Cities Randomly Burn at end of first age

[Nocturnal626]

So i have purchased most of the civ games before and never got truly into the game but i honestly was really liking this one. I felt like each era was a reset and you wanted to make sure you completed your war before the era was over. then i tried to do science/economy win con. I get to the end of the first Era and my city with a library and academy burned down. i thought ok they werent happy let me try again. This time the town was completely happy but then it just burned down. it was early enough before the era so i repaired them and they just kept burning down and then the town was unhappy because everything was on fire. like ok i understand disasters or war but wtf... i meet the wincon for the age and every time you just take it away? i dont understand and i was really liking this game too

[Kettlebloke]

🤔 I don't think libraries are ageless. You may have noticed that some building and all wonders have the term: 'ageless' attached to them.

Only ageless building carry over/give a bonus to the next age.

[TheNightglow]

2 possible things that could have happened here:

1) natural disasters
for some reason civ 7 has like 3 different natural disasters spawn on the map every single turn, however the game tells you when your city gets damaged by a disaster
2) crisis (I would recommend turning this off in the advanced settings for a new game)
a crisis always happens in the last quarter of the age, and among other things, in a crisis your citizens may randomly burn down your buildings

[JerBeware]

Sounds like it was likely a crisis at the end of the age.

You have to actively repair buildings each turn. In addition, there should have been policy cards selected and those should have been chosen in ways that you mitigated the negative penalties best.

That being said, the better option is not to repair (taking 1 turn and then letting the damage spread), but instead to buy the repair for the 30 gold or whatever it costs. This essentially is instant. This keeps the damage from spreading; however, you'll have to buy the repair on that building each turn moving forward to keep it from getting worse.

You'll then need to spend each turn to fix happiness until you either:
a) build things to improve happiness in that town
b) buy things to improve happiness in that town
c) figure out what cards you picked that are causing the unhappiness and work around it (e.g. slot resources, convert towns to cities, etc.)

In any of the above cases, the repairs should/could have been made prior to going to the next age.

As for ageless, you can make libraries or amphitheaters ageless by unlocking all of the slots and spending your culture/science points that way at the start of the next age. However, similar to the cities that downgrade to towns, this is only an option if you unlocked all 3 points.