"Active" cities don't produce

[LPhillips]

There's a problem with my "Active" cities in my non-scenario Crescendo map. I want certain cities to produce units so that the longer they're left alone, the more difficult it becomes for players to occupy them.

Example: A red dragon & orc city, with 80 income. It has 1 red dragon and 4 orcs plus one placed by the game on turn 1. It should produce orcs each turn. Until its upkeep reaches 80, perhaps? Instead, the 4 extra orcs I placed on it slowly disappear over time.

The same trend is observable with all Active cities I create. A city with 1 Crusader and 4 heavy infantry before game start: during the game, it goes from 1 crusader and 5 heavy infantry to 1 crusader and 3 heavy infantry before anyone touches it. I am manipulating the guardian production by arranging the units so that the one I want produced is furthest to the right. By my calculation, the city in the first example should be able to support a total of 31 orcs before incurring debt, totally filling the city when combined with the one dragon. If I am misunderstanding how the "Active" feature operates, please let me know.

[KGB]

LPhillips,

You misunderstand.

Active means they start making men on turn 1. However there is a limit to how many armies will get made there. If you already have a Red Dragon and 4 Orcs plus 1 at game start that city is considered WAY over filled with armies. So it will never make another one regardless of the gold income.

At most a city will make 5 armies and in many cases it only makes that many when the units in the city are crappy ones (1/2 turn units), never good ones (so you will never see 5 Dragons).

KGB

[LPhillips]

That's an extremely limited and pretty much useless application. Also, it's absurd that the game should remove units placed on that castle over time. That's a bug at least. Is it possible to have the "Active" feature implemented more along the lines of what I described? Surely the advantages of what I suggest are obvious in map balance.

A specific city can become harder to take the longer it is left alone, so the losses are least if it is taken early. This promotes aggression and rewards the clever player. In my situation, it discourages players from dropping to a stalemate over central, contested cities. I only want this behavior in a few key cities. It allows me to reward or discourage certain behaviors, just as I can set cities with specific production to promote certain strategies or give certain players an advantage (for example by giving elves and wolfriders to someone whose home terrain is forested, to allow them to fend off cheap, early all-or-nothing invasions).

[SnotlinG]

An active city should never remove/disband its own units.
Are you sure noone attacked the city and thats why it suddenly had less units?

The active city production logic looks like this:

if ($cityunits > 4)
{
continue;
}
if ($cityincome/2 < $cityupkeep)
{
continue;
}

The idea was if a player takes surrender, his closest cities should slowly start defending themselfs, but not filling up with tons of troops.
We can ofcourse change this, it depends on what the community thinks is the best way

[LPhillips]

It's very hard to tell with AI if they stormed one unit across the map into the cities and killed one of the occupants, but I don't believe that happened. They don't do that, right?

I'm looking for a specific behavior. ~4 troops is not enough to really discourage anyone with any ability to competently form a stack. Is there any way you can add an option that lets the city produce much more, either separate from the current "Active" setting, or just the ability to set advanced options for the "Active" setting? I'd be satisfied if we could just calibrate the unit limit for an Active city.

[SnotlinG]

yes the AI should not storm accross the map, so if that city has lost units it sounds like a bug. But it sounds a bit unlikely as I cant think of any code for disbanding Neutral units anywhere in the code... If you see it in any game you have, let me know and I can check what has happened with that unit.

Ill add the Active city advanced options to the list, no promisses yet though