Treasury behaves erratically

[Javewa]

Something is just off with the treasury in the late game.

In my current game I first got an unexplainable influx of 400 , a few turns later my treasury dropped from ~1200 to 24 .
This is not the first time I've notice such erratic behavior in BtS. In a previous, corporation heavy, game I conquered a desolate and primitve Zara and thought the maintainace cost would force me to form a colony. But the + didn't went down much, so I decided to keep the cities under my control. A few turns later I noticed that I was loosing money although a surplus was displayed. After I released the colony, money went back to normal.

This has always happened to me in late game with at least two corporation founded in my cities. Has anyone experienced something similar?

 

[ori]

would you have a save? - please upload one.
I do have on suspicion: this is just derived from knowing Blake's BetterAI mod: with the city governor set on controlling the build queue of your cities it might actually use money to speed up production when you are in Universal Suffrage that would cause you to bleed money rapidly...
As for the unexpected Influx of money - a save would probably be needed...

 

[ainwood]

Yes, a save would help. I doubt that the governer actually upgrades units for you though! Maybe enemy spies?

 

[ori]

I doubt that the governer actually upgrades units for you though!

No but it did rush builds with money with out telling you in BetterAI so in some builds causing people to bleed their whole treasury without finding the cause...

 

[jigglefloyd]

Ori is correct in his assumption for I had the same exact issue. I had universal suffrage on and I had half of my cities completely automated. I also had a few corporations and free market. I was bleeding cash left and right and my only thought was that there were massive spies just stealing my treasury so I built tons of spies and security bereaus but it didn't help.

Then I looked up this thread and changed my universal suffrage to representation and it stopped. I wish you could have greater control over the automation...

 

[dubrown]

The sudden influx of money could be from a wonder you where building but some AI got before you. In such cases you'll get cash for the invested hammers. As it looks like you're automating city builds this could very well be the case.

@ jigglefloyd

The greatest control over automation is not to use it. I know, when you have 50+ cities telling every one of them what to build is a bit of a timeconsuming task. In BTS however, there's a function so you can manually add buildingorders (shift-click to add to end of buildcue, ctrl-click to add first in cue). There's also a way to save buildlists so you can for example set up a cue that you want for all new cities, save it and then with a simple click add it to your new city. I don't remember what the shortcut is for that feature right now but it's described in detail somewhere in this forum I believe.

 

[ori]

saving a build queue is
ctrl-number (where the number is anything from 1-9) - you load it by typing the number you want - so you can save up to 9 different queues...

 

[TechJimNC]

I have played different leaders and I can have a positive cash flow and my treasury goes down, can anyone tell me why?

 

[ori]

welcome to cfc
as explained above - if you are running universal suffrage and have some cities with an activated build governor it will rush buy nearly everything - thus reducing your treasury...

 

[TechJimNC]

thaks for the welcome
I do not have a lot of towns that hurry prodution. I just have a positive cash flow and the treasury goes down and not up. One game I had a +400 per turn and I could not get more then 150 to 200 in the treasury. I have civics universal sufferage , nationhood, emancipation, state property, pacifism. I am not sure how to set the governor up. I chose the items to build in each city.

 

[Dresden]

@TechJimNC: Does it happen if you run something other than Universal Suffrage? If not, it is probably the situation described above with an unintended governor ruining your plans. Go through all your cities and look closely at the governor settings. The composite image below shows the difference between a production governor being on or off:

Anyhow, assuming your problem is different, do you have a save file from a turn before this happens? If so, attach it and someone can take a look.

 

[TechJimNC]

Well I am asking why as this does not happen in the other versions of Civ4 that I have. I do have all those choices turned on, however I fill the list and then I put either wealth, research or culture at the end. I am not sure when it starts (which era)

 

[ori]

this starts when having universal suffrage as your civic.
what other version? do you mean the core game (civ4) as opposed to one of the expansions?

 

[TechJimNC]

I have the core and Warlords, so yes to your question. So should I not use that Civic?

 

[Dresden]

You should turn the production governor off when running Universal Suffrage and/or Slavery because the governor will choose to hurry production via buying or whipping on its own; there's nothing you can do to stop it as Civ4 doesn't have any substantial governor customization. This is especially true if you are queuing (sp?) up your build orders yourself since then the *only* thing the governor will be doing is spending your money and whipping your people. You can still use the citizen governor (button to the right of the production governor) along with the "emphasis" buttons below them.

As for the version question, it's possible the governor may not have been able to hurry production in earlier versions of the game. Someone more familiar with vanilla & warlords behavior would have to weigh in on that though since I spend all my time in BTS.

 

[ori]

the governor was changed in one of the warlords patches - Blake's BetterAI mod which was incorporated into one of the patches is actually the root of this behavior. It is an offshot from Blake teaching the AI to actually use slavery and universal suffrage somewhat efficiently.
I also would recommend not using the build governor - or using it sparingly. Unfortunately the code for the build governor and the AI building code are quite overlapping so that the improved AI code caused this rather undesired behavior for those who automate their cities completely

 

[TechJimNC]

Thank You, I will try that

 

[Kesshi]

In BTS however, there's a function so you can manually add buildingorders (shift-click to add to end of buildcue, ctrl-click to add first in cue). There's also a way to save buildlists so you can for example set up a cue that you want for all new cities, save it and then with a simple click add it to your new city.

dubrown,

The building queue is nice, but that doesn't completely solve the problem due to another bug. If a building requires another building to be built first, you can't properly queue all of the items up. One such example that one might queue up frequently is a grocer->supermarket build queue. You simply cannot make a build queue that has both a grocer and a supermarket in it.

I consider this a bug, or at the very least an oversight.