request for change: captives should always be able to hurry production

Noriad2

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Oct 23, 2014
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I generally choose to use captives to hurry production of buildings rather than settling them as slave specialists or selling them for commerce.

However if a city can build a specific building in one turn, the captive cannot be used to hurry it.
Which is quite annoying if the city has a high production and can build most buildings in one turn.

Sometimes there are ways around this: if you remove all your population from the city map, and turn the citizens (which give 1 hammer each) into a type of specialist that does not give hammers, some buildings might be buildable in 2 turns instead of one. And then you can use the captive to hurry production. Then, after using the captive, you have to change the population back to how it was.

But this is annoying micromanagement. Please make it so that a captive can always hurry production even if the building only needs one more hammer to be completed.
 
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It is not only captives that have that problem Great Engineers and caravans can't either. It is standard BtS behaviour designed to stop you wasting :hammers:. It was not modified for the multiple production option.
 
If I'm not mistaken, I believe I find that I can use caravans to finish the build cost even if the build has only got 1 turn to go. This can be very useful.
 
If I'm not mistaken, I believe I find that I can use caravans to finish the build cost even if the build has only got 1 turn to go. This can be very useful.
If so then there must be something different in the XML as they are just mini Great Engineers as are captives in this.
 
That's what I was thinking... see if there is a difference in method being employed perhaps. Maybe one is using the original vanilla method while the other is using the AIAndy mission method.
 
No they are all using the same thing, the iBaseHurry and iHurryMultiplier to cause the action, ie the Great Engineer method.
 
It seems random. Sometimes a military captive can add production to a build. In another city it can not. Same goes for civilians. I can not fathom the logic used.
 
It is not only captives that have that problem Great Engineers and caravans can't either. It is standard BtS behaviour designed to stop you wasting :hammers:. It was not modified for the multiple production option.
DH has it right.
 
It is not only captives that have that problem Great Engineers and caravans can't either. It is standard BtS behaviour designed to stop you wasting :hammers:. It was not modified for the multiple production option.

You can use trade caravans to hurry production and it will not waste hammers as it gets added to the produced hammer total and excess hammers will overflow to the next item. The problem is only with captives, as they get added to one building rather than the production of the turn. Not sure about engineers.
 
If the captive is added to a building that will finish next turn anyway then why isn't that a waste? Are you expecting it to finiish by adding the captive right then in the current turn? Only Techs can do that afaik.
 
@JosEPh_II no that is not a waste. If a building in your build list has full hammers thanks to the captive, the turn production will go to the next item in your build list instead of to the current building. So the captive will speed up production.
 
@JosEPh_II no that is not a waste. If a building in your build list has full hammers thanks to the captive, the turn production will go to the next item in your build list instead of to the current building. So the captive will speed up production.
That I understand.

But I understood your problem was that you wanted the captive to finish a building in the same turn when it would finish next turn anyway, if the building was left alone (no captive used)?
 
@JosEPh_II: in my current capital city, my hammer production is so high that most buildings that are left available are 1 turn to build. Only 5 buildings take 2 turns to build. But I don't want those buildings due to crime etc. So I effectively can't use any captives there to finish any building. And at Nightmare, units cost 6 gold/turn upkeep so keeping captives around for the future is too expensive.
 
@JosEPh_II: in my current capital city, my hammer production is so high that most buildings that are left available are 1 turn to build. Only 5 buildings take 2 turns to build. But I don't want those buildings due to crime etc. So I effectively can't use any captives there to finish any building. And at Nightmare, units cost 6 gold/turn upkeep so keeping captives around for the future is too expensive.
Seems to be a "cost" for playing the higher difficulty levels don't you think.
 
Seems to be a "cost" for playing the higher difficulty levels don't you think.
No... he's saying he's limited to not being able to get the extra boos of his captive's production injected into the build queue simply because all the buildings he can build are only going to cost 1 round to do so. This shouldn't be an issue because even if it's only going to take around to complete the build, he should still be able to use the captive to get further buildings built thereafter by including the captive's sack production amount into this round and he can't because if he can't get a building in the queue that takes more than one round then he can't sack the captive for production.

It's actually the opposite, a penalty for his production being 'too good' as it is. He can take his citizenry and avoid production wherever possible and try to make it so that a building takes more than around so he can sack the captive then, then turn the citizens back over to doing whatever they were doing before but that's a pain in the butt.

The limitation is somewhere in the dll. I'll have to find it at some point and remove the 1 round restriction.
 
If the captive is added to a building that will finish next turn anyway then why isn't that a waste? Are you expecting it to finiish by adding the captive right then in the current turn? Only Techs can do that afaik.
This is only (mostly) true if you have multiple production on. Even then there are cases where the :hammers: will not contribute to the next thing on the list. Not having a next thing on the list for example seems to always have the :hammers: converted to gold.
@JosEPh_II no that is not a waste. If a building in your build list has full hammers thanks to the captive, the turn production will go to the next item in your build list instead of to the current building. So the captive will speed up production.
If the next thing on the list after the building you are adding the captive to is a unit or sometimes some other building you will be informed that there was an overflow and the :hammers: were changed to gold.
 
Multiple production only "breaks" (i.e. hammers get paid out in gold) if you switch production type in the queue. Production types are wonders, buildings, units-built-with-hammers-only, units-built-with-hammers-and-food, and commerce-types (like wealth). And it doesn't always break. Building followed by unit goes well, unit followed by building tends to break.

In BTS the production tended to break if you order one cheap item at a time (from the popup that the city had nothing left to build), and too many hammers got queued up. Maybe that still causes the queue to break, I don't know as I usually have all my queues filled.
 
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