4381

So Ramkhamhaeng builds Machu Pichu but since I want it for myself and he’s close by I decide to declare war on him. I cap his city with Machu and suddenly Machu is no longer there! A quick search shows a couple of old threads of others having the same problem. This totally bites.

4382

Yes, that’s happened to me in no less than 4 games.

Hopefully it won’t take 2 more months to fix this as it also hurts the AI (AI vs. AI conflict).

4383

I thought that wonders don’t always survive invasions - are they supposed to? (mind you, this assumption may have been born out of my own experience with an error)

4384

It’s a bug, unless they changed the rules in a patch and I didn’t notice. Manual (v1.0) p.76:

Captured Cities

If a city is captured, its World Wonders are captured as well. A city’s National Wonders are destroyed when the city is captured.

The city’s culture and military buildings (temples, barracks, etc.) are always destroyed when the city is taken. All other buildings have a 66% chance of being captured intact.

4385

Actually it would be cool if that was the way it happened, since thats how quite a few of the real wonders were lost. Its one of those odd things in Civilization that the Collosus and Great Library always survive until the modern age unless the city was razed to the ground.

I mean the only thing that actually made it was the Pyramids.

4386

All city improvements (normal ones and wonders) have a value you can set in the XML files that’s supposed to represent how likely it is that the improvement is lost when the city is conquered.
Easily moddable.

rezaf

4387

True, but in the case of Machu Picchu a wonder vanishes – that should never happen. This means that whatever survival rate was set in the XML file (100% for all wonders) was ignored due to a bug – or perhaps it’s one of those XML values that Civ5 simply ignores anyway.

4388

It very well may be just a bug, but one thing I’ve noticed is that whenever you capture a city that has something on a mountaintop, if the mountain ends up not in your cultural radius afterwards the improvement disappears. Could that be what is going on?

4389

Yeah, sorry Chris, I wasn’t saying the behavior was not caused by a bug, but that - if the game works as intended - it should be easy to mod wonders to have a chance to be destroyed whenever a city changes ownership violently.

rezaf

4390

You realize they’re the same building, right? That the paper maker replaces the library? If they removed the slots from the Paper Maker and left them in the Library, the Paper Maker would be a huge downgrade. The gold wouldn’t begin to make up for the loss of science.

The library was by far the most powerful standard building in the game. An early-game city with a library produced 3x the science of a normal city if you hired two scientists and took the Great Scientist points into account. Great Scientists are the most powerful Great People, and because the library had 2 slots, they were also the easiest to get.

This is going to cut down on player science in a huge way. It may no longer be possible to out-tech the AI on deity.

It also greatly changes the Great Person dynamic. Now the early slots are Great Artist (from Temple) or Great Merchant (from Market). Great Engineer remains tough because the Workshop only offers one slot. Since +500 gold and 30 influence is merely “nice to have” compared to a free tech, and +2 gold is rather iffy compared to most tiles, I expect that Great People will be far, far less common.

4391

It was getting silly with all the tech, on large maps you would have tons of tech, but no ability to build anything really in your cities…

Result - library - colosseum - monument built, and I would be into rifle age.
I didn’t mind keeping up with the AI in tech, but AI production on demi-god mode was piss poor aswell.

In CIV 4 , when I attacked on demi-god, you would have to go and eat dinner or something, because the attacks would last for a good 10-15 mins…now…he’s got like 15 units, which according to my advisor is godlike, and is to me one quick war, and he’s toast.

4392

Really, it seems from some of this discussion like the whole system is out of whack. If the AI can’t even manage its own city allocations sensibly there is something wrong.

Sure, tactical hex-based combat AI is hard, that’s why few if any games can put up a fight with equal forces with such rules. But resource management? Is that supposed to be hard to code, too? I mean, sure the library is powerful, but you’d think you could code the AI to use it just like a player. But maybe I’m wrong and this is really hard. In that case, it seems to me the thing to do is to come up with a different city management game system for which it is easier to code the AI. That way different difficulty levels can have different levels of AI nerf instead of increasingly insane handicaps.

4393

It seems like they didn’t quite think hard enough about how one unit per tile would affect city combat. Cities’ auto-attacks do little enough damage compared to the old way of stacking defensive bonuses.

4394

It is somewhat difficult, actually. Hiring specialists is an investment, since you give up hammers and food to do it. It’s difficult to get an AI to prioritize things that really must be purchased now versus the long term - if you take a too-simple approach to this decision, the AI will tend to either under invest (which is what it does now) or over-invest (leaving it very vulnerable to rushes). This is particularly true since Civ V units cost enough that you can’t really build yourself out of a surprise military attack. You really have to build enough entire military before the war starts.

However, it is solvable, given a reasonably skilled AI programmer and enough time.

4395

So how about that patch, eh?

4396

It just dropped…or, at least, I just got the notification for it.

4397

Ahh, it’s about time! There goes my day.

4398

Thanks for the tip, I just launched Steam to grab it. I’ve been home sick for 3 days which has been a drag, but now maybe today won’t be so bad :)

4399

Damn, I have a good game going at the moment and I’m wondering if the patch will muck it up. Is there a way to prevent automatic downloading of the patch in Steam?

4400

Good news indeed. Updating now.