Third (and probably last) set of comments

[keybounce]

People have said that this is probably the date deadline for comments to be read and put into the patch, so this is the last group of comments I have for now.

1. I can build an EW for 5 shields, or a swordsman for 20. That's a difference of 15, or 60 gold.

But I can upgrade my EW for 45 gold.

Now, can someone give me any reason that I'd want to build swordsmen if I can build my Enkidu Warriors? I'm ready to cut some of my own roads so that some cities can be cut off from Iron and still build my good, cheap units, that are cheaper still to upgrade.

2. If you have a unit that is ordered to move to a point along a road, and at the time the order is given, that road is occupied, then the unit is given an order that includes a movement path, that will take it off the road, even if the enemy isn't on the road when it gets there several turns later.

3. The 'X' command to move a stack of units does not work with the keyboard movement directions, only with the mouse movement target.

4. When a colony is brought "inside" a city radius, the colony is removed, as "no longer needed". But that's not true -- if the city goes away (destroyed, or captured) then the colony is valid again, but no longer there.

5.[ deleted ]

6. Odd bug:
If I try to double click on a city, but my clicks are slow, the map moves twice -- once to bring the city to the center, and a second time to move the map an identical distance. First bug: If the map has not been moved, "click ahread" is likely to be an error; a preference option for "ignore click ahead" is wanted. Second: The second time that I did this, it gave a movement order to a horseman, even though normally I have to hold the mouse down long enough to exceede the double click time before the movement target will show up. Bug (very similar to the first): If the movement circle hasn't been drawn, it's not a movement command. Again, it's click ahead.
But here's the odd part of this bug: The second click was treated as move-to command. Neither a map move click, nor a double click on plain terrain, will turn into a move-to command. Somehow, the game manufactured a move-to command out of two delayed clicks, and I can't figure out what logic the program thought it was doing.

7. I want to be able to have a negotiation deal of "Lets build roads towards each other". Right now, if I want to trade with someone, I have to build roads into their territory. I haven't actually tried it yet, but I've crossed the map, and he hasn't even gotten to his territory border yet.

8. I had some seperated cities (built at a distance, so there were gaps in my territory range), with fairly low production/high corruption, even though there was a road network to that city. Building a courthouse in that city (Paid with $$$) only helped a little. So, I put a few settlers to work, to try to bridge the gap.

My 4 production city with a courthouse went from 2 waste, two shield, to 3 waste, 1 shield. That's right -- bridging the gap, so that the city was completely connected to my territory and my capital LOWERED the production and increased waste.

9. C3C is not fully alt-tab friendly. It will (occasionally, somewhat consistently, but I haven't figured out the exact rule yet) leave the taskbar on the screen. When this happens, the right edge of the map (my taskbar is on the left edge) goes off the screen, and the mouse will not scroll left or right (arrow keys still scroll).

Today it happened after I had miniaturized the window. (From the task manager).
Update: A second occurance after using the task manager to miniaturize
However, using Win-D does NOT cause this problem. (But then, Win-D won't leave the window off-screen, nor stop the CPU hog.)
[It also will not go off-screen if I use the microsoft virtual desktop manager to switch desktops]

10. I'd like to see an option to run C3C at a lower priority. I dispise having CPU hogs run at normal priority.

11. I've just verified: At startup, even though I have the .ini line KeepRes=1, my screen is changed from 1152x864@85 to 1152x864@75.

The difference between 85 Hz and 75Hz is noticable to my eyes, especially over time, and with bright white (thankfully, C3C doesn't have much bright white). It gives me very sore eyes after a few hours of playing.

12. While on the city display screen, I'd like to double click on another city on the (smaller) map, and switch to that city.

13. On the city screen, I'd like to see the numbers for the effective (after corruption/waste/feeding) production so that I don't have to count it.

14. There does not seem to be an abort for the 'X' movement command. brings up the "Do you really want to quit?" box, and still leaves you in 'X' mode afterwards.

14B. Additionally, any sort of 'click and drag' has a problem -- holding the mouse button down and moving the mouse is a REALLY BAD activity -- inevitably, you have to reposition the mouse, (especially if the screen needs to scroll), so you have to both lift up and push down at the same time. Most click-drag operations are only selection operations, so that if an error occurs, there's no harm done. Here, an error results in movement to the wrong place. This is bad human interface design.

Trying to use the keyboard mouse isn't much better. As soon as you turn off numlock to activate the keyboard mouse, suddenly the arrow keys aren't moving the map but moving the unit, and (in my case) get hit by accident. (There's no 'move the map' keyboard at that point.)

15. There is no attempt to sort the units to move by the map location, so that nearby units all move after each other. I just had 10 units, 5 on one side of the board, 5 on the other, and they all alternated.

16. A city with 25 production, and 4 waste: If you move the mouse to the left end of the blue shields, the tooltips popup says "Shields Wasted", while over the blue production shields.

17. Normally, if you drag a movement destination on a settler, you get a rectangle for the city radius at the destination. That does not display if the map is scrolled to where the settler is not on the screen.

18. If you have a size 2 city growing three food, the food display will still show four food eaten, even though only three is grown.

19. I think there may be a problem with wonder happyness.

I have 6 of the 7 wonders in the intro 1 victory point scenario (I didn't build the lighthouse; the game will end before anyone gets that tech).

In particular, my cities, including a newly captured one, has a temple (one happy face), and the hanging gardens gives me a content face. A newly captured city, with 2 enemy population units has one content, and one unhappy citizen if everyone is working.

Now, if everyone started unhappy, then the two incoming faces should give me one happy, and one unhappy person. That's in balance, and both can work.

But only one can work; the other is an entertainer.

Incidently, I've got two military in that city, in Monarchy.

20. Trade routes are too hard to build. Partially this is from the AI not building roads or harbors enough. Partially this is from any naval unit being a fighting unit, while ground units can be non-combat (explorers, and road builders). [Implication: While a ground route can be built by both sides making a road, not going into each other's area, for a naval trade route you have to have reached the enemy harbor without being blown up in the process. Even if your ship reaches their ships, that's not enough. If you reach enemy borders, and are asked to leave, you'll not have seen the harbor inside the territory, and not have a trade route.]

Hey, how about a new map trade option: Naval Trade Routes. Naval territory from your harbor nearest the person to their area. In short, if traded by both sides, reveals the smallest amount of naval "land" needed to enable both sides to trade with each other.

21. (Minor). Balance of the Intro 1 scenario:
Three of the 4 sides start on a river. Two of the 4 start in a harbor (sea coast) location.
Only Sumeria has both. Sumeria's river is on both sides of it's mountains, allowing irrigation of a large area. Mycena's river can also irrigate a large area, but it partially needs to pass through the starting city.

22. I'd like to disable 'spacebar' as a "skip turn". Of all the keys, that's the only one that's too easy to hit by mistake and needs remapping. How about '.' for 'rest for a turn'? (Rogue/nethack, anyone?)

Or, I'd like to re-awaken a unit that I've "spacebar'd" this turn, and move it. Either way. Healing from resting should be something that happens at end of turn if a unit has full movement points, not at the moment the space bar is hit.

23. I'd like to be able to clear orders from a large group of units. Either 'clear all orders', or drag over an area and 'clear orders'. Heck, as long as I'm thinking of drag over an area, how about 'Send all selected to location X' commands?

24. There are times when I want my fast units to attack and NOT retreat. Each time a fast unit retreats before dying, there is about 1/2 point of damage not done to the enemy. If I'm attacking a city with a barracks, failing to inflict that last bit of damage from several attacking units only results in a damaged defensive unit fully healing, while if my attackers had stayed the course, they would have succeded in killing the enemy.

For a wounded fast unit with only 2 hit points, this is significant -- retreating at 1 HP left means that it's only doing half the damage to the enemy that it can do. That basically means that they must retreat and heal between battles. This is perfectly good for long term battles -- you are saving a lot of the rebuilding costs for very low repeat costs -- but it makes a blitz of suprisingly overwhelming forces impossible. (There are times that you need to do things during a 20 turn treaty period, and are willing to lose units to get it accomplished in time. Whether these strategies would work against humans have yet to be tested.)

25. If I have a military alliance with someone, I want to be able to move past them on a road, just like I move past my own units on the road. Right now the inability to share a road with allies makes it hard for a 2-on-1 attack.

Corrillary: Moving _THROUGH_ an ally city on the road.

25b: If I have a lot of spare workers, I'd like to be able to help an ally build a road. Even if my ally is a computer -- I want the AI intelligent enough to work with my workers. Hmm -- how about a "Mutual road building" negotiation option, where we have the ability to mark map spaces where we want a communal road to be built by both sides?

26. Production govenors have no setting for "Produce Speed". If I want to make speed 2 units as much as possible, I will constantly have to alter production. A 3/2/2 unit does not have the numbers of a 5/4/1 offensive unit, or a 2/4/1 defensive unit, but the speed and flexibility of it makes it the unit of choice in many cases. (I've already complained about the time of double checking the govenor's production all the time in multiplayer.)

27. Once I have a wonder that gives me a city upgrade, I'd like to be able to easily sell the "duplicates" in the cities where I have already built them. Right now I have to go to each city, right click on each of barracks, grainary, temple, and see if it says sell or not. (Still, for only 3-6 gold each, it's not a very profitable sell.)

28. When I use F7 to see the wonders, I'd like to see when it becomes a tourist atttraction.
I'd also like to see what will make it obsolete. Heck, on the civopedia, I'd like to see "Obsolete by:".

29. Just discovered: If you build a city near an enemy city, you may get only a 2 by 3 radius, not a 3 by three. However, on this turn, 3 of the territory spaces turned to me -- making my city 3 by 3, and their 3 by 2. That's without an actual city culture flip.

Next game, I'm going to try to invade enemy territory this way, and see what happens. You know, build a city every space. Corruption/waste is too high for actual production, so I won't have overcrowding. I'm taking is existing improvements, roads, mines, irrigation, etc. Primarily irrigation, as that will give me new settlers faster. I never need to move into enemy territory, so the AI's won't consider it an invasion, etc.

30. A new victory condition idea: Gold. In the same sense as the golden rule: Those with the gold make the rules; as well as things like the mafia or illuminati that have conquered the world without directly owning a country, how about something like: If you amass gold equal to 2x the number of land squares (and someone who has played more than I have can probably get a better multiple number), then you win.

Fundamentally, no different than 66% of the land. Instead of "Control the land, control the world", it's "control the money, control the world". So what would 66% of the world's money be?

31. When setting difficulty levels, I'd like to be able to handicap the human and AI players differently. Right now they get the same modifiers for combat, city levels, etc.

(In the editior, on the difficulty level tab, the left hand side allows you to specify options to handicap the AI with a bonus; however, the right side affects all civs, human and AI alike.)

32. Ruins should disapear, become overgrown, etc. A new unit, "Archeologist", can "dig up" old ruins for a bonus. Perhaps they can only dig up ruins that were not yours initially (all the news reports I hear of archeological digs are of non-native archeologists digging up foreign ruins.)

33. Should have mentioned this a lot earlier. Chariots being available before horemen makes no sense. A chariot requires horses and more; a horseman only requires a horse.

Now, saying that a chariot is a wheeled unit, and less manuverable than a regular horse, makes sense. Maybe a horseman is just a 1-1-2 (a little faster than normal), and a chariot is a 2-1-2 with reduced manuverability. Maybe a horseman is 2-1-2, a chariot is 3-2-2 reduced manuverability, and the knight upgrade is 4-3-2.

34. Why are there no ground transports? APC's transport infantry. Trucks could transport ground units as soon as they came out. Requiring helicopters is kinda silly. Someone must have historically used horses to transport infantry between cities, yes? Horse drawn carrages, a team of 8 horses hooked up to a towing bed, that should be at least around 1300-1500 AD, right?

35. Several of the scenarios have a 0-1-2 naval transport early, around alphabet; the epic game only has a 1-1-2 naval combat unit at that point. (Why have a combat unit if there's nothing for it to fight over?). Why not have both a 1-1-2 naval combat, and a 0-1-2 naval transport? If the AI really needs transport capacity of 2 to settle new lands (and cannot build two transports), then make it transport capacity of 2 for the AI.

[MrBaggins]

15> Calculating near is a pain in the ass to calculate, for every unit. You'd have to calculate every units nearness to one another, using a fp (slow) calculation, to create the list of relative nearness, then sort that list.

33> Actually, the first organized use of horses in war, were based on Chariots, since they didn't have viable saddles yet. These chariots would have likely been 2 horse teams, with a moderately small, 2-wheel chariot... thats been confirmed through archeological research, and testing. Appropriate styrups, and bow techs allowed horse-borne archers. Use of other weaponry from horseback, didn't happen til much later.

34> You can assume that movement is abstracted, in any civ game. Roads also abstract appropriate vehicles for the units on them.

[keybounce]

"Nearness" isn't hard to calculate, and there isn't any need for floating point calculations.

You just do a 2-d sort, I believe that's called a topological sort, and is a standard algorithm. I've never looked at it in detail, but my initial first draft would be:

From the starting point (upper left corner, capital, etc), take the unit whose distance is closest (Distance: the longer of the X or Y is the "long distance". Find the units whose long distance is the least, and then take the short distance as the tie breaker). For the next stack, take the unit next closest to the current stack.

XCom had a pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good) system, and that was ... a decade ago?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by keybounce
XCom had a pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good) system, and that was ... a decade ago?

But were there thousands of units in X-com?

[MrBaggins]

Incorrect. that topological sort would favor a singular focus. Example... imagine you start at unit A. Unit B and C are adjacent to one another, 6 tiles in a westerly direction. Unit D is 5 tiles in an easterly direction. Your algorithm can take wild goose chases.

Nearness in a 2d environment isn't a crisp problem. It requires either multiple passes, a matrix calculation or an influence map.

XCom had very few actors... around 20 tops, if memory serves, in much smaller maps.

[keybounce]

Well, I did say that it was a first draft :-).

Yes, it has flaws. And yes, XCom did top out at 24 soldiers. So far I've never had more than about 80 total units, and about 30-50 stacks.

Can I really look forward to 1,000 units in Civ3? That's too many. Even for the wargamer in me, that's waaaayyyy too many.

Hmm... "Microgame Civ3". :-)


A big off-topic: My taking out of the XCom final "bad guy". Normally to enter the final room, and the final battle, you have to move into an area where you are exposed to multiple mind controllers, and the time that it takes to move into the area and go up to the second story is too long to also fire any weapons before being mind controlled.

So I blasted a hole in the roof of the corridor, and then (after taking a look around with a sacrifice character) used a guided missile to bypass all these people and take out the final target.

The funny part was the "End of game text" that pretty much assumed that you fought your way through a really nasty, deadly battle, and approached this final target at the end, with it still functioning until you take it out.

[Skanky Burns]

Those guided missiles really were fun in XCom.

One question though, what is this Civ3-specific thread doing in the Civ Future forum? It would probably be better in one of the Civ3 forums.