long story short; AI runs itself into the ground, then stops doing anything


a few more details; AI builds stuff, until its stonecutters run out of stone, then it just sits there, doing nothing to try and fix the problem

what I have observed so far:

playing the egyptian campaign, 1st mission played out without any issues, 2nd map, the AI stopped building, after it ran out of stone ( Asian AI!.. they hardly need stone .. wtf ) .. 3rd mission; same story, and 4th mission as well ( pictures included to prove the AI has access to plenty of stone, they just don't harvest it, and the score-screen, showing the results of a ~3 hour game )



but most interesting of all, is that, in the 2nd mission, you have an ally .. they run into the same problems, not having any stone .. I had to donate ~40 stone to them, to kickstart their economy again .. but watching it happen gave me some insigt into what the hell is going on

the AI doesn't seem to realise that it has run out of stone, they'll keep building despite the fact that they'll never be able to complete said buildings, and they won't demolish any buildings to try and generate some emergency resources .. they WILL TRY TO BUILD a new stonecutter, problem is that it is SO FAR DOWN their list of priourities, that every other building-project will have eaten up all available stone before that can be finished

---

so I wonder; is there any way to fix this ?.. is the GOG team aware of this issue ?.. have they added something to the game, that could explain the change in AI behaviour ? ( because this behaviour is not standard, I've played the game before :P )

ooh, I'm well aware that the AI can be more dumb than a brick sometimes, especially with how it controls its units .. but having played Settlers 3 Gold, no more than a year ago, I just can't help but notice that the AI in this Ultimate edition, seems more broken than ever before .. at least I don't recall this particular issue, with stonecutters ( or lack thereof ) being a problem

maybe the GOG team included some community patches or something, as their way of make the game run on a modern system, that just so happened to change the AI as well

The CD version will have the exact same issue. There are no community patches for this. And the GOG way of making S3 work without the user needing to tweak anything was just by an SDB file (note: it is not that hard to make the S3 CD version work on any modern OS).
Believe me: GOG didn't do anything besides the here mentioned things - I've analyzed the work they did in my free time :)

soo, I heard back from GOG-Support, regarding this, and they pretty much just say what you have said already, Adrianer

I'm just posting it here, in case someone else stumbles upon this issue, and wonders what the hell is going on, like I did;

" Hello,

As Adrianer user already replied to you on forum, AI in Settlers 3 isn't particularly smart. Computer player can only work with resources that it will be able to get basic access to, and it doesn't "search" for additional resources. As questioned- we didn't provide any community, or home-made patches to modify AI. As far as I know the expansion packs from Ultimate Edition should also not affect AI.

I'm sorry for inconvenience. "

--

so I think we can consider this issue 'solved', in some sense .. or at least write it off as a chain of unfortunate events, causing the AI to expand too quickly, running out of stone, and being unable to build more stonecutters

but thank you, both of you, for responding :]