Getting NONE Settlers

[Mixam]

This is my first post on this site! Many thanks to those of you who have asked questions about posts which i have read as they were usually questions I was looking for the answer too.

I was reading on how you can bribe enemy settlers and engineers in order to get the sought after NONE units if they are closer to an enemy city or some such. I don't know exactly how much they cost but I submit an alternative which I just came up with. I admit that after all i have seen here it is probably not a new post (Oh well)

First off I make some settlers if I don't have any (which is not very often) then i pick a site over 16 squares away from the border of any of my cities in a straight line. An ideal site has 2 forest or better sheild output terrain. Then i build a city on one forest and make sure my worker in the city is set on the other forest (or other high sheild output terrain)

Next i set production to a settler. With two forrests I have a total sheild output of four assuming no loss and no railroad yet. I let the settler build for one turn then switch to warrior and buy it for 13 gold and switch back. Let it build for one more turn then switch to phallanx and buy and back to settler for 13 gold. Let it build for another turn and then switch to diplomat and buy for 13 gold and switch back. Last time let the settler build for one more turn then buy it.

I realize this is called incremental buying. But this will likely benefit newbies to this post like me. Anyways this takes 4 turns and only 52 gold to get a NONE settler or engineer. I am not exactly sure on the distance from your cities (but 16 seems to work for me)and if this is better than buying enemy settlers or what thus why I posting this. Hope it helps and I look forward to hearing feedback on this.

I haven't slept in almost 3 days since i found this site. In fact I had to get an email address just so I could post here (what a pain in the a**)

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Shhh... Just Take It!
Shhh... No-one Has To Know!

[Ming]

You are correct that your method is much cheaper than bribing an enemy settler. In almost all cases, bribing an enemy settler will cost you more money.

But, just one correction. The number of squares that you need to build the city away from your closest city is totally dependent on whether the "settler city" is closer to one of your other cities, or that of an AI. You could build your "settler city" 10 (or even less) spaces away from one of your cities, and as long as an AI city is closer, it will become a non settler when the city is disbanded.

[Mixam]

I guess that means that this strategy would need to be modified to include a defensive unit to stay on the settler city square and defend it since it is closer to the enemy unless they are on another continent (in which case i wouldn't bother). Thanks for the input Ming. I am impressed that my first post recieved a reply from someone as knowlegeable as Ming.

[Carolus Rex]

Knowledgeable? Ming?

Welcome aboard, Mixam!

Carolus

[Scouse Gits]

Hi Mixam!

As I'm sure you know, NON Settlers can emerge from huts. The window of opportunity for this is before you have researched explosives. They are never obtained from grassland or plains squares (Advanced Tribes from these terrain types), but are possible from all other kinds of terrain.

Certain other rules apply to these settlers. Whilst you can get more than one per continent - you never seem to receive the second unless the first one has built a city. The exception seems to be the icecaps (a rich supply of these units + any barbs melt away) where you can collect more than one.

An early boat with a couple of diplomats may bring in your NON workers faster!

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SG(2)

[drake]

Ah yes, the non-settler.....the hut tippers finest catch

[East Street Trader]

I think you always get a NONE settler if you disband a city, irrespective of whether the city is closer to the A1 or to you.

On the subject of wandering tribes, I got one from a hut the other day, put it into a boat and then tipped another hut on the same landmass. Out popped anothr wandering tribe.

So the constraint is that you won't get a wandering tribe if there is already a NONE settler present on that continent.


[This message has been edited by East Street Trader (edited April 11, 2001).]

[Mixam]

Thanks SG

Actually I am not very good at tipping huts i only started to do it recently when i found that there is a pattern to the huts b4 it seemed too darned tedious to find em The icecaps being the exception i love tipping the icecaps. Mostly cause the barbs melt away. I actually didn't know that u got advanced tribes when hut was on the plains or grassland tiles. Or that you no longer got non settlers after explosives. Does this mean you also do not get non Engineers? I never realized that; Leos made the point mute for me i rarely give that wonder up.

And EST

Unfortunately no you do not always get non settlers from disbanded city. I used to think so too. I was very dissapointed when i learned that the settler i though was non was draining on one of my cities econ.

However it is interesting that maybe if you place all your non settlers in a ship for a turn then tip a hut you might have a higher chance of getting a non settler.
[This message has been edited by Mixam (edited April 11, 2001).]

quote: Originally posted by drake on 04-11-2001 10:02 AM Ah yes, the non-settler.....the hut tippers finest catch

NON-settlers from huts are nice but I always seem to have problem whether to settle or keep it. Decisions, decisions.. For me, I get my best kicks when stumbling across a 3-4 sized advanced tribe with temple & marketplace in a neglected island later in the game.

And welcome to Apolyton, Mixam! I'm glad you have found this wonderful site with wealth of information and cool people!

[This message has been edited by Marko Polo (edited April 11, 2001).]

[Marquis de Sodaq]

I often end up with 2 or 3 NON-settlers on the same continent. This may be because the continent is large, tho - seas inland or around the periphery only.

Disbanding a city nearer one of your own than an AI city results in your nearest city supporting the new settler/engineer. It is a drag sometimes when you forget to adjust workers - you are reminded when either that distant explorer gets disbanded or the starving city warning pops up...

Another hut-tipping tip is to use a diplomat. Barbarians will often ignore him and run off to find more challenging prey.

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"There is no fortress impregnable to an ass laden with gold."
-Philip of Macedon

[airdrik]

I have a question about this in OCC (one city challange), would this be a legal way to get non-settlers in OCC? Or to upgrade your non-settler into a non-engineer?
[This message has been edited by airdrik (edited April 11, 2001).]

[Mixam]

No it can not be used in OCC unless they modify the rules. In OCC you have to win without ever having owned more than one city. You cannot found another city even if you are going to disband it. You are not even allowed to disband an advanced tribe you get, you have to load to a time b4 you got the advanced tribe. It would be nice if they allowed disbanding an advanced city you got. However then it would not be OCC

[Scouse Gits]

While your original settler is marching out into the wild blue yonder in search of his temporary home - click on his icon in his own city window - it will say 'near to Carthage' say - now if you own Carthage this is bad news, but once it says 'near to Paris' you can found knowing that you will get your non-settler back ...

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Scouse Git[1] -- git1@scousers.net

"Staring at your screen in horror and disbelief when you open a saved game is one of the fun things of a succession game " - Hueij
"The Great Library must be built!"
"A short cut has to be challenging,
were it not so it would be 'the way'." - Paul Craven

[EOL]

I got NON Settlers from consecutive huts on the same (small) continent last week. The first one was still active on the continent when I got the second one. A very pleasant surprise. I think it must just be that the chance of another NON settler decreases dramatically with others present.

EOL

Edit: typo
[This message has been edited by EOL (edited April 13, 2001).]

[East Street Trader]

I tried your technique, Mixam, in my current game. I am way in front with a thriving civ producing pots of cash. On one landmass there is a sole surviving American city with an inexhaustible demand for hides while three of my cities are 50 shield repeat hides builders.

Anyway, your post came to mind and I decided to give an honourable quiatus to some surviving but now comparitively slowworking settlers (didn't bother with Leo's).

It was a curious feature of the exercise that I got to destroy some of the poor puppet city's land improvements.

Occurs to me that this factor might have its uses if you wanted to damage some neighbour who is inconveniently an ally or with whom you do not wish to provoke war.

Briefly I thought I might be able to interupt the city's progress towards extinction to build a caravan/freight or two so as to manipulate the production of commodities by other cities. Couldn't find a way. Might, though, be worth another try.

[Mixam]

EST If I read your post correctly you were building then disbanding cities within the ai's city radius to change your outdated settlers to non engineers. LOL I like how you distroyed thier improvements by building over them. That is something i noticed too. Although i have never actually used it to purposefully destroy their improvements except for experimentation. Nevertheless it is fun to do

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Shhh... Just Take It!
Shhh... No-one Has To Know!

[East Street Trader]

That's it, Mixam.

I was way ahead in that game and the city I was building the temporary cities next to was just a puppet city which I left sat there mainly for trading purposes. So destroying its mines was of little significance.

But I reckon there will be other times when I want to hamper a neighbouring city's shield production without provoking a war. So I've stored up this little tactic. Clearly it would rarely be worth tying up a settler/engineer for that alone but, in combination with your tactic for getting NONE units, it might become well worthwhile.

Trying your notion out in my game made me think quite a bit better of it. You save both a shield and a wheatsheaf every turn with a NONE settler/engineer. I had the cash to tie up the unit making the transition for only one turn so little work was lost. In the special case of converting ancient settlers to engineers it's definately a winner. But I now think it may well have the wide application your first post suggests.

I have finished the game I was playing now and did not manage to find any cunning trading uses for the temporary city during its brief life. But I continue to think that there must be some trading tactic in there somewhere. I don't re-home caravans/freights but a player who did would surely like to have three new commodities available for a while.

[Mixam]

EST I am not sure about this but doesn't a size one city have a very good chance of demanding hides? It could be a way to get a bonus from that infinite hides suppy you probably have in a few of your cities. However I also remeber a post that said hides doesn't even have a demanded bonus so maybe it wouldn't be worth while. Oh well only testing will tell.

[East Street Trader]

No, hides is a commodity which can be demanded and supplied by all sorts of cities at all sorts of time. It's special quality is that (for reasons so far unknown) you get the occasional city in which you can go on building hides caravans without "hides" ever going into parentheses. Similarly there are some cities (cause again unknown) where hides are perpetually in demand.

You are right to think that there are commodities which are size/age related. Cloth tends to be a commodity which will only come into demand in a small/recently founded city (rather silly I've always thought). Copper, I think, tends to get produced during an earlyish phase in a city's development. You can pretty well count on silk coming into demand widely once cities grow to a certain size or get old enough. It then stays in widespread demand for quite a while.

Gold only comes into demand fleetingly and, in my experience only in capitals and other core cities during a particular period in the development of a civ - late BC to earlyish AD might roughly place the start of the period. I think it also tends to start a dozen or so turns after gold starts appearing as a commodity which city's in your own civ will produce.

The use I thought might exist for the free commodities in the temperary cities was based on the fact that you can sometimes shake a commodity free of the parentheses by delivering a new caravan to that city. This foundered though because, I think, the technique only works if the result of delivering the caravan is to change the city's trade routes. In my game a caravan from the temp city would never do this because that city would have pathetically few arrows compared to the full grown cities all around it. So it would never have the trading muscle to displace an existing route.

[Mixam]

I find that Barbarians seem to demand hides alot when they take over a city and they never seem to fill that demand no matter how often you send hides to them. This is the only case i have had that happen personally. Not the infinite supply, I always get that, but the infinite demand. Also of not if you wanna free up a trade route destroy the city you sent it to. I have used this a few times. I would send all my caravans to a very big foreign city then after i no longer had any routes free but hides and maybe cloth I would conquer that civ and destroy the city i traded with. Then i would pick another big city from another civ and do the same thing. Makes for an interesting game. You don't destroy a cive till you make alot of money off them. And you never have to worry about running out of trade routes. I was doing some research till Civ froze up. I think it doesn't like Win 98 I guess i have to restart now and start my research over again.

[East Street Trader]

You will find a few perpetual hides demand cities. I seem to remember Adam Smith saying he gets a really high proportion of them but for me, like you it seems, it is pretty rare. But far from unknown.

In the game I just finished the same perpetual hides city also demanded coal without having the demand filled for a while. I have a suspicion in this case that delivering two or three caravans a turn to the city was creating special conditions. SG, I think (or it might have been Adam Smith again), once posted to say he believed there are repeat demand cities for commodities other than hides. I hadn't found any before the coal case.

I have sent caravans to barb cities a few times but can't say I've noticed that they favour hides. I thought they were a special case in that they don't send goods back (so your sending city doesn't parenthesise one of its demanded commodities on the arrival of the caravan) but I've come to doubt my observations on that because once you buy in the barb city there is a two way route in place.

Interesting idea about killing a city off to free up commodities. Sounds a bit drastic - but I thought that about disbanding cities before trying it so I'm not about to ignore that one either!

Anyway there is a lot of work still to do before we get to the bottom of trading in yhe game. If I was lab minded I'd be looking into the mechanisms by which routes are displaced. Xen Yu posted some ideas which centre on using a food caravan to effect the change. Expensive, again, though, I think.

[East Street Trader]

I found another good situation where you can combine the creation of a NONE settler/engineer with another purpose.

I wanted my fleet of ironclads to move throuigh an isthmus to continue the assault on the civ I was rolling back. So of course I was intent on building a Panama City. I had a choice of sites and one was close to an enemy city. I didn't need the canal to stay in place and it proved very convenient to found, let the ironclads through and then disband.

I'm definitely starting to like this tactic.

Edited to add - oh, yes, and in Democracy the saving is two wheatsheaves. That means two extra specialists in some cities or the ability to sustain one or two more mines in others. That's a big return for the time and money spent.
[This message has been edited by East Street Trader (edited April 20, 2001).]

[Mixam]

Yes you can say have a vet battleship on a fortified mountain. But while you are at it why not also send in a vet AEGIS Cruiser to take care of any air or missile attacks

[airdrik]

You can even use this to build inland battleship senturies: Build city on coast, move battleship into city, disband city, build city further inland, move battleship, disband city, etc. repeat until battleship is in desired location. Set battleship to sentury and have fun.

In some of the older versions of the game, after you had built a high number of Settlers, every next Settler would be designated as "NON" (rather like how you can only build so many cities). This was changed by a patch though (2.42 I think), and I was very unhappy when I couldn't build my "free" Settlers any more! It was always a part of my game plan to build those Settlers towards the end of the game and disband my Settlers that were still supported by cities.

[Mixam]

Sergei: The version I bought from the store was 2.42. I guess I missed out on some of the earlier cheats. Unfortunately there are still a lot of the bugs left in the game. Ah well maybe Civ III will have less bugs. If not by the time Civ IV comes along (hopefully) I will be on the Civ programming team.

[War4ever]

quote: Originally posted by East Street Trader on 04-20-2001 07:40 AM I found another good situation where you can combine the creation of a NONE settler/engineer with another purpose. I wanted my fleet of ironclads to move throuigh an isthmus to continue the assault on the civ I was rolling back. So of course I was intent on building a Panama City. I had a choice of sites and one was close to an enemy city. I didn't need the canal to stay in place and it proved very convenient to found, let the ironclads through and then disband. I'm definitely starting to like this tactic. Edited to add - oh, yes, and in Democracy the saving is two wheatsheaves. That means two extra specialists in some cities or the ability to sustain one or two more mines in others. That's a big return for the time and money spent. [This message has been edited by East Street Trader (edited April 20, 2001).]

EST this is also a realistic and highly effective little canal you have created. Even better is when it turns from military passage way/fort/supply line..... into a thriving city full of beauty and splendor