Prebuild problem.

[automator]

My last game, I decided to take advantage of this "prebuilding" thing I'd heard about here.

So I was at the middle/tail end of AA and wanted Art of War. My production centers were kicking out units for a war I was engaged in, so rather than pull one of them off assembly, I set a secondary city to building a collossium -- said it'd take 40 turns, and I mapped out fewer than 40 turns before I'd be done researching feudalism (or whichever tech gives AoW). Finished the research, went to my city that had been prebuilding and tried to switch it over to AofW. No dice. I checked all my cities to make sure AofW wasn't in any of their queues ... no one did. To the city that was pre-building I could add AofW on the queue after the collossium, and it would be done in 45 turns. That wouldn't help, since it still had like 10 or so turns left on collossium.

What was happening? I ended up giving AofW to a core city to try getting that one to build it, but I was beat by another civ about halfway through the build process. Had my prebuild worked, I would've gotten AofW.

[MrMahk]

Ok, 2 things here:
1. This has happened to me before, except it was for the FP, so there really wasn't any urgency to get it finished. However, I just had the city build something else, and a few turns later I looked and it would let me build it. Weird, but it worked.

2. If your city will build a colosseum in 40 turns, that means it's getting just 3 shields per turn. (40 turns/120 shield project=1/3=3 shields per turn, yeah I'm fancy I know) So prebuild or not this would not be a good choice to build Sun Tzu's as it is 600 shields, so even with the prebuild it would take (600-120 shields for the colosseum: 480 shields. 480/3=)160 more turns after that (this is not factoring growth in, but oh well.)
Just a little advice for you there, I think it is better to have at least a somewhat better if not core city build it.

[gunkulator]

Another possibility is that your colliseum build contained some "tainted shields". If you ever chopped a forest nearby or disbanded a unit in the city during the coliseum build, the shields obtained from these actions are considered tainted. You are not allowed to have any tainted shields when building wonders. This prevents someone from storing up a shields in a bunch of units and then disbanding them all at once.

[vmxa]

Yes it is tainted shields. IIRC there are no reqirement to build SunTzu, so it would show as grey if you could not build it due to some other city building it.

A prebuild is intended to hopefully hold enough shields for the wonderf or at least get it to the point no others could beat you without a leader. So for a 600 shield wonder, you need to use either another wonder or a palace. Even a palace probably is not large enough early in the game, but it will get you at least half way there.

[thetrooper]

"Tainted shields". Good term. Your "invention" gunkulator? I can't say that I've heard it before.

[gunkulator]

Naw, I'm not that creative, although I had just finished listening to "Tainted Love" right before replying...

[thetrooper]

Ah - a classic. Soft Cell isn't it?

[Drakan]

Soft Cell it is.

Whoring my own article on Prebuilds for nOObs

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=92070