New Version - May 19th (5-19)

[Rafs]

What mods are you using?

With EUI and huge map, you must be running close to the RAM limit.

Only EUI, the standard package for the comunity patch and 3rd/4th component mod. While it obviously pushes things a bit to the limit, the test I did previously was without any mods (aside from comunity patch). Setup was duel map on quick speed (wanted to test out some stuff).Ran into the same EUI shenanigans, and the trade routes too.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

Is anyone having issues with the interface (specifically I'm having problems with trade routes showing cities in my empire being disconnected when they are not, and the global unhappiness measurement is wacky and makes absolutely no sense).
pic in spoiler

Spoiler :

I've tried reinstalling the game, the patch, EUI, and I still have this problem.

I just came across with this issue tonight, I posted it on GitHub.

 

[chicorbeef]

Only the cost for the first conquered city will remain. The others will return the cost to normal when you lose them. But anyway, it looks like you can't do this with cities conquered to others (unless they were former city states) and this is not worth it to do with settlers.
It may be not so bad if you let a city or two to be returned to his founder after you've vassalized him.

Edit. I might be wrong. It rarely happens to me.

I believe that if you lose an owned city, the costs remain the same, but the next city will be free Culture/Science wise.

 

[tu_79]

I believe that if you lose an owned city, the costs remain the same, but the next city will be free Culture/Science wise.

Yes, so it's not that much of a pain to lose one or two cities when you have too many. Isn't it?
Thing is, if you don't overexpand, it's rare to have seceded cities. While if took the effort to expand so fast that secession becomes a problem, these revolted cities help you to not fall in an inefficiency trap. It's not useless effort either. Your units got experienced, the enemy receives a crappy city back since those are the most likely ones to lose.
Maybe the worst thing is having to deal with rebels at the wrong time. Maybe when you are committed to another war.

Anyways, I haven't seen any city revolting after that beta release that was so harsh for happiness that tradition couldn't work specialists in the capital.

 

[psparky]

Just to be clear, the tech/culture penalties are based on the highest number of (non-puppet) cities you ever had. The penalty never gets reduced, but if you lose cities in any way it creates a float where you can acquire new cities without an additional penalty until you exceed the previous maximum number of cities.

Personally, I hated this mechanic so much that it was the first thing I changed once I learned how to build the DLL (I changed it to just be based on the current number of cities). The current mechanic penalizes civs that lose cities and cannot replace them, so they fall even further behind. It makes it far harder for a human player to recover from losing a city or two, in what otherwise might be an interesting game. It adds a prohibitive (to me) cost of certain actions like liberating a city-state or other city, or taking and razing a city that was forward-settled against you (unless you plan on expanding in the near future). I have seen it described as a penalty on warmongers, but to me, it works the other way - I don't care about it when I'm warmongering but do when I'm not.

 

[Omen of Peace]

Have you tried proposing your patch for it to our code leaders?
I had understood it was a bug they couldn't fix.
I would be keen to have it included - the current mechanism doesn't make much sense. It actually penalizes civ who get eaten up by warmongers since their culture/science costs don't decrease.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

I agree, you could propose your solution to G or ilteroi as this would make a good change to a most probably unintended behaviour. It would be well appreciated!

 

[Moi Magnus]

Have you tried proposing your patch for it to our code leaders?
I had understood it was a bug they couldn't fix.
I would be keen to have it included - the current mechanism doesn't make much sense. It actually penalizes civ who get eaten up by warmongers since their culture/science costs don't decrease.

The way I understand it, it is not a bug. Though it may be difficult to change that in current version for some technical reason I don't know about, I remember being told it was initially a feature.
The argument being that you should not want to catpure a city and lose it immediatly.
(Note that this "feature" was introduce at a time where war wearinness was mostly absent)

 

[crdvis16]

I thought that the science/culture cost of tech/policies was recalculated to reflect your current number of cities after opening a policy or unlocking a tech? In that scenario, losing a city would only penalize you with higher policy/tech cost temporarily.

 

[Gazebo]

It's not a secret, nor a bug, but rather a Firaxis design choice:

//    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// How many Cities does this player have for policy/tech cost purposes?
int CvPlayer::GetMaxEffectiveCities(bool bIncludePuppets)
{
    int iNumCities = getNumCities();

    // Don't count puppet Cities
    int iNumPuppetCities = GetNumPuppetCities();
    iNumCities -= iNumPuppetCities;

    // Don't count cities where the player hasn't decided yet what to do with them or ones that are currently being razed
    int iNumLimboCities = 0;
    const CvCity* pLoopCity;
    int iLoop;
    for(pLoopCity = firstCity(&iLoop); pLoopCity != NULL; pLoopCity = nextCity(&iLoop))
    {
        if(pLoopCity->IsIgnoreCityForHappiness() || pLoopCity->IsRazing())
        {
            iNumLimboCities++;
        }
    }
    iNumCities -= iNumLimboCities;

    if(iNumCities == 0)    // If we don't pretend the player has at least one city it screws up the math
        iNumCities = 1;

    // Update member variable
    m_iMaxEffectiveCities = (m_iMaxEffectiveCities > iNumCities) ? m_iMaxEffectiveCities : iNumCities;

    if (bIncludePuppets)
    {
        return m_iMaxEffectiveCities + iNumPuppetCities;
    }

    return m_iMaxEffectiveCities;
}

The magic is the 'update member variable' line - it never allows your total city count to 'go down' once it has gone up.

G

 

[Enginseer]

I thought that the science/culture cost of tech/policies was recalculated to reflect your current number of cities after opening a policy or unlocking a tech? In that scenario, losing a city would only penalize you with higher policy/tech cost temporarily.

PERMANENTLY.

 

[Der_Zorn_gottes]

Something clever, something clever, Entropy, something clever.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

It's not a secret, nor a bug, but rather a Firaxis design choice:


The magic is the 'update member variable' line - it never allows your total city count to 'go down' once it has gone up.

G

And is it possible to change this? I mean, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense Can we / want we?

 

[Gazebo]

And is it possible to change this? I mean, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense Can we / want we?

Sure. Question is the latter. I understand the logic: if you expand to 10 cities and have that advantage for 100 turns, then drop back to 4 cities, you’d suddenly be able to get policies and techs quickly, perhaps instantly depending on the speed. Not saying it’s realistic, but that’s probably why they did it.

G

 

[crdvis16]

Learn something new every day. The mechanic certainly punishes losers of war pretty harshly when they've probably already been punished a lot to begin with.

 

[psparky]

I don't think it's a bug, as it's a Firaxis design decision. However, VP improves on countless such decisions

It's pretty clear that the current mechanism is misunderstood looking through the posts - the alternative is at least easy to explain and understand. I am concerned that there may be ways to exploit it though.

And yes, all I did was change the line that sets the count to just use the current city count, rather than the maximum of current saved maximum and the current count. That does seem to work OK.

In the vanilla game, liberating a city or capturing and immediately razing a city don't incur the penalty, but in VP they do. Perhaps that might be regarded as a bug.

 

[tu_79]

Sure. Question is the latter. I understand the logic: if you expand to 10 cities and have that advantage for 100 turns, then drop back to 4 cities, you’d suddenly be able to get policies and techs quickly, perhaps instantly depending on the speed. Not saying it’s realistic, but that’s probably why they did it.

G

How's that benefitial?

I can't raze my own settled cities. I have to let them be conquered or lose them due to a very bad mismanagement of my economy, so I would not be faring well in any case.
I could conquer a few cities and then raze them all, while in current system I have to do this one city at a time for avoiding extra costs, but this is not intuitive at all.
It's no longer possible to sell many buildings at once in a razing city.

I don't see many ways to exploit this mechanic, especially with all the changes from vanilla, but this would help bad players to keep playing in case they overexpanded too much and also badly wounded wide civs would be able to recover faster.

 

[civplayer33]

To be fair to the current mechanic, razing a city immediately after conquest will make the city not count in the following turns; so you don't have to wait until it's completely razed before you conquer and raze more, as long as you don't interrupt the razing process. If you didn't have a "free spot" available in the maximum, however, it will increase the maximum by 1 for the first city, though; after that you're good. (I've tested this)

To me, the most annoying aspect of the current mechanic is that a single liberation or razing will increase the counter irrevocably the first time, which doesn't matter much if I'm going wide, but if I planned to stay tall for a while, let's say with 5 cities, liberating one city without planning to conquer / found another shortly thereafter will be a pretty bad move.
So I'm wondering if it's possible to omit increasing the counter on liberation / instant-razing instead of the proposed change (once razing is interrupted it should increase, however); this would be more of a minimalist best of both worlds, no?

 

[Revolutionist_8]

if you expand to 10 cities and have that advantage for 100 turns, then drop back to 4 cities, you’d suddenly be able to get policies and techs quickly, perhaps instantly depending on the speed

I hate being an annoying potato, but I don't understand how would that possible. You lose cities -> you lose yields. The tech and policy % remains the same compared to #Cities. With less yields, you need less proportionally. Fair fair. (Am I missing something? Could someone please explain to me)

 

[psparky]

I just did a test on my modded version, and there is an exploit. You can temporarily set captured cities to be razed which lowers the tech/culture costs, get a policy (would probably also work with tech), then cancel the raze. I kinda wish I didn't know that

I'm considering a further change to make cities being razed count. You would then potentially suffer a penalty for multiple razing cities, but it would reduce as each city was completely razed. I do wonder if I'm digging a hole for myself though.