AI bug? or exploit?

[Dino the Dinosore]

So I was doing play-testing of some custom ruleset features I'm working on, adding to the civ2civ3 ruleset. I noticed, what seemed weird to me, that the AI got the Great Wall wonder very quickly, in what I thought was suspiciously few turns between when I saw the message "Aztecs have started building Great Wall" and seeing message "Aztecs have built Great Wall". This was still in the early game, I have 6 techs, researching Currency. Too early for anyone to have Trade and use caravans to help build wonders, which I don't think the AI's are smart enough to do anyway. I gave up the game because I wanted to tweek my ruleset customization, but I was curious about the wonder thing so I found a saved game from a few turns earlier and loaded it. Then used edit mode to plant a spy next to that Aztec city and investigated the city - wow! It was size 2, had low food surplus and high shield production and was building a settler. Which it couldn't do because it was size 2 and in civ2civ3 ruleset settlers cost 2 population, which results in a limbo state where the shields just keep accumulating - it had 117 shields stored. A case could be made that this is a bug in the AI, it shouldn't be trying to build a settler at size 2. But it's also an exploit that allows storing up shields for a long time and then using them for a wonder when it finally becomes available. Human players could do the same exploit - when the wonder becomes available change the production from settler to warrior with no loss of stored shields, then start the wonder next turn with a head start.

Unclear if anything can or should be done about this.

[John Campbell]

You can't really do it as a player; the AI gets to cheat here because it can switch production between build classes without penalty (necessary because it's too stupid to actually plan anything). Try it as a player, you'll lose half your sunk production. I've done something similar with Wonders that I either didn't actually want or got beaten to, though. Rival beats me to something I was building and there's nothing else available quite yet that I want, I'll just keep on building the already-built Wonder, or if one of my big production cities becomes available and I don't quite have the tech for the Wonder I want yet, I'll start building another Wonder I don't care about — and switch production over when a Wonder I do want becomes available. There's no penalty for switching between Wonders.