City management and road graphics

[Mart]

This is about two things that I find very difficult in this game. I hope it is possible to change it in future patches:

1) City tile management when city radii overlap.
It is probably overlooked or really little anyone cares about micromanaging it.
When in a city view - one cannot see what tiles in its radius are worked by other cities. Seeing this would be really helpful, and what is the biggest problem is that when beeing in city view of one city you can remove a worker from a tile of another city. That screws that other city. You make a change in another city unknowingly. A serious flaw of the game interface.

2) Road and railroad graphics is presently such that it is very difficult to see what tiles are connecting what. I liked civ3 method better. the best was simple way ("straight lines") in SMAC. Maybe that could be worked on in mod, but having this in a vanila version would be nice.

[Willem]

Originally posted by mart7x5

When in a city view - one cannot see what tiles in its radius are worked by other cities.

Sure you can. If it's dark yet it should be lit up and so be in the fat cross, then it's being worked by another city. I have no problems figuring that out.

[Mart]

At least having that fat cross there would help. It should not be a puzzle for a player to figure out which tiles are inside the cross and which outside the cross. If what you say is true they are not different from tiles outside the cross.
Marking such tiles is a good game design.

[Mart]

And speaking of things being dark or not - specialists in a city are awful also. Maybe it's my screen, but I do not see that large difference between specialists that are actually there and those "dark" which are not dark enough for me, which means they are not there.

[Mart]

I checked this and I have 2 cities 3 tiles apart, Paris and Orleans. In Paris there are 3 tiles in "fat cross" greyed out. But only 1 of them is worked by Orleans. Thus it is possible to have greyed out tiles in the city cross that are not worked at all. I think that should be corrected in a patch.

[CerberusIV]

I do find a problem in that the game seems to assign a shared tile to one city or the other (dark in the screen for the city that doesn't have it) and it is necessary to assign workers manually (I normally let the governors run things at that level) to get the tile re-assigned from one city to the other. I don't remember this from previous versions of civ and do find it slightly annoying.

[patcon]

Originally posted by CerberusIV
I do find a problem in that the game seems to assign a shared tile to one city or the other (dark in the screen for the city that doesn't have it) and it is necessary to assign workers manually (I normally let the governors run things at that level) to get the tile re-assigned from one city to the other. I don't remember this from previous versions of civ and do find it slightly annoying.

What's particularly annoying is when a new city "steals" tiles from an established city (even if it has plenty of good tiles to work) thereby causing the established city to go into starvation. Later in the game I will establish "filler" cities in the gaps in my empire to utilize good tiles that are in the gaps between my older cities. I prepare the location first by roading, farming, mining, etc. the tiles that the new city will work. But when the new city is established does it work these newly available tiles? No - it works a shared tile, thereby unnecessarily taking away production from an established city. It seems as if the new city gets first choice on shared tiles, when it should be the other way around. It should be a simple matter to eliminate this tile thievery - a line of code to the effect of "If tile in use, then don't use, else go for it." I imagine something like this is already in place for assigning citizens within a city.

[Aro]

Originally posted by mart7x5
At least having that fat cross there would help.

We should see the "fat cross" when in the city view. Clearly.
Would help a lot.

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by Willem


Sure you can. If it's dark yet it should be lit up and so be in the fat cross, then it's being worked by another city. I have no problems figuring that out.

If this were true, it would at least make life easier, but in my experience it is not true. In my expereince, a tile that is dark when it should be lit means that it is "assigned" to another city, but says nothing about whether it is actually being worked.

And I agree with the OP that the wiggly lines in the road display make it difficult to tell what connections have been made. A mod that used a clearer road graphic would get my support.

RJM at Sleeper's