AI Question for the Devs

Build order...

I noticed that my governor on each planet just queues up the next available upgrade when it becomes available. I most often move my factories from the bottom of the list to the top, sense that will usually finish the rest faster than if I just finished them first.

My question: Does the AI use the same govonor? And are they able to see the benifit of changing the order of upgrades (this helps with research/moral/ect too!) and acting on that knowledge?

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Good question - though it seems that in 1.1 the Ai ismuch more efficient managing it's planets than in earlier builds so my hunch would be yes.

On Edit: You can probably check this out by going into cheat mode and giving the AI a tech that will upgrade stuff - then switch over play that Ai next turn to see if they have maximized the order.

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Or you can just uncheck 'auto upgrad' and go to your planet everytime something finishes.

Though it would be nice to know if the AI is using auto upgrade. I cannot think of any reason why it should.

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The AI doesn't autoupgrade . It upgrades things as it sees a need. It isn't very smart about it though. I find little rhyme or reason in the upgrade system because it seems the needs outweigh any sense of efficency. They will decide they need to improve the economy and will upgrade to a stock exchange taking 140 turns or whatever while they could more then half that by upgrading a factory first (or even building a factory in the first place).

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I generally move factory upgrades to the top as well but I also favor upgrades to planetary improvements on key bonus squares. I would put a lab upgrade on a research bonus square before a factory upgrade on a regular square. If your empire's factory output is much higher than your research output then you will have to set your social spending % low and research spending % high in order to research at a decent rate. This in effect will delay completion of your projects, so it better to keep production balanced.

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Why shouldn't the AI be good at it? Effenciency is just a matter of calculations on this topic. It could easily figure out whether building that factory would take off 2 turns, or in the long run just add one. When in late game I will sometimes build all factories but a few tiles on new planets and then convert convert them back into other things. This really speeds up how fast you can get a colony going when all the buildings are so expensive, especially those first few. The AI should be able to calculate all this out pretty easy, while I am just using intuition. There could even be different formulas with different amount of slack for different AI levels.

Devs: any comments on this?

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I gave up on getting this to show in the forum so the devs might notice it, so I've moved it to Game Talk where I inteded it to begin with.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2411

The AI uses the default governors.

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Problem with that, as noted, is that factories can end up at the bottom of the queue when really you'd want them at the top, and then why upgrade an entertainment centre before a farm if you've got high morale, etc.

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Thanks for the replay Frogboy. So I do have an advantage there. I like it when I can beat the computer at effeciancy.

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