Airport tracker

[Hein]

Hi,

I saw people complaining about an Airport Tracker so that you know which cities you can send your units to be lifted across the world.

I have a very simple airport tracker that works for me. Whenever I build an airport in one of my cities I rename that city and add " Air" to the end. So "Thebes" becomes "Thebes Air". You can even go as far as identifying each of your island by a character. This will give you the required info on the map.

I do something similar for the city with my palace by adding " Cptl".
By changing the city name you can of course identify whatever you want, like barracks or a port.

Hein

 

[Ali Ardavan]

Welcome to CFC, Hein.

Thanks for sharing your method. But my main complaint about the airports is that Civ2 does not tell you apriori if it has already been used that turn by graying it out. Instead it gives you an error message after you have chosen it. This is frustrating.

As for using city names to indicate something about the city, people are all over the spectrum. Some do not use it at all. Others, at the other extreme, have developed code names that resemble a part number telling them not just about the city but also what they plan to do with it in the future. I stop using Civ2 suggested names as soon as I get off my home island. I use other related names for each land mass to help me know where every city is when using supply/demand lists and the airport list.

 

[Hein]

True, I tend to use the Airports only to transport units (mostly caravans) to/from small islands. For larger units packages I rely on (dual-way) transport chains and railroads. 8 units per turn per transport is much more convieneint than 1 by air.

 

[ElephantU]

The issue I have is not where are the airports but planning out ahead which caravans will use each during the turn (since you can only use one). I do this with a spreadsheet on the side that lists all the cities with airports. The second column is caravan/freight (OriginCity-Commodity), and the third column is destination. Each turn I wipe the second and third columns and replan before moving any other units.

OCC is so much easier...

 

[Hein]

Oops. That is a lot of work to do each turn. It would take me too much time and in the end each turn easily can consume 10 minutes. I use the F5-Supply and Demand option to see where to send the Caravan/Freight to. I scout for foreign cities, even if these are small. From that I usually have a left and right caravan collect and exit point on my main island and then I simply keep sailing to and from until I am done. When leaving the city I check whether each caravan should go left or right. Maybe not the most clever system, but I never got beyond that level.

I find sometimes that a caravan is ready next to a (foreign) city with the requested commodity, waiting for a tech beaker slot and when there is the slot the requested commodities have changed. That is frustrating when it is on the other side of the world with no new target city in site. ;-(.

 

[ElephantU]

With Airport at least you can hop to another side of the world. The Solo Cycle determined that city supply can change a maximum of once every 16 turns unless a delivery unblocks a slot, which won't happen very often with the AI. Demand should be the same, although it will probably be your deliveries that change things. If I've got a lot of freights to deal with (I don't usually build more than 20-30 cities) I will scout the AI cities near airport destinations and put demand notes in my destination lists. Once the freight has arrived it is not worth it to sit around very long. If you can't use the extra beakers at least the gold lets you rushbuy something useful. If you are sitting on a pile of freights and gold you are not developing as efficiently as you should. You can get more than one tech per turn with city research, so use the extra gold to build the improvements to grow the cities and their beaker output.

 

[Ace]

Just be carefull that you do not deliver too much freight, in one turn, or you may flip the sign on the beakers and wind up with a negative number. That will stop your research for a couple of turns until you work off the negative number. Its usually safe to over fill the beaker box by several hundred, but its risky. AFAIK, no one has done any research to determine the safe overflow percentage...its not a constant number because it changes with the number of beakers required for an advance, but it might be a percent of the required beakers.

 

[ElephantU]

I haven't run into that, and I've overfilled the beaker box by a few thousand, but it would be interesting to look into. There is a game over at Poly that has a bunch of stored freights that we could experiment with...

 

[Ace]

I should add that both times it happened to me, I had passed FT 167 and the beaker requirements had gone back to the beginning. I don't remember the details on the first oops, but the last time, I needed about 5200 beakers to fill the box, and had about 4500 in the box. And I thoughtlessly delivered a Uranium load for approx 3000 coins. The result was a -2100 (approx) beaker count. I didn't keep a save...

 

[Mercator]

This sounds like a job for Xin Yu. His CivManager utility sounds ike something that could help here.

Perhaps he could add an option to automatically rename cities or mark them somehow in the city list on CivManager when they've already airlifted units.

He last posted in the Civ2 section 3 years ago, though.