This is annoying as hell. Especially for puppets. I had one starve from size 4 to size 1 because it didn't work any food tiles. And I have to micro my capitol early game because it keeps wanting to starve it self every turn unless I tell it exactly what tiles to work.
Production/gold focus starves cities
- Thread starter Soronery
- Start date
lordsurya08
class-A procrastinator
The AI is just pathetic. I am trying to write a better one in Visual Studio right now...
AfterShafter
Deity
I find it easy enough to rectify with the lock-square use from the city screen. But, I do agree, it's a problem. There should be two production focus automated options. One should focus production without starving, one should just outright focus production even at the expense of staying positive for food income. I believe they put the production focus as it is as a means of combatting happiness problems through starvation - I often use it as such... But sometimes that's not what you want - you want sustainable production.
wurstburst
Prince
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2009
- Messages
- 301
I disagree. The standard options should never starve your city, under any circumstances (unless there's not enough food to support it, period). If you want to starve your city, lock the hexes you want to work manually. Having your cities starve randomly when there's enough food to no starve makes no sense.
AfterShafter
Deity
Well, I've got to say, your disagreement doesn't make much sense to me either from gameplay or historical perspectives. Historically, there is precedent for a leader adopting policies resulting in the starving of a city (though I'm sure not to deal with happiness problems, that's an indirect side effect of beefing your production to the 100% max). Heck, isn't that the whole song and dance about Early Stalinist Russia and Maoist China? I doubt it was their goal to starve their people, but it was a result of their policies which were in many cases focused on industrial productivity.
And from a gameplay perspective... Just because there's a second option of "Production focus, not avoiding starvation" does nothing to you if you don't want to use it and rather use the "Production focus, avoiding starvation." It saves me having to lock squares in to achieve an end that I sometimes pursue, and doesn't infringe upon your play in the slightest. Heck, I'd even be happy if it were at the end of the list.
Seriously though, have you never gone into a city in a Civ game before, saw you had an excess of either food or population, and set up your city to run at negative food for a while to either reach a certain short term production goal or, in Civ V, deal with runaway population? I know I have pretty damned frequently.
Don Julio Anejo
Chieftain
No. The famines were a side effect of collectivization where peasants had their land taken away from them for collective farms and weren't given much in the way of supporting themselves during the transition. Industry didn't have much to do with it.
AfterShafter
Deity
Hate using this as a source, but, beats the heck out of scanning my books trying to find out where I read it first...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
"Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals."
Agricultural workers being diverted from their fields to aid in metal production in a crackpot scheme to make China a steel producer, during a period where the Chinese are famous for starving. I think that pretty much smack-dab hits that historical precedent I was talking about. Wasn't *sure* about Stalin, but I was sure about Mao. And besides, Stalin's five year plans, as I understood it, saw tremendous population redistribution in favour of industrial production... Did none of that contribute to starvation?
And beside that, do you honestly believe that's the only case in all of history where a ruler adopted a policy with the intent of increasing production which left the people starving? I'm no historian, but that just seems far fetched to me.
Don Julio Anejo
Chieftain
Mao I don't know much about, so you got me on that one.
However, in Russia it worked differently. Russia was already an industrialized country at the time of the revolution, just a crappy and inefficient one. It actually had major unemployment and workers were paid extremely low, which was one of the factors leading up to the revolution. As such, there wasn't much need for new workers, especially since they were ideologically "persuaded" into working major overtime.
Population redistribution to new industrial towns on the Urals/in the Sibera was done through PoWs from the civil war and a major effort to get young workers to move there, both through bonuses (i.e. make 200 rubles in European part of Russia or 400 somewhere in Crapknowswheregorsk) and through propaganda.
Not to say the famine wasn't completely unintentional (the USSR had major food reserves it could have sent to the affected areas), but an attempt at industrialization wasn't the reason.
However, in Russia it worked differently. Russia was already an industrialized country at the time of the revolution, just a crappy and inefficient one. It actually had major unemployment and workers were paid extremely low, which was one of the factors leading up to the revolution. As such, there wasn't much need for new workers, especially since they were ideologically "persuaded" into working major overtime.
Population redistribution to new industrial towns on the Urals/in the Sibera was done through PoWs from the civil war and a major effort to get young workers to move there, both through bonuses (i.e. make 200 rubles in European part of Russia or 400 somewhere in Crapknowswheregorsk) and through propaganda.
Not to say the famine wasn't completely unintentional (the USSR had major food reserves it could have sent to the affected areas), but an attempt at industrialization wasn't the reason.
Unfortunately, Firaxis has quite some attitude to break working features when patching.
With the 0.62 patch they broke the city governor and the display of the food basket (astonishingly enough, not when you are asked to select a new production), with the 1.135 patch they broke the "build street" request from city states.
In both cases, no attempt was made to repair this with the following patch.
AfterShafter
Deity
Even so Don, my point concerning historical precedent stands - Mao's Great Leap Forward did result in starvation, and at least in part due to attempts to increase and modernize production. I also can't help but notice you didn't answer this question:
"And beside that, do you honestly believe that's the only case in all of history where a ruler adopted a policy with the intent of increasing production which left the people starving?"
It seems far fetched for me, in a history rife with ruthless dictators and merciless despots, not one other time did a ruler adopt policies to increase production that resulted in starvation.
"And beside that, do you honestly believe that's the only case in all of history where a ruler adopted a policy with the intent of increasing production which left the people starving?"
It seems far fetched for me, in a history rife with ruthless dictators and merciless despots, not one other time did a ruler adopt policies to increase production that resulted in starvation.
AfterShafter
Deity
Heh, check my post history in the Civ IV technical support forum. This is nothing new... A huge, huge pain, but... I've had multiplayer fixed and rebroken on me so many times in Civ IV it makes my head spin. Heck, after their final major BTS patch, myself and my usual playing partner had to roll back to the previous one in order to fix yet another inexplicable multiplayer OOS error.
Not making excuses, but... I've long expected unofficial patches to fix a good number of things. Firaxis patches oftentimes break existing things - despite the patches usually being overall positive, they rarely come with no strings attached.
Anyways, on a side note, just to be clear on my position on what the OP is concerned with: I absolutely think that a production focus that doesn't result in starvation should be the first priority and should be in the game. But, a second production focus that results in starvation makes sense to me as well, for either max-speed rushing of a wonder or population control. Slavery used to fill that role, but, it's gone now.
Tokira
Warlord
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2010
- Messages
- 163
For me its usually the opposite: the cities do all they can to work on food tiles producing 1-5 production if I don't manage them. They also grow too fast when I have small amount of happiness so I get to -5 from time to time if I don't manage the cities to work on production. Also I've seen the AI (India) getting 20/25+ population cities during the medieval/reneissance era.
In my opinion the best way to reduce micromanagement would be that the cities would focus a little on growth and more on production if the empire's happiness was lower than 5. If the happiness was over 5, they would focus more on growth but also on production. Many times I've had cities which have had a new citizen every 3-5 turns, but only about 4 hammers. When I put the "production focus" thing on, they have like 20 hammers and still the city grows in every 10 turns or so.. In my opinion that is annoying.
In my opinion the best way to reduce micromanagement would be that the cities would focus a little on growth and more on production if the empire's happiness was lower than 5. If the happiness was over 5, they would focus more on growth but also on production. Many times I've had cities which have had a new citizen every 3-5 turns, but only about 4 hammers. When I put the "production focus" thing on, they have like 20 hammers and still the city grows in every 10 turns or so.. In my opinion that is annoying.
It had not much reserves, and they were sent to where famine was. Also, some of food shipment that was supposed to be sold to West was reverted. There are lot of documents confirming it, including critics from the West for failing of food shipment obligation.
Collectivization can be considered a reason of 1933-th famine, but not because it was a change to the worse, but because process of change from individual to collective mechanized agriculture was pretty rough. Imagine what would happen in Civ if starvation was not switched off each period of anarchy.
But after collectivization was completed, regular famines that was hitting Russia each several years before, was ended.
If you want an example of a forced famine, I'd recommend to look at Ireland, 18451849.
AfterShafter
Deity
Isn't that what production focus does?
jagdtigerciv
Prince
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2007
- Messages
- 468
Except that the Soviet Union didn't outproduce Imperial Russia (despite technology advances) until the 1960s.
Famines and output are totally different. People being forced to eat a hell of a lot less from collectivization is not success by any means.
