Hi all,

I finished 3 games this past week and have noticed that the AI or at least 2 AI opponents usually do very well in Fame points up to the Medieval Era, sometimes even having a lead of 2000+ points on me. Which is great !

However once they hit the Early Modern Era something makes them literally fall apart. The top AI stops gathering any Fame points and after 10 or 20 turns I see them lose territory. No, not to other AI opponents but to rebels. Even when I go and try to grab those free new territories, rebels keep on spawning from their nearest cities which leads me to believe that the AI enters a Stability issue spiral from which it never gets out. I think this has to do with their placement of Districts, notably Commons quarters. Let me illustrate this :

As you can see, the Commons Quarters are highlighted in pink. The left and center cities are still AI controlled, the one on the right was conquered by me. The AI constructs the Commons quarter next to each other like other basic districts, apparently trying to obtain an adjacency bonus. However this has the opposite effect and gives them no stability at all.


Here is the city I conquered from the AI that was actually in first place before the Early modern era. If you go and count them, there are at least 12 Commons quarters in that city alone that provide zero Stability bonus because they are only adjacent to another Common quarter. The +1 Stability per District is from a tech I researched and has nothing to do with district placement.

This happens in almost every AI city and they can not get out of that Stability crisis - on low stability they can not build other districts to improve their empire and building Commons Quarters has no impact at all due to their poor placement. A few patches ago I noticed AIs building a lot of garrisons but at least they added some stability and the AI could actually get out of this predicament.

Now, how do we resolve this ? There are a few options :
- Change the AI preferences and let them build both Garrisons and Commons Quarters in equal measures. Garrisons on the frontiers, Commons quarter in the interior.
- Improve the AI's logic when building Commons quarters - make it so they build them only when adjacent to two basic district (either Farmer's, Maker's, Trade or Research one) and forbid them to build two Commons quarters right next to each other.
- The lazy approach is to simply add an adjacency bonus for Commons quarters as well. Either the same (+5 per Commons quarter) or a bit lower.

I personally would go for improving the AI's logic but I am not aware how is the current one programmed and does it work as it is supposed to. Have you encountered similar behavior from the AI around the start of the Early Modern Era?

PhoenixStriker wrote:

It should be noted that Commons Quarters originally gave a stability adjacency bonus like every other district tile. This was nerfed in one of the recent updates, which I personally feel improved balance, but evidently the AI logic was not updated to reflect this change which then resulted in the current disastrous urban planning the AI is undertaking. It seems like the AI logic was an oversight with the nerf, so hopefully they’ll address this problem in one of the newer patches.

LOL, this makes total sense. I also have been seeing this alot and was always like whaaaaa? AI why you so bad?