Stave churches rebuild themselves after conquest?

[Stagnetti]

So I'm playing Norway and I'm taking over Georgia. Tamar has built temples in most of her cities, but I'm making sure to triple pillage every Holy Site before conquering for the nice pillage yields.

Every time I take a city, the Holy Site and Shrine are pillaged, but the Temple is replaced with my unique building, the Stave Church, and is no longer pillaged. My expectation is that it would still replace the Temple with my building but it should still be pillaged.

Some cities also had a worship building, the Cathedral. So for those ones, I had pillaged the Holy Site 4 times before conquering, and when I looked at the city screen, the Holy Site, Shrine and Cathedral were pillaged and needed repair, but the Temple had been replaced with an undamaged Stave Church.

It seems weird but I guess it's just a consequence of how the buildings are replaced, and maybe an oversight since it doesn't check if the Temple is pillaged. I didn't take a screenshot but I came to this conclusion after thinking about it for a bit.

[plaguepenguin]

Plenty of city-states and quite a few civs have unique tile improvements. Quite a few civs have unique districts, and religions can be constructed with a worship building unique to that religion within that game. The game system handles each of these uniques a bit differently, but there are lots of examples of each type of unique, and I have never seen a glitch or coding oversight in any of those situations.

There are also some, but fewer, unique buildings, so fewer opportunities to notice if any of those are miscoded, as the stave church seems to be in your game system. That is the question here, is this just a miscoding in the program we're all running, a failure to code so as to reach the presumably intended effect of replacing pillaged temple with pillaged stave church, or is this just your system having just its code somehow glitched? I can't say I've ever seen this happen with any other unique building in a conquered city I have observed, but I am also not sure that I have ever as Norway conquered a city with a holy site that I had taken care to pillage thoroughly. Stop being so thorough!

Why would the game fail to get the stave church right, while it has, to my observation, gotten other unique buildings right? The only difference from other unique buildings I can see is that the stave church affects the holy site's adjacency bonus, while other unique buildings don't (as far as I can recall, and a quick review of the wiki confirms). I imagine they code these things as categories -- all unique buildings -- rather than each one as a separate case, so you would think there has to be something different about the stave church compared to other unique buildings that made this error happen. Maybe the devs faced this problem only with the stave church, that they had to split off adjacency effects that only the stave church confers, from other effects of the temple that get taken away if it is in a pillaged state. They would have had to create a special case coding for the stave church and decided that was too much trouble, or perhaps putting that feature in would have messed up some other coding.

You're playing as Norway right now, so that's handy for getting some observation done. Have you had stave churches of cities you own pillaged by enemy action or natural disasters? If the stave church is also unpillageable under those circumstances, that tends to confirm my theorycraft.

Addendum: I noticed in the wiki that playing in Heroes and Legends also gives the stave church, as well as ordinary temples, a 15% discount to recalling heroes. The modes are notorious for coding oversights. If you are playing with this mode, this becomes the likeliest explanation. If not, another brilliant theory down the drain.

[Stagnetti]

Oh yeah, I happen to be playing with Heroes & Legends, so that could be the thing that is making the difference. And no, none of my buildings have been pillaged, since none of my cities have been under threat, and it's just one of those games where the rivers just decide not to flood. There's a superstituous theory that rivers flood more when you are building or close to finishing a dam, but I've faith bought mine with Moksha, so who knows...
Thanks for the detailed response.

[jmerry82]

Unique buildings do this in general; if you conquer a city with a pillaged instance of the normal building, you get an unpillaged instance of your unique building. It's about how the game handles transforming between the two versions of the building.

[plaguepenguin]

Ah, so it is a general coding issue. Hadn't noticed. I clearly need to pillage more thoroughly.

[Stagnetti]

Publicado originalmente por plaguepenguin:

Ah, so it is a general coding issue. Hadn't noticed. I clearly need to pillage more thoroughly.

It's just so good to do in general if you're conquering, the amount of yields you get from pillaging more than make up for the time it takes to repair them. If it's a tile improvement, it's not even costing you a builder charge. Just always have the raid card plugged in.

[plaguepenguin]

Really thorough pillaging is in conflict with the benefits of taking a city quickly. That, and among districts, for me the holy sites would usually have the lowest priority in pillaging. But, sure, if you are stuck in a lengthy siege anyway, by all means take advantage, and getting every district pillaged lowers the defense strength anyway, of what must be a tough city, or why is the siege taking so long?

[Stagnetti]

Publicado originalmente por plaguepenguin:

Really thorough pillaging is in conflict with the benefits of taking a city quickly. That, and among districts, for me the holy sites would usually have the lowest priority in pillaging. But, sure, if you are stuck in a lengthy siege anyway, by all means take advantage, and getting every district pillaged lowers the defense strength anyway, of what must be a tough city, or why is the siege taking so long?

Usually it just works out, I take a turn or two to set up the bombard units, in the meantime I pillage with light cavalry, with +1 movement they can pillage twice a turn, or you can get the other thing where they can pillage for 1 movement. I don't always get every tile but I get a lot and I usually don't delay capturing the city.