Goody Huts' Mechanics

Hi everyone,

I wonder if there is one article or thread all about Tribal Huts because research function didn't give me something that relevant about it. For Civ III, experimental insights have been done and mechanics have been unveiled, while there is nothing related to CIV's tribal villages.
What I'm requesting isn't only the probs of results from huts, but also some their behaviours or properties (Some insights can optimize goody huts hunt) . For example, from what I've learnt experimentally:

*Goody Huts never are closer than three tiles; that means regions not discovered by our early scout and within three tiles of a hut we've discovered can be ignored.

* We never get a tech from goody huts before founding its first city.

* AI scouts seem to ignore jungles; we can explore jungle at the end of exploration and find late huts for potential high value techs. (Thx Sun Tzu )

* Experience given to the discoverer of the hut and warrior given by villagers results seem to occur only after 10 turns (normal speed)

* At some distance of cultural border, whatsoever the popper (warrior, scout, worker, etc.), we never get barbs as a result.

Of course, I wonder what are probs under circumstances:

- Scout pops huts
- Before settling its first settler
- When free xp points and given warrior are taken in account
- Settler or Worker pops the huts
- Any other situation I don't know

I thank in advance any contributors that'll make tribal villages less secretive.

All of the probabilities can be found in CIV4HandicapInfo.xml

*Goody Huts never are closer than three tiles; that means regions not discovered by our early scout and within three tiles of a hut we've discovered can be ignored.

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That's right - it's controlled by iGoodyRange in CIV4ImprovementsInfo.xml

Tachywaxon said:

* We never get a tech from goody huts before founding its first city.

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That's right - it's a side effect of the way research works. Importantly, the hut pop that happens when you found a city immediately adjacent happens before the city is founded.

Tachywaxon said:

* AI scouts seem to ignore jungles; we can explore jungle at the end of exploration and find late huts for potential high value techs. (Thx Sun Tzu )

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Might be so - I know squat about AI movement code.

Tachywaxon said:

* Experience given to the discoverer of the hut and warrior given by villagers results seem to occur only after 10 turns (normal speed)

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20 turns, I think -- it seems to be hard coded into CvPlayer::canReceiveGoody(). I don't believe it will be adjusted for game speed.

Tachywaxon said:

* At some distance of cultural border, whatsoever the popper (warrior, scout, worker, etc.), we never get barbs as a result.

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Not quite true. We never get barbs when you have no cities (same timing as discovering a tech). If you have exactly one city, and the hut is closer than 8 tiles by plotDistance from the nearest city controlled by your team, it can't pop barbs. but further cities can.

plotDistance essentially means how many border pops away the city is. It sort of means that diagonal steps count 1.5.

Once you have more than one city, all bets are off.

Tachywaxon said:

Of course, I wonder what are probs under circumstances:

- Scout pops huts
- Before settling its first settler
- When free xp points and given warrior are taken in account
- Settler or Worker pops the huts
- Any other situation I don't know

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The main rule is this: the contents of the hut are not determined until the hut is popped. Then the game starts rolling dice until either (a) you get a goody you can receive, or (b) you exceed NUM_DO_GOODY_ATTEMPTS (GlobalDefines.xml - 10 by default - in which case you get nuttin'.

Scouts can't get bad goodies. Healthy units can't get healed. Non combat units can't get experience. You can't get a tech if there's no discoverable tech you can currently research, etc. See CvPlayer::canReceiveGoody.

And, keep in mind that the algorithm is "roll the dice on a goody, then see if you can get it", not "see which goodies you can get, then roll the dice to pick one". Since the number of retries is capped at 10, the absolute probabilities are somewhat less than you might naively calculate.

VoiceOfUnreason said:

20 turns, I think -- it seems to be hard coded into CvPlayer::canReceiveGoody(). I don't believe it will be adjusted for game speed.

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Thx for answering VoiceOfReason.

The earliest I got was 10 turns.

VoiceOfUnreason said:

The main rule is this: the contents of the hut are not determined until the hut is popped.

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Is it some hack-proof rule? It seems so.

VoiceOfUnreason said:

(b) you exceed NUM_DO_GOODY_ATTEMPTS (GlobalDefines.xml - 10 by default - in which case you get nuttin'

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So? The strange disappearance of huts when popped is the nuttin' result. I always thought it was a bug. But it is a rare result.

It's sad I never get much replies in my threads. But VoiceOfReason gave me a solid one.

Tachywaxon,

It's a good thread - I just can't add anything to it!

I remember looking without luck some months back for a Strategy Article to confirm for me that; 'you can't pop a technology from a Goodie Hut until you found your first city', although it was mentioned in a few posts within this forum. Seeing that interpreting code isn't my 'strong suit', an article such as the one you have proposed is quite handy. Even until today I didn't realise that the AI avoids jungle when scouting!

Cam_H said:

Tachywaxon,

It's a good thread - I just can't add anything to it!

I remember looking without luck some months back for a Strategy Article to confirm for me that; 'you can't pop a technology from a Goodie Hut until you found your first city', although it was mentioned in a few posts within this forum. Seeing that interpreting code isn't my 'strong suit', an article such as the one you have proposed is quite handy. Even until today I didn't realise that the AI avoids jungle when scouting!

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It's reassuring that my thread isn't useless; the last about settler capturing (I mean defeat a settler and then we get a worker) wasn't popular at all and only AZ had a bit to say about it. I just wanted to know if it could be considered as a bug or not, but I only heard grasshoppers' opinion. lol

Before Sun Tzu Wu's remark, I've noticed there were remaining goody huts in jungle. I didn't pay attention to this. I observed twice Alexander (G-Major 89) avoiding jungle, probably for optimizing scouting.

As regards the no tech rule before settling, I just tested it in worlbuilder by popping all huts and then I added more and more to pop more then. In consequence, never pop a hut before settling as the best result is a scout.

I've only my own experience to offer;

Voice, are you including scouts as non-combat units? My scouts receive experience virtually every game. I habitually make the scouts woodsman I and II.

Also like to point out that I've NEVER gotten a single null-benefit result from a hut until I played on monarch. Is there a variation in this determination based on difficulty level? (I was surprised at this too, but chalked it up to the difficulty level--previous civ versions have had this feature.)

Peregrine - I would guess that because on lower difficulties there are more good options, you're less likely to get a null result. The Difficulty Levels thread has a nice summation of the odds of getting any given result on each difficulty
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=15813

Peregrine said:

Voice, are you including scouts as non-combat units? My scouts receive experience virtually every game. I habitually make the scouts woodsman I and II.

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No I am not - technically, the actual check is CvUnit::canAcquirePromotionAny(). So of course scouts can score XP... although not in the first 10 turns (another turn check).

Also, there's a threshold for healing to kick in.... If I'm reading it correctly, unless the unit is below 40% max health, the healing goody is skipped.

Coanda has the right explanation for null results. Well, that, and the fact that as you go up in level, you start to adjust your play to avoid the less desirable outcomes.



Not an article I recommend writing - it's an awful lot of work for little payoff.

Tachywaxon said:

So? The strange disappearance of huts when popped is the nuttin' result. I always thought it was a bug. But it is a rare result.

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Hmm, what happens when you don't get anything from your Hut? Is there at least some kind of a message, such as "The villagers were too frightened of you and ran away," or perhaps "As you walked into the village, you slipped on a leaf and fell flat on your face. The villagers laughed you out of town. "

Is the behaviour instead simply nothing happening? I.e. Does the game leave you thinking that you saw a phantom Hut? A Ghost Town? A graphical glitch wherein you just figure that an AI must have beaten you to the Hut and that the graphics didn't update on your screen in time, particularly for a Hut that you had already seen but had been in the fog of war (such as when you got a Map from a different Hut)?

Dhoomstriker said:

Hmm, what happens when you don't get anything from your Hut? Is there at least some kind of a message, such as "The villagers were too frightened of you and ran away," or perhaps "As you walked into the village, you slipped on a leaf and fell flat on your face. The villagers laughed you out of town. "

Is the behaviour instead simply nothing happening? I.e. Does the game leave you thinking that you saw a phantom Hut? A Ghost Town? A graphical glitch wherein you just figure that an AI must have beaten you to the Hut and that the graphics didn't update on your screen in time, particularly for a Hut that you had already seen but had been in the fog of war (such as when you got a Map from a different Hut)?

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On a desert, I would assume it is a mirage...
On a serious note, my best case of the nuttin' result was from cultural expansion of my capital over a hut: it just plop down with the usual sound characteristic of a discovered hut. This goody hut was there for sure.