c176# DO OTHER PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT THIS TRICK?

[Mercator]

By the way, you can mine your city square. just have a settler start mining and have another build on top of him while the first one is still mining.

You can mine your city square only if mining means transforming the terrain (e.g. Forest to Plains, not like Hills to Hills with mines).

Knew about the trick, I always presumed tha it was something to with the fact that they want to save memory. have an 8-bit number instead of a 16-bit number to describe terrain 'features'.
If you have features such as road, rail, irrigation, farmland, airbase, fort, mine, pollution, hut which would have on/off flags then you'd need 9 flags for each square. You could half the memory needed by representing the airbase as a combination of others - giving all the benefits as a side effect.

EOL

Edit: This combination is made unique - ie. can't normally be achieved without building an airbase - because you can't irrigate and mine the same square without losing the benefits of one of them.

You hit the nail on the head! To be precise an airbase is a combination of the "city present" and fortress codes, see this for more: http://gene.wins.uva.nl/~jvermeir/savmaps.htm
Hmmm, I´ve been posting this link quite often lately, but it IS quite usefull/interesting isn´t it?
This "city present" code causes the additional food on Hills... By the way, as I saw in DaveV´s table, city squares give all kinds of bonuses, I can´t remember reading anything about airbases giving the exact same bonuses as cities, though, just the bonus on hills???
Not only does this "city present" code induce this bonus, it also causes the "act as railroad" thing (just like cities), and it also causes the fact that irrigation and mining can´t coexist with airbases, which should have been possible, considering that the airbase code does not include either the irrigation or mining code.

Looks like MicroProse found a nice way of using 1 byte in stead of 2, but forgot to prevent the "city present" side effects.

[Paul]

Originally posted by Mercator
You can mine your city square only if mining means transforming the terrain (e.g. Forest to Plains, not like Hills to Hills with mines).

Father Beast is trying to say that you can build a mine on a city square if one settler starts mining and another settler builds a city on that square before the first one has finished the mine.

[Mercator]

Oh, I see

[Father Beast]

I have done this mining the city square trick any number of times. set a settler to mine the square, then (usually the same turn) have another settler build a city on the same square. if the mine is finished when you build the city, the mine is wiped out when the city is built. and you can't mine hills a city is built on once the city is built. but I've done it this way any number of times to enjoy the added production from the city square.