Kmad forgot to say that when the goody hut is popped because of expanding cultural borders, you can't get exp or healing ( duh!), so the "better" way to pop a hut ( with "better" I mean bigger % of getting the so desired free tech ) is with a expanding border.
you're right, i didn't even think about that! and *blush* thank you for the part of your reply that i'm too flattered i can't even quote *giggle*.
two questions related to huts opened by city borders:
i have read (and believe) that it's impossible to get a free tech from a hut by popping it with any unit
before you have any cities. you're just not allowed to learn technology before your empire has been born. i've never gotten a free tech by a hut that was opened when i settled my very first city. i get the feeling that case counts as "this hut was popped
before your first city was founded", even tho the borders created by the capital are what opened the hut. i guess it's opened before you have any commerce, so your empire doesn't have any brains yet or something. does anybody know for sure? it wouldn't change how i do it, i just want to know.
and does anybody know whether my feeling that border pops can't get barbarians is true? i can't confirm that with rules or code, i just know i've never seen it happen. and i hope i never do, since sometimes i pop those huts with no garrison in my capital
.
in today's "things you may have never wondered" news: you've probably seen huts that haven't been popped later in the game, that are guarded by barb warriors who take their job very seriously, and will not move off the hut to attack you. they are assigned there to guard that hut and that is what they will do, no matter what. i found out recently, reading a report about a game played on a terra map, that if the hut underneath such a warrior is popped by a city being placed nearby so that culture borders expand, that warrior goes poof bye-bye. that leans me even more towards thinking that culture pops can't give you barbs, if they make even already-existing guardian barbs go away (that was a vanilla game, and there was no great wall). but i've learned i can't alway apply my sense of logic to this game.
Long ago, some kind person posted a list of the hut yield probabilities for all difficulty levels. There's a 10% chance of getting a tech, at all level: you can't get Settlers or Workers above Warlord level (10% for each at Settler or Chieftain, 5% at Warlord)
yeah i wasn't that kind. partly because i was too lazy to work it out. and partly because it's easy to miss things like ... techs are 10% at all levels
noble and up only. it's 4/20 for settler, 3/20 for chieftain and warlord, and then 2/20 for noble and up. it sure seems rarer at deity though! i'm sure that's because you have to focus on making things other than exploring units early on, you have to bring exploring troops home earlier to fogbust because barbs show up sooner, there are so many more chances to get barbs from the huts themselves so your guys might die before they find another hut, and the AI gets so many more units than you do that they find more huts. so your chances to pop the huts are lower in the first place. i know the first time it happened to me i checked the settings screen (three times
) to verify i was indeed playing deity because i was so shocked, but mathematically the odds for each individual hut are the same as they are on noble.
getting settlers and workers for free is so incredibly awesome! playing settler or chieftain with no barbarians, if you get settlers and/or workers, they can scout around safely for you for a while, and then make new cities or improve the land ... and you didn't have to stop your city from growing to make them.