Initial colonies shouldn't be placed on bonus tiles
Started a game, found class 22 planet, initial colony got placed right on a manufacturing bonus tile.
Iirc they said in one of the podcast that this would be fixed.
^Yea, capitals shouldn't be on bonus tiles and I shouldn't have to pay taxes either.
DARCA
One of my first alpha suggestions was to let us place the location of the initial colony when a planet was founded. Eliminates the problem above, and the issues when the colony is sometimes in a corner and can't really use its adjacency bonuses.
I like one of Earth seeds I've seen - most hexes available for construction were in seas and oceans. Initial colony was in south Atlantic. What, our descendands grew fins?
I have to agree that initial colony should be placed manually to boot- with the AI having some hard rules on how to do it- no bonus tiles, place least likely to block adjacency bonuses
So true! I had this too. I particularly liked that the ocean tiles in question were classified as prairie lands and mountains.
I also like Stalker0's idea of choosing where the initial colony goes when you colonize the planet. I think this makes perfect sense and solves a bunch of issues. Although admittedly the initial colony on your starting world should probably still be placed by computer.
Glad to hear that this issue will be fixed; however, it's not just an issue with colonizing a new planet. I found that what sucked in GC2 was conquering another race's planet only to find that the AI had placed tile developments inappropriately on tiles with an otherwise useful bonus, for example finding a research facility on a quadruple manufacturing bonus tile or, even worse, finding the starport built on a tile with any tile-bonus. I would expect that this shouldn't occur with a next generation version of Galactic Civilizations, there's the challenge Frogboy, AI-Grandmaster. I also think that the tile-bonuses in the alpha need improvement as does the infrastructural development of the game, something that is more important to me than the shiny-shiny starship building dock and it's uses.
But what if (unlikely I know) all the available tiles are bonus tiles? Maybe the player should be able to choose where to put the initial settlement, with an option for automatic placement
Schaefespeare raises a good point though. If it's symptomatic of a general problem with how the AI places facilities, then manual settlement placement would only solve part of it
True... I'm still for manual placement by the player though. Especially with the new adjacency bonus feature I think it would be great to get to choose where you place initial colony to make best use of this feature. There may even be times when you want to place the initial colony on a tile with a bonus you don't plan to use
I agree. If we can't cure the disease we can at least treat some of the symptoms. And to be honest, manual settlement placement should be an option anyway if not necessarily the method of settlement placement
Thanks for the appreciative responses. I didn't mean to sound as if I'm against manual placement, It's a good idea but I was just pointing out it doesn't go far enough in solving Tile useage problems created by the AI.
Well right now it's not AI placing the colony, it's a random number generator.
Other possible solutions:
1. Designate the colony space when the planet is generated at the beginning of the game. The original colony would always appear on the same space no matter when or who colonizes the planet. The designated colony space would never have a bonus. This is pretty much a stand-alone solution, but minimizes multiple save/load cycles trying to roll a good placement
2. The colony placed manually by the player, and using the internet-based adaptive AI to data mine player strategies for the AI players to use. A simple algorithm could probably work without the adaptive AI, but I'd love to tie it in to 3, 4 and 5.
3. The colony building *benefits* from whatever bonus tile it's on.
4. The colony building counts as an adjacent building for all other types of building. It has manufacturing, research, food, morale, and economy attributes and should be counted as a level 1 of each of those types for adjacency purposes.
5. The colony building itself can benefit from adjacent buildings; surrounding it with factories could create a massive manufacturing planet.
Combining 2, 3, 4, and 5 would turn the colony building from the current liability into a huge asset.
There's a nice little heuristic that could be coded in for automatic placement:
1). Colony is not to be placed on a bonus tile (pretty sure the AI can be instructed to leave at least one tile as open during planet generation)
2.) do a quick scan of all non-bonus tiles, assembling the "worth" of each tile. Each tile has the following "worth index":
A] +2 for every tile adjacent to the tile being assessed
B] +1 for any bonus on the adjacent tile
3). Place the initial colony on the (open) tile with the highest worth.
It's not absolutely optimal, but the above is simple to code, and is a good 80% solution - good enough that we shouldn't care, because, let's face it, people don't always automatically pick the absolute best possible place to put down a city. They make a decent estimation (which is what the above goes with), then deal with the consequences later. Which is exactly what we Players should be expected to do.
Initial colonies already provide +1 level to any adjacent building, so consider this part of your request granted. I agree that 3 and 5 should be there as well, if we're not going to guarantee that the initial colony only spawns on a tile which is never adjacent to anything and never has a bonus. 2 is fine by me, as well. I don't know that I'd consider the initial colony a 'huge asset' if 2, 3, and 5 were added; at only +1 level to adjacent structures it's no better than any other structure for a highly specialized planet build, and depending on just how the level bonuses it would get from 5 work out, it could be a slight liability in a specialized cluster by reducing the total bonus from levels added to the specialty multiplier. On the other hand, it would in general be an asset for mixed and balanced planet builds.
Option 1 seems like the only decent alternative to option 2 or the combination of options 3, 4, and 5; if options 3 and 5 are implemented, then 1 and 2 are unnecessary, though the implementation of 2 would be appreciated, and I don't see much point in having only one or two of options 3, 4, and 5 implemented; with those three, I tend to feel that it should be all of it or none of it.
Absolute worst is the Hyperion Matrix on any kind of food bonus tile (especially the 300% ones), built on the Thalan homeworld. You can't get rid of it, and it boosts the population cap so astronomically that there's no reasonable way to control the approval rating of the planet. But yes, some work on the improvement-placement portion of the routines would be appreciated, especially since improvements and tile bonuses on adjacent tiles now matter when building things, in addition to what's on the tile you're improving.
I actually don't know that this is terribly unlikely anymore, as Mountainous, Arid, and Grasslands tiles each carry a tile bonus before you add any special resources, and I'm fairly certain that I've seen planets where half or more of the tiles available were one of those three types (Mountainous and Grasslands are a pain to find, though, since they display no differently than the default prairie tiles).
Manual placement of the initital colony is a good gameplay option. Sounds like a fun decision to make. There does need to be a heuristic default for the lazy or the learners.
I think that is a different topic than AI placement of tile improvements That is something that needs attention in GC3, made even more important with the adjacency effects. But that has more to do with how well they function as opponents than what I might or might not inherit from them. I would like having the option of moving the capitol of an AI planet when you take it over. That also makes sense on a story/narrative level. It would remove the existing improvement, but that is a trade off. Otherwise, you just have to figure out what pre-built buildings you want to keep and what you don't want. It's a hard life for raging conquerors, but what can you do?
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