AI city building logic

I noticed that AI will never ever build city on empty patch of land that has no resources.

Now, obviously, best valuable places for city are those that have resources, but there is one big ramification of having logic as this.

On every map there are big patches of land that have no resources. Those will stay empty all the time, since no AI would build city there and would become magnet for monster spawning.

Also, if there is a resource on the other side of empty patch, AI would travel through it and build city on the other side, making a lone outpost very vulnerable to attacks.

On the other hand, smart player would build level 1 cities (or level 2 if having plenty of food) to fill critical parts of the land without resources, and keep his kingdom contiguous, thus reducing number of places where garrisoned troops are needed.

elemental

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I tended to find the AI in clumps with wide-open area around them. They'd have their capital city, and then they seemed to drop a new city at every resource, even the very close ones, so by the time I went to destroy them they were just a big mass of cities all clumped in a ball with little to no room to expand. They never "got it" that if they waited a few turns their city would expand to take the resources close by, they'd just drop a new city 6 squares away from the last one. This resulted in me having to raze at least 2/3 of their cities (some rather well build) simply because I didn't care to take care of poorly placed overlapping cities. Of course, by that point, the game was pretty much decided anyway (or I was facing bad slowdowns) so I'd just start over.

Sometimes the AI would come all the way to me, and drop a city right next to one of mine to get a resource I had already planned to claim in a turn or two when my city expanded (which = early war and me eradicating them from the planet for being that silly).

We don't really know what the Devs plan to do with each part of the game, though. Tweaks to the way the resources spawn could change everything. Tweaks to the AI will change other things. They've build this big carpet of different threads, and yanking or changing one has ramifications to others.

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