Engineering

In my quest to help the Civ 6 AI I have found lots of little things that I can do, small changes that help in nearly invisible ways.  One of the things I felt I should try to fix is the Fort spam that the AI often engages in.  Forts are defensive structures built by Military Engineers, and each Engineer can build 2 Forts in total.  I have found Forts to be pretty much worthless because while they do grant a small defensive bonus that bonus rarely comes up.

Once you slam down a Fort you only get a benefit while the war is in that exact location - advance a single tile, the Fort is junk.  Retreat a tile, the Fort is junk.  If you put up a Fort and your enemy advances when you didn't expect it, they can even use it against you.  In any case that tile can't get a proper improvement to increase its productivity like a Mine and you have to sink 85 production into making it.  Forts are bad.

But the AI likes building Forts.  Especially in cities that have little productive territory, it would seem, because desert and tundra cities are usually surrounded by Fort after Fort, defending trash terrain that nobody would bother attacking anyway.  It is a waste.  I wouldn't mind this so much if the AI at least built Forts on its borders so it looked like it was doing something, but the tundra being filled with Forts smashes that illusion.

My solution was to increase the number of Forts a Military Engineer could build to 6.  I figured this way the player will still never build Military Engineers (beyond 1 to get the eureka, probably) but at least the AI will not have to build so many of them to fill the deserts of the world with pointless Fort spam.

This was a mistake.

The AI didn't respond by making less Military Engineers... no, it simply put Forts absolutely everywhere.  I walked into enemy territory to find big cities with 12 Forts surrounding them, covering all the productive territory.  My attempts to help the hapless AI simply caused it to do even stupider things.

Instead of making Forts cheap, I had to make them good.  My next solution was simple, and ended up looking a lot like my solution for Wall spam by the AI:  Add an Amenity to Forts.  I also restricted them to 1 per city, to avoid bizarre Fort spam.  The roleplaying justification is that people like knowing they are protected so building Walls and Forts makes them feel secure from war.  The numbers justification is that Forts are quite powerful when they grant an Amenity, but only having 1 per city means you won't be slamming them down everyplace.  Forts will cost more to build than a normal Builder improvement would, and they will be better.  Seems reasonable to me.

Now I just have to run through another game or two and see if this actually sorts out the problem or not.  If anything breaks it will be the Forts being restricted to 1 / city.  The AI may well end up with Military Engineers it doesn't have a use for, and they will end up wandering around pointlessly.  I hope not, but only real testing will tell.