Sharing tiles

[BlackHat]

I came across this old discussion on a bumped thread and realized there's a mechanic that I've used but never seen discussed.

exactly how can you get a town to share a bonus resource with another?

It is an exploit if you are not just moving the tiles the towns are working but using the same tile for two towns in the same turn.

I'm not sure it's possible to double-gather food from the same tile in a single turn, but if you could I think that would widely be considered an exploit. (There are intra-turn exploits possible, but I think mainly you get the benefit of high food tiles and high prod tiles, not double of any given FOP.)

It actually is possible to use food tiles twice but it's clearly an exploit for the HOF. The trick comes from the processing order on the interturn. First commerce is collected in all towns. Then each town goes one by one (I'm not sure if the order is fixed or variable, but I do know my capital has been first or very high on the list throughout a game) first collects the new food, calculates whether or not it grew, assigns the new citizen to the "best" tile then collects the shields.

So far so good, but the exploit comes when a build completes. You can then zoom to the town and rearrange the citizens. No problem. This is perfectly allowable under HOF and GOTM (I think) rules. But you can ALSO use the arrows to navigate to other towns that have not yet processed their builds and rearrange their citizens. This is very clearly illegal for competition, but not for the reason that you stumbled on here. The traditional use of this exploit is to use high commerce tiles to collect gold, then change them to high food/shield tiles.

A player could also wait until after Town A had completed the build, and break into the build order before Town B processed to rearrange town A and B such that B gets to use the cows for a second time. In fact, this seems to me to be a far more powerful use early in the game - it might let two towns function as 4 turn settler factories despite unspectacular resources.

But there is another situation in which I have used the same tiles production for two towns on the same turn, and it is entirely legal (though "exploit" is up for debate) as far as I can tell.

Preconditions:
Towns A and B that share a high production tile
The towns process such that A processes before B
B will grow next turn
A completes a build next turn and has a worker on the high production tile
The governor set to prioritize production only

Then you can zoom to A after the build completes and move the citizen off the high production tile. When B grows the new citizen will go to the high production tile and reap the shields a second time that turn.

This may seem like a hyper specific set of requirements, but it shows up quite frequently when town A happens to be a 1 turn worker pump. Sometimes Town B is also a worker pump and the dance comes every turn. Sometimes B is a two turn worker pump so you get the growth every second turn. Sometimes the benefit just comes occasionally. But if you had two towns that lacked a shield or two from both completing builds on the next turn it could be an effective strategy if the second town happens to be growing. It's also something to pay special attention to when you happen to have a strategic resource on a hill or mountain in your core, and might justify an adjustment to city placement.

 

[Spoonwood]

Preconditions:
Towns A and B that share a high production tile
The towns process such that A processes before B
B will grow next turn
A completes a build next turn and has a worker on the high production tile
The governor set to prioritize production only

Then you can zoom to A after the build completes and move the citizen off the high production tile. When B grows the new citizen will go to the high production tile and reap the shields a second time that turn.

This may seem like a hyper specific set of requirements, but it shows up quite frequently when town A happens to be a 1 turn worker pump.

Yes.

"Since you can re-assign citizens once your production phase has completed, for a while I had my worker pumps share a mined bonus grassland upon growth. Since the capital always goes first in the production phase, the city advisor would ask me what I wanted to do with 001 when it produced a worker. So, I would zoom to the city and re-arrange tiles back to the above."

"There did exist an arrangement of tiles that I could have used to still have two 1 turn worker pumps and not have them share a tile upon growth. Note the bonus grassland here not directly adjacent to 005 and which could have gotten used by either 001 or 002"

Original source

I have pictures there, and the shared bonus grassland tile can get seen if you scroll down to the parts where I talked about the 2-turn settler factories.

Though I can't say you found this first Blackhat, your explanation does seem more thorough as to the possibilities and requirements than mine (also... in a comment in Jon Shafer's "The Case for Food", Mazarin mentioned 1 turn worker pumps, so this sort of thing might lie somewhere on the forums further back).

 

[Lanzelot]

I'm not sure if the order is fixed or variable, but I do know my capital has been first or very high on the list throughout a game

It's both...
It's "fixed" in the sense that cities are always processed in the order in which they appear in the "global array of all cities".
But it's "variable", because newly founded towns can be inserted into that global array at earlier positions, if cities got razed in the meantime.

Let me explain that with an example: assume you have founded 4 towns so far (A,B,C and D), which may be at positions 1, 12, 17, 24 in that array. (The other spots inbetween are occupied by AI towns.) Your towns will always be processed in the order A -> B -> C -> D.
Now assume that you or someone else razes the AI town at position 8. The next town that gets founded on the map, will now fill that open position instead of being added to the end of the array. So if at that point, you found your next town "E", before any of the AIs, E will be assigned to position 8. Now your towns will be processed in this order:
A(1) -> E(8) -> B(12) -> C(17) -> D(24)

If some AI town gets founded as the first one after the raze, it'll get the 8, and your "E" would get 25 (or whatever the current end of the array is), and the processing order for you wouldn't change. (So you would get the expected A -> B -> C -> D -> E.)

Note: because of this mechanism, it is even possible that at some point of the game your capital is no longer the first city to be processed. But only if you move your Settler on the first turn and found on the second turn (or later). The AIs always found on the first turn, so the AI capitals would get positions 1-7 (or similar, depending on how many AIs are in the game), and your capital would then get position 8. If one of the AI capitals gets razed later, and you happen to found a town right afterwards, then your newly founded town would now get the open position in the 1-7 range and would now precede your capital in the processing order...
Similarly if you capture one of these AI capitals: that AI capital would now be your new #1, and your capital would drop down to second place.