Crime & Punishment

I think you're trying to model realism too closely to make a good game. The mechanic, regardless of how "brilliant" you think it is, is driving me crazy and I wish you were a little more understanding and not quite so patronizing. It's not about perfectionism, it's about comfort. Part of the problem is that I have a very hard time seeing where the "safe" level is in terms of total crime (so as to avoid the instability-inducing crimes) and so I feel that I have to utterly stomp it out or it will explode as soon as I take my eyes off it.

In my example, I was already running the Closed Borders civic, so I was still seeing crime problems regardless of foreign trade being cut off.

I seriously don't mean to be patronizing. I'm sorry it came across that way - internet tone of voice can be assumed in a number of ways and its tough to pick truly neutral wording.

If trade is causing you crime trouble and you're only trading internally, then apparently you must have some cities that have been allowed to maintain crime while others are heavily policed?

A safe level of crime is 0 or less crime rate I think. Its ok to have some crime problems now and then because if you stretch too much to try to control it you'll cause yourself a financial problem in staffing too much. That is by design.

I'm being very understanding by offering to option that dynamic out. Differences in personality and play style are a good thing and I like to support them all rather than have one dictate to another how the game should be played. So by no means do I mean to say you're poor player... no indeed that perfectionism is actually a really powerful gamer quality. But I personally prefer a bit of fear and uncertainty in my games because I feel that's what keeps me on the edge of my seat.
 
No, crime does more than just :( and -:gold:. Crimes produce instability, and I was actually losing cities due to revolutions spawned by crimes. Cities that didn't have the crime problem were showing revolution indexes of 1. That's what spooked me so badly about crime. It's like the penalties for failure were too high.

To be honest I always play with revolutions on and deity and apart from some recently captured cities in the early game, my cities have never reached a point where there's been revolutions regardless of how high my crime rate has gotten. And even if there's a threat of revolution in a city, some bribing and acting to fix the problems causing instability usually solves it. So I have no idea what you're doing wrong to have so much problems with crime.
 
I have a couple of questions on the mechanics of crime (and disease which seems similiar).

I know that crime is generated from the city and trading, but how does it end up in the surrounding plots of the city? Is it diffused from the city plot to neighboring tiles?
If thats the case, how come its possible to have the city plot have negative crime while the surrounding plot have positive crime? Whats the best way to reduce crime in the surrounding plots?

Ive noticed that the numbers are different if you mouseover the city plot and mouseover the city name for the city details. It seems the number shown at the city details is what determines what crime/pollution/health negative buildings are built, but is this number just the sum of all the citys fat cross plots? It doesnt seem that way, it didnt add up when I checked all the plots.

Finally, the town watchmen. He has a base ability that reduces crime -5/city and -3/plot. If you get the crime reduction promotion, the promotion itself shows -5/city twice instead of -10/city. And if you mouseover the watchmens unit info, it only shows -5/city. Is the promotion working properly or is it just a tooltip error?
 
I have a couple of questions on the mechanics of crime (and disease which seems similiar).

I know that crime is generated from the city and trading, but how does it end up in the surrounding plots of the city? Is it diffused from the city plot to neighboring tiles?
If thats the case, how come its possible to have the city plot have negative crime while the surrounding plot have positive crime? Whats the best way to reduce crime in the surrounding plots?
There's very little impact from crime on non-city plots, so far as I understand. It might be used for triggering events like banditry and such but it has no direct effect.

Yes, crime diffuses from one plot to another and features on that plot can influence that too (like Forests tend to attract criminal hideouts so gather more from neighboring plots with higher crime than a forestless plain would.)

It's possible to have extremely varying #s in those plots because you may have had a Town Watch type unit on one of those plots, or it may be a giveaway that an unseen enemy rogue or thief or something of the sort is hanging out on a plot that has unusually high crime.

The best way, generally, to reduce crime on your plots is to allow negative crime from your cities to diffuse out to the plots the same way crime built there diffused out to those plots in the first place. If you have a great concern about a plot or two you can always send your Town Watch units to go mop things up there but if it continues to be an issue, you may have a hidden enemy that a Dog unit can detect for you. (usually though they like to hang out in the cities.)

Ive noticed that the numbers are different if you mouseover the city plot and mouseover the city name for the city details. It seems the number shown at the city details is what determines what crime/pollution/health negative buildings are built, but is this number just the sum of all the citys fat cross plots? It doesnt seem that way, it didnt add up when I checked all the plots.
I believe the amount that shows on the city plot is the quantity that exists. What it shows in the city help popup I'm not sure - may just be as you say the building modifiers total only. The reliable #s are in the city screen under the property tab on the right middle. It shows the crime rate (I think from the city only - don't know if ALL factors are included there but they may be... AIAndy would need to explain that one - I also think the trade routes should show incoming crime rates if possible) and then the volume. The negative or positive rate is how much the city should add or remove between this round and the next.

Finally, the town watchmen. He has a base ability that reduces crime -5/city and -3/plot. If you get the crime reduction promotion, the promotion itself shows -5/city twice instead of -10/city. And if you mouseover the watchmens unit info, it only shows -5/city. Is the promotion working properly or is it just a tooltip error?
Its a tooltip error that's probably related to the way we have promos combining into just the most developed promotion along the same promotionline. I can look into that eventually but the way these property modifiers are designed makes it a bit tough for me to decipher sometimes and I may struggle to 'fix' that one. But I think I can resolve it. For now, just understand its not properly combining the values and both probably apply.
 
I believe the amount that shows on the city plot is the quantity that exists. What it shows in the city help popup I'm not sure - may just be as you say the building modifiers total only. The reliable #s are in the city screen under the property tab on the right middle. It shows the crime rate (I think from the city only - don't know if ALL factors are included there but they may be... AIAndy would need to explain that one - I also think the trade routes should show incoming crime rates if possible) and then the volume. The negative or positive rate is how much the city should add or remove between this round and the next.

Hm but then why do I have crime/disease buildings when mousing over the city plot (where the units stand) shows a negative crime/disease quantity? I assume the real quantity of crime is shown in the city info when you mouseover the citys name and population. But then what does the city plot number represent? Maybe I should grab some screenshots the next time I load up my game.
 
yeah... I'm getting a bit confused by the display references - and the fact that since I didn't set it up and I'm not entirely sure I'm being accurate with explanations there without looking very closely.
 
AFAICT, the city plot number represents the amount of crime on the city's PLOT, which is not the same as the city itself.

Crime is a property that applies to individual plots and also, separately, to cities, just like resources. You wouldn't say that the if city plot produces, for example, 2F/2C/2H, that the CITY produces 2F/2C/2H unless everyone was on strike and you had no buildings. Same with the crime. Any effects that crime has on a per plot basis - which I believe have to do with things like events and how it spreads, but here I'm not sure - are based on this number for the city plot.

The crime number that appears when you mouseover the city's name is the same as the one that appears on the city properties screen. The actual crime "buildings" in the city are based on this number.

For example:

My city of Pataliputra in my current game shows 17 Crime when I mouseover the city's name on the map, 17 Crime when I look at it on the Properties screen, and -17 Crime when I mouseover the plot the city sits on. Sure enough, Pataliputra suffers from Soliciting (at 1+ Crime) and Littering (at 10+ Crime), because the city's crime is over 10, even though the plot's isn't.

(Mind, the city's crime will soon be negative, too, because many of the same modifiers that drove the plot crime down are working on the city, too, it was just a bit more crime-ridden then the plot to begin with.)
 
The other thing is, people really need to get out of the vanilla concept of having 1 production city and pumping out all your units from that city. I have done it too and yes, it is tedious to train 1000 law enforcement units from that city and transport them around your entire empire. But there's no reason cities can't just build their own law enforcement units. Their goal is to reduce crime. So they don't all need to be built at level 10 in your production city as they still reduce crime at level 3. You'll find that it's a lot easier this way.
This is absolutely no solution (for me). If I built the law enforcement units in every city they won´t have those crime reduction promotions (compared to the specialized unit building city) and I´ll have to build even more of these otherwise useless units.
 
The other thing is, people really need to get out of the vanilla concept of having 1 production city and pumping out all your units from that city. I have done it too and yes, it is tedious to train 1000 law enforcement units from that city and transport them around your entire empire. But there's no reason cities can't just build their own law enforcement units. Their goal is to reduce crime. So they don't all need to be built at level 10 in your production city as they still reduce crime at level 3. You'll find that it's a lot easier this way.

Easier, but vastly less effective.

It's incredibly hard to get XP to "civilian" units. Civics and settled Great Generals seem to be the only way. And they need TONS of it due to the Combat x requirements of the Policing promotions. A Town Watchman's value as a crime fighter goes up by 33% if he's level 3 - enough for Combat II and Policing II. That value isn't quite as extreme for Guard and later units but it's still significant. And until the recent SVN updates, Guard and later units required the Barracks tree! I'm certainly not going to stick an unhappiness-with-useful-civics-causing, otherwise useless Barracks in some commerce city. (Fortunately, as of this month I don't have to.)

Frankly, I have no intention whatsoever of abandoning my "vanilla concept" of training ALL my units in one production city. It's far more effective in C2C than vanilla, since maintenance tends to be higher, building dependencies make having the ABILITY to build units in multiple cities either annoying or impossible, and Great Generals flow like water from sound hunting and victories while a Minor Civ. We even have Multiple Production to take the sting out of only being able to build in one place.

Incidentally, the Combat x requirement for Policing x was added because Town Watchmen and Guards used to be Melee units (who can easily get tons of XP) and their upgrades were Gunpowder units (and could still get a lot of XP). Now that they have their own unitclass, is their any chance we could get that Combat x requirement removed?
 
Easier, but vastly less effective.

It's incredibly hard to get XP to "civilian" units. Civics and settled Great Generals seem to be the only way. And they need TONS of it due to the Combat x requirements of the Policing promotions. A Town Watchman's value as a crime fighter goes up by 33% if he's level 3 - enough for Combat II and Policing II. That value isn't quite as extreme for Guard and later units but it's still significant. And until the recent SVN updates, Guard and later units required the Barracks tree! I'm certainly not going to stick an unhappiness-with-useful-civics-causing, otherwise useless Barracks in some commerce city. (Fortunately, as of this month I don't have to.)

It's still more effective to have cities build their own law enforcement. Even if these units are only half as effective as a fully trained one, you're able to get crime under control much faster than if you were to have 1 city pump out everything. Which I think is the goal for anyone who has a compulsion to have negative crime in every city.

The unhappiness isn't even a factor. I didn't have any happiness issues past the very early stages up until my cities were reaching 150-200 citizens and a butt load of pollution.

I have tried using 1 city to produce everything and found that it just wasn't practical. At the time, I had around 24 cities. The city where I settled all my great generals/heroes could build 1-2 units per turn. It took 6-8 units per city to bring crime into the negative. That's averaging about 4 turns per city and nearing 100 turns to enforce all my cities. Oh but wait, my cities grew every 5-6 turns so by the time I finished enforcing my last city, the first one would have grown quite a bit, gotten more crime so it would need more units. In the end, that 1 city would be doing nothing but building these units.

Conversely, you can have the entire thing sorted within 20 turns by having all cities build their own units. But you could also do nothing because as I said, crime had barely any impact on my city's operations until I was in need of the happiness. Only then did I really start to reduce it.
 
Of course you couldn't have one city pump out all your police when you waited to build any until you had a 24-city empire and crime needed multiple new ones per turn to fix. :p (And you were probably in Industrial or later to boot if you had pollution problems.)

I build police units as I expand, as part of each city's initial compliment of defenders. They don't cost as much as the crime buildings they routinely prevent, so there's no reason not to aside from laziness.
 
Of course you couldn't have one city pump out all your police when you waited to build any until you had a 24-city empire and crime needed multiple new ones per turn to fix. :p (And you were probably in Industrial or later to boot if you had pollution problems.)

I build police units as I expand, as part of each city's initial compliment of defenders. They don't cost as much as the crime buildings they routinely prevent, so there's no reason not to aside from laziness.

But if you're not waiting until your city has enough settled generals to pump out fully trained units off the bat then there's no difference. You either still have a bunch of low level guards not much better than ones you can get from other cities or you will still have to spend the turns replacing them later. So there's not much point building them as you go along if your goal is high level guards.
 
Conversely, you can have the entire thing sorted within 20 turns by having all cities build their own units. But you could also do nothing because as I said, crime had barely any impact on my city's operations until I was in need of the happiness. Only then did I really start to reduce it.
It depends on civic. With Subsistence and Matriarchy cities grow like crazy. So suddenly i was looking at -27 gold/city because of crime before cities even finished their long build queues. So i was forced to drop all build queues in almost all cities and build only crime/disease buildings.

Now it's -60 crime/turn in some cities... I think it was -15 crime or so several turns ago... I guess it's because crime levels dropped in cities i trade with. That module really should have a better explanation what exactly affects crime levels...
 
This is absolutely no solution (for me). If I built the law enforcement units in every city they won´t have those crime reduction promotions (compared to the specialized unit building city) and I´ll have to build even more of these otherwise useless units.

Not necessarily true. I never have a "specialized" city. All my cities are capable of producing decent units and they are not useless.

JosEPh
 
I dont see the problem:
Guard with Policing II (5XP, 2XP if you get free combat I somewhere) gets you:
10 + 5 + 5 = 20 crime reduction.
Guard with Policing III (26XP!, 17XP if you get free combat I) gets you:
10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 25 crime reduction.
Almost any city can easily get Policing II from a barracks or civics. To gain Policing III requires a ton of settled great generals. The only gain is 5 crime reduction. Policing II is just fine for anti crime needs.
Now if your worried about barracks negative effects... its barely noticeable. You get so many happy buildings that you almost never have to worry about it. As you progress through the era sand your cities get bigger you unlock even more and better happy buildings, it just never becomes a problem. Gold is also plentiful if your worried about having to build slightly more guards. There are a few spots in the tech tree where your income cant keep up with your maintenance, but if you identify the problem you can beeline towards some + gold techs (there are tons of good ones)
I play on immortal difficulty and marathon speed though I dont think there will be too much difference on other settings.
 
I dont see the problem:
Guard with Policing II (5XP, 2XP if you get free combat I somewhere) gets you:
10 + 5 + 5 = 20 crime reduction.
Guard with Policing III (26XP!, 17XP if you get free combat I) gets you:
10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 25 crime reduction.
Almost any city can easily get Policing II from a barracks or civics. To gain Policing III requires a ton of settled great generals. The only gain is 5 crime reduction. Policing II is just fine for anti crime needs.
Now if your worried about barracks negative effects... its barely noticeable. You get so many happy buildings that you almost never have to worry about it. As you progress through the era sand your cities get bigger you unlock even more and better happy buildings, it just never becomes a problem. Gold is also plentiful if your worried about having to build slightly more guards. There are a few spots in the tech tree where your income cant keep up with your maintenance, but if you identify the problem you can beeline towards some + gold techs (there are tons of good ones)
I play on immortal difficulty and marathon speed though I dont think there will be too much difference on other settings.

That doesn't work anymore with V27, as now the Defense line are Civilian units and so don't get most of the Free XP that is available. I'm only able to get 4-5 XP on my Guards by the mid-Medieval era in my cities. That is why I changed it back from what it used to be.
 
This might have been brought up but I couldn't find it - crime buildings don't go away(at least they aren't for me) when you reduce crime, and in some instances the buildings are being built even when well below the threshold.

Maybe I'm just stupid and doing something wrong though haha.
 
That doesn't work anymore with V27, as now the Defense line are Civilian units and so don't get most of the Free XP that is available. I'm only able to get 4-5 XP on my Guards by the mid-Medieval era in my cities. That is why I changed it back from what it used to be.

Eh are you playing the SVN? Im also on v27 and its still working (they are called Civilians).

Specifically, what isnt working anymore? In my game Civilians only gain XP from Wonders and Civics / Generals.

Though my original point was that a 5XP guard was perfectly fine, and you are able to get that apparently. I mean if its not enough.. just make more, in medieval era your income should be able to handle the minor maintenance cost anyway though I suppose that depends on how much your getting out of the % gold increase buildings like Jewelry.
 
Eh are you playing the SVN? Im also on v27 and its still working (they are called Civilians).

Specifically, what isnt working anymore? In my game Civilians only gain XP from Wonders and Civics / Generals.

Though my original point was that a 5XP guard was perfectly fine, and you are able to get that apparently. I mean if its not enough.. just make more, in medieval era your income should be able to handle the minor maintenance cost anyway though I suppose that depends on how much your getting out of the % gold increase buildings like Jewelry.

It does get some free XP, but compared to other units that number is quite low (check it, for me it is 5 vs 14-16 for Melee units).
 
Crime: The Events!

I was wondering, would it be possible to code in some crime events? I was just thinking if we are going to have a dynamic crime system in game, would it not be more... fun, if it was actually intractable? ... That doesn't sound right, anyways, what I was thinking is would it be possible to actually code in events that effects or has an affect on the crime in a city?

For example, if X + Y = Z, then event 'Jack the Ripper' spawns, and you have to deal with it. How dynamic these events would be, or how hard to overcome is academic at this point, but I am wondering if first it is even possible, and second if anyone thinks this could be a good thing to make the crime system more fun, or if it would just bog the player down even more in a system some people always play with turned off?
 
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