Question concerning No palace bug!!

[Smirk]

I reload ALL the time, every day in fact, every day when I continue my game .


I think the multiplayer statement puts all this in context, you will be hurting if you don't learn how to play without reloading. And there are certainly many skill-based options to avoid losing 6 swords to a spearmen. And there are a host of other "superstitious" methods to avoid it, (ie things that I've noticed, but don't seem possible: like not attacking with your last movement point, fortifying the unit before attacking).


As for wizlock, if he says he innocently found this bug I believe him. If any map wants you to explore before settling its this one, however in most cases its not worth it, as long as your start has food production, settle. I only move 1 or 2 spaces if I get more resources or river/coastal.


The person arguing semantics about bugs, STFU, firaxis doesn't have to officially proclaim anything is a bug, if that were the case more than half the bugs that exist in all the software wouldn't be. You sound like a marketting droid. If in fact you are a Microsoft employee, you should know that most companies don't follow MS guidelines on this.
The dice in my Monopoly game melted and so no longer roll properly (and 1 die has 3 pips and 5 pips on the same side!), Hasbro neglected to mention what I should do in such a event, so now when we play we just pick random numbers from our head and use that instead.


Back to the topic..
I understand why this is a bug, but I consider it a stupid one considering there are only a few things you need to worry about to ensure a player always has a capital. Its a rare case, potentially, since you aren't much of a war going civ if you have no cities, but as Aeson mentioned he was able to repeat it just by abandoning his only city. So this is exploitable *any* time in the early game.

I would be quite annoyed if this happened to me by accident, because it then ruins the game. If you don't feel cheating ruins the game, then you have to get over the win-at-all-costs mentality and learn the enjoying-the-game-itself.

 

[SirPleb]

LOL, I would never have been the person to find this bug! I'm way too cautious.

As something which might be interesting to some readers (advanced players may find this boring):

I suggest never opening a goody hut even with a worker, not to mention a settler. With a settler the risk is extreme, it could be game over, not a chance I would take. But even with a worker the cost could be very high. At the start of the game a lost worker could make a big difference. And, to my thinking, there's no reward for taking that risk! At the start of the game, my worker(s) will be 100% busy in already explored areas, so diverting them to open a hut would waste moves. And any hut near enough to the workers to be opened by them will still be there a few turns later - if it is that accessible then it is in our territory, we'll get there first. We can afford to wait and examine the hut with a fighting unit when one is available.

Somewhat unrelated but may be of interest to some, here's the thought process I went through at the very start of GOTM #3. (There's some relevance to my already digressed note <g> since I remember that I ignored a goody hut at the start. I just replayed the start to write the following notes. I'm fairly sure these notes are an exact replay of how I started because the following sequence ends up popping barbarians from the hut, just what happened in my actual GOTM #3.)

4000BC: The starting position seems tolerable but not great. Before committing to it let's move the worker one space. Normally I do not start exploring with a diagonal move (I'll try to write more about that in another thread sometime) but in this particular situation:
1) There's ocean East of us.
2) There are mineable tiles SW and NW of the start position. When possible, my priority would be to irrigate more food for the first city. But this start position can't have the food improved for the first few citizens. Given that, my next choice is to increase production. Therefore the SW and NW tiles are of interest, the worker should start by mining one of them ASAP if we do start the city here.

So I move the worker SW. (A toss up. There's a hint of plain/desert visible to the south which suggests north might be better. Against that, the ocean curves to the south suggesting more land mass in that direction. I pick south.)

The worker move doesn't reveal any better place to start, so I build Beijing in the starting position.

I start Beijing building a warrior. (I don't worry about a barracks at the start, it is more important to get units exploring quickly.)

I start research on Pottery. (I want Granary ASAP so that efficient pop rushing can begin.) I set the research rate to 100%.

3950BC: Start the worker on mining the SW tile. Although there is a visible goody hut, that can wait for the first warrior.

3800BC: Move the worker to the NW mineable tile.

3750BC: Start Beijing on another warrior. Move the warrior it just produced due south - he's going for the goody hut, but he's going there with an efficient exploration pattern. Start the worker on mining the NW tile.

3700BC: Move the warrior south another step.

3650BC: Explore the goody hut. Blast it, barbarians!

Despite the bad luck in getting barbarians from the hut, that doesn't change my thinking that this was a good sequence of starting moves. If you play out the sequence you'll see that our warrior defeats two of the barbarians but the third one goes the other way and ransacks Beijing. It is a pity (sure didn't feel like a great start when it happened) but it really turns out not to be a big deal in the greater scheme of things. It is just a bit of gold lost and a reminder that this is why we don't open huts with settlers or workers!

 

[Aeson]

I find it best to wait to explore huts that are within 3 spaces of an undefended city, worker, or settler. If barbarians have the choice of attacking a military unit, or going for one of the undefended options I mentioned, they will always choose the undefended (even if they shouldn't be able to see it). Horsemen Barbarians are worse, as they will go for unseen, undefensible units up to 3 spaces away. But since Horsemen don't pop out of huts, it isn't a problem in this case.

Also, getting barbarians from goody huts is the second best thing in my opinion (a settler being first). This means your military unit is now an elite military unit, and at the stage where goody huts are still being found, this can be huge. An elite Archer has a good chance of taking out a couple AI cities early on (other than Deity level). On GOTM3, I took over the capitols of the Japanese, Persians, and Babylonians with just 2 units. For peace treaties I got a Persian city, and another Babylonian one just a few turns later. The Japanese hadn't built a 3rd city, otherwise it would have been 6 cities overall, with only 2 military units. Both were Archers, one which had been promoted to elite by barbarians from a hut. If it hadn't been for that promotion, it wouldn't have been able to beat the Babylonian capitol (finished with 1 out of 5 hps). So those barbarians were actually worth 2 cities in this case, even better than a settler.

 

[SirPleb]

pagh80: Good for you! I was so glad to read your latest post. I too am comfortable that this is a fair play zone. (There may be exceptions but to focus on them would spoil the good fun, so let's not. They won't win anything that matters by it.) I barely decided to play my first GOTM, #2 last month. I was actually really nervous about not reloading. I was used to playing on my own and just going back and replaying when disaster struck. I didn't think I could enjoy playing on after a massive barbarian uprising, a stupid war when I didn't want one, etc, etc. It is a whole new kind of play for me. Much to my delighted surprise it turns out to be way more fun! It turns out that the worst of bad events can be recovered from and sometimes they are even blessings in disguise. They are not so bad to deal with as the thought of them was! Discovering that has been a liberating experience. And they add a new dimension of unpredictability, of having to change direction after making plans.

 

[SirPleb]

What a neat thought Aeson! I hadn't considered the barbarians from huts as a positive but of course you are right! That sure fits in with my previous reply to pagh80 - this game is full of surprises to me in what can turn out to be a good thing.

 

[pagh80]

Right now i am playing GOTM3 for fun. Just to try how it is not to reload at all. (not that i reloaded all the time before.. but i did some times if i realiced ive made a big mistake or so on)
Like sirPleb(by the way.. nice 2nd place in the GOTM2) i realiced that its somehow enjoyable to play that way... well its nice to rise again after a mistake. lets say a devistating war..

As for the huts. I agree with aeson. after a settler the next best thing is barbarians because it almost everytime makes your unit elite... great for early conquest. Settlers and barbarians are only good at the very beginning, i prefer techology later on though.

Has anyone tried to hurry attack units in your cities??
At start you have despotism and it is pretty crappy. But it has one good thing... If you goes for conquest its very good to speed up production on attack units. You Shall ONLY do it in your cities with high corrution. I usually get too many cities in the start so the corruption takes a big part of my money and overall shields.. but the food-output will not be touched.
A city with high corruption who are placed just on a decent spot can easily rice to two before it get a swordsman build, and therefore it makes the production of units much higher if you speed it up. A city on size 1 or 4 does´nt make the big difference because corruption takes a big part of the cities shield and money-output. The concern of the peoples mood is neither a concern. Just have a unit stationiced in the city, and the people will be content( i dont even think you have to have a unit in the city if the size is 1).
A couple of turns(5-10) before you decide to switch to republic, its a good thing not to hurry on your cities. That way your people will forget your cruelty.. :rocket3:

I wonder if you guys would tell me what level you usually play on.
I play on monarch or emperor but i have never really tried a game on Deity.(The huge bonuses the computer gets is pretty scary) :slay:

 

[Aeson]

I usually play Deity games, just because then every mistake I make, I notice it and can learn from it. My most common mistake is trying to divide my forces during conquest, instead of keeping large groups of units concentrated on individual cities. On Monarch and even Emporer, this isn't really that big of a problem. On Deity though, trying to take cities with less than overwhelming force usually ends up costing me. Also I have a tendancy to not build enough overall units, which the AI will remind me of very quickly. Only 1 or 2 units per city? Say "hello" to Cleopatra's 200 archers/spearmen/warriors (they still don't upgrade much on Deity sadly).

You just figured out a large part of what makes all these high scores in the GOTM's possible pagh80! Pop-rushing in Despotism is probably the most powerful production tool in Civ3. Food isn't affected by corruption at all, so using population to build units or improvements almost makes corruption irrelevant. Sounds sorta like the argument against the no palace bug right? but this is an intended game feature, though probably more useful than intended. I try to not use it too much, as it is so powerful, but none of the high scores in the GOTM's would have been possible without at least a bit of Pop-rushing. My original Horseman army and Barracks were pop rushed in GOTM2, along with the Galleys I also built. After that it really wasn't needed as those units, and the units that they were upgraded to, fought all of the battles until Mech Infantry/Modern Armor were available. In cities that were just somewhat corrupt I did rush courthouses and temples in as well though.

You don't need a unit in the city if you either have a temple there (which can be rushed as well, 2 pop points for non-religious civs though), or a luxury hooked up. It usually is best to just park a spearman in the city for defensive purposes though. One thing about Pop-rushing, is that it adds a lot of micromanagement, especially with how many cities were possible during GOTM2. Each city needs to be checked for size, and have units pop-rushed once they grow. Sometimes its best to have a city hover at size 2 or 3 instead of 1, and this can get confusing. To determine the optimal pop rush point, just count up the number of "good" food sources that the city can use. If there are 2 flood plains and a cow, that means you want the city to be at size 3, and pop rush whenever it gets to 4. This is because that is when it will be growing fastest, as each population point takes 2 food per turn, and any 3+ food spaces will decrease the time needed to fill the food box. The food box is the same size from 1 thru 6. If pop-rushing is going to be used for extended periods of time, then building a granery is often a good idea (or capturing the pyramids if your neighbor decides to be nice and build it for you).

There are lots of little (and some big) strategies that can be used throughout the game. A lot of them are posted over on the Apolyton Strategy message boards if you want to check them out. The most important ideas are on Pop-rushing, Use of 2 Movement troops (horsemen), Diplomatic/Trade negotiations with the AI, and maximizing food production/use efficiency (when combined with pop-rushing). Other ideas such as worker factories (try building a worker in a city size 7, with a granery.. worker per turn), expansion/build patterns, and others can all help at certain times in the game. If you are playing on Emporer/Monarch and doing well, then a lot of these things you probably already found out, or do to some extent without realizing it.

 

[barefootbadass]

You should not reload to redo anything in a way that gives you an advantage you wouldn't have had otherwise. That is cheating and anything obtuse like the no palace thing is cheating. I have only reloaded once so far in my GOTM 3 and that was when I accidentally gave a unit goto orders for like 17 turns of movement and I didn't even know what unit it was. Something like that is the only place where that is acceptable and then only if you hadn't done anything since the last save.

 

[OneInTen]

Marketting guy? Actually no, I'm a programmer. Thus I know how when something is working as intended but someone else doesn't understand it and thinks it's a bug, it can cause problems (ie their "fix" being worse than the original problem). That's why I suggest holding off declaring it an official bug until there is confirmation.

In my opinion, it's only a bug under 3 circumstances:
a) It causes the game to crash
b) The observed behaviour is different to the documented behaviour (which may infact be a bug in the documentation not the code!)
c) The original developer has confirmed it's a bug (which really reduces to case 2, since by doing this they're really just enhances the documentation, albeit unofficially)

Until then I think it's very dangerous territory to go making calls as to what is a bug. Perhaps what you think is a bug is just a feature that doesn't work as you would expect. Perhaps this is a situation the original developer never expected, but upon reflection believes it works as it should.

Since there's no documentation (at least that's available to us) as to what the expected behaviour is when you capture rather than build your first city, we can't know whether it's a bug or not.

Common sense says that it's most likely a bug, but we'll have to wait and see I think.

 

[pvondrak]

I'm sorry, but that's just too ridiculous. This isn't some deep and obscure effect that requires much study to determine whether or not it acts as intended.

You're still basically saying that unless a developer says otherwise, it's not a bug. I have to say I feel that's somwhat foolish. We aren't talking about mathematical proofs here. We may not be able to know with 100% certainty that it's a bug, but no normal person I know of needs to know something to that degree of certainty before they'll say they 'know' it to be true. It certainly doesn't lend itself to being categorized as dangerous territory.

I'm guessing if you witnessed a murder, were put on the stand, and asked if you were certain you saw the crime, you'd say no. After all, you wouldn't even be sure you're really in the courtroom, everyone may all be a figment of your imagination, so who's to know what's really true, right?

 

[Matrix]

Originally posted by barefootbadass
You should not reload to redo anything in a way that gives you an advantage you wouldn't have had otherwise. That is cheating and anything obtuse like the no palace thing is cheating. I have only reloaded once so far in my GOTM 3 and that was when I accidentally gave a unit goto orders for like 17 turns of movement and I didn't even know what unit it was. Something like that is the only place where that is acceptable and then only if you hadn't done anything since the last save.

Completely right. Only an accidental wrong order (e.g. by pressing the wrong button) is a valid reason to reload.

I kind of surprised me someone actually didn't know it is disallowed to reload. Do you even read the rules page? Perhaps we should become more irritating like you first have to read the rules before downloading the GOTM.

 

[Matrix]

About pop-rushing: Firaxis will probably be informed about this. As long as they don't make a patch which counter-effects it, it is allowed.

By the way, I think this is done a lot in the real world as well. The average age was much lower, and the birth and death rate much higher. Perhaps they wanted to reflect that by this.

 

[Aeson]

I think Firaxis has said that they are going to tone down the effects of pop rushing in a future patch/upgrade. It is overpowered right now, and something should be done about it. Most likely they will change the way citizens moods are affected, instead of just adding 20 more turns of unhappiness (which will still be calmed by the garrison units/luxuries/temples) there needs to be levels of unhappiness. In other Civ games there were angry people, and then there were angry people. Pop rushing once should have the same effect as now, but continued pop rushing would cause unhappiness to become a problem even with garrison units/luxuries/temples. Also the amount of shields per population point needs to be toned down a little most likely.

 

[pvondrak]

It would probably be less of an issue if the unhappiness was allowed to stack. Like Aeson mentioned, let people go from unhappy/angry to really unhappy, so that instead of needing one content face to make an unhappy person content, that person required two (or more, if you've been really busy killing all their friends and relatives).

Perhaps another solution would be to further reduce food/shields produced by people in that condition (possibly regardless of their happiness after modifiers), along the lines of the current despotism penalty. *shrug*

Stuff like this can be hard to balance though. Probably the easiest thing for them to do would be to make it more expensive in population cost.

 

[Matrix]

We'll see what Firaxis does with it. But in the mean time we won't take any awkward decisions ourselves. It's just something you may take advantage of, now you still can. I did that too, by the way. At least I think. Rushing lots of units saved my butt, because the Persians were kicking it. (I now have peace.) And it didn't even cost me a penny!

 

[SirPleb]

I've been mulling over the pop rush issue for a while. I've come up with an interesting idea. I hope someone from Firaxis is lurking on these threads and reads this!

The problem with pop rushing seems to be that it feels like it isn't something which Firaxis intended to be this powerful, and thus that if feels like it is imbalancing the game (every high score GOTM play will use it I think.)

My basic thought is, how about embracing it? Change perspective to consider it an interesting new fundamental game element and integrate it better as such. With small tweaking (small enough to be done in a patch I think) it could become yet one more dimension of the game which is as commonly used as food, shields, resources, etc.

Specifically here's a way this could be done:
1) Add a new on/off field in some city management window field called "forced labor".
2) Add a new numeric field in the same window called "maximum population".
3) Under all governments but Despotism and Communism these new fields are disabled and have no effect.
4) Under Despotism and Communism, if "forced labor" is on for a city, when the city's population grows past its "maximum population", eliminate the new citizen and add 25 shields to the project the city is currently working on. Unhappiness goes up just as it currently does.

The results would be:
1) It no longer feels unintended and like cheating a bit. Instead it is a clearly presented powerful game element.
2) Less awkward micro-management is required in play.
3) The strength of the technique is clearer and more predictable. (Vs. the current approach where one can squeeze 39 shields by doing it right.)
4) The strength of the technique is slightly reduced.

In terms of fitting the game's historic feel I think this would work well. In the ages we rule with Despotism forced labor was of course common and it did have a price in human life.

Rushing with workers should, I think, be a natural side-effect. If one has a worker join a forced labor city which is at the designated maximum population, the worker gets converted to 25 shields. This again seems to fit the feel of the game to me, workers are natural for this purpose. (Vs. the similar Caravan technique in the previous Civ which did not really feel right to me.) I don't think that using workers this way is an imbalance. It can be done with the current pop rush technique and I don't think anyone has found it overwhelming - workers are too valuable as workers to waste casually. In terms of moving production from one city to another, that seems ok to me. It can be done currently with pop rushing. Doing it this way the result would be that a worker costs 10 shields plus one pop growth in city A. Then the worker is used to gain 25 shields in city B. The pop growth in city A could have been used for 25 shields there. So the net cost of moving the production is 10 shields plus the time lost to move the worker.

The number of shields I've suggested, 25, could of course be any number. I like 25 for a few reasons. It is less than the currently possible 39. This reduces the power of the technique a bit which is good, particularly since this new way it would be more commonly used, and there'd be some additional power from the new way in cumulative effects. I like a number which would be just a bit less than the cost of a Horseman, so that there'd be some prize in creating a forced labor city which also had a little bit of production. This would make the technique a bit subtler with more tradeoffs. But one might argue for 30 as a good number, or even 20 I guess (I'd worry about that being a bit low and possibly eliminating this as a major game element.)

Wonders should continue to be excluded from rushing just as they are now. Personally I'd love to see that change but, as well as being more work, that could change the game balance. The consequences of being able to e.g. build Forbidden Palace by using 12 workers are too hard to foresee. An important thing about the basic change I've described is that it would not (I think) damage the game balance. It would change the existing unexpected technique a bit but mostly it would just embrace and better integrate it.

Similarly, cities which are at their maximum size should perhaps be excluded. E.g. a size 6 city without water/aqueduct should not add shields when it grows by one. The reason I suggest it is to avoid a change in balance vs. the current game. With a new easy way to pop rush, people might often put a maximum size city onto forced labor, to easily gain from the wasted food. One can already squeeze a city this way to some degree, building workers in it and having them join pop rush cities elsewhere. But we wouldn't want to introduce a new possibility of applying the excess food directly in the source city to other kinds of production - that's something which can't currently be done so it would risk some new imbalance.

I know that a change like this would be larger than one normally considers in a patch. But it might not be too large. Especially since it would deal with what seems to be the largest unexpected power technique. (Excluding bugs of course.)

Anyone else have thoughts? Perhaps I missed something and deserve to be quickly shot down on this?

Should I be posting this on another thread to improve the chance that Firaxis sees this?

 

[Smash]

now you want pop rushing taken out or cut back?

why not just make the game completely unplayable?...almost there now.

Maybe the player should be limited to 10 techs in the game?
Maybe settlers should not be allowed till a city hits size 20?

WHY NOT MAKE A BETTER AI IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Better yet eliminate the pathetic AI with MP.

 

[Aeson]

No one is advocating taking out pop rushing (at least not here), just modifying it to make it more balanced with other forms of government. As it is now, staying in despotism is the best idea until the (self-imposed) limit of your conquest is at hand. I play Deity games without pop-rushing, and it is still possible, so toning pop rushing down a bit isn't going to make the game unplayable. It might allow a different production method to compete in the GOTM's though, which would be a good thing. Competitions where there is only one way to do well are less interesting than those where you have several options.

I agree with a lot of what SirPleb said, and definitely reducing the micromanagement involved would make the game more enjoyable, plus make pop rushing seem like an intended part of the game. There does need to be more of a trade off with happiness though. Being able to station 1 unit in a city to keep unhappiness from many many pop rushes just doesn't cut it. Increasing levels of unhappiness would allow pop rushing to be useful, but not so overpowering.

Another idea is perhaps with each pop rush there is an increased chance of a cultural defection ("hey! if we join the babylonians, they won't whip us to death!" *cheers*). Also, the intended use of pop rushing was that the first pop point is worth 40 sheilds, and all others are 20. Through step production, the diminishing returns are circumvented, which certainly isn't right. Of course since the most effective use of pop rushing is to produce units of 30 shields, and buildings of 40-60, this doesn't come into play all that often.

One way to curtail pop rushing's effectiveness, and step rushing as well, would be to put a hard limit on the number of turns between possible pop rushes. The best pop rushing cities can grow every other turn (at size 2-3 with a granery and some irrigated wheat flood plains). The average city grows in 5 turns with a granery though, and 10 without. Of course there isn't really a valid reason other than game balance that would explain a 5 or 10 turn wait.

 

[Smash]

nope...now this is the kinda thinking that got us what we have.The players are winning...take it out.

A much better idea is give me a reason to get out of despo.Make the "advanced" governments better.MUCH better.

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by Aeson

... There does need to be more of a trade off with happiness though ...

I like your idea of reducing happiness further Aeson. Ideally what I'd like would be something along the lines I described earlier with an increasing unhappiness level also happening.

Of the three things you mentioned (more unhappiness, chance of cultural defection, and hard limit on frequency of pop rush) the first two seem much nicer as models of the real world. Also, a hard limit on frequency would tend to curtail use of the technique vs. adding to the richness of the game.

I prefer the unhappiness approach to the chance of defection because I'd like pop rushing to stay predictable. There are elements of the game which are highly predictable (e.g. food growth, shield production) and elements which are unpredictable (e.g. combat results, discovery of resources.) I like the idea that forced labor would be in the predictable category.

Thinking as a programmer (I've been programming for 30 years), it seems unclear whether tweaking the unhappiness would be difficult, beyond what one might be willing to consider in a patch. It depends on the internal structure of course. But I have the impression that there may not be an existing internal structure which could be easily extended to allow for the appropriate new kind of deepening unhappiness. So they might not want to make that change. The cultural revolt idea might or might not be difficult. Limiting the number of turns between rushes would almost certainly be easy. I think it is good odds that doing something like what I described in my earlier note would be easier than the unhappiness and revolt changes, but of course harder than a number of turns limit. It sure would be wonderful if they could do that stuff and the unhappiness too!