Is it good to let borders pop goody huts?

I agree about turning off huts. I do it as a crutch. If I turn them off I'm not tempted to go all over the map looking instead of scouting my immediate neighborhood like a sensible player.

I always play with huts off, but from previous experience, culture popping seems very similar to using a scout (i.e. no barb). The only difference that I believe exists is that you never get experience from culture popping a hut. You can get a technology from a culture pop.

Basically what happens is the following statement:

You have an element that pops the tribal hut. Can be units or culture borders.
When the tribal is accessed, it rolls a dice over different results. If the popping element doesn't allow the rolled result, like experience over a settler (popping element), the roll is cancelled and the dice roll starts again and it goes for 10 times max.
After 10 dice rolls in a row without a compatible result, the dice roll is stopped and the hut returns not only nothing but also no message (while CivIII returned "the tribe is deserted" I think).

All you to consider are:
Settler/Worker can't receive experiences
Healing doesn't happen to units with more than 1/3 of the full health bar
Culture border doesn't trigger experience.
Huts from a certain distance of the capital (and only the capital and I think it is 8 tiles away) are barb free.
Checking "No barbs" option will make huts free from barbs, this dice rolls for barbs don't happen.
Techs are not allowed without the first city settled

There are perhaps other possibilities, but my memory decay is doing its job gradually.

Now you basically know all about huts (perhaps to know furthermore that huts are separated mnimally by three tiles between them; for better hut pathfinder...), turn them off unless you just want some casual emotional bursts.

Thanks Tachy, good stuff.

After 10 dice rolls in a row without a compatible result, the dice roll is stopped and the hut returns not only nothing but also no message

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Thanks, the last time that happened I got confused because I never saw a message and then finally chalked it off to Old Geezer wasn't paying attention as close as he thought he was.

Tachywaxon said:

I have a much better advice for all of you: don't play with huts.

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I know this is a popular sentiment, but I disagree. I always play with huts on, because either it makes it a bit harder (on Deity, anyways), or on rare occasions you get to have the fun of winning the lottery by popping a few techs or a scout. It's basically win/win.

Same thing goes for events, although the frustration factor of getting bad events is very conspicuous, whereas it's more of a general escalation in difficulty when the AIs gobble up lots of huts. I can understand why players might be opposed to events, but the resistance to huts doesn't quite jive with me. I'm totally biased by my love of randomness though.

I agree 100%. Now if you're doing comparison games, I can see why you'd want to take these elements outs, but for normal play the added randomness is just another aspect of the game, just like your starting territory, and neighbors. But again it's neither right or wrong, just personal preference.