Patch 1.0.0.62 - Production focus lets cities starve?

[lschnarch]

The title tells the story:
After having set the Governor to "production focus", severel of my cities start to starve.
Even a city which has just grown, so that any starvation would immediately lead to a loss of population, is concerned by this.

I am in a Golden Age and have enough money and happiness.

In the previous version (1.0.0.20) I haven't observed any such crazy situation.

OTOH, I am continuing an old savegame, so it *might* be that there is some kind of problem with old savegames only (although I don't see any reason for this). Standard version of Civ0.V, btw, no deluxe version.

Has anybody made similar observations?

[Fenhorn]

It happened before .62.

[FatTony]

See, now your never going to get any replies unless you learn how to post this question.

You need to include caps, screams, accusations at 2K, the words Epic and Fail at least 3 places in your post and mention how you stopped playing before and you probably will again because after 15minutes with the patch, you have had a single issue and it there for must suck!! Oh, and demand your money back. :p

he he... sorry OP, I'm not actually trying to poke at you but the general mentality that is so prevalent on this forum. ;) Your post struck me as the kind of question about a game mechanic (and its potential issues) that was simply stated with no accusations, like one would expect from an adult.

Actually, I noticed this myself on my current game. Also like you this game was started prior to the patch so perhaps there is something left over from pre-patch. I will find out when I finish this one and start on my next game (have played 4 games successfully start to finish without a single crash...guess I'm one of the lucky ones).

Either way, I'm sure they still have more bugs to hunt and kill but it looks like they may have made a good start with this patch.

[legacy_programmer]

It happened before .62.

I don't know if I agree with that. I've seen the same symptoms as the OP. My cities were set to focus production before the patch. After the patch, I suddenly got a message that three cities were starving. I thought maybe I'd lost food from a maritime CS, but that wasn't the case.

I went into the cities in question and selected 'standard' distribution and all was fine. I then selected 'production' again and the city put so many gathers on production that it threw the city into starvation.

I'm all for 'focused' production, but not to the point that my cities starve.

Selecting 'food' focus gave me an overabundance of food, so there sure was enough to go around. I ended up having to select 'production' focus and then manually tweaking a couple guys so the city didn't starve.

[lschnarch]

It happened before .62.

Has never happened to me.

Actually, I always thought the Governor was one of the things which were working correctly.
Now, in this game which I am continuing under .62, it already has happened to three different cities.

Seems to be remarkable that I have to notice it for the first time, yet for three cities in a row, when playing with the new patch.

[Akinaba]

Well focusing the city on one particular goal just optimize the city's employments. Why thay should not starve if in the titles that perform, for exmple maximum money income, just contains not enough food to provide it's own citizens? Seems fair to me.

It causes you think first press buttons second. but if you prefer totally to rely on AI only, maybe it will be usefull to add "Avoid starving" tick just under the "Avoid growth". IDK.

Take a note that any additional citizen causes more food to feed the whole city. that's why the bigger your city is the more food it need. Seems fir to me again. to avoid it use various medicine buildings (that inflicts 25% of food for a new citizen).

And yes I might admit that a lot of tinny things like, for example this one are not described in wikipedia. That's sad. In the ideal way wikipedia must contain closest possible description of geme mechanic and the vrious description of what happening in the same way. Sounds complex I know, but that's how great deals deeds.

[lschnarch]

Well focusing the city on one particular goal just optimize the city's employments. Why thay should not starve if in the titles that perform, for exmple maximum money income, just contains not enough food to provide it's own citizens? Seems fair to me.

It causes you think first press buttons second. but if you prefere to play by automates only maube it will be a good thought to add "Avoid starving" tick just under the "Avoid growth".

Take a note that any additional citizen causes more food to feed the whole city. that's why the bigger your city is the more food it need. Seems fir to me again. to avoid it use various medicine buildings (that inflicts 25% of food for a new citizen).

And yes I might admit that a lot of tinny things like, for example this one are not described in wikipedia. That's sad. In the ideal way wikipedia must contain closest possible description of geme mechanic and the vrious description of what happening in the same way. Sounds complex I know, but that's how great deals deeds.

Oh sorry, dear Sir, but if you don't have anything to contribute to the topic then I would like to kindly ask you to refrain from posting in this thread.

[FatTony]

It happened before .62.

Perhaps for you, perhaps once. With what frequency?

The question would better be answered with a little more info because what you experienced may not be what others experienced.

For me, in the previous games that I played (pre-.62) ... this almost NEVER happened. Once every few hundred turns would an auto producing town starve and lose population.

For me, this was a rare occurrence. Now with my 1hr of playtime today (post patch) it has happened 1/2 dozen times. So from my experience so far, this appears to be occurring with more frequency.

May be just for me or just this game.
I cant speak for everyone else.

But I think its a better answer than just "No, happened before" with nothing more to back it up ;)

[dip22]

Pre .62 Production focus would always ensure city was not starving FIRST. THEN grant maximum production with the leftovers.

[Fenhorn]

Has never happened to me.

Actually, I always thought the Governor was one of the things which were working correctly.
Now, in this game which I am continuing under .62, it already has happened to three different cities.

Seems to be remarkable that I have to notice it for the first time, yet for three cities in a row, when playing with the new patch.
I happened to me quite often pre-62 actually. Sure those times when it happened mostly was when I annexed a city and wanted to haste the production of a courthouse.

Other than me over at CFC have also seen this pre-62. Perhaps annoying, yes, but since I used to do this (manually) in CivIV (micromanaging) for short periods I have not reacted so strongly as I thought it was suppose to be like this.

[lschnarch]

Pre .62 Production focus would always ensure city was not starving FIRST. THEN grant maximum production with the leftovers.

This was my observation as well.

[legacy_programmer]

This was my observation as well.

I second that, and it's exactly how I'd expect this feature to work. Food requirements should always be covered before maxing anything else (production, culture, etc). If you then want to tweak and throw your city into a negative food state then that's up to you, but the default should be for that not to happen. Otherwise, I might as well skip the governor and just micromanage the city myself.

[RiotBoi]

Happening to me too. Unless i micromanage each worker my city starves.

If I set it to default with avoid growth the AI doesn't focus on production either.

The only solution I've found is to have a water mill and granary. With both of those the AI somehow manages not to starve.

Civ 5 was ok before patch, now its bordering on too irritating to play because i'll have to micromanage every single worker in every single city that I want to focus on production.

[Akinaba]

I repeat again, it forces you to think first, press button second. Now there IS need in Grnary, Medical Clinic, etc. This thing makes those thing playable. Gus think ahead and consytruct a granary if you plann your city to be big. (And don't forget about happinecc thou). :D

[Finite]

I don't think the governor worked that well eve before the patch, but the problem then was that it left too much food surplus even with production focus and "no growth" ticked. I figured it might have been to do with not able to take certain policies, city states or civ bonuses into account when counting the food. But yes, that was not as bad as having too little food.

Did not like the governor much otherwise, either. Most often could assign superior worker placement manually. But that I could write off as the price to pay if not wanting to micro manage. Starvation, not so much...

[Black Gate of Mordor]

The title tells the story:
After having set the Governor to "production focus", severel of my cities start to starve.
Even a city which has just grown, so that any starvation would immediately lead to a loss of population, is concerned by this.

Has anybody made similar observations?

This almost always happened to me whenever I selected production focus, although I haven't played the game with .62 yet.

[Dreamer]

I can definitely confirm that this has happened to me before .62 multiple times.
Furthermore that focus stuff didn't seem to work very well at all - often happened that the "default focus" would result in more hammers than a "production focus"

[IceCube]

they should check it .

[goodgimp]

Yay, now it's even more idiotic than before! Pre-patch, I'd oftentimes tell a city to do Production focus and I'd get ~17 hammers. I'd switch it to food focus and get 32 hammers. Oookay.

The reason being that production focus was somehow putting a lot of people into specialists, like Scientists, whereas food was putting everyone it could on tiles. I really don't get it.

It was never consistent, though. Oftentimes I'd tell my city to do Production focus and it'd do fine, then halfway through it's production of the unit/building I'd notice the number of turns to completion have jumped dramatically, only to find the problem I described above. I really have no idea what it was doing.

[dip22]

For those of you claiming it was broken pre-patch already, it seems you obviously never bothered to tick "manual specialist control" which made the focus actually work properly.

What we are talking about is having the manual control and due to the patch, production focus now actually starves the city instead of stagnating/minutely growing it.

[MadDjinn]

pre-patch, the focus would give *more* than what was needed to maintain population, even with 'avoid growth' checked. They patched it, somewhat, so likely this is a consequence of that adjustment. Now it just switches to all production tiles, and if you aren't getting enough food, you should manually adjust.

I kinda prefer it this way, since before the game would choose the 4 food 1 gold tile over the 3 food 1 prod tile all the time. I would get +8 or more food this way, even with avoid growth on. So having the city now choose maximum production where I'd have to purposely go in to balance the food to get it to 0 (or close enough) is very nice.

[General Masters]

I haven't had this problem myself, but then when I want maximum production while still having enough food I do it manually as I do not trust the AI governors to get it right.

I have noticed the few times I did it that setting the auto to 'Max Production' typically still left at least some growth potential, so what might have happened is that they tweaked it to actually max production regardless of whether or not that left enough food for population maintenance. I would have to try it to see, though.

[RiotBoi]

I repeat again, it forces you to think first, press button second. Now there IS need in Grnary, Medical Clinic, etc. This thing makes those thing playable. Gus think ahead and consytruct a granary if you plann your city to be big. (And don't forget about happinecc thou). :D

And I repeat, having to micromanage EVERY SINGLE worker in EVERY SINGLE CITY during EACH TURN is not playable. It is IRRITATING.

[RiotBoi]

pre-patch, the focus would give *more* than what was needed to maintain population, even with 'avoid growth' checked. They patched it, somewhat, so likely this is a consequence of that adjustment. Now it just switches to all production tiles, and if you aren't getting enough food, you should manually adjust.

I kinda prefer it this way, since before the game would choose the 4 food 1 gold tile over the 3 food 1 prod tile all the time. I would get +8 or more food this way, even with avoid growth on. So having the city now choose maximum production where I'd have to purposely go in to balance the food to get it to 0 (or close enough) is very nice.

The problem is you have to adjust every single worker(population) in the city. Not just locking some hexes, but all of them. If I lock just some and have high production and stagnation/very slow growth and thenend turn, the next turn the AI decides to move the unlocked workers in the city around and starvation occurs again.

[Lord Byte]

It happens most often when you "Manually control specialists". Untick that and the AI works sorta properly (still not optimal but meh).
On the other hand he still manages to screw up my production focus in heavy mountain towns :( -16! food o.O
And I was so looking forward to this patch, sadly it changed the game to "Citizen Tycoon, Don't Starve". I miss civilization.
Did they even try to test this? Or they just went like "meh, it's weekend, ☺☺☺☺'em".

[IceCube]

before was working good .
i pick production and city produce max hammers plus food they never run out of food .
now we are forced to micromenage ? then why should we choose production at all if we have to adjust it ?
its all about time taking max turns to micromenage empire is bs good luck with finding your games .

[Eshme]

It is this way since the patch period. The issue is that the production focus does not maintain food at a minimum anymore, as soon you activate it and any turn thereafter.

That system doesnt help at all anymore :confused: