Forbidden Palace forbidden

[Cactus Pete]

I'm playing civ4 on Prince, and I have 8 cities and six courthouses, but two of my newest cities have the Forbidden Palace icon greyed out (while all my other cities have a bright icon and will allow me to build FP in them). Naturally, I want to build in one of the cities that will not allow it. Is this a bug in the game, or is there a reason why some cities don't allow FP construction? I can't find anything in the manual or the civpedia and would certainly appreciate advice and assistance.

Cactus Pete

 

[j_buckingham80]

Do you have a courthouse in the city you want to build the forbidden palace in? I'm not sure, but I think that may be both and nationwide requirement (x numbers of courthouses) and also a city-specific req. (must have courthouse in that particular city.)

 

[Cactus Pete]

You may be right about that. I'll check it out tomorrow. Even if you are, it should certainly be noted in the civpedia as a requirement, because it can be an important tactical consideration when attempting to conquer a new continent -- much more time consuming to build both a couthouse and the FB in a captured city. Both were not required in CivIII.

 

[Maestro_3295]

All the small wonders that require a certain number of other improvements also require that they be built in a city with the required improvement. I agree, it could be considered a bit ambiguous, but think of it this way: if the small wonder required an improvement to build, wouldn't it be strange that you could build it where the required improvement doesn't exist? Build Ironworks without a forge? Wallstreet without a bank? The designers assumed it would be obvious, but it isn't obvious to us, because we weren't involved in creating the game. And the Civilopedia just sucks; there's no help there. To sum up, the building requirements are functioning properly; there is no bug. However, there is a fairly serious documentation problem for many of the less obvious features of the game.

 

[Cactus Pete]

I checked it out. A courthouse is required in the city where the FB is constructed. This, or at least the general rule, ought to be in the civpdia. How do we encourage that?

 

[Maestro_3295]

I'm pretty sure the Firaxians are on these boards. When the "random map" bug was reported, it was addressed directly by one of them. If one is reading this message right now, I want to express encouragement to fix the bugs that we report. Most of us who are on these boards are not here to criticize the efforts you have put forth to develop this game. We seek only to solve problems, and help you to make a good game into a great one.

Cactus Pete, as far as encouraging Firaxis to correct discrepencies, the only clear way I can see is to continue reporting any errors we may find, and provide constructive, detailed information about the percieved problem. "This game is crap" and "look here, we're beta testers" isn't helpful, but I've been reading similar posts to these far too often in this forum, along with flaming people who make honest mistakes and report "bugs" that are not bugs.