1.0.0.621: Worked city tile sharing between nearby cities is broken

Perkus

Prince
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Old Save (from Sept 23 - pre .62 patch) attached. Reproducible in 1.0.0.621.

When the save loads, Rome is working a Furs resource tile to its NW. It's shared with Neapolis - either city could work it. If you go to Neapolis, it shows the two arrows for that tile, and doesn't show a yield even with the Citizen Management open, because that tile is not available to be worked. It knows somebody else is working it.

Now go back to Rome (it shouldn't matter how you switch cities - cycle or by banner), and stop working that tile. It shouldn't matter how you do it. Go to Neapolis again. Notice the tile now appears free (arrows are gone) but it still doesn't show a yield, even with the Citizen Management open. Do NOT click on the Furs tile yet. Try resetting the tiles worked assignments by clicking on the center tile or on "Reset Tiles". That tile will not be chosen to work. Try setting focus on Gold - it still won't be selected to be worked, despite producing 3 gold. Now carefully click on that Furs tile. Notice your first click is totally ignored. But this apparently ignored click actually makes the tile available to Neapolis. Now resetting the tiles works it, and focusing on gold will use that tile. You can also of course work it explicitly with a second click that now toggles it.

This is totally reproducible multiple times. While the attached save is very old and was created before patch .62, I believe this problem still exists as I saw it with .621 a few days ago. No, I don't have that save, and it was heavily modded anyway. I believe anyone with cities sharing tiles can reproduce this.

Aside from that, the City View screen only shows yields in hexes being worked if the Citizen Management panel is closed. To see the yield in others, you have to open it. While this isn't terribly useful design, it seems intended.

Save obtained from here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9865918#post9865918
 

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I'm not sure this is actually a bug - this is how it worked in Civ IV as well, if I recall. There, in the city view, the tiles that are claimed by another city, but unworked, are greyed out and have small yield icons. Clicking it once ungreys it, but doesn't force workers there. Clicking again forces workers there.

It could definitely be displayed better than just not showing yield icons for tiles claimed by another city. Perhaps a dot or a dash through the assignment 'coin' instead of it being blank or having arrows in it.

Oh, and hitting 'y' to display yields also works in the city screen, if you don't want to keep the citizen management panel open.
 
Hmm, it's been ages since I played Civ4, I never considered that this could be designed as intended. Even if so, my concern then would be that the city governor AI seems to not be able to transfer tile control between cities on its own. It would seem that left to its own governor AI, once a city works a tile, it owns it permanently, and the AI would never transfer control over it to another city, even if is highly advantageous to do so for some reason. That doesn't seem right.

I knew that Y would show the yields, but I don't see why it couldn't show the yields anyway without needing to do that. You could have the CM panel closed, but perhaps be changing specialists, and would like to see what the unworked tiles are providing.
 
Suprised to see this bug post was made 2 years ago and still exists. I'm experiencing this right now and its driving me insane to have to constanty micromanage efficiency out of my automated cities.

The problem is most noticable when swapping city priorities. Lets say I have 2 cities on default. I then decide to militarize and swap to production. Prior to noticing this bug I'd go to both cities (or in the case of my current game, a central city with its 3rd "ring" of hexes shared with 4 other cities), click production, then leave.

Late game is when I started noticing this, mainly due to causing starvations that I know shouldn't happen. Namely, City A swaps to production and in doing so, finds an optimal set of tiles and releases some old border tiles, including some good food sources. Now I go to city B and it can't find a production solution without starvation, because it won't grab the tiles that City A releases that perhaps lead to a much better solution.

Now, the people in the old discussion suggested this is intended behavior so as to enable a user to "claim" tiles for a specific city so as to intentionally block other cities. Thats a sound idea, until you notice that if theres a cluster of these "blank" tiles and you click on one of them the requsitie 2-3 times before the game will actually add a citizen ... you'll notice that some of the other neighboring "blank" tiles will suddently update even though you didn't touch them. Hence why I believe this is a bug.

The screenshot below illustrates a city with lots of "blank tiles" (also, notice mountains get a slot til you click on it) on the first 5 settings. The left side is with them untouched, the right side is after getting every hex recognized by the AI. In some cases you get strictly much better results.





 
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