City proliferation, why settlers being cheap is bad

[Kaiku]

I guess I'm mostly surprised by "They need to decide on building or not building a settler without knowing in advance where that settler will be used," which I hadn't expected at all and is so limiting.

I assume it's also not possible to include parameters for settlers such as "Location needs to be at least X pop and/or X production (etc)," so that you can play around a bit with such values? That would stop them from colonizing the utter trash locations.

[Seravy]

Well, they had already produced the settler so not using it on the trash location would be even more wasteful.
Don't remember if there is a limit or not, I think there was one but it was set quite low (like, pop 3+ low).
Even trash locations are very much worth it for the AI on high difficulty levels where it has more gold than it can spend however as it can just buy all the buildings and have a lot of power and research from it, even if the taxes and unit production stay minimal.

[Nelphine]

Yup. Outpost growth cheatong bonus means that at high difficulties it will still turn into a hamlet fairly soon. Then with gold cheating, buy an amplifying tower. Now that pop 1 tundra locked nothing adds 7 to your casting skill. Which is huge.

I'm curious about seravys thoughhts on reducing settler production if the AI is at war. That could be interesting.

[Seravy]

Unfortunately the AI doesn't have the capacity to tell apart relevant wars from unimportant ones.
In other words you can drop a planar travel spearmen on the other plane, declare war on everyone there, and win the game because they stop producing settlers and can't do it for the rest of the game, while they have no way to actually attack you until opening towers (which without cities will take forever) so it costs you nothing to make them stay in the stone age for the entire game. All that's left is beating the people on your plane but if they also can't build settlers and you raze their first 2-3 outposts, you won - AI bonus or not, they won't beat you with just a capital (which you can even quarantine by surrounding the 8 adjacent tiles)

So no that's a very bad idea.

[Kaiku]

It'd have to be tested of course, as like I said I'd like the AI to stay challenging, but if the AI wasting production on a settler here and there means the map would be slightly less littered, with them stepping on your toes a little bit less, I may feel that to be worth it.

And yeah, there may be other things worth looking at like stopping settlers at war. That could possibly be even beneficial to the AI, while also reducing the litter of cities. (Never mind)

[Seravy]

btw even as a human player I consider everything pop 6 or above a spot I'm willing to use for a city. Maybe not on turn 10 or 50, but once I can afford the 300 gold on a settler without noticing, it's a bargain as it gives me another place to build a wizard's guild, cathedral and amplifying tower. Late game, magic matters more than money so even if the city is big loss in gold, it's still worth it for the power. (Fortunately the AI is nice enough to settle these spots for me so I don't need to actually bother in most cases)
I would even use pop 1 with some realms except there is no way my outposts can survive there without gaia's blessing or stream of life and life/nature aren't the realms where I care about magic power that badly. I can see that happen for something like Nature+Sorcery or Life+Chaos games though.

[Kaiku]

There's some difference in view here as well (which is fine), as I'd like the concept of 'city' to have some inherent value in itself, not just as an empty platform to built amp towers on. I mean that I know it's eventually beneficial to exploit every little spot for those buildings, it's just not appealing to me to do, gameplay wise.

[Seravy]

Well, then the problem might be that research and power (and amplifying towers which are kinda like power production in a different package) do not follow the usual "higher population = more resources produced" rule in usual 4X games. For example, you don't assign people to work as scientists and have libraries boost that output by 20%, instead your libraries produce research on their own without people.
Gold and production work normally, people make them and you get a percentage bonus from buildings - aside from the marketplace and sawmill which are necessary to make sure you don't need to wait an extra 50 turns for your capital to grow productive like in the vanilla game - but both only provide a small amount (~4 population worth).

Unfortunately, I don't think anything can be done about this and I'm a bit unsure if we even need to. Relying on population too much would make tactics that kill people too powerful.

[Kaiku]

Aye, I know. We're also getting wildly off track. I just had high hopes in changing (mostly) the AI's behavior to settler and expansion spam, but after learning they're unable to do so 'smartly', it pretty much stops there. I have no intentions of suggesting entire revamps to core systems.

[Catwalk]

I think mass AI expansion is a good thing. It does generally get away with it, and it promotes semi-aggressive human gameplay (a good thing). If you sit and turtle, the AI gets away with it.