Archaeology Strangeness

Well that's weird. I'm playing Arabia. An archeologist doing some work in the unsettled northern tundra just sent his report, and it's: "Razed City. Conquerer: Arabia. Founded by: Egypt. Classical Era"

I've fought exactly one war in this game, and yes, it was against Egypt. However, as I recall (and it was this weekend), I never razed any cities, and Egypt never founded any on my side of the continent (it's kind of a "U" shape, with me at the top of one end, Egypt on the top of the other, Greeks and Iroqois between at the bottom of the U, and the war was fought during the medieval era, meaning I had to go down and up the U, rather than across the middle. (I did it to expunge Islam from the world.)

I have, however, dispersed quite a few barbarian camps from that spot.

Is this a bug, or a feature? Did the game improperly remember, or is the game modeling the imperfect memories civilizations have of their past? Did the archaeologist find evidence of a battle, know that there were hostilities between Arabia and Egypt at around that time, and come to the wrong conclusion? Or did the game screw up when generating the site?

Well if there were less incidents than the exact number of artifacts then obviously stuff has to be made up^^

It still might be unintended, don't know. But in general there seems to be a lot of randomness about archaeology... in my last game I was absolutely sure I was clicking on the artifact that said it was a Short Sword. Going to my cultural overview then to re-arrange stuff for the theming bonus there was no short sword but a different item (the era and the CS remained though, just the item type changed).

In my opinion, the Artifact Dig Sites have a far too narrow script. It seems like it just looks at what and which cities or civs are nearby and tries to cross the two nearest civs in a "_____ city razed by ______" pronouncement. What the specific artifact is is entirely random. Now if all artifacts were Ancient (as most of them are) I'd say it was a splinter group from your own civ that wandered off to do its own thing before you established your first city. (Kind of like the 12 Lost Tribes of Israel.) So the fact that you hadn't razed any cities doesn't matter. But when there are artifacts from the Classical. Medieval, etc., later eras, that gets way off track and complicates what is supposed to be a simple mechanic.

Did you ever read Xenophon's The Persian Expedition? Long story short, a Greek mercenary arny, the Ten Thousand, gets stranded in Asia Minor after the main expedition has things go sideways. The book relates the events as they have to march through hundreds of miles of hostile territory, looting and pillaging along the way. So, there is a premise of "Persian city, razed by Greeks" that was NOT done specifically by the Greek "player". So you could look at those results that were NOT done by you, but is attributed to your culture at large. What would be harder to explain is how cities NOT built by that civ's player came to be in existence to be razed. I have to assume that the program is using "city" where it should be saying "village".

FeiLing said:

Well if there were less incidents than the exact number of artifacts then obviously stuff has to be made up^^

It still might be unintended, don't know. But in general there seems to be a lot of randomness about archaeology... in my last game I was absolutely sure I was clicking on the artifact that said it was a Short Sword. Going to my cultural overview then to re-arrange stuff for the theming bonus there was no short sword but a different item (the era and the CS remained though, just the item type changed).

Click to expand...

Maybe in the museum they discovered the artifact was actually beads

Maybe the "barbarians" I dispersed were a culturally Egyptian splinter group that got blown WAY off course one day, which accounts for them crossing the top of the U ages before the oceans could be crossed in a more regular fashion. (This spot is just north of my capital. I never bothered to settle it.)

i once dug up a "razed city" artifact from a CS (forgot which one) that i know for a fact never existed in that particular game.


i REALLY hope (except it's too late now at least for 2013) that they expand artifact names, like things other than mostly beads. i also want some flavor artifacts that can be dug up from Warmongering AI as well as a Warmongering Human like "genocide site/mass grave" that might spawn on a razed city tile. maybe have a diplo or +Culture effect from this if made into a Landmark or put into the affect civ's museum.

Yeah it appears that it will just make up occurrences if it can't find enough things to make artifacts from or they aren't diversified enough. Unfortunately it does deter from the immersion factor of the game.

I would hope that they fix this or find other ways of creating artifacts without making up events.

I think I'm starting to figure this out. Either the game just makes this stuff up at random, or the developers operated under the assumption that even barbarian camps count as communities, and have semi-random cultural affinities. My latest:

RAZED CITY. Conqueror: Arabia. Founded by: Vatican City. Medieval Era.

Vatican City can found cities that can be razed? We know for a fact that's not right, so this just has to be the way the game "remembers" dispersed camps.

RAZED CITY. Conqueror: Genoa(example). Founded by: Sidon(example).

How can you ever raze city-states? And Sidon was still around on another continent, independent from Venice or Austria. Had to share it.

Pythakoreas said:

And Sidon was still around on another continent, independent from Venice or Austria. Had to share it.

Click to expand...

It's not at all uncommon to have names to resurface after the original goes into the dustbin of History. Like Memphis. Egypt disappears, but then centuries later Memphis, TN appears. Or Cairo, Egypt remains, but later Cairo, IL appears. And sometimes you get sites like Troy, Asia Minor, which turned out to have four (or was it 6?) distinctly different cities, layered one on top of the other.

In my current game, I got a Mongolian artefact and the Mongols weren't even on my continent and they were defeated by Songhai in the medieval era. I never met them and they never sent a unit to my continent.

I thought that Archaeology reports were deliberately vague and misleading due to the difficulty of producing accurate history in reality. If my civilization had just conceptualized Archaeology, I certainly wouldn't expect to be 100% accurate all the time.

It strikes me that of all of the available civs, only a small percentage get brought into play. So when it comes to razed cities, couldn't those be linked to the civs not in play? Perhaps even have the case be that they had been razed by others civs not in play. Then the archaeological account would be like something from Conan The Barbarian:

"In a time before History was recorded, there existed many civilizations. But through war, treachery, and the ravages of Nature, the bones of their cities have been swallowed by the sands of Time."

"They all came and went before the civilizations of today were ever born."

Eliminates the paradox of "But I never razed any cities! How can there be a razed city that was leveled by my civ?"

I want to find a crystal skull artifact!