Ok, so I enjoy playing against the AI as I don’t have to deal with either waiting or some of the BS online playing comes with, and I am currently trying to defeat 2 hardest-AI Dheli players and it is proving difficult. I was able to defeat all other civs in a similar match up using the French (currently learning the French).
So until now, I have never had the need to go too defensively, not even against the 2 Mongol players. Dheli is killing me so I am experimenting with stone walls. I have noticed that sometimes you cannot lay out a stone wall on an already-explored part even when there are no apparent obstacles.
At first I thought: Maybe there are obstacles I just don’t know they are. Maybe certain resources like gold or stone mines have a certain “margin” one must respect. But then I could not justify one disallowed wall placement in one of my attempts. I said to myself: Myself, don’t be fooled. There’s no obstacles there! So I took a scout, sent it to where I wanted to place the stone wall and voilá!, I could lay out the wall.
I have continued to see it in the sense that it is far simpler to have scouts in place beforehand. In other words, my stone wall placements have gone far more smooth by preemptively sending a couple scouts to the locations where I want the wall built.
I think this is due to enemy units pathing through the plan of the wall at the moment you create it. Sometimes I drop a line of walls and the plan just vanishes immediately upon placement. Often an enemy scout comes out of the fog shortly after, which I think must have been in the right place at the right time.
I still think it’s a bug in that the plan should be allowed to place and the villager can figure it out later whether there’s something in the way at a particular segment or not.
Ah, I’ve had this happen to me 3 times, let me explain how the placing and sight works for the walls.
If you want to place over undiscovered land that’s completely black, it won’t work.
If you discovered the land but it’s shrouded, you can place down but if there is an enemy going through, or you hit multiple obstacles, the placing is canceled.
It doesn’t have to be an attack, someone simply scouting there can prevent you from putting down the building foundation and if you did place it there while an enemy unit or building was on the way, the system will never allow you to build there because it thinks there will always be a unit. It causes a weird error probably, and you can click there in the same location multiple times, it will still deny you the placement because the system knows in that area there is an enemy, while it probably wasn’t after a while.
Thus…you need to re-discover that area to show the system 100% surely that there are no units there. After a bit of testing with it, I think the game takes the unit the same way as a building. So it knows on the map it is there but it takes it as if it’s a building when you mark it with a failed wall foundation. So perhaps this causes such event to happen.
Thanks, but it is statistically impossible to have happened on almost every wall I tried to lay out in a single game. Something else is going on for sure.
I don’t t think that is the case. As a developer myself, I cannot think of a reason why wall placement conditions need to be cached somehow as opposed to calculate them real-time as it was done for the very first wall attempt. For the cache to be useful, it would have to be exact wall placement every time, and I did try “variations” of the wall with the same result. As stated for the other commented, I am sure something else goes on here.