My biggest gripe about Civ 3 (or all the Civ games for that matter) is that you get no warning that something bad is going to happen to your city. Things like riots, you would have to check EVERY SINGLE CITY to make sure there aren't too many unhappy people, or, next thing you know, the city is rioting. Civ 3 introduced the Culture-capture, but here you get no warning whatsoever that your city and all its troops are about to flip.

The first case - the riots - is easy to solve. When you hit END TURN, the game checks to see if there's a city that's definitely going to revolt and gives you a verification message, like "These cities are going to revolt next turn! What do you want to do? Ignore / Show me". If a city wasn't supposed to revolt, but during the course of the other players' turns is put into a position that it will revolt (population changes, improvement destruction), then it doesn't revolt until you've been given the warning next turn, and a chance to do something about it.

The Culture one is a little harder to do, since it's given a random chance of success each turn, but I think the way to do it is if that city succeeds at its task of flipping, instead of flipping, it will - next turn - give a warning message that the city is going to flip next turn unless you do something about it. Maybe you could add more units until you've reached whatever threshold was necessary to prevent the flip. But I don't think you should be allowed to remove any units already there, because they were "corrupted" and intended to flip. If you manage to avert the flip, then those units can behave normally (unless the city succeeded in its task to flip AGAIN).

I don't know what Civ4 is doing about this, but I hope that there is some kind of warning system in place to allow you to prevent sudden flips or riots or whatever.

Naturally, cities captured through enemy military action or espionage would be unaffected; you knew the risks of sharing a border.

That would have the effect of practically eliminating flips and riots altogether (neither of which, incidentally, will be in CivIV). Riots in I-III are caused when the player does not wish to check every city every turn. It's the price you pay for rushing. Culture flips are virtually unpreventable anyway; the best you could do would be to station troops outside the city to retake it.

Why yes, it would practically eliminate them... until you've got so many units preventing flip that you go broke from the maintenance cost. But the riot thing, man, I really do have better things to do than check 200+ cities EVERY BLOODY TURN. I accept that most of the time, when I get a new population unit, he's sometimes going to be placed inefficiently, and at some point I'm not going to check all my cities every turn, only when something big happens.

It's about removing unnecessary tedium and boredom from the game.

But if you're correct about them being eliminated from C4, then I may just be blathering over nothing.

Just tell the governors of your cities to manage citizen moods and Presto-Chango: no riots. I haven't had a riot in 2 years of Civ3.

The bad part about this is that the governor will always assign specialty citizens as Entertainers and you have to manually go into the cities to change entertainers to scientists or tax collectors.

Rather than tell you the turn before a certain culture flip, I'd be fine with a warning that tells me that a particular city is at "high risk" for a culture flip (as in a 50% chance in the next 10 turns or something like that).

Just tell the governors of your cities to manage citizen moods and Presto-Chango: no riots. I haven't had a riot in 2 years of Civ3.Yes, but the problem with that is that the governers act too early - if you manage the moods yourself, you get a grace period of one turn in which the city can have an excess of unhappy people, yet not riot. This can be especially useful in such applications as setter factories - that extra turn of production from the one unhappy person can make the difference between a settler every three turns and one every four.

Secondly, the governer always controls happiness by assigning entertainers - in some cases, you can prevent a riot by making a taxman or scientist - again, its much more effective.


On topic - yes, warnings would be great. Lack of warnings is one of the reasons why CivAssist (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=118540) exists. Configurable warnings woud be even better - I don't want to have to go through 20 or thirty towns to be told they're rioting - what do I want to do (eg in anarchy). How about summary of all warnings instead of town-by-town ones?