DOS Civilization 1 (1991) Bug(s) discussion - What should be fixed in OpenCiv1?

[Valen]

I can add two of my favorite cheats/exploits to the bug list.
Fast settlers. A settler can take two steps down a road and initiate some activity. Upon reactivation, it gets all its movement points back. This continues until it either runs out of road or has enough work points that it completes its assigned activity - hopefully something you wanted.

Ship sentry. Also a well-known bug. Two passenger-carrying ships can travel the world (triremes still have to be careful). One ship moves until it has one movement point, then sentries. It's partner then moves into the same square and wakes it up with an Unload command. The ships then swap roles. The second ship moves on and sentries, the first ship wakes it up. Repeat. The same ships can similarly escort a battleship anywhere it may be needed.

 

[Mize]

Alpha Centauri has such a penalty, when you switch production, you loose some of the shields (production resources), thus it really doesn't pay off to do such a thing, unless you know what you're doing. Yes, I agree money to shields should be a constant, not a variable. And together with a penalty for switching the production it really shouldn't pay off anymore.

If a penalty for switching should exist, it should be for switching from buildings to units, but only if the higher cost of unit shields is kept. Unit and wonder/SS shields were obviously meant to be more expensive for the player, but the ways to circumvent this rule are also so obvious that barely anyone sticks to it. Either enforce it strictly and slash half (or whatever %) of shields that are already in the box when switching from 'low cost' to 'high cost' shields, or get rid of it altogether, make all shields cost the same and maybe let players choose how many they want to buy. Also, caravans should be able to contribute to regular buildings too. Taking into account the price of wonder shields in gold, wonder -> building is actually an ineffective switch. The player should be allowed to make a bad deal.

 

[rahorvat]

I can add two of my favorite cheats/exploits to the bug list.
Fast settlers. A settler can take two steps down a road and initiate some activity. Upon reactivation, it gets all its movement points back. This continues until it either runs out of road or has enough work points that it completes its assigned activity - hopefully something you wanted.

I have already added this exploit to the list.

Ship sentry. Also a well-known bug. Two passenger-carrying ships can travel the world (triremes still have to be careful). One ship moves until it has one movement point, then sentries. It's partner then moves into the same square and wakes it up with an Unload command. The ships then swap roles. The second ship moves on and sentries, the first ship wakes it up. Repeat. The same ships can similarly escort a battleship anywhere it may be needed.

Wow, so many creative ways to exploit units

 

[rahorvat]

If a penalty for switching should exist, it should be for switching from buildings to units, but only if the higher cost of unit shields is kept. Unit and wonder/SS shields were obviously meant to be more expensive for the player, but the ways to circumvent this rule are also so obvious that barely anyone sticks to it. Either enforce it strictly and slash half (or whatever %) of shields that are already in the box when switching from 'low cost' to 'high cost' shields, or get rid of it altogether, make all shields cost the same and maybe let players choose how many they want to buy. Also, caravans should be able to contribute to regular buildings too. Taking into account the price of wonder shields in gold, wonder -> building is actually an ineffective switch. The player should be allowed to make a bad deal.

Yes, I agree

 

[civ1forever]

Do you have the bug where a defended city acts like it has no defenders?

And the one where as the game gets advanced your units start being taken away. I assume this was added due to resource limitations on old computers at the time(so maybe technically not a bug but a workaround of hardware issues that would hopefully not be an issue now).

 

[Mize]

Do you have the bug where a defended city acts like it has no defenders?

And the one where as the game gets advanced your units start being taken away. I assume this was added due to resource limitations on old computers at the time(so maybe technically not a bug but a workaround of hardware issues that would hopefully not be an issue now).

First one's nasty. Second one isn't a bug, the game even tells you it's going on. It definitely is a limitation, but I'm not sure it's just because of hardware, maybe it's to stop the AI from overproducing or the player overindulging.

 

[civ1forever]

Agree it's not a bug but I think it might be an instance of a separate class of 'possibly issues that need to be fixed'. You might be right there may be some other reason other than hardware capability, but it only seems to affect me rather then the AI.
As I tend to play for conquest and ignore the space option and official end of game for the score, it does tend to destroy the gameplay for me as the game gets on. However, once the code is finished it might be simple enough for me to alter on my own copy.

 

[civ1forever]

To be fair I can't say it doesn't affect the AI the same, but I only ever play on Emperor and it cheats like crazy already so I'm not sure I'd notice either way

 

[civ1forever]

Is the limited movement on a railroad a bug? I believe it's supposed to be unlimited but it's not quite that. It doesn't bother me with gameplay though. Actually I prefer how it does work rather than unlimited.

Does GO function properly. It always seems to go the wrong way. Is that a bug. It does make GO unusable for me when playing though.

 

[civ1forever]

I'd suggest that the correct implementation of GO would be for the computer to work out the path of least resistance based on terrain types and roads/railroads and correctly use those with the same number of moves as a human player would have had. There is then the question of if it should be smart enough to keep away from enemy units whilst in transit, but I think that would be asking too much.

Rather than being a bug this is maybe fixing something in the game that was just not correctly implemented and isn't worth fixing. Does anybody use GO?

 

[Lord_Hill]

The broken goto has been discussed in detail and is on the list (it also affects the AI as it uses the same logic for pathing).

I did mention the undefended city thing but didn't initially suggest it for the list as (far as I'm aware) we don't yet know how to reliably trigger it. Maybe if we can get a save the turn before it happens, but the random nature of it makes it tricky. I certainly agree that it should be fixed if it can be though!

The manual says railroad movement is supposed to be unlimited, so I think that would count if it actually isn't.
"4. Railroads increase all commodities by 50%, rounded down. Movement along Railroads costs 0 movement points."

 

[civ1forever]

I'm not really sure how the limited moves on railroad actually happens, but they are definitely less than unlimited. I don't think it's as simple as getting x moves instead of unlimited moves, it seems more like there are sometimes squares that impede unlimited movement. So maybe there is some fractional amount each move that is less than 1 but still greater than 0 and is perhaps related in some way to terrain type or other improvements on that square or other square specific attribute. If so maybe the manual is correct it is 0 movement points if it's 0.1 and they round down it's 0 If it's classed as a bug I wouldn't make it a high priority one.

It would be quite interesting to be able to peek under the hood and see how it actually does work though.

 

[Lord_Hill]

There's some interesting stuff here about how the game deals with the unit cap and which units to remove when a city is taken. I'd need to study it in detail to work out if there was actually a consensus on what the actual bug is.

Losing units - bug or normal?

I've been playing Civ1 probably since it was released (I don't remember when I started but I was much, much younger) and by far, my favorite game. Anyway, glad to find this forum and see there are still people out there passionate about the game! I'm not sure if what I am experiencing is a...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Lord_Hill]

This old thread has a save where the 'undefended city bug' has already been triggered. The challenge is going to be getting a save just before it happens to spot where the game is going off the rails.

City Remains Unprotected...

Here's something that I dont get. I have a conquered city that has military units in it with a courthouse and a cathedral. It still gets listed as undefended and if I fortify my troops I loose the control of the city. When I move other troops to that city it shows up as me taking it over again...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[rahorvat]

Do you have the bug where a defended city acts like it has no defenders?

And the one where as the game gets advanced your units start being taken away. I assume this was added due to resource limitations on old computers at the time(so maybe technically not a bug but a workaround of hardware issues that would hopefully not be an issue now).

It's hard to know. As I said (lately) multiple times, the GoTo function misbehaves so badly and overwrites stack and data that it's hard to know if this is a result of limitation or a data corruption bug.
Will see as I slowly rework the code toward the next major release of OpenCiv1

 

[rahorvat]

Is the limited movement on a railroad a bug? I believe it's supposed to be unlimited but it's not quite that. It doesn't bother me with gameplay though. Actually I prefer how it does work rather than unlimited.

Does GO function properly. It always seems to go the wrong way. Is that a bug. It does make GO unusable for me when playing though.

Yup, a very buggy GoTo...

 

[tjs282]

The manual says railroad movement is supposed to be unlimited, so I think that would count if it actually isn't.
"4. Railroads increase all commodities by 50%, rounded down. Movement along Railroads costs 0 movement points."

(Bearing in mind that it's a looong time since I last played CivDOS, but) From what I remember, the Limited-Rail-Movement GoTo-bug is different from the Can't-Cross-the-Dateline GoTo-bug.

The Rail-related bug is that while manually-controlled (mouse or KB) moves along Rails are indeed unlimited, GoTo-moves along Rails treat them as if they're only Roads (i.e. with the 3x movement-rate multiplier). So the player either has to laboriously tap/click to move their units tile-by-tile, or lose the Rail-benefit for the sake of playing faster.

 

[rahorvat]

(Bearing in mind that it's a looong time since I last played CivDOS, but) From what I remember, the Limited-Rail-Movement GoTo-bug is different from the Can't-Cross-the-Dateline GoTo-bug.

The Rail-related bug is that while manually-controlled (mouse or KB) moves along Rails are indeed unlimited, GoTo-moves along Rails treat them as if they're only Roads (i.e. with the 3x movement-rate multiplier). So the player either has to laboriously tap/click to move their units tile-by-tile, or lose the Rail-benefit for the sake of playing faster.

That behavior is even documented in official Civilization's manual Addendum:
"...GoTo using the Mouse: to move the active unit to an adjacent square, click on that square with the RIGHT Mouse Button. For long distance moves, select GoTo from the Orders menu and click the LMB on the destination square. Note also that units using the long distance GoTo command use the Road movement rate even when travelling on Railroads..."

But, I don't see why that would be logical or required, as you could make that move manually without any penalty, so I will classify this as an official bug.

 

[Mize]

That behavior is even documented in official Civilization's manual Addendum:
"...GoTo using the Mouse: to move the active unit to an adjacent square, click on that square with the RIGHT Mouse Button. For long distance moves, select GoTo from the Orders menu and click the LMB on the destination square. Note also that units using the long distance GoTo command use the Road movement rate even when travelling on Railroads..."

But, I don't see why that would be logical or required, as you could make that move manually without any penalty, so I will classify this as an official bug.

It was possibly done to prevent AI units from going into an infinite loop and locking up the game.

 

[rahorvat]

It was possibly done to prevent AI units from going into an infinite loop and locking up the game.

Possibly, we have all experienced AI movement loops in a game...
But the curious thing is: this only applies to long Go To commands, not a short ones (or maybe both, I'm not sure anymore)?