🚀 go-pugleaf

satu...@newstand.syr.edu (Ayse) writes about the peaceful Procurator
level:

> I still love this game in theory, but the "peaceful" level with
> three bridges and the natives and the nine-farm fertile area in the
> middle of an island is about to make me quit it forever.  It's not
> quite there yet, but it's close.  I am starting to suspect that if I
> don't build exactly the right city, with each building in exactly
> the place the programmers thought I should put them, it's damn near
> unwinnable.

I doubt that, as my city is pretty chaotic, and I'm always redesigning
as I go along.  I just finished it last night, and I posted some stuff
specific to raising prosperity on another thread (Subject: Ceasar III
Procurator (peaceful) level).

> I *sailed* through the levels before this one, needing only a couple
> of shots at each one before I was able to do them right.  But this
> one is picky and contrary.  I'm about THIS close to requesting that
> someone send me a saved-game where they're just about to win it so
> that I can just win it and move on, since I have lost all hope of
> having any fun with it any more.

I don't have a save from *right* before the end, but I've probably got
one at about 4000 pop. with high ratings, if you want to take a look
at it.

> I'll start with a minor bug report.  Does it seem to you guys that
> there is no risk of fire anywhere on this level?  Like, ever?  Is it
> supposed to be like that?

Yes, it's apparently a very wet part of the world. :-) I finished the
level with one prefecture, which I built for crime but discovered I
didn't need.

> Natives lose their tempers for absolutely no reason in this
> scenario.  I have a game (I'll send it to tech support if they want
> to see it) where I have three active mission posts and the natives
> are happy for years, trading their big carts full of (cotton? what
> is that stuff?) with me, and generally keeping their plans to
> overthrow my city to themselves.  And then, blam, down go my
> buildings with NO warning whatsoever.

I had this happen once despite having four mission houses, but this
time I finished the level with two.  I'm not certain, but I think that
if your missionaries don't cross an area of the natives' territory
every so often, it'll return to hostile status, and if you build on it
then, they'll get mad.  I'm not sure about that, though.  It might
also make a difference if you remove their roads, so the missionaries
can't get around to all their territory; this time I left their roads
alone, or just moved them.

> That part is possible (at least until the natives Lose It).  What's
> less possible is getting furniture and pottery to the area north of
> your primary island.  I'm getting better at micromanaging warehouses
> and granaries (empty granary! OK, now stop! OK, empty again! how'd
> you get so empty so fast? stop!) so that goods go where they're
> supposed to, but it is definitely an Extremely Large Headache.  I've
> pretty much given up expanding onto the eastern mainland, although
> I'll be damned if I can figure out how to make the main island and
> the native island alone support 5000 people.  I seem to have to
> sacrifice prosperity for population, and vice versa.

I squeezed 5000 people into the native island and the three islands
below it (the farm island, the big island in the bottom corner, and
the one in between those two), with a few houses dispersed among my
farms on the plateau for labor.  I only put a fort, a granary, and a
warehouse on the mainland.  It's a little tight, but you can do it.
Keep in mind that once housing develops to insulae, it'll usually have
room for a lot more people, and it takes quite a while to fill up,
especially considering how far immigrants have to walk.  If you've got
housing with extra room, you might try things other than adding
housing to bring in people - low taxes, high wages, 0% unemployment,
etc.

> I've complained about wolves before, and I don't think anyone wants
> to hear me rhyme off the reasons they annoy me yet again.  But BOY
> do they annoy me.  This is the logic as I see it:

> - If you surround wolves with aqueducts they'll leave you alone.
> They won't die, of course, since they have plenty to eat in the 3x3
> aqueducted space that has been given to them, but they'll leave you
> alone.

It's always annoying when people find a loophole to defeat a challenge
in a game.  (Didn't a single beta-tester try walling in the wolves?)
If you build a tower on your side of the river, it'll keep the wolf
population trimmed down until you get a javelin troop formed.  Then
you can build a bridge, run them across, and wipe them out.  Once
you've wiped out all the wolves, they won't come back.  

> You're telling me!  Not to mention the fact that you can never count
> on getting your imports, since "random" landslides often prevent
> traders from getting to your city later on in the scenario.
> Moreover, the psychos from one of the trade routes seem to think you
> need 400 oil at a time, bankrupting you the minute they set
> donkeyfoot near your warehouses.

They won't sell you more than the limit on the trade map, but at the
price of oil, that adds up fast anyway.  In my other post, I recommend
holding off on importing oil until you've got your treasury to $5000
and have a steady income.  It doesn't do any good to bring in a short
supply - that'll just cause your housing to fluctuate a lot and make
things more difficult.

> I know this level is winnable, since a number of the people on the
> newsgroup have done it.  But it's starting to remind me of those old
> text-adventure games, like Zork.  As much as I loved those games, I
> hated the fact that you basically had to read the developers' minds
> so that you could choose EXACTLY THE RIGHT verb to use with the
> object they gave you.

I get that feeling less with this game than with most.  The
first-person shooters are really bad about that - jump here, shoot
there; they remind me of Pac-Man, where if you knew the pattern, you
could play the game forever.  Even in games like SimCity, the radius
method of providing services doesn't leave much to the imagination;
everything gets laid out in a similar grid every time.

In C3, I can design cities of long main streets with side cul-de-sacs,
small blocks, large blocks, and probably some things I haven't thought
of yet.  In fact, my cities look a lot like real cities - square
blocks of different sizes, dead ends, streeets and neighborhoods
weaved around the terrain.

> I said in my last message that I thought there was a fruit bug.  I
> had done everything right -- emptying the warehouse, setting the
> granary to "getting goods", you name it.  One thing I've noticed is
> that food seems to be lowest priority for cart pushers -- they will
> spend all their time running around your city taking iron to weapons
> workshops and they will CONTINUE to do this even if your people are
> starving.  I guess the right thing to do is to have a warehouse that
> does nothing *except* accept fruit, which seems like a huge waste of
> space and labour.

I'm not sure if it's a priority problem, or if it's random, but you're
right, I've seen this too.  Since the granaries don't go get food from
warehouses, the best solution is to make sure nothing else is allowed
at that warehouse that would need to be delivered.  You could still
let your industries put export goods on it, though.

> Why does prosperity creep up so slowly?  I'll have the "Your
> prosperity is rising" message for months and months of game-time and
> nothing will happen.  Then my prosperity will go up by 2 for a short
> time, usually to drop again soon afterwards.

I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that it's easier to *keep*
ratings high than to *get* them high.  That's probably just a
perception on my part, but it seems to help me if I add housing
slowly, and get it up to at least insulae, so it doesn't pull
prosperity down.  That message is annoying; I don't think I've ever
seen it say anything but "Your prosperity is rising", even when it
clearly isn't.  It's too bad it doesn't tell you something useful,
like the other ratings do.

> Oh, while I'm here, I'd like to complain about the priority
> system. [snip] Let's say I have 30 labourers and I set Water,
> Religion, and Industry to 1, 2, and 3.  Then it should set 10 people
> to each of those, not 30 to Water and let the other two go empty.
> Or at least there should be an option to do it that way.  I didn't
> explain that very well, but I hope I made my point.  

In other words, you'd like to be able to set multiple things to the
same priority, so they would split whatever workers are left for that
priority level.  There are times when that would be handy.

> Anyway, I've ranted enough for now.  I really wish I could just
> forget this level for the rest of my life.  It hasn't been fun for a
> long time, and I just want to move on.  I spent a lot of time
> reading Mr. Lester's friendly and informative posts, and I want to
> reiterate how glad I am he's here.  But I really find this level a
> dud, and as much as I like and respect Mr. Lester, I can't get over
> the fact that the game would have been a lot better if this level
> were more reasonable.

I have to say that I'm enjoying the difficulty of the game.  So many
games nowadays become too easy once you figure out the basics; I've
been playing this one quite a while and still don't feel like I've
mastered it yet.  That's not to say that difficulty options would have
been a bad idea; just that it's nice to play a game for once where I
don't feel like I've outsmarted the programmer after the first few
hours of play.


Aaron
-- 
Aaron Baugher - abau...@rnet.com
Extreme Systems Consulting - http://haruchai.rnet.com/esc/
CGI, Perl, Java, and Linux/Unix Administration