I suppose one-city-challenge allows only one city, but...

[Pdflk]

Hello everyone. I was playing a one city challenge. I sent my scout exploring around the world, when I encountered persian borders. But the borderline was a little irregular, so that made me suspicious, and I started exploring better. And -what the hell- persians have two cities! The one-city rule works only for human players? It's a little weird, 'cause if I want to auto-limit myself I don't need a specific rule to do that! I suppose persians can have received a settler from a goody hut (it's the only answer I can imagine), but I can't prove it, the city was already built when I reached them.


(I apologize if my English sounds weird, I'm Italian, but I hope it's at least understandable. )

 

[Bast]

AI must've been cheating!

 

[Maksim]

The rule only applies to human players, yes.

As to why you would want to set it - well, it polices you. With this, you cannot even choose to keep a city when conquering - the game will auto-raze it for you.

Having said that, there are some problems with the setting -

1) You cannot win by cultural victory, as that requires three cities
2) You cannot return a city to its original owner when conquering it

In my game last night, I had to retire, as the cultural victory was impossible, conquest was impossible (non-coastal city + couple of islands in the world), my friends were big so would oppose me in diplomatic elections, and having less than a hundred turns to go, I didn't even start Apollo Program.

Score-wise, Americans were ahead of me, and they were: a) friends of mine; b) technologically advanced; c) on an island of their own, so my tanks couldn't reach them.

Mind you, mine was the only city in the world with Legendary Culture, the amount of land I controlled was visually pleasing, I had most of the Wonders, and was personally responsible for raising over twenty cities and destroying the Spanish. So, a good game.

 

[Pdflk]

Under this terms it seems to me a pretty useless rule, like some kind of suicide-Rambo-setting. In my opinion it's more useful if it applies to every player, so I can make a sort of city-state game. There is a way to do this?

 

[Maksim]

At a guess, you could create a custom mod which would disable building settlers.

In practice, I'm not sure how useful it would be. AI balance is a delicate thing, and disabling the option for them to expand could very well break it so you'd end up with a rather boring game, I'm afraid.

 

[MrCynical]

One city challenge was one of the most popular variants in Civ 3, and it's nice to see it officially included in Civ4. If the one city limit was applied to the AI as well though it would be a rather pointless variant as it would present no challenge. The AI would be largely incapable of handling having only one city, especially the problem of being forever stuck on one continent if they don't start on the coast.

It's intended as a major challenge, especially now culture victory (which was always the easiest method in Civ 3) is now impossible. I think you'd find a game with only one city for everyone rather trivial.

 

[TheNiceOne]

The One City Challenge was/is quite popular in CIV3, and I've tried it a few times myself. There, you simply restrict yourself to one single city, while the AI civs play as normal. It's a quite interesting challenge. The OCC option in cIV is exactly that. If the AI civs were similarily limited, it wouldn't be much of a challenge for you.

The problem is of course that the normal way to win the OCC in CIV3 was by cultural or diplomatic means. Cultural is impossible in CIV4, and diplomatic is much harder now that each civ's vote is based on its population. It's an interesting challenge though.

If you want to limit the AI to one city each too, I guess you can easily mod the game so that settlers cannot be built at all.

 

[gakkun]

This isn't really a bug as when you select the challenge it clearly says the 'human' player, not the AI as well.

 

[jameson]

IIRC using the OCC rule allows you to build some buildings that would otherwise have restrictions ( must have built x number of buildings to build y ).

 

[Maksim]

Yes, and it also removes restrictions on national wonders - you can have an unlimited number of them in one city.

However, cathedrals appear to be unaffected - they require two temples to be present. This meant that I was unable to build one in my game, as nobody spread their religion to me, and I was only able to found Christianity.