City starvation

[ColdPhoenix]

I think this is new to Warlords, I don't remember it happening before anyway.

Whenever a city grows and there is not enough food available in the city tiles to support it, lots of citizens are instantly converted to specialists so that the city will starve quickly down to the size it was before.

I find this very annoying as, usually, when this happens the city is unhealthy and I could quickly build an aqueduct or there's an unhappy citizen and I could build a temple. I'd rather do that than lose the population and have to regrow.

It means that every time this happens I have to go into the city and faff around trying to sort it out manually. Is there any way to stop this happening? Can it be fixed in the next patch?

[Blaupanzer]

Cities need management. The tendency of the machine to pull citizens off the most productive food squares when unhappiness arises is very agitating. I'm not sure what the algorithm is; I don't tend to use the "emphasize" buttons, but in this case the AI selects to keep maximum production at the expense of food every time. This was true in basic Civ IV as well.

I haven't noticed a tendency by the AI to create new specialists without my intervention except in one case. When I build forges, the cities will end up with an engineer specialist as long as they won't starve to get it. Have to check though, because this action can often stagnate city growth. AARGH!

[ColdPhoenix]

I do manage my cities by going in every now and then to swap around where the citizens are working (and I never use the maximize buttons). What I'm talking about here though is when a city grows so that it can't produce enough food from its tiles and so drastically changes the citizen use.

For example, a city grows to size 10 so needs 20 food. Perhaps there is 20 food within the city radius but there is one unhealthiness point so the city can only get 19 food and would (at the highest food production) be starving by 1 food per turn. The game will then take maybe 5 citizens and turn them into specialists so that the city is starving by 12 or so food per turn and will quickly eat up the granary supplies and reduce a size.

I find this annoying as I'd rather go in and build an aquaduct rather than drop a population point and have to grow the city when it doesn't even have a half food bar provided by the granary. Has anyone else noticed the game doing this?

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
Cities need management. The tendency of the machine to pull citizens off the most productive food squares when unhappiness arises is very agitating. I'm not sure what the algorithm is; I don't tend to use the "emphasize" buttons, but in this case the AI selects to keep maximum production at the expense of food every time. This was true in basic Civ IV as well.

I've become a believer in the "emphasize" buttons. I will also micro-manage key cities and key phases of the game, but for the rest I will use the emphasize food-hammer-commerce buttons and I've been pretty happy. When a city is new I use emphasize food and hammers. When it gets close to max pop I will turn off emphasize food. When it has most of it's basic buildings it goes to emphasize commerce.

And, finally, the "avoid growth" works great as it will let the city grow up to precisely 1 food from growth and then sit there forever without growing--something that is hard to accomplish without micromanaging the food every turn. And which means that when you get a new resource you can just go let the city grow for one turn and it will expand and you can put it back in avoid growth and the ai will let it accumulate just enough food for the next pop point. Very handy.

When I conquer a city, I turn on emphasize food so that it will grab as many food spots as possible when it comes out of anarchy and preserve the population just in case I don't notice the transition due to focus on the war elsewhere.

I haven't noticed a tendency by the AI to create new specialists without my intervention except in one case. When I build forges, the cities will end up with an engineer specialist as long as they won't starve to get it. Have to check though, because this action can often stagnate city growth. AARGH!

If you leave the manager on but do not give him emphasis settings he will make a seemingly random set of specialists. Likewise the AI will assign specialists when the city grows with annoying frequency if the manager is off. If you want to avoid unwanted specialists I have found that: manager on, emphasize food+hammers+commerce works best. If I want specialists, I then just go in and force however many I want.

If they really wanted a useful pair of settings, they would be "always avoid unhealthiness" and "always avoid unhappiness". Sometimes you want a city to grow beyond it's health or happiness caps, but it would be handy to have a setting where the manager automatically switched to "avoid growth" mode when the city reached one of those two pop caps. An alternate feature would be to just add the "optimal population" to the city detail so that I could tell at a glance in globe view which cities had reached their caps.

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by ColdPhoenix
Has anyone else noticed the game doing this?

Only when the city manager is left on.

It is my understanding and consistent with my observation (I am willing to be corrected) that if the city manager is turned off the AI only comes into play when placing a newly born citizen or if the conditions change dramatically (such as if the cultural boundaries shrinking or invaders forcing a citizen to be reassigned from a tile with hostile forces on it, etc).

I've not seen the starvation-related behavior you've seen with the city manager off.

[Dis]

hmm, I wonder if the city manager was turned on when I installed warlords.

I actually saw this the first time last night. I'm not sure why it happenned. Very annoying. I had to use the maximize button to get rid of all the specialists. And I also had a city go from size 20 to 18.

[rah]

Yeah, it's annoying since later in the game with more cities, I have a tendency not to check a city untill it finishes building something. If it was a long build, there more time for the city to have been screwed up.

[CerberusIV]

I don't have a problem with this behaviour during peacetime as I usually manage to build aqueducts or have my workers turn tiles into farms before the city starts to starve. Where it does really, really annoy me is coastal cities during war when they cannot work ocean tiles due to enemy warships. A large city which might take 30 turns to starve down (by which time the war would be over or the enemy ships sunk) gets starved by the governor in three turns and then takes forever to get the population point back.

I'll try the maximise food button next time but this is definitely a change for the worse from vanilla.

[ColdPhoenix]

Maybe I do have the governer on. I didn't think I did (certainly didn't turn it on myself) but it may be on as default.

Will try and turn it off when I get home! It's down alongside the maximize buttons?

[ColdPhoenix]

Originally posted by SirIlya

It is my understanding and consistent with my observation (I am willing to be corrected) that if the city manager is turned off the AI only comes into play when placing a newly born citizen or if the conditions change dramatically (such as if the cultural boundaries shrinking or invaders forcing a citizen to be reassigned from a tile with hostile forces on it, etc).

Just a thought, but possibly what's happening is that the city grows a size and then the governer swings into action and decides to starve the city. Even though he was turned off...