Tile control for overlapping cities

[Kylearan]

Hi,

does anybody know how the game decides which tiles are under control of which city in case of overlapping cities? You can no longer assign tiles to cities as you could do in Civ 3, but how does the game decide which tile belongs to which city? I think first ring tiles have precedence over second ring tiles, but what about a tile which is in the second ring of two cities? Is it culture? Which city had been founded first? Or something completely different?

I often want to found a city only if it won't steal away tiles from another city of mine, so this would be important to know...especially as you no longer can abandon cities.

-Kylearan

[Sullla]

Kylearan, you CAN assign tiles to cities when they overlap. Just click on the tile that you want a city to grab, and it will go from being blacked out to being selectable on the city screen. For the longest time during testing you couldn't select which tiles went to each city, but you certainly can in the final release!

As for how the game chooses which city gets which tiles, that I don't know. Fortunately, it's largely irrelevant as you can customize which city gets which tiles.

[Renata]

You actually can switch tiles between cities. In the city screen, just click on the grayed-out tile you want to use, and it will light up. You can then place a citizen on it as you normally would.

(I'm not sure what happens if a citizen from a different city is already working that tile -- does the tile light up and make that citizen a specialist in the other city, does the tile light up and move the citizen from the other city somewhere else, or does the tile just refuse to light up? I'm still sufficiently programmed by CivIII that I always manually move any interfering citizens away first.)

[kryszcztov]

Sirian may go angry after me, but this is one of the things that bugged me in my very first game. I don't need to play 50 games to know that this feature isn't good, in fact it is worse than in Civ1, Civ2 and Civ3 ! Unbelievable. This grey-out thingie is nonsense, especially as many grey-out tiles aren't actually worked by a close city (they were before, or maybe you selected them for another city before deciding for another tile). So sometimes, you have grey-out tiles that are just free for your city, and you don't know other than by memory (gasp !) or by having a peek at the other city. Also I'm not sure what does happen when you select a grey-out tile that is worked by a close city : like Renata said, does it mess up the other city ? I could check right away, but I'm lazy.

Summary : This feature is poorly implemented in Civ4, that's a certainty (or please give good arguments). Please bring back the old system with red squares or something. Plus, the tiles NOT in the city's vicinity are also grey-out, so this is rather confusing.

[Renata]

I agree with all of that. There should be a way to distinguish in the city display between workable tiles, tiles that are unworkable due to another city using them *at that moment*, and tiles that are unworkable due to being outside the city radius.

[Sirian]

does anybody know how the game decides which tiles are under control of which city in case of overlapping cities?

Goes to the closer city. In case of tie on distance, goes to the older city.

Each plot will now "belong" to a city, only one, but which city will control it can be changed in case of overlap. As others have stated, you enter the non-controlling city and click on the plot. Control of that plot will now attach to the city you are looking at, and become grayed out in any other cities in range of it.

It is simple, clean, permanent (unless you change it again), and yes, it is not meant to encourage regular swapping back and forth. (You can do it, but you have to micro it if you do.)

This feature is poorly implemented in Civ4, that's a certainty (or please give good arguments).

There's one overwhelming, "sweep everything else off the table" argument. It is necessary to assign a plot to one city or the other in to prevent the city governors from both trying to use the same plot (and all the attendant misery that results from this).

You have control over which city gets the plot, and NOTHING will override your assignment. If the default assignment (handled per above explanation for Kylearan) is not to your liking, go in there immediately and change it.

If you want to be changing that back and forth constantly, trying to run cramped cities and swapping multiple tiles in multiple locations every single turn, and don't like all the micro involved, then I would be the WRONG guy to complain to about it, because discouraging ICS at every level was part of my job. If you aren't trying to be cute about redefining your local counties every other game turn, then setting them once, initially, or maybe changing them once or twice through the game, is not NOT painful at all, but prevents you from having to babysit the city governors for the one city not "stealing" plots you mean to be controlled by the other!


If you don't like it, well, you're entitled to your opinion, of course. In my mind, it represents an enormous step up from previous Civ games. Perhaps it is not adequately documented, but that wasn't my department.


- Sirian

[Renata]

The issue IMO is not how it works but rather how it's displayed. Screw ICS, cities *do* have overlap frequently for any number of valid reasons, and it's natural for a player to assume, as Kylearan did (and I also did until I just happened to click in the "wrong" place one day), that grayed-out tiles are off-limits, particularly since some of them (the ones outside the city radius) *are*. A player who doesn't realize tiles can be shifted around might occasionally face a significant disadvantage with only minor overlap issues -- for example if a later-founded city has much more growth potential than the earlier one, or if a silver mine should pop up on a tile shared between a commerce-generating city and another one, and happens to belong to the other one.

So to reiterate -- at least for me, it's not the way that tile-sharing works, which I think is fine, but the way the information is displayed in the city screen. Anything at all to alert the new player that there's potential functionality there would be a good thing.

[A random story of tile-sharing oddities: In a current non-RB game, I had a high-culture city in conflict with a foreign one (six shared tiles, originally apportioned three each.) I had long since taken control of all six, and was working every tile in my city's radius except the two mountains. Then the foreign city flipped to me, and I abandoned it. The next turn I realized that three of the citizens in *my* city had become specialists! The game had apparently assigned the three tiles back to my new city while it still existed, evicting the townsmen and windmill operators that had been there for eons in favor of a city that at that moment only had a single citizen. It was funny.]

[LKendter]

I would only like one change for this issue. Make it clearer when the tile is unvailable (AI owns it, lack of culture borders), and when it is used by another city.
To be honest I don't see this "greyed out" look.
I have no problem with the current tile assignment system except that is is to hard to tell.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

thanks for pointing out how to change tile control. I was sure I had tried clicking on the tile, but it seems I hadn't.

Now that I know how to do it, I think I like the way they implemented it. Well, not that it's a bit hard to find, but the idea behind it - that you can "permanently" assign a tile to a city so that the governor can use it. I use the governor most of the time, and have no intention of swapping tiles between cities. It's just that I didn't want to "steal" tiles away from a big city by founding a fishing village near it.

-Kylearan

[MeteorPunch]

Somewhat a similar problem: Specialists get assigned automatically. There should definitely be a button, "don't assign specialists."