[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays

[superdeath]

The stack in Civac land was on Galleons that i had been sailing around the world to hopefully coordinate with his modern ships so i could unload 12+ commandos. If Nauf had EVER given me open borders again (grumble grumble ex friend) i was going to move them into his territory to try and get a first strike. Cuz well, someone had to.

[Mjmd]

I see people really liked the most important thing I did early when Oracled Masonry in this thread.

IF I'm being honest the oracling masonry probably wasn't the stupid thing, but actually going for Oracle at all. But ya I wanted to do all the ind/phi things. And I was aiming for AP so it made sense at the time. Mids did really fix my happiness issue and was much better than monarchy for me for all but like 2 cities on 2 different turns.

[Qgqqqqq]

I was just remembering that this was that game and we hadn't brought that up to give you shit about oracling masonry at the end!

Well played regardless. I didn't follow the last 50ish turns, and still don't quite understand how you pulled back from the hole you were in at one point to be in the commanding position you were in when I stopped.

[Tarkeel]

I see people really liked the most important thing I did early when Oracled Masonry in this thread.

IF I'm being honest the oracling masonry probably wasn't the stupid thing, but actually going for Oracle at all. But ya I wanted to do all the ind/phi things. And I was aiming for AP so it made sense at the time. Mids did really fix my happiness issue and was much better than monarchy for me for all but like 2 cities on 2 different turns.

Agree that the stupid(est) part was going for Oracle, you probably would have been better off researching masonry over priesthood.

[ljubljana]

Also, not sure if I feel better or worse knowing that I lost my cat stack because of some bullshit rules regarding culture after city capturing.

was just rereading the thread and was reminded of this - now that the game is over, is there anyone who can explain the situations in which tiles of enemy culture will revert to neutrality after the capture of a nearby city? or is it actually just random outside of the first ring, as it appears? given how close the margins ended up being, i think it's not an exaggeration to say that i think the whole strategic-level outcome of my and greenline's war depended on whether or not this bug occurred, and that is really out of place in an otherwise-polished strategy game (to say the least...).

i really do not know how you're supposed to play a game where leaving one stack out of position by one tile on one turn is the difference between defeat and victory if you can't even know which tiles you will control on your opponent's turn... it is also pretty easy for me to imagine ways in which a player could exploit this in a desperate situation, by setting up a defensive trap that will expose your opponent to cat collateral if and only if a specific road tile fails to revert to neutral

i assume this is not something that is easy to fix, especially with charriu's retirement.... but if it is doable in python, i was frustrated enough by this in-game that i'd be willing to take a stab at it

[Tarkeel]

My working theory is that when a city is captured, any tile it controls which has never had culture from another player on it will stay controlled until the end of that turn. But it's just a theory.

[ljubljana]

My working theory is that when a city is captured, any tile it controls which has never had culture from another player on it will stay controlled until the end of that turn. But it's just a theory.

unfortunately, i think what i saw during the greenline war is a counterexample to this theory



on turn 187 i captured RussiaFreeTiles from greenline for the first time - the key tile is 2N of the city center, which has a road on it as well as most of my army. on this turn, you can see that it has remained sumerian, so i couldn't use that road to advance further, nor could i move the 1-movers from that tile into the city to defend it; i therefore had to leave it empty and end my turn.

on greenline's turn 188, they retook the city and moved a stack containing a bunch of knights and all their catapults (roughly 30 units in total) onto the forest 2SW of the city center, the one with the two workers on it in the above screenie. this stack would have been safe from my 2-movers if the game followed the t187 behavior on recapture. but instead, when we retook the city on t188...



the roaded tile DID revert to neutral, which put greenline's stack in range of the cuirs.

the fact that the same tile behaved differently on two consecutive turns suggests to me that the bug's behavior can't be determined just by some inherent property of the tile such as whether it has ever had foreign culture on it, as i don't see any way that could have changed between turns. note also that the desert tile 1N-1NW of the city center, which is culturally identical to the roaded tile in all the ways i can think of, remained "bugged" after both captures, so it's not like the capture + recapture "fixed" all the tiles in the city radius somehow.

others might disagree, but given that ginger was <10 turns from intervening at this point, it is my opinion that this specific interaction decided the war. if there's really no way to fix it, maybe it's worth spitballing ideas about rules we could write around it (reload if it happens? have an admin manually change control of the tile, if that's even possible?). there probably isn't a great solution tbh (i don't really think either of those are practicable) but it's hard for me to imagine a more miserable way for someone's game to end than getting screwed by the behavior of a seemingly-nondeterministic bug

[Mjmd]

Ya its something we've kind of been living with forever. This was probably one of the worst recent examples though.

[Dreylin]

Yeah, Cod got razed because of the same bug:

The largest city in the world reduced to ash, population scattered to the 4 winds.  

[T-hawk]

I looked at that code for the weird culture behavior once many years ago, but didn't try very hard to make sense of it. (It's DLL code not Python.) I think I remember one bit is that it can depend on adjacent tiles, which is why one tile can behave differently on different turns. I also remember some cases where you get culture control of a tile that's not actually in your city radius if you surround it on 3/4 or 4/4 sides, and part of the weird behavior is in trying to undo that when you lose one of those adjacent tiles. (Though I'm not 100% sure I'm remembering Civ 4 over Civ 3 here.)