habitable land tile detection or something.
...oh I see. For this check, the AI runs a simplified version : "If same continent has a buildable tile with no enemy troops, return ok" while the full version of the procedure does "and that tile is reachable from this tile and has no settler going there yet" in addition. Problem is this was necessary : Running the whole thing, for every AI on the entire world map takes too long. Only actual settlers looking for a destination use the full version because that only runs once : for the tile the settler is on. But the continent selection runs this for every single shore tile on the world map.
Using the simplified version means continents have the chance to get selected equal to their full size, not limited to the actual habitable tile count or their reachability. This works this way because it picks from shore tiles because the old ship procedure used to send ships to this specific selected shore tile. The new one does not. Which means we can, for a future version, drop this whole call to the settler procedure and instead make the continent selection simply pick at random from "any land tile that has no enemy units and can be built upon". Then we can also make the ship procedure prioritize the disembark location closest to this chosen tile, instead of the one closest to the ship. That does allow the ship to find the correct location even if it's blocked by a node. However that's a lot of work for the benefit of merely saving a few turns, and using the cutoff parts (which someone with water walking settlers will find anyway eventually, those don't mind that) so I'm unsure if it's even worth the time. Definitely not something to do right now.
I would point out that before saving the settler had already went back and forth some amount of times. Also, no other settlers so expansion is incredibly slow even if that one was going somewhere.
EDIT: Also military units nearby do the same back and forth with another transport.
The AI has a single Troll and Draconian city, whichever race is higher priority is the only one the AI can build settlers in at the moment.
I wouldn't call 13 cities in 1408 incredibly slow though. It might feel that way because Arcanus is already filled, but Arcanus has 4 people doing the job while Myrror has only one.
5 of those cities were not built (starting cities and neutrals), leaving 8 more so 1 per year. 12 turns is fairly reasonable considering the settler has to actually get built and reach the destination. This isn't a human player we are talking about, the AI doesn't know anything about the urgency of doing anything specific, it merely abides by the "2 settlers in production or on the move per continent total, 4 globally" rule. That means in this case 24 turns for each settler from first turn of production till reaching the destination. That's reasonable considering settlers only move 1 tile/turn and the production itself can take up almost half of that time by itself. (Also, this ignores the fact the AI has to first wait for at least one city to complete production before it can start making a settler every time.)
(April 23rd, 2019, 20:48)Seravy Wrote: -Ghouls lose their +1 to Hit bonus and instead gain 1 more melee and ranged attack. (this should make the common buffs less powerful on them.)
As they're meant to be used with darkness this is a direct nerf, which is fine as long as their cost reflects it. Considering only darkness they should be divided by 1.07: 82. Considering focus magic they should drop 1.14 and get down to 77 but that ignores FM cost, I'd say go to 80.
(where was this discussed? I missed it completely)
