Warlords: Annoying AI/Governor bugs

[Xarlak]

Ok, After having run through two Noble-level epic games in warlords, I've run into a couple of annoying bugs having to do with the AI:

1) Once a city goes even slightly into starvation, unless you specifically tell it to concentrate on food and minimize starvation, it will pump everything into production; I had one city that increased in size, was losing one per turn, but the AI reconfigured the workers so that instead of losing one food per turn, it was now losing 8 or so per turn. It was working mined hills instead of flood plains. This has happened a couple of times, so it's not just a one-off thing. Telling the governor to concentrate on food can help, but it's still annoying.

2) For some reason, the game has stopped asking me what to build in newly conquered cities after they finish revolting. I suspect this may be a setting or something that I missed, but I didn't see it... so tell me, is this a bug or just a wrongly-set option?

 

[cymru_man]

It asks you what you want to build the turn after you conquer the city, iirc, instead of once it has finished rebelling, as in vanilla Civ.

I hear you on #1, weird and annoying.

 

[Commander Bello]

1) Seems to me that this would be the best the gouvernor could do. Your city is starving. Obviously, this is not due to citizens set to specialists or something else, but due to missing food for the size of the population.
Now, if there is starvation anyway, why not making the best of it and get some production, until the city reaches a size it can maintain?

Looks like the correct reaction to me, based on your short description.

 

[Xarlak]

1) Seems to me that this would be the best the gouvernor could do. Your city is starving. Obviously, this is not due to citizens set to specialists or something else, but due to missing food for the size of the population.
Now, if there is starvation anyway, why not making the best of it and get some production, until the city reaches a size it can maintain?

Looks like the correct reaction to me, based on your short description.

Except that even after it decreases to a managable size, it continues concentrating on production to the exclusion of food - ie, if it can sustain a level 22, and grows to 23, It's been going into the red, and continuing to stay in the red until I notice - which in one case, wasn't until it was back down to a size 15 city or so.

 

[Rael]

Another annoying thing about governors is that they almost always make one of the citizens an engineer. This significantly slows down the growth of the city. Also starving a city that can't sustain itself is pointless, because I would rather lose that one food per turn and work with higher population as long as I can. For those reasons (and many others) I rarely use governors and usually just check every city at the end of turn (it's quicker than you'd think, I don't play large or huge maps - they kill my PC)

 

[MrCynical]

1) is a serious problem. It's not that uncommon, particularly in the late game that due to for example unhappiness, or just nearing the terrains maximum capacity, a city will be short say 1 food per turn. This would normally be a trivial issue with loads of time to correct before the food box is exhausted. However the governor now creates vast numbers of specialists so the cities is losing dozens of food per turn, and hence will starve in only a couple of turns instead of 30 odd. The extra production is not worth this, and if you're unlucky you won't spot the governor's done this until several population have unnecessarily starved away. This may have been a well intentioned attempt to make the governor smarter, but it was a seriously bad idea. Worse still the same issue occurs with AI cities, and I've seen a number unnecessarily crippled by this.

2) I haven't seen and can't duplicate.

 

[Mr. Do]

God (1) is annoying when you catch it.

 

[dgonaz]

I don't use AI Governers so I don't know much about problem 1. Problem 2 I have had myself, more than once I have had conquered cities that have done nothing for seven or eight turns when they could be doing things because they didn't pop up asking me what to build after they got done rebelling and I simply forgot to check while doing other things.

 

[djlemur]

2) For some reason, the game has stopped asking me what to build in newly conquered cities after they finish revolting. I suspect this may be a setting or something that I missed, but I didn't see it... so tell me, is this a bug or just a wrongly-set option?

I had this on my last game - I had conquered an entire continent quickly (infantry vs archers) and failed to notice that any of the cities had failed to prompt for several turns - it made a big hole in the treasury.

DavidR.

 

[iiee]

This happened to me exactly and i HATE that very much. If this happened in early game then this is manageable, but in mid or late game, one by one city management is really tired. Happened especially during war time and war weariness starts to accumulate.

 

[shadyforce]

You're told if happiness/food resources have been pillaged, or deals cancelled, and you should check your war-weariness throughout any war. So if there's a sudden problem that would cause a lack of food, you should spot it. And if you want time to correct the problem, tell the governor to emphasise food and he'll gladly give you the time.

Otherwise, the governor shouldn't second guess you. It should assume you have optimised the city and that it has in fact reached it's natural limit.

Now the question is, which way maximises the amount of shields, commerce and GPP you get: emphasise food starving the city slowly and getting a little of extra resources over a certain amount of turns, or de-emphasising food, starve the city quickly but get a large bonanza of extra sh/com/gpp for the few turns it takes to starve?

I'm not sure if the governor calculates this, or if it automatically starves the city quickly, but I would think that leaving this feature, but let the governor calculate the optimal starvation rate would be best.

 

[MrCynical]

The governor issue is generally a matter of the annoyance factor. It also not only de-emphasizes food, but ignores it completely, resulting in situations where a city switches from using a 5 food 3 commerce tile to a 2 food 3 commerce tile when it starts starving for any reason, which is just plain moronic. It simply regards food as of zero value, and ignores it completely. There are practically no circumstances where this governor induced mega starvation is even remotely better than normal slow (and correctable) starvation. The very short term boost to production and commerce from specialists is usually not even worth the massive quantities of food burned from the storage boxes.

At best this wastes an immense amount of the player's time in wars. At worst it cripples cities, and it also affects the AI. It is probably the single biggest thing that needs fixing in warlords. If you can't figure out a way to get the governor to understand starvation Firaxis, then will you at least put it back to how it was in Civ 4!