Screenshot of the Day #117: Shrinking Border

Thunderfall

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A friend and I were playing over his LAN. He captured the last British city that had culture in it. For some reason the culture radius didn't decline until the next turn. When the borders shrank he got a message saying "Our borders have shrunk due to declining culture". I have never seen this and thought it was interesting.

http://www.civfanatics.com/sotd/sotd117.jpg

Thanks to DogBoy for the screenshot.
 
Wow. That's pretty interesting. Usually when I capture an enemy city, the cultural borders shrink immediately, just like in single player civ 3.
 
I think this bug was reported some time ago - I think either Cracker or Zachriel noted it in a GOTM some months ago (although it may have predated that)

IIRC the culture shrinkage bug is triggered when you actually have a cultural building create some culture. It seems the game doesn't recalculate the city culture boundary until there is a change to the amount of culture, so it gets 'stuck' with the old culture until you actually add some, then it redoes the sums and gives you the correct, smaller, radius.

It's similar in concept to the GA wonder weirdness, whereby the game only checks your civ for wonders triggering GAs when you build one, not when you capture one. So a military, religuous civ CAn trigger a GA by building a commercial wonder IF they have recently captured what would have been a 'qualifying' wonder. The game only recognizes changes to game conditions under restricted conditions. A bit sloppy, IMHO.
 
I believe the game can be modded to give buildings negative culture, however MadScot's explaination seems to be the best reasoning.
 
I believe the game can be modded to give buildings negative culture
Really? Didn't know that. Opens up some interesting possibilities for city improvements. Maybe a bordello (one unhappy citizen content but -1 culture/turn):D
 
This is a bit off topic - I like the dropdown menu at the top of the screen and I'm curious how to get it. Is it only a multi player thing, or is it in all PTW games?
 
Originally posted by Chaps
This is a bit off topic - I like the dropdown menu at the top of the screen and I'm curious how to get it. Is it only a multi player thing, or is it in all PTW games?

It's a multi player thing.
 
Everyone keeps calling this a bug, but why would a programmer have even typed in the quote, "Our borders have shrunk due to declining culture" if it was never meant to happen?
There must be a reason to see this..
Is it just for games that have modified buildings, etc?
 
how do you make it so it keeps a history of htose messages?(WLTKD, borders, etc) because sometimes, there are messages, and my comp just skips it cause its goin pretty fast
 
“Our borders have shrunk…” is probably in there to be used when the AI’s border pushes yours back because it has higher culture (only on higher difficulty levels).
 
Originally posted by PritomD
how do you make it so it keeps a history of htose messages?(WLTKD, borders, etc) because sometimes, there are messages, and my comp just skips it cause its goin pretty fast

That's only in Multiplayer. There really is no message history in single player, although a message log would be quite useful for both.

Originally posted by Chaps
?Our borders have shrunk?? is probably in there to be used when the AI?s border pushes yours back because it has higher culture (only on higher difficulty levels).

Nope. There is no message when the AI's borders push yours back. This happened when a city was captured, and the borders didn't shrink back to level 1 until the next turn.

Maybe the message is in there in case you have something that gives negative culture, that shrinks the borders. :hmm:
 
This is nothing new and we first reported and documented this bug in the Civ3 software back in June of 2002.

Here is the discussion thread where this bug was revealed and confirmed by independent testing:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27119&highlight=corona

There were images of this bug displayed in the campaign review against Japan from the Gotm9 records:

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/japan_campaign/campaign_choices.htm

We even dedicated a webpage to the problem on August 10, 2002.

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/corona_bug.htm

The bug is related to the cultural memory function for cities and the fact that the internal ID numbers for civilizations and cities can be mis-matched in some turns due to some early bugs in the implementation of multiplayer internal identification. The bug even shows up in single player games when you know what to look for. It has been present in all versions of the game since Civ3v1.21f including v1.29f plus the first 3 versions of PTW. We have not yet confirmed it the PTWv1.21 patch.
 
I knew the bug, but the accompanying text is new to me and I think it's weird. Why put in a text to point to a bug that shouldn't have happenend in the first place?

Prolly the famous Firaxis school of programming again :)
 
Originally posted by Hygro
I believe the game can be modded to give buildings negative culture, however MadScot's explaination seems to be the best reasoning.

I'm using negative culture in my mod for some buildings, but the culture never shrinks. It only gets subtracted from the total until it reaches 0. After that there's no effect.
 
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