CivCity: Rome Now Available; Innovative City Builder Inspired by Civilization

[jdchambe]

so blake, how did you finish this game?? for me because of the bugs related to the transport jetty that I mentioned above it is impossible to mine the iron, stone, or marble spots on the colonia map. I've tried restarting multiple times and tried deleting and rebuilding buildings multiple time. it usually takes multiple deleting and rebuilding of buildings to finally get the vagrants to the mines. but once they are there, they just dump all the resources they mine into a black hole.

[Blake]

I didn't have any problems with that map but I hear it's useful to build two bridges if the transport jetty bugs out.

I just built the warehouses and weapon shops with the iron mines - note that the iron miners need to drop the iron off at a warehouse, then the weapon shop picks it up from the warehouse. If there's no warehouse I'm not sure what the iron miners would do.
(edit: Weapons are automagically teleported out of a warehouse - no kind of connection is needed to the fort)


Make sure to always observe the yellow radius showing how far a shop/workshop will go to get stuff. I find my mills bug out every so often and need to be replaced but most of the time they work fine if placed close to a source of wheat.

Note that certain buildings have dumbass cartpullers who will cross the map to get a resource because a nearby source didn't have "enough" - these cartpullers can take a LONG time to make the long range round trip and the building will be idle in that time.

With Granaries and food, rations to feed the population (as per happy screen) are automagically deducted from the granaries - this is why the granaries empty out. The solution is to simply have more food going into the granaries. Note you can have granaries for the supply of rations isolated from any housing. On maps with fishing it seems fishmongers are the best way to mass-supply rations (because the fishing docks are tiny), otherwise bakers (since bakers don't spend much time getting flour and mills are smaller than goat farms).

[Blake]

I decided to play through that map again, my ferries broke at one point but bulldozing and replacing fixed it.

Defense is really annoying, because intercepting on the empire map requires constant attention, and once they get in the city they are a right pain to round up - and on this map up to 3 barbarian armies can attack simultaneously.

As a solution I built a wall around the city with a nice corral to process the barbarians.

It wasn't quite automated (since archers outrange roman troops) but as long as I checked every so often and moved the army forward to squish the archers it worked great. Not one enemy soldier got through to the city (I had the cohort plugging the exit to make sure of that).

[muxec]

After Caesar 3 and related game this one looks really stupid. I started to play the campaign. Tutorial. First the population reached 2000 with just 2 tents and than it just fell to zero. Wierd. Maybe the game is not bad, but it certainly needs much better tutorial.

[jdchambe]

yeah. I know about the way iron and weapons workshops and fortresses work. I couldn't have gotten through the earlier combat missions without figuring that out.

unfortunately in my games, they ferries don't just bug out sometimes. they simply never work. everytime I've attempted that level, I put the warehouse there and then watched what the guys at the iron mine do: they finish smelting their iron. The guy picks up the ingot and walks out of the mine. He then walks down the road about 2 or three squares in the direction of the ferry. Then the ingot vanishes from his hand and he turns around and walks back to the iron mine. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. No iron ever makes it out of the mine. It all vanishes from their hands just after they leave the iron mine and completely disappears from the game.

I'm going to put the game on the shelf and forget about it for a while. Let them fix the many bugs first so I can enjoy the game correctly. If they don't fix it... well I'll remember who the developer and distributor are. and that'll count as a mark against them in my mind the next time they try to sell me something.


your comments about tracking the attackers down when the break ranks into your city is something I have noticed too and it really annoys me. My troops can only be moved as full units. But their units are able to break up into smaller groups and run off in more directions than it is theoretically possible for me to pursue if I let them get past my front lines. then they can run around in small groups of 1 or 2 and just wreak havoc on the city. I have found that I have to intercept them early and decisively to prevent that. Funnelling with walls looks like a good idea for the maps where you can build walls. But this colonia map is the first map where you can build walls.

[jdchambe]

Originally posted by muxec
After Caesar 3 and related game this one looks really stupid. I started to play the campaign. Tutorial. First the population reached 2000 with just 2 tents and than it just fell to zero. Wierd. Maybe the game is not bad, but it certainly needs much better tutorial.

i thought the tutorial was pretty straight forward and very clear. just wish they had spent less time on the tutorial and more time on polishing off the game's rough edges. the game really plays like it was released 2 months early. given that Caesar 4 is looming on the horizon I rather suspect there is a reason for that...

[Snotty]

Im on the third campaign city and everything burns down! its like I have a pyromaniac anarchist in my midst I build a network of fire control towers and wells but to no avail.

Do I need to build many many fire towers or am I missing something?

edit for clarity

[Adagio]

Weird, I never really had any use for the fire towers. During all the (peacefull) missions I only had like 6-8 fires, and all the fires started in the middle of nowhere

[Snotty]

Ive been replacing stuff as soon as it burns down, maybe I missed a few but heres the state of play on my reload. up top is a burnt house and well, on the right is a burnt well and fire tower, at the bottom is a burnt meat shop, and on the left is another burnt house. I think maybe I dont have enough water because my wells are not stockpiling water outside them, but ive built loads of wells and they keep burning down



another shop starts burning when I unpause

[Locutus]

Yeah, fire towers are useless if they don't have sufficient well water, you wanna keep them well-stocked. I usually have 1 well per fire tower (usually right next to each other) in addition to whatever I need to supply my houses (you could probably do with less but better safe than sorry and more jobs keeps the unemployment unhappines to a minimum )

Also, make sure the fire towers are actually fully manned. In that screenshot it seems you may have more jobs than citizens (I count some 30 jobs on the main map only and the radar map reveals there should be a lot more off screen, but you only have 39 citizens), which means some positions will be vacant and if those are at fire towers you're asking for trouble. You may need to reassign some citizens to keep those fire towers (and wells) occupied at all times.

[Snotty]

Thats it, thanks

I guess I was confused as when I built a new fire tower my buildings lost their fire warning thermometer, even though the fire towers were unmanned.

I started the map again, and while I still have to rebuild a fair amount of burning buildings, it is at least not the frenzied whack a mole rebuilding game it was before

[Blake]

On that map the fires are spawned events - these event fires can be prevented by fire towers, but you need to build the tower right on top of the spawn point - simply having it in range of a tower isn't enough (the fires spawn at the same point every time, so just build a firetower wherever a fire spawns).

And fire towers will use a lot of water, especially if they are actively putting out fires. Bump the workday up +1 (if it isn't already) have 1 well for each firetower and 1 well for every 6 houses or so. You wont need as many wells if you research Pottery, and in later missions piped water mostly eliminates the need for wells.

Other than missions with fires, the fire towers are only needed for hard difficulty.

Originally posted by jdchambe
unfortunately in my games, they ferries don't just bug out sometimes. they simply never work. everytime I've attempted that level, I put the warehouse there and then watched what the guys at the iron mine do: they finish smelting their iron. The guy picks up the ingot and walks out of the mine. He then walks down the road about 2 or three squares in the direction of the ferry. Then the ingot vanishes from his hand and he turns around and walks back to the iron mine. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. No iron ever makes it out of the mine. It all vanishes from their hands just after they leave the iron mine and completely disappears from the game.

That would be frustrating, altough it's worth noting you don't need to get into the mining area to win that level - the barb cities can be taken with javvies and the civ score needed for part 2 is only 80, I'm pretty sure that can be easily managed without wonders.

[Willem]

Originally posted by jdchambe
I was really enjoying this game for a while, but I'm getting to the later maps and am finding that the bugs are starting to over whelm me. :-(

There's also a serious bug in the Massila campaign, which left me high and dry. I had a Trade Dock built to export my Marble and the dock workers loaded 10 tons, or whatever, then stopped. Since I had my trade route set for 15 tons, the ship just sat there forever. I finally tried to manually lower the rate to 10, but still the ship sat there. As well, my Wheat ship was coming back, but the Wheat would mysteriously vanish from the dock. I guess I'll be waiting for the patch before I finish the campaign. I've been playing a couple of the Free Build single missions since then.

PS: Good to know that the Jetty thing is a bug as well. I tried the Free Build scenario based in Britain that had an Iron mine across the river that I couldn't build a bridge across. But the Jetty didn't do anything. No one crossed the river to work at the mine I had placed.

[jdchambe]

Originally posted by Willem


There's also a serious bug in the Massila campaign, which left me high and dry. I had a Trade Dock built to export my Marble and the dock workers loaded 10 tons, or whatever, then stopped. Since I had my trade route set for 15 tons, the ship just sat there forever. I finally tried to manually lower the rate to 10, but still the ship sat there. As well, my Wheat ship was coming back, but the Wheat would mysteriously vanish from the dock. I guess I'll be waiting for the patch before I finish the campaign. I've been playing a couple of the Free Build single missions since then.

Yes, I was having problem like that with the trade docks on that mission as well. Destroying the trade docks and rebuilding them fixed it for me.

I've also had the same problem with mill's a dozen different times on different levels: the miller just sits there lounging around doing nothing as though he thinks there is no wheat in the city. Meanwhile, I'll have a warehouse right next to his shop overflowing with wheat. The lazy bumb.

I also will occassionally run into situations (on 4 or 5 different maps) where I can't keep my granaries filled with meat no matter how many butchers I have feeding meat into those granaries. I used to think this was happenning because I was mismanaging my building placement, but I no longer think so. I think the meat sometimes starts disappearing into black holes sometimes too.

[Willem]

Originally posted by jdchambe
I've also had the same problem with mill's a dozen different times on different levels: the miller just sits there lounging around doing nothing as though he thinks there is no wheat in the city. Meanwhile, I'll have a warehouse right next to his shop overflowing with wheat. The lazy bumb.

I had a game just recently where no one was working at all. No Goats being kiled, no water being drawn, nothing. All my citizens were on a perpetual holiday. I thought maybe I had screwed something up when I edited some of the files, so I un/reinstalled everything.