A45: RefSteel's Lunacy

[RefSteel]

Thanks for the comments, T-Hawk! I'll respond when I get a chance later; for now, here's (finally) the rest of my report!


So, the second of those great artists I mentioned was just about to arrive at Clementine to (mistakenly) settle down - it was the year 1270 (turn 187) - when Caesar called me up again.



You know, because the previous war had gone so well for him. (It had. He'd traded a handful of mounted and recon units for a tech, whereas I'd traded a tech and a couple of archers and worker turns for some xp. Way better deal for him, even though it opened the Heroic Epic for me. No surprise that he'd want to do it again!) He had a pointless knight (yes, one) near Chicken - my sentry had seen him coming, and the place was well prepared. The other "enemy has been sighted near" warning is for a Roman Caravel floating around in the south. I didn't remember if Caravels could or couldn't pillage seafood, but this one was a million miles away from any of my nets, and I had the tech for Frigates. Caesar had neither Astro nor Chemistry. (I'm not sure now what the "successfully defended" message in the background represented. It may have just been a barb going after my Explorer on the middle islands.) I also had lots of cash on hand, and would upgrade a couple of Caravels in the inner sea to Frigates, just in case. I had received the "Harbormaster" quest, and though I had no idea what it was supposed to do, I went with it - I figured seven Cothons and three Caravels would be worth building anyway. By this time, I'd completed it successfully and taken the bonus to the Cothons (so each generates 1 gold per turn) because much as I love Navigation 1 on ships, the language on the screen made it seem like it applied to CURRENT ships, rather than all ships built in perpetuity, and (more importantly) I didn't expect naval combat (C1 for all ships ever built was an option too) or even ship movement to play an important role for the rest of the game.

Even so, I was ready to start playing war games ... but Civ wouldn't let me yet. I still had to deal with another diplo screen.



Um. Great timing, Ramesses. Nothing like getting into two wars on the same turn. But sure, I'll join your war with France. They'll have to get through their Eternal Enemy's lands to reach me anyway.

I started that war off on the right foot by noticing a French settling party on the same central island as one of my knights, right by Malinese territory. I had just under 70% odds once I promoted to Combat 2, but figured it was worth the gamble, and it paid off. Also, here's Caesar getting welcomed to Carthaginian territory:



There's plenty more force in Chicken in case this fails (which it didn't). Good to get some use out of a jumbo, since the Statue of Zeus was the one wonder I started (in Pastoral, for the artist points) but lost to an AI. (I don't remember exactly when it happened - just that it did.) Some things to note:
- No, my HE city isn't really building a Grocer in wartime. That Grocer just kept coming up on top of the build queue every time I completed a unit (nearly every turn) and I never bothered to delete it. I think my next build here was actually a Frigate. My Mansa sentry reported that no Roman stacks were incoming by land, and of course Mansa's borders were closed to Louis.
- Chicken has controlled its entire BFC (and then some) for some time now - including tiles in Djenne's first ring.
- That jungle tile on the island will never be in anyone's cultural territory. Sure, six of the eight tiles surrounding it are mine, including the rest of its island, but it's three tiles from the mainland on all sides, so no dice. This was funnier when Mansa controlled the coast tile 1NE of the island jungle, as I then had a little finger of culture sticking out onto the forest, making Civ's lunatic cultural reasoning all the more apparent: I'm able to control that tile because there's mainland 2 tiles away ... never mind that the mainland in question is miles from my land, in 100% Mansa territory! (I would later control eight of the nine tiles around that jungle, but since the one not controlled was directly west, not on a diagonal, it remained strictly independant in perpetuity.)
- My 0% tech rate is looking a lot better. Thank you, representation. I'd recently started another golden age, and would (finally!) revolt to USuf as soon as the tech came in. As I've mentioned too many times already, I did everything way out of order in the late game.
- My cash reserves are at 2995, and I'm barely losing more than 77 gold per turn. (Among other things, I was trading lots of happy resources away for gold per turn. I didn't need any happy.) It's a shame I don't remember if I dropped research below 100% once or twice in the early-mid game, because I'm never going to need to lower the culture slider. I'd love to be able to claim my gold rate was zero percent for the entire game!!! Just to make sure though, when I gave Alex Military Tradition and my map to join my war against Rome again, I asked him to throw in his 80 gold treasury.

An Apo Palace vote came up, and I went for "stop the war against Carthage," because why not? Juluis and Louis both defied the resolution because they're idiots. I hope they have fun with the -5 happy in their Hindu cities, because they're not going to make an inch of headway in their wars with me. Wait, maybe it's not fair to call them idiots. After all, maybe they realize that I'm running away toward a cultural victory and they.......




.....

See, so, Louis is at war with Ram-Ram (that's how I got into that war in the first place) - who is half a world away, with the intervening territory controlled by Egypt's friends. (Mali isn't at war with him anymore, but he's still Mansa's worst enemy, and will never get open borders.) And of course Rome's war with their powerful Greek neighbors is my doing. But Louis and Caesar are also at war with each other!!! They have been for ages. I believe that the only cities any AI conquered in the game were taken from one of these two - by each other, or by Alex (from Caesar) while the Roman armies were (maybe) slogging toward me, never to arrive. My enemies' behavior was ludicrous, frankly.

On turn 195, I bought rifling from Justinian for Corporation and a little under 600 gold. (I had far more cash than I needed to finish the game at 100% culture by then.) I believe this was the first (and only) time in the game that I made a tech trade with cash going out instead of coming in. So, you can ignore the builds in the following screenshot (or at least the one in Chicken; I'm not sure what an Observatory was doing in the queue in the first place). I was ready for Cavalry.



As you can see, my workers were getting bored. Some of the forts they built (like the one you can see in the desert) were pretty much pointless and silly. Some (like the one under construction in the jungle) would just speed transit by one move in certain circumstances. Most of those in this picture though - including the one inside a BFC, hooking one of the three sugars in spite of the lower resulting tile yield for Tartar - were necessary. My HE city was a natural for shipbuilding, but it was on the outer sea, and the action was pretty much all on the interior of the ring. As you can see by the Galleon in the one-tile lake, this series of forts and lakes, with the city of Tartar, meant that for me, they were both the same sea. (The Galleon is on its way to take a bored worker to the island just off Djenne, to chop a forest into 20 base hammers for Chicken.) The Farm 2/4 tile was special: I would bring it to within a worker turn each of a farm and a fort, and then if I really needed a ship to move quickly (or my workers were REALLY bored) two workers could (first) convert it to a fort, (then) wait for a ship to pass through (saving two points of movement) and (finally) convert it back to a good-yield tile, all on the same turn!I never actually used this trick, but I did something a little like it near Chopping Block just to speed the transport of Christian Missionaries. (It took forever to get a successful religion spread there, but it didn't matter in the end; I did build three Mandirs, three Synogogues, three Mosques, and three Pagodas, but at some point, I realized that the capital was going to be the first to hit legendary even WITHOUT a Cathedral or Confusion Academy!)

[RefSteel]

Have we really hit turn 200? Okay, so, this has to be a good sign, especially if you're going for culture:



The top 3 cities in the game are my three will-be-legendaries ... followed by my Artist Farm city. I'd have liked to put the Parthenon in Pastoral, for the artist points, but I wasn't willing to risk it, since others had the techs to build the thing. That one and Sistine (in Chicken) had gone in the cities that could build them second-fastest and fastest (respectively). Even Carthage couldn't keep up with Clementine and Chicken for those, since it didn't have any forests left. (They'd been saving theirs for just that reason.) I don't think I'd mentioned yet in this report that I built the Spiral Minaret in Nevermore along with Versailles. I was doing everything I could at one point in the game to keep my civ's costs down, the longer to stay at 100%. You'd think one of the two cities closest to my capital would be the wrong place for Versailles, but this was actually part of a larger plan that would soon come to fruition. Also, notice U Sankore in Clementine. It was another one I wanted (it helped speed up Democracy too, thankfully) so I wasn't willing to wait for Nevermore, which turned out to be a good thing when Clementine was unexpectedly elected Cultural City #3.

We also got to hold another AP vote to stop the war against me. Julius defied again - poor thing. That can't mean ten unhappy faces in his Hindu cities, can it?! If not, why wouldn't Louis defy again instead of just voting no? ... But it would be insane. Also (in no small part because we're at war and he can't buy it from me) he doesn't have Democracy, and I'm now in Emancipation to speed up some freshly-planted cottages around Clementine (now that I know it's going for culture). I'm not the only one, either. So, if 100% of the citizens in one of your cities are unhappy, does it just sit there eating maintenance, or does it actually go into revolt? (Caste System would have been better than Emancipation, of course; I might have managed to squeeze one or even two more Great Artists out of Pastoral and shaved as much as three turns off my victory date. As I've already mentioned again and again, happiness wasn't an issue for me.)

Also, Pliny (presumably the Younger, as we'd already seen presumably-the-Elder's greatest work, centuries before) told the world that mine was the wealthiest civilization on earth. Better still, I was back to using my Great People properly.



Here we see Raphael about to compose a Great Work in the city of Clementine, in the year 1410 (turn 201). We're researching Steel here partly because I'd heard that the AI knows how many beakers you've put into a tech and will discount trades for it accordingly. I don't know if it was discounted or not, but I presume so since I got it from Friendly Ramesses later the same turn, with a world map and 60 gold, for Rifling. (Just before, I had run up against WFYABTA for the first time in the game: Alex wouldn't trade techs to me. I think the hypocrisy is precious: You really only ever have to worry about the AI "fearing you are becoming too advanced" when you're so backward that you have to trade for everything. When I was far and away the most advanced civ in the game, trading techs away for money rather than other technologies simply because almost no one had any tech that I didn't have already, those rare civs who had any tech at all that I lacked were happy to trade with me. What they say is exactly the opposite of what they mean.)

I had also started cash-rushing things - mainly cultural infrastructure at Clementine. (Finally.) The Cathedral was the last culture multiplier it finished, and I think I cash-rushed it on turn 203 (might have been a little later though). I also rushed a couple more monasteries and temples there, but stopped and just built culture when the only ones left were Christian and Confusion Temples and an Islamic Monastery. I must have been playing really late at night, because I thought I'd actually wind up with more culture that way (I had more money than I knew what to do with) ... which would only have been true if I didn't rush them or I waited until the last few turns of the game. Worse still, when my final golden age came along, I switched to Free Religion, failing to realize how Sistine Chapel worked. Clementine claimed to be making more culture after the switch than before, and I didn't check (until just now, after reading one of T-Hawk's comments above) to see what the various cultural buildings were doing, or what amount of culture it claimed on the following turn. The correct move would have been a switch to Pacifism to help Pastoral's GA birthrate. Live and learn!



(Actually, strictly speaking, I don't think the culture screen is lying as such; I *think* that much culture was really added the following turn. But a look at the buildings themselves would have showed what was really happening, and starting the *next* turn, my culture rate in that city had dropped by almost 100. I wasn't paying enough attention, obviously, since I could have revolted back before the end of the Golden Age. As it was, this cost me at least one turn - maybe two - to victory.)

Meanwhile, I was fighting my "two-front war" (a zero-front war from a defensive perspective for me). I nearly took the ill-defended French island city of Grenoble with Cavalry riding directly in from a Galleon, but fell short by one attacker ... and the following turn, the French showed mercy for the wounded of the battle! I didn't actually even want the city - I just wanted Louis to give me a white peace - and the event was even better! The survivors of my invasion force moved on to Roman targets, and troops from my HE city started flooding up through Mali and France to join with the one-time enemies who had shown their comrades mercy ... in those noble Frenchmen's still-ongoing war against Caesar!

I'd gotten a Great General out of the war, and he built a Military Academy in Chicken - after giving Alex Constitution and my map for some gold and Military Tradition. (Our long-standing mutual military struggle had brought him up to Friendly). Probably should have just settled him for the XP, as the place had insane production already.

[RefSteel]

While my Cavalry were en route, I experienced my one bad event of the game.



The city just visible to the right is Krakatoa. I told you my workers were getting bored! (There's yet another fort off the screen 2W of the ones the twisters wrecked). If my ships want to take a canal across the East-of-Carthage Peninsula, they have OPTIONS! There was no reason on earth for the lost fort to exist, but I rebuilt it anyway. There was a more important (single) fort on the desert tile next to Pastoral that sped sea travel between the western inner-sea region and Carthage itself by a full turn or more.

My cavalry finally showed up for the war against Caesar. I was hoping during the first war that I could get some troops up to a Roman city that had Buddhism, capture it and hold it long it enough for it to come out of revolt, whip a Missionary, and request peace as soon as he was built and on his way home. If needed, the city itself would be paid as the price for peace. If not, it would be gifted back to Rome once peaces was made anyway. I didn't have the forces or the logistical wherewithal to do it though, so I settled for six religions instead of seven. I did make a half-hearted attempt to take a buddhist city in this war, but I'd never have gotten a missionary home in time to make a difference anyway. Ironically...



...the one city I did capture had Hinduism. Notice the French forces that softened up the defenders so I could take the place with my vanguard. Also notice how much cash I had at the time to cover the next seven turns, and how much I was still making. All my cities except Chicken (units) and Nevermore and my capital (both culture) were building wealth at that point. Not that I actually needed cash for anything anymore....

Wait, what's that you say? You thought Carthage was supposed to go Legendary first no matter what I did? You thought Clementine was the city that most needed the culture? Why was I...

Let me explain. Here's a picture of my capital.



Remember how I had a larger plan in mind when I built Versailles in Nevermore? The FP went in Tartar, and the Palace - with its 2 innate culture and 8 commerce = culture - was cash-rushed in Clementine, my brand-new capital! Carthage didn't need it. When this screenshot was taken, it had just gone Legendary.

(Yes, I was still in Free Religion. I stayed in that civic, losing both cultural power and diplomatic brownie points, for the rest of the game.)

Of course Clementine won't really go legendary in eight turns. For one thing, the golden age ends in two. But for a more important thing....



We get another Great Artist out of Pastoral next turn. Can someone please explain to me why the best way to speed your civilization's cultural development in this game is to starve your cities half to death? Another way I could probably have shaved a few turns off my win would have been by running MORE Caste System artists ("just" ten in the city now) for MORE starvation and MORE great artist points. (Yeah, I'll leave that softball teed up for whoever wants to swing at it, I think.)

Two turns later (thanks to a brilliantly - and totally unnecessarily - planned logistical maneuver involving "useless" roads, a couple unnecessary forts, and a Nav 1 Galleon express-built for the purpose at Carthage's drydock) the Great Artist bombed Clementine, and I cleaned up some unfinished business.



I checked to see if he'd give me a Buddhist city, just to say I did, but no dice. Nevertheless, I now feel I've come out ahead in our little skirmishes.

Soon thereafter, I found Ram-Ram was down to Pleased (no more shared religion - sigh...) even before I turned down his demand that I cancel my deals with the Greeks. But that was on turn 220. Nevermore went legendary the next turn. And the turn after that....



Hey, look! It's my zone defense Medic Chariot! Remember? The one that killed that Roman scout at the start of the first war?

I mean...

Yes, yes, Krakatoa is at size 22. Chopping Block is doing okay too.

All right, all right, what I really meant to say was:

GG, Ram-Ram. It's been fun.
GG, Musin'. Sorry for practically forgetting you existed. Whatever it was you did instead of expanding, you might try not doing that in your next game.
GG, Big King Louis. I guess you're not all bad. (Just mostly.)
GG, Justice. You'd have been a really tough opponent if I didn't have two terrific wonders in my capital to start the game.
GG, Ax. It must have been fun beating Rome into the ground. I barely got in on that action.
GG, Salad-Brain. Try to pick the right enemies next time, mmmkay?

[RefSteel]

Beware: Wide image ahead.

Final Demographics:



This would look different if I wasn't going for culture.
Like, I wouldn't have the world's best approval rate.
And I wouldn't have three times the Rival Best "GNP."
Probably.

Top 5 cities:




Mine, mine, mine, mine, and mine.
Did I say that Krakatoa turned out pretty well?
'Cause, you know, it kinda did.

[RefSteel]

Okay, enough side-scrolling. Let's look at some of my top builds.




Check out all the Christian and Confusing Missionaries (and this doesn't even include the free one). If I *had* managed to get Buddhism from somewhere, I shudder to think about what the fail rates would have been.
The Hindu guy I sent to Mansa's capital was the only missionary I ever sent to a non-Carthaginian city.

How do those Worker numbers add up? I built 14, lost none, and captured a French Settler for my 15 total. I never tried a worker steal, so how'd I get two kills? Welllll ... I did kill this one Roman galley during our second war. I guess now we know what cargo it was holding....

Seven settlers built + one to start the game + the captured Marble + Forbidden Palace Barbarian city of Tartar = 9 cities for the cultural victory.

This report skipped over a lot of the last war, including the naval battles. I lost two frigates in battle with French frigates, and one to the Romans, who swarmed it with Caravels. I killed more Caravels than warriors and archers combined, including barbs. (Two of my Frigates were upgraded Caravels. The two of the latter I lost were also in the Roman war; I was using them as a screen and sentry web for my Frigates and Galleons).

The Music Artist went for a Divine Right part-bulb (I still say this was dumb; I could have teched it fast enough without that). The last two bombed Clementine. The others got settled in non-Carthage legends - the last two in Clementine.

The one warrior I lost was the one I didn't build: The freebie to start the game.

My first two Great Merchants settled in the capital. The next two went to Byzantium on Trade Missions with a sentry NC out front to watch for hostiles. I thought trade missions increased with the size of and distance to the target city, but either I was wrong or there's a hard cap, because they went to different cities, but both results were the same nice, round number. The last Great Merchant combined with the last Great Scientist for a golden age. (The first Great Scientist made an academy in the capital, and the second went for a one-man golden age.)

On to buildings. I'll skip the boring stuff and go right to the uniques:



- Carthage got my lone Academy, my only Observatory, the Hagia Sophia, the Great Library, and Oxford (yes, building six universities just to add ~9bpt was insane).
- Nevermore got the Spiral Minaret, the Mausoleum, Versailles, and my only Customs House (how I overlooked that at Clementine, I don't know).
- Clementine got the Parthenon, my Hermitage, U Sankore, and the Palace.
- Pastoral had the National Epic, the Taj Mahal, and the Globe.
- Krakatoa had Moai Statues and nothing else of note, and was the #5 city in the world by the end of the game.
- Chicken got the only Walls I ever built, the Sistine Chapel, the Heroic Epic, and the Military Academy. It had one of my two Drydocks too, and if Civ mechanics allowed it, I think it could have just about built a pair of 4xp Frigates per turn. (The other Drydock, like the other Stable, was in Carthage.)
- Tartar got the Forbidden Palace because it was well-located in the west.
- Romulas and Chopping Block both got off to very fast starts, and proved to be quite strong production centers, but neither had a building that wasn't built by both and by at least four other cities.



In spite of all the mistakes I described, I realize that overall I played a very successful game. I do think even more could have been done with my two wonders, but I did a great job of rolling with my mistakes when I made them and making the best of every situation I came across. The best example might be Pastoral: When I realized it wasn't going to work as a legendary city given the way I'd played to that point, I didn't try to force it, and I didn't tangle myself up trying to do things I ought to have done already, dozens of turns too late. I took another look at the situation as it had taken shape, and built a new plan around that - apparently with Augustus-like success. That said, whatever abilities I displayed in this game, I don't think "Leadership" was among them! Also, let's not forget that I had a great pair of wonders, and a healthy dose of luck.

[RefSteel]

Yeah. As with many games (with a choose-your-freebie or not), some players like the power plays and some prefer more interesting plays. We're best off when we have reports of both types.

Absolutely. I usually prefer fun/interesting/weird over powerful for my own games, but I'm thrilled to have the chance to read reports of exceptional power plays that show what's really possible in the game!

I'm pleased that you found use for Citizen specialists. They seem like they should be laughable filler, but sometimes you really do just need the one hammer more than anything else.

Yup. 1 hammer per turn per city is not to be laughed at, and by the time a given city was doing well enough that one hammer wasn't a big deal, it had the infrastructure to run real specialists instead.

I've never played MOO, but I do lurk and read most of the reports here.

I still think it's the best 4X game of all time - ancient AI and all.

Is that a Flying Spaghetti Monster reference?

Maybe that's the real reason I revolted to Free Religion: Hindu gods still don't have enough limbs! Has Carthage been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

A couple players did notice the Mediterranean. But it seems that Mali interrupted the pattern enough that most players didn't. Howcome 1/7 civs out of position is more noticeable than 6/7 correct civs?

I think because Mali was our immediate neighbor. If we started with a view of the entire map, I think more people would have seen it. The way I thought about it though, was, "Egypt to my east, Mali north of my western holdings, France borders Mali, and everybody else is somewhere off on the far side of this curious square-looking map." I should have noticed they were all Mediterranean civs, but in terms of positioning, the only ones I really noticed were (Egypt excepted) the ones that didn't fit.

But anyway, that was just a fun little tidbit, and I think Mali there did make for a better (more peaceful) event than if it had been Isabella.

For sure. Besides, making Izzy a land neighbor for Carthage? You'd have had to edit in a strait of Gibraltar, and that would definitely be too game-changing for just a fun little tidbit.

Sounds like Eiffel was indeed pretty good. I was hoping to see a full-blown culture treatment with that wonder.

Hey, glad to oblige!

This wasn't necessarily a mistake. It's rare to get any missionary spread of Islam from an AI, since whoever founds Islam is probably using an earlier religion. Founding Islam is not a bad idea in culture games. Your Great Artist, if settled, would have produced something like 5000 culture before the finish with multipliers. If you got some Islamic mosques built, it's possible that they produced more culture than that.

Good point. I did get Mosques (and all their equivalents) in my two trailing cultural cities, but I don't think the sixth of each was worth 5,000 culture by game's end in either city (or even in both combined).

The holy city goes to waste anywhere, since you're always in another widespread religion for Sistine, and you won't ever care to build the shrine. So this way, the holy city can be dedicated to monastery (I'm usually in Pacifism for culture) and missionary production for that religion.

Errr ... very true, I realize belatedly. Oops.

As for Hermitage, most often it should go in the #2 culture city. The leader needs no help and it would be overkill. The trailer will be brought up to par with the endgame Great Works, since those are equally powerful regardless of the city's multipliers. Hermitage neatly brings city #2 up to match city #1.

Excellent advice. With my late-planted cities though, and my late civics mistakes (stemming from waiting too long for Democracy) - to say nothing of an Artist Farm with three less food than I expected (thanks to misunderstanding chain irrigation rules) - I had in effect a city 1, a city 2, and a couple of city 4s. I needed the Hermitage to make one of them (Clementine) into a legitimate city 3, given that I would only manage two culture bombs in the game.

Thanks again for all the kind and helpful comments!

[T-hawk]

So, if 100% of the citizens in one of your cities are unhappy, does it just sit there eating maintenance, or does it actually go into revolt?

Just eats maintenance. Unhappiness never causes revolt. Only a conquest, cultural flip, or spy revolt causes revolt.

As I've already mentioned again and again, happiness wasn't an issue for me.)

True for every culture game. 100% culture slider is all the happy you ever need.

the AI knows how many beakers you've put into a tech and will discount trades for it accordingly.

Yes. Works both ways, if an AI has put some beakers into a tech, it will offer that much less to get it from you. This has been true since Civ 3.

(Actually, strictly speaking, I don't think the culture screen is lying as such; I *think* that much culture was really added the following turn. But a look at the buildings themselves would have showed what was really happening, and starting the *next* turn, my culture rate in that city had dropped by almost 100.

Did you actually adopt a state religion after you changed to Pacifism? You don't automatically go back into a state religion when you leave Free Religion, you must adopt one explicitly from the F7 screen. If you didn't, then you got no GPP boost from Pacifism, and Sistine didn't do anything so the screen is right.

You bounced the Palace to a new city, just for the commerce-to-culture? Interesting trick, I never thought of that one.

GG, Musin'. Sorry for practically forgetting you existed. Whatever it was you did instead of expanding, you might try not doing that in your next game.

Yeah. I really need to fire up a debug mode and see what Mansa did to himself. He sucked in almost every single game.

much as I love Navigation 1 on ships, the language on the screen made it seem like it applied to CURRENT ships, rather than all ships built in perpetuity

All the free-promotion quests work this way. Although you'd never know it in-game of course.

[RefSteel]

Yes. Works both ways, if an AI has put some beakers into a tech, it will offer that much less to get it from you. This has been true since Civ 3.

Heh. So you can tell I'm not only new to Civ4 but hadn't played the franchise since Civ2!

Did you actually adopt a state religion after you changed to Pacifism?

It's worse than that: I never did revolt to Pacifism! The "lying" screen is claiming I'm still getting 71 base culture from buildings after revolting to Free Religion, the same as I was getting under Hindu/OR. Which as far as I can tell was actually true that turn, but by the following turn, the game realized I was (foolishly) in NSR and the base culture points from the buildings dropped accordingly.

All the free-promotion quests work this way. Although you'd never know it in-game of course.

Errr ... which way? The bonus is applied to existing units only, or all future ones? Or is it different for different options (all future units for C1, current units only for Nav1) as the screen seems to imply? (Since I chose the gold bonus, I never found out in-game).

[T-hawk]

Heh. It's always all current and future units both.