v1.16f: Issues? Bugs? This is the thread

[Encomium]

Why Culture Flipping Sucks

I don't know if this is a bug, even more AI stupidity, or just Sid's weird view of reality.

Whatever, here is what happened.

I have a mine, road, and garrisoned fortress near my border. The Aztecs move up another of those DAMN LAND-GRABBING SETTLERS again (extremely irritating) and build a town. Eventually, the border flips in that area, and now MY improvements and spearmen are in Aztec territory.

This happened even though I led the Aztecs in overall score.

I am then told "your recent movements of troops. . ." may cause a war for which YOU will be blamed. Or some such garbage.

I will NOT leave MY improvements, and even though I am militarily superior to the Aztecs they provoke the war (while blaming me). They of course start losing the war quickly - but their STUPID AI advisor is extremely stubborn, almost suicidal. I had to wipe them out.

Five hundred years later I cross an ocean. . . and the Egyptians, who never heard of the extinct Aztecs, won't trade with me "because of the deal you broke with the Aztecs"!! That's a deal the Egyptians never should have even knew of, nor cared about.

Culture Flipping borders are as big a CROCK as culture flipping cities (with their vanishing garrisons). And the AI advisor is an idiot. Beyond that, expecting someone to abandon their own improvements because for some reason known only to Sid a border flipped is ASININE.

[RO]

A simple and much needed change

When you get a tech advance the advance is implemented after you have gone through all the city build queue prompts. It would heave been much more efficient if it had been the other way around.

As it is, I have to remember going back to all the relevant cities to add that much awaited unit or improvement to the build queue after the tech advance has been implemented. I would save a good deal of time by being allowed to do it the first time through.

[star mouse]

Re: A simple and much needed change

Originally posted by RO
When you get a tech advance the advance is implemented after you have gone through all the city build queue prompts. It would heave been much more efficient if it had been the other way around.

It seems the game only loops through the cities once. I've proposed a double loop to handle this:

for each city

• add to current production, finishing items as needed
• do pollution
• add to science and treasury

calculate trade network
if science is done, choose next advance
for each city

• deduct maintenance for improvements from treasury
• if production finished, choose next item to produce

[Kevin Ar18]

CD

I have multiple CD-ROM drives on my computer just like anyone else who has a new computer does.

I would like it if I could run Civ3 with the CD-ROM in any of my CD drives. Riven works this way. It would really help if Civ3 would too.

[star mouse]

I would like to be able to see visible ID numbers for military units as a configurable option. It may aid the story writers that are tracking the adventures of a particular battleship to know what that ship did in a war. Modern military hardware such as ships and aircraft have ID numbers on them, and it would be great if my CIV military hardware also had numbers.

This would work by changing the display in the bottom right corner from "Battleship" to "Battleship #14".

[star mouse]

Originally posted by star mouse
I would like to be able to see visible ID numbers for military units as a configurable option.

Another idea I've just had - I would like to be able to name my ships!

[Nemesis]

In a Monarch-game I started yesterday something strange happened.
Standardmap two continents. My (Cleopatra) continent filled with
Americans, Japanese, Persians and Romans. The other continent with
French, Germans and Iroquois.
During midgame the Persians and Iroquois where destroyed. After that
I noticed that the Germans and Frech had dissapeared from the
Foreign Advisor screen. So I couldn't contact them anymore through this
screen.
The other civ-leader-images had huddled up together top-left (10 to 1 o'clock).
I don't remember all the starting positions but Caesar had moved from
7 to 10 o'clock. When I moved my mousepointer to 4 o'clock a green filled
circle appeared that enabled me to contact the Japanese. The Japanese
leader-image was at 11 o'clock.
I don't know if it has happened before and if it's some kind of bug.
Maybe my videocard is going crazy. I have not yet reloaded the game
but I'll try that today.

[barefootbadass]

Re: A simple and much needed change

Originally posted by RO
When you get a tech advance the advance is implemented after you have gone through all the city build queue prompts. It would heave been much more efficient if it had been the other way around.

The only thing I have seen that would cause this is if the tech revealed a new resource and the units available with the tech needed that resource, the problem would be that the game hasn't calculated that the resource is there if you happened to have one connected. My solution is to go pillage one useless square of road in my empire which forces the game to recalculate the resource requirements for all your cities.

This is a bug. Your trade network should be recalculated when you get an advance that reveals the location of a resource automatically.

[barefootbadass]

Re: Why Culture Flipping Sucks

Originally posted by Encomium
I don't know if this is a bug, even more AI stupidity, or just Sid's weird view of reality.

I have a mine, road, and garrisoned fortress near my border. The Aztecs move up another of those DAMN LAND-GRABBING SETTLERS again (extremely irritating) and build a town. Eventually, the border flips in that area, and now MY improvements and spearmen are in Aztec territory.

I will NOT leave MY improvements, and even though I am militarily superior to the Aztecs they provoke the war (while blaming me). They of course start losing the war quickly - but their STUPID AI advisor is extremely stubborn, almost suicidal. I had to wipe them out.

Culture Flipping borders are as big a CROCK as culture flipping cities (with their vanishing garrisons). And the AI advisor is an idiot. Beyond that, expecting someone to abandon their own improvements because for some reason known only to Sid a border flipped is ASININE.

No bugs, its how the game works. If you don't want that to happen work on your culture more or expand so that area wasn't the border. Also, I never build fortresses until my borders are fairly stable.

Your point about culture flipping borders being a crock is silly because that is the whole point of culture borders. It is an abstract way to represent 'inluence'. Obviously a new city could steal some influence(at least momentarily, if you would build some more cultural improvements you could push them back, or build another city and start pumping cultural improvements if that border city is already really high in culture.

[Golden Bear]

Reasonable Fixes

I gotta say, I like the corruption and culture (-flipping) aspects of the game. They make the game unique, they make sense, leave 'em be.

Changes that I care about:
- Moving stacks instead of individual units - please!
- Let us see "red faces" for unhappiness on the F1 summary screen so that we can address issues before they come up and so that we do not have to sweep around later!
- A "goto city" (g key) command a la AC would be a lot handier than what is currently installed.
- Fix the Indian Elephant.
- Personal brainstorm (-fa_t?): let me write some notes that time activate so that I remember to do things at 10 or 20 turns (or 100!) in the future.

Another culture flipping note... now that we have been told the fundamentals of how the process works, I find that I can pretty well predict, and generally avoid, the problem. "Fan-shaped" advances work better than focused thrusts for adopting territory. If there is a lone exposed city out in the middle of enemy country with high culture surrounding it, I gut the city, starve it down, ruin ALL improvements and let it revert. It is a sadistic sort of fun, but it works for me.

OTOH, the end of the game sucks. Warfare is not fun - too many units, too slow.

Oh well, no more blah blah blah.

GB

[MegaCore]

1.16f is so bugged it is unplayable!!

It never fails.. everytime i get to the middle ages, it crashes constantly when the turn ends. I cant play the damn game before this bug is taken care of!

I have tried disabling all the different options (including revolt pop-up) , but nothing helps. I cant believe Firaxis hasn´t solved this problem yet, as the 1.16f patch has been out for a while now.

[Dimension]

two LEGITIMATE bugs

Video Mode:

KeepRes=1 works just fine in the Civilization3.Ini file, but Video Mode doesn't work at all. Under "ini file tweaks," the readme.txt specifically says:

Video Mode=1792 / Video Mode=1600 / Video Mode=1280 / Video Mode=1152 - Force screen resolution to one of these settings.

None of those work.

Railroads:

There is a very annoying problem I ran into with two different squares I was trying to build railroads on. Both times there should have been 11 action buttons for the worker (6 in the top row). The workers were on luxury resources on flat land. The tile was irrigated with a road. The top-row options should have been:

1 - (B)uild Colony
2 - Build (R)ailroad
3 - Build (F)ortress (Ctrl-F)
4 - Build (M)ine
5 - Pla(n)t Forest
6 - (A)utomate

Instead, "Build (R)ailroad was missing". I tried building a fortress, then it let me build the railroad. I tried pillaging everything, and then it properly showed 12 total buttons, including "Build (R)ailroad" and "(I)rrigate." I'm having trouble repeating this...

[Romothecus]

Game-crashing bug

In a game, I destroyed all Roman cities. However, the Romans had a settler aboard a caravel. I sank the caravel, destroying the Romans, which instantly crashed the game. It tried to several times over, and the same thing happened. Also, this caravel carrying the nearly-extinct Romans never moves, it sits in the same square forever.
It's impossible to end the war with the Romans because I can't contact them; they keep refusing my envoys. Thus, my democracy is doomed because of the War Weariness.

[Encomium]

THIS IS SURELY A BUG!!

Culture Flipping doesn't get more ridiculous than this.

I led all as the Iroquois, but Greece Declared War with no warning (or apparent reason) anyway even though they had been "Polite" for centuries and we had just concluded a trade deal.

I crushed them. None too smart by their AI.

914 to 538 is the score, Iroquois to Greeks, and that difference is rapidly increasing owing to my military victory twelve turns earlier.

I have eighteen cities, and the Greeks just two. My Culture is very high, likely five times that of the Greeks. Sparta has a temple and library, plus the usual useless large garrison. My Military could swat the Greeks like a fly.

So what happens? Sparta flips, turns Greek, and the garrison vanishes. "Imagine"!!

No, I can't imagine. IT IS EFFING ABSURD.

So now I go to war, raze Sparta, but even the Indians will hate me as a "warmonger".


Another game ruined.

Obviously, Culture Flipping is determined ONLY by the PROXIMITY of one civ's laborers to their capital city, and no doubt some randomizing factor. It is truly a joke.

[vetcrusader]

trade connection bug

There is a trade connection bug. The Chinese (at war) built a city on my roads, effectively disrupting trade routes between two parts of my empire. I attacked the city, which was automatically destroyed since it had no culture. Now the intervening territory between two cities is all roads which belong to no country. I have checked to make sure fog of war is not hiding anything; the roads are in place, and there is no enemy territory on any of the roads. But the game does not register that there is a trade connection between the towns. Somehow the fact that there used to be a Chinese city there makes it not register as a trade connection.