[PB59 NO PLAYERS] - Jungle All The Way!

[Rusten]

Thanks.

[Charriu]

I mean that is part of the difficulty balancing traits. PB59 the top two tech players were both financial and I don't think that was an accident. Financial is probably better for larger maps, just like aggressive is better for smaller. All the traits are affected by map size, # of players, and difficulty.

Mjmds comment in the mod section triggered me to do another small analysis of this game. The question I wanted to answer is: Is Financial better for larger maps? And while we are at it. Where does most commerce come from on this map?

To answer this I went back and looked at the state of the game at the end (T250) and how much total accumulated commerce each player generated. You will also find the FIN numbers (this time without modifiers) and the numbers for foreign and domestic trade.




What we can see from this is that FIN is pretty consistent with a 16% share of the total commerce produced across the whole game. But more importantly we see how dominant trade and especially foreign trade was on this map. Only Miguelito and Amicalola managed to increase their domestic trade share, because of their later wars and big empire sizes.

But what you are missing is the comparison to all the other games played on "normal" maps. I've looked that up and found the following:

- FIN contributed 18% to 20% of the total commerce for all the relevant FIN players. Relevant meaning survived with a big enough empire.
- Both trade incomes combined contributed around 20% to 32% of the total commerce. Everybody in PB59 was way above those numbers.
- Foreign trade is either equal to domestic trade or worse. Only exception to the rule was Amicalola in PB60 as a PRO player with Great Lighthouse, if I remember correctly, who had almost no foreign trade an 48% domestic trade share.

Verdict

What I can conclude is that FIN isn't really that much better on large maps. The real difference is the dominance of foreign trade, which shifts the numbers for all the other pure commerce incomes.

[naufragar]

Very interesting analysis, Charriu.

- Foreign trade is either equal to domestic trade or worse. Only exception to the rule was Amicalola in PB60 as a PRO player with Great Lighthouse, if I remember correctly.

Really? That's very surprising to me, even for smaller games. Iiiiinteresting.

[Charriu]

I see two factors for that.

- People start running Mercantilism
- People bomb foreign trade routes thanks to wars.

All of the games we played before have fewer players. Most of the time there are only 4 relevant players alive at the end and those bomb or bombed their trade routes due to war.

EDIT: I see my sentence about Amicalola was not well written. I corrected it so it is not misleading anymore.

EDIT2: Don't take this analysis as ignore foreign trade on smaller maps. It's still better then domestic trade. But if you bomb foreign trade there is of course only domestic trade left.

[Tarkeel]

There's also the issue of not having enough foreign cities for all your routes later on.