I'm not playing again until the AI players have to wait to raze cities.

You can mod this in ElementalDefs.xml

No.  You can't.

Can I have your stuff?

If you have ever done programming before you know that one tincy wincy fix will break an entire project. It may take time but these things are worth the wait. 

Maybe you can't.  I wouldn't know why that is... I can (click for larger)

@Dangerlinto, Try reading the original post again, the subject is based around the AI ignoring these rules, so while you can change how the rules work, it wont matter since the AI will still ignore them.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Oh I see.  I suppose it's annoying in that regard.  I just liked almost equal footing.

I'm quite optimistic that Frogboy will fix this soon as he's stated it needed fixing, so it's on the radar.  Sounds like him and Kael have been flat out getting the LH beta ready, but once that's out... hopefully they can sort this one out for us in the 1.4 patch.

But yeah, understand your frustration... it's at the top of my list of annoyances too.

Doesn't bother me in the least since that's the way MOM did it (though the player had the right to raze at any time as well). I don't want this 5 turn restriction though. If you're going to FIX IT FROGBOY then make it IMMEDIATELY for both sides.

StevenAus-

Care for some cheese with that? 

I won't go that far, but this is what I categorize as a major bug, and something that means a game can't be considered finished while it still exists.

The fix is likely going to be the removal,of the 5 turn wait for the human which can be done in elementaldefs.xml

Seriously?... That doesn't sound like a fun solution

~ K

Well anything else is going to take a lot of work. So if Im going to do that I'd want something better tha the 5 turn thibe.

It kinda make sense to make it instant. Considering it doesnt take 20 months (seasons on earth 4 months X 5 turns) to burn down a city.

Just occured to me in Civ 5 razing a city would take 2000 years or so if done early on. My army is lazy...pulls out the whip.

I am always bothered when the decision of a turn's arbitrary length comes before the actual gameplay feeling of the game...

I like the point where it takes several turns to raze a city, to give me more time to re-capture the bastard, and  to prevent severely crippling a nation because of 1 lucky blitz.

I understand Frog's response though.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I'd *like* to see it where you raze a city and it takes N turns where the turns are 3 per level and each turn results in the destruction of improvements and such.

But that would be a lot of work (not by me of course).  So it's not likely to be done as it would mean cutting some new feature out of LH (it's a zero sum budget).

I think 1 turn razes are perfectly fine.  Not ideal. But good enough.  They were only made 5 turns later to help the AI. But the AI is a lot better now than it was back then.

So why isn't it you started printing your own money yet!

~ K

Maybe something like

for x= 1 to numOfBuildings {

    cityHp += building(x).productionCost

}

cityHp*=cityLevel

if (isBurningDown == true) then

    damageDoneToCity = garrisonedTroop Attack Power * 10

   Look at a sorted list of buidling and from the highest production cost down to the lowest pay back the damage with building to destroy them

}

}

I donno thats rough and ugly and maybe even makes no sense but then you slowly destroy buildings unless you ahve a big army there speeding up the process Also its not entirely random

In the example above, you'd have to inroduce the concept of CityHP and have that be carried through across the board as well as into saved games. Then you'd have to create a flag for city is burning down which would have to be incorporated into the turn updating. 

It would probably take about 16 engineering hours to do (including QA time). The problem is that it would mean 16 engineering hour less for something else.

So in short, I like your idea. I just don't think it could be implemented.  I'll grovel to see if something better can be put into LH.

Yeah that idea was not something that I'd expect in the near future. Was kinda bored at this contracting job, call center with no inbound calls and management recommend we read a book or something, so figured I could try fleshing out an idea for fun. 

While this might be true, the amount of breakage that happens can be mitigated by handling how systems are coupled together.

Based off the nature of all the bugs I see it's pretty likely that the AI is not connected to the same rules system as the players at all, and instead tries to mimic all the rules the player has in a way that makes sense to the AI code.

This probably means every time something changes that is part of the players rules, the same change has to be made to the AI rules in such a way that makes the net outcome exactly the same. If so, this must be maddeningly difficult to manage.

Speculation, but it would explain the odd issues that just make it seem like the AI is playing a completely different game than the player. In a very real sense they probably are, in spite of the best of intentions.

That's not how it works.

The AI has to play by the same rules in virtually all cases.  The only time that isn't the case is where a game play rule is implemented at the UI level rather than at the game level.  Generally speaking, we try to avoid this sort of thing precisely because it causes the kinds of problems we're discussing.

So in this case, the Raze City *button* has an IF statement on it that determines if it's enabled or not.  The AI does not.  But the AI only evaluates whether it should raze a city at the time of conquest.  

However, late in the beta, it was decided to change it to require a 5 turn minimum and it was implemented as a UI restriction on the player.

I know Frogboy refuted this in the very next post but to be honest I agree entirely with Sythion. The game feels very much to me like the AI is not using the same library functions as the player is.

Perhaps it is for 90% of things but 10% is enough to still give the impression that it is playing by different rules? Regardless it is how I feel.