Getting NONE Settlers

[Mixam]

EST If I read your post correctly you were building then disbanding cities within the ai's city radius to change your outdated settlers to non engineers. LOL I like how you distroyed thier improvements by building over them. That is something i noticed too. Although i have never actually used it to purposefully destroy their improvements except for experimentation. Nevertheless it is fun to do

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Shhh... Just Take It!
Shhh... No-one Has To Know!

[East Street Trader]

That's it, Mixam.

I was way ahead in that game and the city I was building the temporary cities next to was just a puppet city which I left sat there mainly for trading purposes. So destroying its mines was of little significance.

But I reckon there will be other times when I want to hamper a neighbouring city's shield production without provoking a war. So I've stored up this little tactic. Clearly it would rarely be worth tying up a settler/engineer for that alone but, in combination with your tactic for getting NONE units, it might become well worthwhile.

Trying your notion out in my game made me think quite a bit better of it. You save both a shield and a wheatsheaf every turn with a NONE settler/engineer. I had the cash to tie up the unit making the transition for only one turn so little work was lost. In the special case of converting ancient settlers to engineers it's definately a winner. But I now think it may well have the wide application your first post suggests.

I have finished the game I was playing now and did not manage to find any cunning trading uses for the temporary city during its brief life. But I continue to think that there must be some trading tactic in there somewhere. I don't re-home caravans/freights but a player who did would surely like to have three new commodities available for a while.

[Mixam]

EST I am not sure about this but doesn't a size one city have a very good chance of demanding hides? It could be a way to get a bonus from that infinite hides suppy you probably have in a few of your cities. However I also remeber a post that said hides doesn't even have a demanded bonus so maybe it wouldn't be worth while. Oh well only testing will tell.

[East Street Trader]

No, hides is a commodity which can be demanded and supplied by all sorts of cities at all sorts of time. It's special quality is that (for reasons so far unknown) you get the occasional city in which you can go on building hides caravans without "hides" ever going into parentheses. Similarly there are some cities (cause again unknown) where hides are perpetually in demand.

You are right to think that there are commodities which are size/age related. Cloth tends to be a commodity which will only come into demand in a small/recently founded city (rather silly I've always thought). Copper, I think, tends to get produced during an earlyish phase in a city's development. You can pretty well count on silk coming into demand widely once cities grow to a certain size or get old enough. It then stays in widespread demand for quite a while.

Gold only comes into demand fleetingly and, in my experience only in capitals and other core cities during a particular period in the development of a civ - late BC to earlyish AD might roughly place the start of the period. I think it also tends to start a dozen or so turns after gold starts appearing as a commodity which city's in your own civ will produce.

The use I thought might exist for the free commodities in the temperary cities was based on the fact that you can sometimes shake a commodity free of the parentheses by delivering a new caravan to that city. This foundered though because, I think, the technique only works if the result of delivering the caravan is to change the city's trade routes. In my game a caravan from the temp city would never do this because that city would have pathetically few arrows compared to the full grown cities all around it. So it would never have the trading muscle to displace an existing route.

[Mixam]

I find that Barbarians seem to demand hides alot when they take over a city and they never seem to fill that demand no matter how often you send hides to them. This is the only case i have had that happen personally. Not the infinite supply, I always get that, but the infinite demand. Also of not if you wanna free up a trade route destroy the city you sent it to. I have used this a few times. I would send all my caravans to a very big foreign city then after i no longer had any routes free but hides and maybe cloth I would conquer that civ and destroy the city i traded with. Then i would pick another big city from another civ and do the same thing. Makes for an interesting game. You don't destroy a cive till you make alot of money off them. And you never have to worry about running out of trade routes. I was doing some research till Civ froze up. I think it doesn't like Win 98 I guess i have to restart now and start my research over again.

[East Street Trader]

You will find a few perpetual hides demand cities. I seem to remember Adam Smith saying he gets a really high proportion of them but for me, like you it seems, it is pretty rare. But far from unknown.

In the game I just finished the same perpetual hides city also demanded coal without having the demand filled for a while. I have a suspicion in this case that delivering two or three caravans a turn to the city was creating special conditions. SG, I think (or it might have been Adam Smith again), once posted to say he believed there are repeat demand cities for commodities other than hides. I hadn't found any before the coal case.

I have sent caravans to barb cities a few times but can't say I've noticed that they favour hides. I thought they were a special case in that they don't send goods back (so your sending city doesn't parenthesise one of its demanded commodities on the arrival of the caravan) but I've come to doubt my observations on that because once you buy in the barb city there is a two way route in place.

Interesting idea about killing a city off to free up commodities. Sounds a bit drastic - but I thought that about disbanding cities before trying it so I'm not about to ignore that one either!

Anyway there is a lot of work still to do before we get to the bottom of trading in yhe game. If I was lab minded I'd be looking into the mechanisms by which routes are displaced. Xen Yu posted some ideas which centre on using a food caravan to effect the change. Expensive, again, though, I think.

[East Street Trader]

I found another good situation where you can combine the creation of a NONE settler/engineer with another purpose.

I wanted my fleet of ironclads to move throuigh an isthmus to continue the assault on the civ I was rolling back. So of course I was intent on building a Panama City. I had a choice of sites and one was close to an enemy city. I didn't need the canal to stay in place and it proved very convenient to found, let the ironclads through and then disband.

I'm definitely starting to like this tactic.

Edited to add - oh, yes, and in Democracy the saving is two wheatsheaves. That means two extra specialists in some cities or the ability to sustain one or two more mines in others. That's a big return for the time and money spent.
[This message has been edited by East Street Trader (edited April 20, 2001).]

[Mixam]

Yes you can say have a vet battleship on a fortified mountain. But while you are at it why not also send in a vet AEGIS Cruiser to take care of any air or missile attacks

[airdrik]

You can even use this to build inland battleship senturies: Build city on coast, move battleship into city, disband city, build city further inland, move battleship, disband city, etc. repeat until battleship is in desired location. Set battleship to sentury and have fun.

[Sergei Vamos]

In some of the older versions of the game, after you had built a high number of Settlers, every next Settler would be designated as "NON" (rather like how you can only build so many cities). This was changed by a patch though (2.42 I think), and I was very unhappy when I couldn't build my "free" Settlers any more! It was always a part of my game plan to build those Settlers towards the end of the game and disband my Settlers that were still supported by cities.

[Mixam]

Sergei: The version I bought from the store was 2.42. I guess I missed out on some of the earlier cheats. Unfortunately there are still a lot of the bugs left in the game. Ah well maybe Civ III will have less bugs. If not by the time Civ IV comes along (hopefully) I will be on the Civ programming team.

[War4ever]

quote: Originally posted by East Street Trader on 04-20-2001 07:40 AM I found another good situation where you can combine the creation of a NONE settler/engineer with another purpose. I wanted my fleet of ironclads to move throuigh an isthmus to continue the assault on the civ I was rolling back. So of course I was intent on building a Panama City. I had a choice of sites and one was close to an enemy city. I didn't need the canal to stay in place and it proved very convenient to found, let the ironclads through and then disband. I'm definitely starting to like this tactic. Edited to add - oh, yes, and in Democracy the saving is two wheatsheaves. That means two extra specialists in some cities or the ability to sustain one or two more mines in others. That's a big return for the time and money spent. [This message has been edited by East Street Trader (edited April 20, 2001).]

EST this is also a realistic and highly effective little canal you have created. Even better is when it turns from military passage way/fort/supply line..... into a thriving city full of beauty and splendor