unusual start primary luxury outside range of starting settler

joncnunn

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I've frequently used the legendary setting and so am used to having a lot of nearby copies of one luxury, but this is the first game I've ever had where no copies of the primary luxury were within range of the settler. Instead the capital has two different luxary tiles that it will work; neither is the primary luxury.
See screen shot. I settled in place in 4000 BC after moving the warrior showed nothing much better.

See screen shot which shows the Cotton is my primary luxury and my obvious second city will work a lot of it by more capital will never work it.
(My capital will instead work Citrus and Gems.) Sorry, my phone decided to switch to landscape mode taking the picture ...

Pantheon chosen (actually already have due to Religious City just off screen : Desert Faith)

Second city will be on a river Cotton.
Third or Fourth city will be in the northern part of the landmass to my E

I need to explore the territory with of the city state to see if there's anything worthwhile.

edit: Image ended sideways; it should be rotated 90% clockwise. In addition, the image is better on my desktop; either the process of uploading it here scaled down the image or the viewer zoomed way out.
 

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That's really hard to see, but I think the game occasionally messes up the map coding. Once as Egypt on a normal BNW game (no mods) I started in a desert with Citrus on the flood plains. Never saw that before or after that game.
 
That's really hard to see

That appears to be the fault of this sites viewer; the image quality is indeed better on my desktop on photo gallery than when I clicked on the image viewer here.
 
I can't make out anything in that screenshot. But based on your description, and the fact that you're playing a Legendary Start, I suspect you'll unearth a lot of Strategic Resources around your capital in the future.
 
I'm curious what the rest of the map looks like. This is a good example of the "few" deficiencies within the default script.

There's at least two things that could have happened:

Also, you can use these charts as a good reference:
luxury weights per region
luxury tile preferences

Also, to let you know, cotton is one of the "problem" luxuries in the default game with very inflexible placements.

- - - - - - - -

1. I assume your region was designated as a desert one. That means, cotton could very well have been designated as your regional luxury. This is a bad thing for the default game to do, because it's dependant upon flood plains! On top of that, cotton will not be placed on regular plains which usually surround desert -- only grass! (Which is a little unnecessary, in my opinion, along with some other luxuries -- especially when there are already odd placements which exist in the game, like ivory up in the tundra because river tiles were converted to plains before placement.) Citrus and Sugar do this as well (I guess because of the limited number of luxuries, Firaxis was desperate to get more luxury types designated to desert regions). But the game couldn't place your regional luxury near your city; so instead, will compensate for it within the rest of the region (which still stinks... and especially if you were Venice!).

- - - - - - - -

2. This one is much less likely. Perhaps, cotton isn't "your" regional luxury and it is another civ's. Sometimes, when placing a city with a region, the game locates the spot more towards the edges of your defined region instead of more towards the middle because of the fertility scores of the tile groups. Also, sometimes during regional luxury placements because of randomness and/or the tile preferences of luxuries, your regional luxuries can be placed far from your starting city. So, your start may have been around the edges of your region and another civ's regional luxury was placed and grouped further from their city. So, it looks like they're "yours".

Though, you're still missing that third luxury under the Legendary setting, right? Well, there's also another small infrequent bug during "second" luxury types placed at starts (and in your case, "third" too). When the code scans the start for tile attributes so that it can later choose and roll for appropriate luxury types which prefer those attributes, the code doesn't first check to make sure a resource (regional luxury) isn't already placed there. If the attribute is rare around the city and also a resource is on top of it, then a luxury type could very well be chosen for it still and when the game tries to place it, and it can't place it anywhere else, it just moves on and you're out of luck.

So, in your case, there's a small chance the citrus is actually your regional luxury and more couldn't be placed around your start so you don't see them yet (it's very unlikely to be the gems since that doesn't belong to the desert region choices for regional luxuries). Then during the phase to place the additional luxuries the code scanned that hill within the 2-tile radius of your city and added a bunch of hill luxuries to the pool to randomly choose from. If two hill luxuries were chosen that don't like being placed on flat plains/desert tiles, then those gems just blocked out the additional luxury from being placed -- the start is now less legendary. :)

Though, as said, it's probably #1 which happened.

- - - - - - - -

If anybody is interested, I have a mod which fixes things like this and a lot more:
More Luxuries and Optimized Resource Distribution

When I get back into the swing of things, I'm also going to release another version without the extra luxuries (though, the fixes will be a little more limited without the additional luxury types) and a deluxe version which adds some really cool things. I also have some more things planned for the mod linked above, since there are more things to improve within the code.
 
I can't make out anything in that screenshot. But based on your description, and the fact that you're playing a Legendary Start, I suspect you'll unearth a lot of Strategic Resources around your capital in the future.

I've reached techs to reveal Horses & Iron; there is a horse in the general area but it was 5 tiles away from the capital. In addition, Horse isn't within range of my second city on the other River.

Closest Iron is outside the screen shot but on my land mass; however the only way to get to it via land is by marching thru the city states territory. (about 8 tiles as the crow flies; about 15 via land)

It remains to be seen on if I was granted late game strategic resources near my capital;
but that second city has the numerous tiles I'd normally expect my capital to have in a legendary start.

I don't have sailing yet so I don't have any more territory revealed.
 
I've reached techs to reveal Horses & Iron; there is a horse in the general area but it was 5 tiles away from the capital. In addition, Horse isn't within range of my second city on the other River.

Closest Iron is outside the screen shot but on my land mass; however the only way to get to it via land is by marching thru the city states territory. (about 8 tiles as the crow flies; about 15 via land)

It remains to be seen on if I was granted late game strategic resources near my capital;
but that second city has the numerous tiles I'd normally expect my capital to have in a legendary start.

I don't have sailing yet so I don't have any more territory revealed.

Well, there's still the all-important Coal/Oil/Aluminum/Uranium yet to go . . . if you feel like playing this game out long enough to find out. I hope you do since I'm curious to see if my theory is correct, or if it's the bug that Barathor mentioned.
 
Legendary Start has nothing to do with strategic resources. It adds a third luxury type at civ start locations and adds two more bonus resources to the determined number needed for that location.

Strategic Balance adds a major node of only horse, iron, and oil at civ start locations.

Save for only a few normalization methods (one attempts to place a small node of horse or iron to low production areas) all luxuries are placed first. The Strategic Balance option above runs before normal luxury placements, but I believe joncnunn used Legendary Start for this game instead.
 
Did you use a camera outside the computer that you were using? You could take a screenshot by pressing f12 during the game.
 
Did you use a camera outside the computer that you were using? You could take a screenshot by pressing f12 during the game.

I usually just hit the "PrtScn" button and paste it into MS Paint or Word or something.
 
Did you use a camera outside the computer that you were using? You could take a screenshot by pressing f12 during the game.

Yup; my camera takes them in jpeg; the other keys place it some weird format that ms paint doesn't understand.

Indoor lighting conditions might not have been the best at the time. The image if the site's viewer would expand to the whole screen would be better.
 
I have a bit more of the map discovered:
Cotton was confirmed as the intended primary luxury for me and not one of my neighbors.

But yes, none of the Cotton was on plains tiles; one was on flood plains tile and the rest were on grassland tiles.
I also lost one copy of Cotton to the city state. So this left me with only 4 copies of Cotton. (3 workable by my second city; and last workable by my third city on the coast)

There's only one hill other than Gems within range of my capital; so unless Coal appears on flat plains, it does look like my start is less than legendary due to the generator overvaluing plains.

(I was though able to secure Iron in my fourth city; but it required an early war whose sole purpose was to kill an AIs settler that was in route to it.)
 
Online software can allow you to convert the screenshot from printscreen or f12 to jpg or any other image type that is uploadable by civfanatics.
 
Online software can allow you to convert the screenshot from printscreen or f12 to jpg or any other image type that is uploadable by civfanatics.

Never noticed what type of format the Steam screenshots are in, but you can just upload them on steam and then link to the image online for those of us here. If you press Prt Sc it goes to your clipboard - paste that into Paint and save as a .jpg and you're set. Although not sure how it works for Civ 5, it definitely does for Civ 4, but Prt Sc disagrees with some modern games.
 
but Prt Sc disagrees with some modern games.

That's because Civ V and some other programs overrides the hot key away from standard windows functionality and reinvented the square-wheel :( Things may be better for those with Macs.

Civ IV actually overrode it as well; but in that case it was still readable by paint and able to be converted.

Civ III was the last version they left the key alone.

A good tool for screenshots is now built into MS Office & MS Outlook (since around 2010 or so) ; but my home machine doesn't have MS Office nor MS Outlook and my office would greatly frown upon me installing Steam or Civ V onto my work machine.
 
Well, there's still the all-important Coal/Oil/Aluminum/Uranium yet to go . . . if you feel like playing this game out long enough to find out. I hope you do since I'm curious to see if my theory is correct, or if it's the bug that Barathor mentioned.

Coal: Not on my starting landmass and nearest source is about 15 tiles away. It's a large one [7] In fact the city states had very little coal compared to normal (only one city state; it seems that both Brazil and the Incas being in the same game may have used up most of the world's coal)

Oil: One source workable by my capital; no other oil on my landmass (nor off the coast). The was the small oil reserve [3]

Aluminum: One source on my starting landmass about 8 tiles from the capital (as the crow flies). Right next to the 6 Iron. This was the small Alum deposit [3]

I've not yet reached the tech for Uranium.
 
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