Game over with no cities questions

[gja102]

I was experimenting with ways to shake up the civ progression a little bit - I.e. not have all civs start everywhere at 4,000 B.C.

I made a small mod which split the civs into ‘Agricultural’ and ‘Nomadic’. Agricultural civs worked as standard, but nomadic civs started without any settlers. Instead, they just had relatively powerful ‘barbarian’ units with hidden nationality (and the ability to spawn new units in victory). Basically, the nomadic civs would have to prowl around the map, fighting battles to get their strength up, before attacking an agricultural civ’s city to get a homeland of their own.

Parts of this worked quite well - the replay map was pretty interesting, as civs would start expanding from 4000 BC as normal, only to have parts of their empire break off to ‘new’ nomadic civs that conquered them.

However, whilst the game will seemingly let a ‘nomadic’ civ start playing with a bunch of units but no cities, as soon as one of the units is defeated, the human player gets a game over screen. My guess is that the game makes a check when a unit is destroyed, and if you also have no cities then it’s game over.

Does anyone know the exact conditions for game over? I’d like to find a way of making such ‘nomadic’ civs a playable prospect.

 

[Yoda Power]

If you have no cities and no settlers you are destroyed when you lose your first unit. If you're using a custom map, you could place a settler for each nomad civ on a mountain only island and they wouldn't be destroyed, but still not be able to build any cities.

 

[Moosezilla]

I hope the so called "Settler bug" of CCM does not cause a crash.

 

[gja102]

Thanks Yoda, it seemed like that was the rule. Annoying that the game won't let a city-less civ fight on. 'Backup' settlers is a clever idea but I don't want to use that approach for now.

My workaround was to make the nomads obscenely powerful - i.e. there was no way they would get defeated before capturing a city. The concept worked, although it was pretty unfair and left the nomad civs with an uber unit for the rest of the ancient era.

What's the settler bug?

 

[Vuldacon]

I wonder if setting up a Regicide Game would work concerning the nomads.
I have not experimented with Regicide games but it could work to prevent the Game Over when a Nomad Unit is Killed.

 

[Moosezilla]

re: Settler Bug: in the CCM mod when a civ's last city is captured and has a Settler that is unable to settle the game will crash... I can imagine a case where a nomadic civ might capture a city (one) and lose it and the mountian settler causing the crash.

 

[Yoda Power]

Why does that happen in CCM and not in the normal game or other mods?

 

[Civinator]

Why does that happen in CCM and not in the normal game or other mods?

In the prebetatestings the settlers and terrain in CCM had different movement rules compared to standard settlers and terrain. Here is a screenshot what happened to Moosezilla: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8817524&postcount=370

These rules were modified for the CCM betatesting biqs to help the AI.

In the case of gja102, I agree to your answer in post 2 of this thread. The ending of the game has nothing to do with AI pathfinding problems.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I wonder if setting up a Regicide Game would work concerning the nomads.
I have not experimented with Regicide games but it could work to prevent the Game Over when a Nomad Unit is Killed.

And it would make in-world sense - nomads with a strong leader, but the tribe falls apart if the leader is slain.

 

[Vuldacon]

And it would make in-world sense - nomads with a strong leader, but the tribe falls apart if the leader is slain.

Blue Monkey... Absolutely