3.17 changelist

[wodan11]

Originally posted by Willem
You can pretty much forget about running any Specialists there until Biology since you'll need all the farmable land to support your miners. Meanwhile you're up against a coastal civ with 5 food sources in his BFC. I'd hardly call that balanced.

Are you saying that the player must run specialists to be able to compete?

I would've thought the argument was more about Slavery than specialists....

Wodan

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Willem


But even once you chop, a single Cow on a Plains tile doesn't leave you much in the way of food. You can pretty much forget about running any Specialists there until Biology since you'll need all the farmable land to support your miners. Meanwhile you're up against a coastal civ with 5 food sources in his BFC. I'd hardly call that balanced.



What game are you playing? It's more like 1 in 10 for me, maybe more.

1 in 10 is nothing... I thought it was more common than that for you if you're complaining about it this much

The point is you can get 3 more cities instead of 1 more city in roughly the same time. One of those will be your high food city Forest starts, played right, can be very powerful. Just don't get too attached to the "my capital has to be my best city" mentality.

[rah]

I'm with snoop. Maybe 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 times on an inland start it's mostly forest as you described. And if inland vs coastal is anywhere near 40% costal 60% inland than you'll only have to reset ever 6 or so times to avoid that start. That's not that time consuming if you're trying to avoid that kind of start.
While I never thrilled with the all forest start I'm more likely to restart on a too few forest start.

[Krill]

Added "No Espionage" game option

I take back most of the bad things I said now

[snoopy369]

Krill

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by jkp1187


Really? What's the problem here?

The problem is either that tanks are not inflicting collateral damage, or possibly it is not being reported correctly.

RJM

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers
The problem is either that tanks are not inflicting collateral damage, or possibly it is not being reported correctly.

Not inflicting - tanks, even barrage promoted tanks, have 0 collateral strength, so the collateral damage calculator immediately exits.

There are way lots of details about this in Another Place.

[Standup]

Seriously, though, FOR ****'S SAKE, fix the problem where you DL 177MB of patch and then IT JUST DOESN'T INSTALL IT

Yeah I got this as well. I'm running Vista. Downloaded it several times before I worked out you had to go to the patch folder and run it manually.

[jkp1187]

Originally posted by snoopy369


That must be an OS setting ... is it Vista?? Mine installed just fine

You do know where to find the downloaded patch EXE, once that happened, right?

And while we're on the subject, your computer WAS plugged in, right?

[Willem]

Originally posted by snoopy369
1 in 10 is nothing... I thought it was more common than that for you if you're complaining about it this much

What I meant was that only one start out of ten isn't forested . And that one is usually a coastal start. Which is nice to have if I actually have Fishing, but most times I don't.

Forest starts, played right, can be very powerful.

I agree, but I'm getting a bit tired of having to use the same opening strategy over and over again. Even if I start with a civ that has Agriculture and The Wheel, I'm still stuck having to get Bronzeworking ASAP if I want go for Pottery and start making Cottages right away. It leaves room for a very limited opening strategy.

Just don't get too attached to the "my capital has to be my best city" mentality.

Yeah well, that's a hard one for me to break. In vanilla and Warlords, most of the time I was able to turn my first city into a respectable GP farm, but that option is all but non-existant since BTS came out. Unless I get a coastal start with a scad of seafood I can pretty much forget about it, since I never have enough food otherwise.

[snoopy369]

Is it possible your maptype is the problem? What maptype(s) do you play??

[Willem]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Is it possible your maptype is the problem? What maptype(s) do you play??

Hemispheres, with two continents. It hadn't occured to me that it might be my map choice, maybe I should try another.

[Willem]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Is it possible your maptype is the problem? What maptype(s) do you play??

Well it's not the map script, I just tried going with Continents. After regenerating the map 10 times, I had 6 starts where the BFC was completely forested except for some food resources and the odd hidden resource. And one of those starts would have been completely Forest except that I had a few Floodplain tiles. So that's about 70% of my starts with nothing but Forest in the BFC. Too many IMO. I am however seeing more food than I used to before the patch, generally two tiles now instead of just one, so there is some improvement on that score it seems.

[snoopy369]

Do we know what causes this? I don't see anything obvious in the code, unless it's just a higher percentage of forests (60% currently, afaict, but it's been that way since the last Vanilla patch, I believe, ie BTS release).

[Willem]

Well I just tried it again. This time out of 10 regenerates, I only got 2 starts where everything except for Coastal/Ocean, Floodplain and Resource tiles wasn't covered in Forest. I then tried it in Warlords and I only got 4 starts where every Grassland, Plains or Tundra tiles, including Hills, had a Forest on it. So based on that small experiment, with BtS I'm twice as likely to have an all Forest start. And it's been that way ever since BtS was released.