AI

[Nelphine]

How fast does the AI expand (chaotic expansionist, huge land mass, orc, 8 nature, 4 chaos, guardian, alchemy)?

My impossible death game has entire sub continents with no cities in them on the arcanus plane (I've only explored half the plane, but I've only found 8 or 9 cities, plus at least 3 neutral cities the AI hasn't conquered yet - and I haven't seen a single conquered node yet), 1413, while I have 30 cities on Myrror. I know I stopped expanding because of micromanagement city issues (that and I'll shortly be gold capped despite converting gold to mana with no alchemy retort) but the computer shouldn't have that problem?

The other reason for asking is that, since meeting I've had more spell power and power production, despite impossible AI bonuses, so it seemed odd they wouldn't have expanded more to generate more spell power.

[Seravy]

How fast does the AI expand (chaotic expansionist, huge land mass, orc, 8 nature, 4 chaos, guardian, alchemy)?

My impossible death game has entire sub continents with no cities in them on the arcanus plane (I've only explored half the plane, but I've only found 8 or 9 cities, plus at least 3 neutral cities the AI hasn't conquered yet - and I haven't seen a single conquered node yet), 1413, while I have 30 cities on Myrror. I know I stopped expanding because of micromanagement city issues (that and I'll shortly be gold capped despite converting gold to mana with no alchemy retort) but the computer shouldn't have that problem?

The other reason for asking is that, since meeting I've had more spell power and power production, despite impossible AI bonuses, so it seemed odd they wouldn't have expanded more to generate more spell power.

There usually aren't any settling spots left by 1408 in impossible, though huge land might take longer.
However if they don't build the ship wrights guild and have no water walking or wraith form, they might take very long to leave their starting continent, which can result in this. Expansionist has the highest chance of building ship buildings, though.

Oh wait, I think I know. Here, this is from the coming 2.71 changelog :

-Fixed bug : AI settlers does not check if a ship is fully loaded before trying to get in.
-Fixed bug : When AI settlers is trying to get into a ship, it does not order the ship to stay there and wait for it. The ship might leave the shore before the settler gets to move.

So basically if the AI can't transport them with spells, the settlers might get stuck on the starting continent despite having ships.

Are you absolutely sure you're playing Impossible? It sounds more like Normal from what you describe.

[Nelphine]

Yup its impossible (I've got 6 sorcery nodes with many sky drakes on my home continents, the weakest lair I've seen was 4 chaos spawn and 5 hell hounds).

With 8 nature I can't imagine she doesn't have water walking. Though I have not seen any water walking units. I'll check the settlers I've found.

And there are dozens of ships around.

[namad]

Were there 3 myrrans or something? having less wizards on arcanus might somehow screw up their ability to claim continents?

[Seravy]

If you upload the save file I can look and see if I see anything wrong.

[Nelphine]

I'm going to scout his home continent first, and see how settled it is. I'm up to 16 cities found, at least 3 I thought were his capital, bUT no capital yet.

[Seravy]

I'm going to scout his home continent first, and see how settled it is. I'm up to 16 cities found, at least 3 I thought were his capital, bUT no capital yet.

Oh, sounds like it's working fine then, the land might just be too big.

[Seravy]

I've found two situations that can slow down or block AI settling.
Unsurprisingly, if the intended settling spot is unreachable, the settlers will do nothing. That means out of the 2 settlers the AI gets, one becomes inactive. If both of the first two are in such a location, then both get stuck.
The other, if the AI selects a continent where no city can be built as the "settling" continent, or doesn't select any, then the settlers can get stuck on the shore of such a continent, entering then leaving the ship. Since in this case there is nowhere to go, nothing can be done about it, until the AI selects another settling continent, they'll be stuck.
In my case they were on a 1 tile island which had another city in range on the main continent.

[Seravy]

Upon inspecting how the AI sends their settlers to the nearest shore if they need to leave the continent, I found shocking design flaws:
-It goes for tiles in a range of 1 from land tiles adjacent to water. Meaning tiles not adjacent can be chosen if they are only 2 away from land...obviously the settler can't board the ship then.
-It doesn't check for 9 own units on the tile. So if the nearest sea access point is their own city, bad luck.
-if it actually did what they originally intended and checked in a range of 1 from WATER tiles next to the continent, then it could have selected land tiles in another continent, if the sea between them was only 1 tile wide. But since it checked next to land tiles...that bug invalidated this one.
-and btw if there was no path to the nearest shore, again bad luck. This one I won't fix though. I think it's extremely unlikely to have the nearest shore tile entirely blockaded by lairs. Such situations usually happen when there is a lair on a thin land bridge but then sea would be closer to the settler on their own side of the lair so that doesn't happen here. And if there is more land, it would need at least 3-5 lairs to block all valid paths. Units blocking it are a bit more likely but those will eventually move out of the way...

[namad]

Or they'll be an intentional human player cold war blockade, which is probably an intended feature/mechanic?