When the AI consistently beats you to a wonder by 1 turn...

fyar said:

The WORST example of this happening for me was when I had been going for one of those wonders (I think Chichen Itza or Notre Dame?) and my capital said I was 1 turn away from finishing. Well, that 1 turn passed, and it didn't finish. I thought it was strange, but didn't think too much of it until hit "Next Turn" again only to find that the AI finished it in some far off land!

I was really annoyed, so I loaded an autosave to investigate why it didn't finish on the turn that it was supposed to. After loading and reloading a few times, I figured out that it was because my Golden Age ended, and the expected completion time was counting on the +20% , but apparently the Golden Age ends before the city adds the hammers into your production. Without that extra +20%, I fell 3 hammers short. Had I known that the hammers would get added in this way, I could've manually added 3 hammers for that turn. But the city screen told me it was 1 turn away, and I believed it.

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That is REALLY annoying. I regularly encounter that "magically created one turn" resulting from elapsed Golden Ages, and it always does seem to happen when I have 1 turn remaining on a city production, but I've never had it result in missing a Wonder by that 1 turn. Good reminder to check hammer production on critical building projects during the last turn of a GA!

Lochlann, I appreciate your help. There was no random seed, and absolutely no other changes. I wish I had saved the game.

Anyway, late on a Friday here and I am turning in. Thanks for the suggestions and it is probably something minor. I am not getting paranoid- but I still hate the AI!

Cheers

Lochlann said:

That is REALLY annoying. I regularly encounter that "magically created one turn" resulting from elapsed Golden Ages, and it always does seem to happen when I have 1 turn remaining on a city production, but I've never had it result in missing a Wonder by that 1 turn. Good reminder to check hammer production on critical building projects during the last turn of a GA!

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Yeah, I was much more annoyed because I felt deceived by the Golden Age turns counter. If the effects weren't going to be active for the next turn, the game should've just told me that my Golden Age had already ended.

Edit: I realized that this could adversely affect, say, Persia, who would have 1 less turn of military maneuvers with their UA active. So I would suggest having the counter start at 9 instead of 10, and then on the last turn it should read "Golden Age turns remaining: 0" and the cities should show the normal hammer production without the +20%. But it's so rare that this makes as drastic a difference as happened to me that I doubt it's high on their priority list.

Cicerosaurus said:

Lochlann, I appreciate your help. There was no random seed, and absolutely no other changes. I wish I had saved the game.

Anyway, late on a Friday here and I am turning in. Thanks for the suggestions and it is probably something minor. I am not getting paranoid- but I still hate the AI!

Cheers

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Cheers man, no problem at all. I believe I mentioned having a touch of the OCD. It's tempting to turn to good old Sherlock for the answer here, and say that clearly the AI must change things in response to "peeking" or whatever, but...hmm. More data would be good.

Or we could always give a nod to Iris Dement, and just let the mystery be.

fyar said:

Yeah, I was much more annoyed because I felt deceived by the Golden Age turns counter. If the effects weren't going to be active for the next turn, the game should've just told me that my Golden Age had already ended.

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Yeah. It's easy to overlook the fact that all "projections" in the game are based on current values and statistics. It's nice when it works in the opposite direction, though; occasionally I'll jump from "2 turns remaining" right to a tech discovery, skipping over "1 turn remaining", due to some sciency thing or another being built/expanded/whatever and not taken into account in the previous turn's projection.

I think the AI is just good at beelining to wonder production. I played a game as Romans, and I was trying to beeline the Eiffel Tower. I was behind the Germans in getting Radio, and they already grabbed Broadway, so I knew the race was probably already on. I maxed one of my top production cities to build ET, and was lucky enough to get a GE during the time I was building it. However, I thought I would hold on to it rather than just use it up, thinking that I might just wait to see if Bismark beat me to the ET and then reload the turn earlier and rush it with the GE to beat Bismark.

Well, Bismark did beat me to ET, so I reloaded the turn earlier and rushed my GE to finish ET, but found that Bismark still beat me to it. It appears that the project did not actually complete on the turn that I filled all it's hammers, but rather the turn after, which meant that Bismark must have already filled all his hammers for it the turn before I used my engineer.

Anyways, I happened to also have another save from about 5 turns earlier, so I reloaded that game and rushed my GE three turns before the turn Bismark built ET from my other save, and that's when I managed to beat Bismark to it. So, my take is that the AI doesn't get any magical ability to beat players to wonders, it's just really good at making the play for them.

I do not think I ever played a game where i didn't get Eifel Tower (hard building it). Thats probably because I always enter Modern trough Radio, and at that point I already have tech lead, so the AI simply has no shot at it.

And, yet again...the 1-turn wonder snatch....In my current game, last night, I had one turn left to get Petra in an ideal city....and I could have rush-built it with an engineer, but I thought I was in a good position, but.. Alas, it was not to be!!

It kind of takes the thrill out of the game a bit, but I'll play on and probably become a bit of a "warmonger"...at this point I don't know where Petra is, but it probably doesn't matter now.... And a bit later, I was also a couple of turns away from Machu Picchu in another city and it was "scooped" as well...

But, hey, Alex is very close and he has built a few wonders that I "covet". With any luck he'll be the one who beats me to the "Forbidden Palace"...and then he'll pay the price for any frustration I've been having to endure....

funkymunky said:

It appears that the project did not actually complete on the turn that I filled all it's hammers, but rather the turn after, which meant that Bismark must have already filled all his hammers for it the turn before I used my engineer.

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Yeah, this is a separate issue, also very frustrating. The GE's special ability is unique among Great Person actions in that its effect takes place on the following turn instead of immediately. Bulbing a tech with a GS, founding a religion with a GP, starting a golden age with a GA, producing a great work with a GWAM, etc.; these all take place on the turn you activate the ability. Not so with the GE. (It can be argued that the actual benefits of some of these things don't come into effect until the following turn, such as the increased gold from golden ages, but the golden age is still "in effect" from the moment the GA is expended.)

More on that issue here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=508718

In my current game Egypt has beaten me to the choice culture wonders and thanks to my diplomat I'm able to see that he is pulling in 180+ hammers when he builds a wonder. My diplomat says he is only pulling in 150 hammers so that makes me suspect the AI uses its trade caravans to bolster production.

I got to Rocket Artillery first and so I'll just have to take em by force......

Wojciech Rodzik said:

Happened to me once (China took Machu Picchu from me one turn after I used GE!!!:/).

I just took my army, and after long and bloody siege captured Beijing + Wonder which was RIGHTFULLY MINE.

In your face AI

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Hey, in Civ5 it's a perfectly legitimate diplomatic reason for war: "You built wonders that they coveted!"

Yeah, I do that, too. These things get *personal*, darn it!