CPU city placements still the same ?

[freche]

It was a couple of months ago I played civ5, what then annoyed me was that the computer would make annoying cityplacements.

• He could move across the entire continet just because he found a spot with 1 more banana then he got close to home.
• He could settle a new city where there where only 3 tiles left (some other civ owning all other tiles around the city).
• He could make an agressive settlement close to me and then threaten me to not settle close to his empire (even if that city was miles from his empire).

Do the computer still do these kind of settlements or is it better now ?
If it's not better is there any mod that makes the computer not settle on every free tile untill the map is completly covered with cities?

[SamBC]

They already don't settle absolutely everywhere (or at least, not all AIs do). I have a theory that your second point is due to a flaw in the city-location-choosing code that causes it to not down-rate or ignore the value of tiles that already belong to an existing city, particularly a foreign city.

In terms of crossing the map, it's important that they do, if the location is good enough (especially for strategic resources), but my experience with the current version is that they don't often, although they will skip past city-states now, which they did only rarely before. From what I can tell, the placement code reduces the perceived value of a plot with distance from the settler's current location.

[nasuellia]

It was a couple of months ago I played civ5, what then annoyed me was that the computer would make annoying cityplacements.

• He could move across the entire continet just because he found a spot with 1 more banana then he got close to home.
• He could settle a new city where there where only 3 tiles left (some other civ owning all other tiles around the city).
• He could make an agressive settlement close to me and then threaten me to not settle close to his empire (even if that city was miles from his empire).

Do the computer still do these kind of settlements or is it better now ?
If it's not better is there any mod that makes the computer not settle on every free tile untill the map is completly covered with cities?

Yes: the city placement algorythm is an utter disaster. Every single match has a AI with that freaking stupid personality that makes him settle literally everywhere; even on completely useless snow/desert/tundra/generally_poor zones; they place a city next to your border and then they get angry saying to you "you don't settle near me badass!"...

... Yes, sadly that aspect of the game is still like that, exactly as day-1 release.

[Mega-Dolphin]

I've noticed that city placement has improved in my games so that AI city-spam no longer occurs in the same way. However, the AI still will occasionally move a settler far away to get a better spot.

[slowtarget]

Yes, sadly that aspect of the game is still like that, exactly as day-1 release.

Well that's not true.

Does the AI place cities as well as a human? No. Of course not. It never will. Does it build cities far from its center to capture a slightly higher concentration of resources? Yes. So do I. Does it build cities on poor land just because it has a settler and nothing better to do? Sure. Do some of those cities end up being productive beyond what I would have expected? Not always, but often enough. Does the AI sometimes build cities right next to yours (especially when resources or land is scarce)? Yup. Again, I do the same thing. Does this mean the AI is super-smart? No. It's just doing math. While I do some of those things for strategic value, the AI knows nothing of that and is just struggling (blindly, often) to find acceptable places for cities. Now's a good time to re-iterate that point about how Civ is a strategic game and it will be decades before a consumer-level game has an AI that can make decent strategic decisions.

Does the AI uselessly spam cities? Not generally. Sometimes it overbuilds. Sometimes it underbuilds. Sometimes it grows fast, sometimes slow. At launch, the AI actually grew pretty slowly. Then after a patch, some Civs began growing really fast (looking at you, Alexander). That's toned down a little now. I don't actually have much of a problem with the way it works now. Yeah, the AI does some screwy things on occasion, but I'm fine with that because I'm capable of comprehending the monumental task thrown at the AI. For the most part, (in a Huge/Marathon game) I'm usually close to the median for growth speed and that feels right.

[Israelite76]

I find that I still experience city placement issues as described above; aren't they supposed to be a minimum of 4 tiles from another city? I also experienced cities moving a long way to not, get '1 more banana' but to sit on a 3 or 4 dye, which seemed like clever tactics to me. Also, you could argue that by building a city far away from his initial clutch of cities and closer to you, he is asserting his authority, especially if he tells you not to build near him. Anyway, cities like that are always good for the plucking with reserve units so far away to beat off an attack.

I found something else though, that on occasion, AIs have settlers wandering around, escorted by a military unit looking for a new spot to settle down by going through/beyond my borders that would in theory, cut it off whilst from the rest of its empire and at the same time ignoring perfectly good city placement that could eventually be absorbed into their initial empire as a contiguous state - that's must be a glitch.

[SamBC]

I personally think that the decision of when to build a settler is a bit mucked up. I don't build settlers unless I know (roughly) where I'm going to send them. The AI seems to build settlers when the numbers tell it it could do with another city, and then any city that has a new build choice come up before the settler is built might also choose to build a settler, seemingly without regard for the fact that one is already on the way. Now, if it makes sense to build two (or five) that's fine, but sometimes it doesn't. It then doesn't give any 'thought' to where it's going until it's built.

I also reckon it values a tile that's already 'owned' by a city, be it own or foreign, exactly the same as it does a 'free' tile, which doesn't make sense. Maybe value a third-ring own tile nearly as high, but foreign ones should be down-weighted significantly, and own ones somewhat. My experiments suggest they aren't (the own city part being why it hardly ever goes further than the minimum distance from an existing city).

[lietkynes]

It was a couple of months ago I played civ5, what then annoyed me was that the computer would make annoying cityplacements.

• He could move across the entire continet just because he found a spot with 1 more banana then he got close to home.
• He could settle a new city where there where only 3 tiles left (some other civ owning all other tiles around the city).
• He could make an agressive settlement close to me and then threaten me to not settle close to his empire (even if that city was miles from his empire).

Do the computer still do these kind of settlements or is it better now ?
If it's not better is there any mod that makes the computer not settle on every free tile untill the map is completly covered with cities?

Yes it's still crap.
No there is not any mod that fixes it.
Wait for the upcoming patch, hopefully they did something about it (but don't hold your breath).