Does anyone use "avoid growth"

Ahh-haa! I'm sensing vibes of a new K-Mod version just around the corner... :lol:

Indeed - but on closer inspection, I don't think I'll be changing those emphasis buttons just yet. It's mostly just an aesthetics problem. I want to change it for better functionality and control, but I don't want it to look awful or be confusing to use... I've got some ideas, but I think it's going to be a bit more difficult than I originally thought, and it isn't a high priority at the moment.

I'm pretty much ready to upload a new version of K-Mod, but I think I'm close to corning an OOS bug. Multiplayer stability is one of the core goals of K-Mod so I'm waiting to play a few more multiplayer games to (maybe) see this OOS problem so that I can fix it for the new version.

(I don't know if anyone actually uses K-Mod for multiplayer games anyway... But they should, because it has less OOS problems!)
 
Hmm, now that no one tries to use the global upgrade all units of one type option anymore and always running it in admin mode (which seems to eliminated the golden age oos issues) , we haven't seen an OOS problem in years. And we average a game or so a week.

But we have been looking to upgrade to K-mod for MP. We have just never pulled the trigger.
 
Indeed - but on closer inspection, I don't think I'll be changing those emphasis buttons just yet. It's mostly just an aesthetics problem. I want to change it for better functionality and control, but I don't want it to look awful or be confusing to use... I've got some ideas, but I think it's going to be a bit more difficult than I originally thought, and it isn't a high priority at the moment.

Just a thought: For me, the "DRAFT" button is butt-fugly... Maybe you can 'skin' that button?

And while you're at it... the three "rush" buttons on top (draft, whip, pay) might be collapsible into one row of three buttons; that will give you an additional row for your Good Things To Come™ ;)
 
Avoid growth button is the only button in city manager that I use, after reading about it in Kossin's micro challenge. Before that I had barely even noticed those small buttons there. Still don't know what the other buttons do...

Those are the governor buttons. You can have cities automate the tiles citizens work. These buttons also influence what improvements automated workers will build in your cities' fat crosses. They actually work fairly well. I never used those buttons until watching TheMeInTeam's "Let's play Civ 4" videos on YouTube. After he gets his main core cities up and running, he uses those buttons and automates workers (he's Immortal/Deity level player). Apparently, automation works fairly well when you use the emphasis buttons.

You can emphasize :food:, :commerce:, :hammers: or specialists and you can tell the city which specialists to focus on but I forget how to do that.
 
No, automation doesn't work well at all even with the buttons. TMIT never advocated for it, but he did use it some simply as he is a super fast player that didn't want the bother at times. However, he was very cognizant and valued the important of good early worker management whether he did so or not in a specific game. Interestingly, I really learned about this during a little experiment Phil ran a few years ago, posting a game where everyone tried automating workers from the start, and using those buttons. It was that experiment that convinced how bad automating workers is regardless.
 
Wait, I didn't say early game automation. He never did that. I said
After he gets his main core cities up and running, he uses those buttons and automates workers (he's Immortal/Deity level player)
After you get your cities specialized and up and running, you can use these automation and it works fine. In most of his earlier videos he does say how the buttons work fairly well once you have your core empire set up. As for Phil's test, no you should NEVER automate workers in the beginning of the game. It is far too important to get the exact tile improvements up and running. This is for mid-to-late game and it does work fairly well in that capacity.
 
Whether or not automation works well is kind of beside the point, because the Avoid Growth button does something unique which automation cannot do: prevents the city's population from increasing when the food bar is full. Avoid Growth has it's own special game mechanics complete aside from automation.

I personally don't like that Avoid Growth has that effect. I'd prefer for it to just avoid growth rather than prevent growth; but I'm currently just the mechanics of it alone, because I don't think it matter much and some people actually like it.

In terms of automation, I agree that it's generally wise to not automate anything in the early game - because in the early game, micromanagement is the only thing that can possibly give you an edge over the other players. (On anything higher than noble difficulty, The AI has a heap of different bonuses that the human player doesn't get. If you just automate your workers and your cities, you're essentially letting the AI control your stuff. How are you going to beat the AI if you're playing the same way they are playing?)

That said, I've put a lot of work into the automatic citizen allocation for the next (unreleased) version of K-Mod. I've been dissatisfied with it for a long time now, and I've made a lot of attempts at improving it. The new version still isn't perfect but I think I can finally say that I'm happy with it. I've found it a surprisingly difficult task to solve. With each attempt there always seem to be some rare fringe cases which result in the AI doing something stupid...
 
i made a mod that put extra food into a national treasury when a city has avoid growth on. then other cities can take this food from the treasury. basically move food between cities.
 
i made a mod that put extra food into a national treasury when a city has avoid growth on. then other cities can take this food from the treasury. basically move food between cities.

That would make the game a micromanagers paradise. One advantage for human over AI too. To me it sounds like too much work.
 
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