[SPOILERS] SevenSpirits becomes self-aware

[Krill]

Enabling strategies which swap civics frequently. And this one is the really hard one to figure out. How it really plays out is that, instead of getting e.g. 100% benefits from slavery, a SPI player can get maybe 80% of the benefits of slavery and 70% of the benefits of caste system, by swapping between the two frequently and planning ahead to use the powers of each one at the right time. I will try to estimate the marginal value of this over just being able to run a single civic, for each column (ignoring the very late game). At the end, I will divide the sum of this by two, because you can do a lot of this stuff with golden ages, you just aren't in a golden age 100% of the time.

I think one of the important points is that SPI gives much greater flexibility in what you do with your GP, and the %ages you are giving for each civic is something that varies a lot with player skill i.e. Those are totally arbitrary numbers that you could surpass or fail to reach.

How would you even measure them, anyway?

[SevenSpirits]

I think one of the important points is that SPI gives much greater flexibility in what you do with your GP, and the %ages you are giving for each civic is something that varies a lot with player skill i.e. Those are totally arbitrary numbers that you could surpass or fail to reach.

How would you even measure them, anyway?

There are really only two things to do, 1) measure the aggregate benefit of SPI by repeated play and comparing growth curves, and then subjectively attributing parts of that growth to the different bonuses of SPI, and 2) make gross estimates about things.

Do you have a sense of how much you value SPI compared to top traits?

[Krill]

I don't think I can really answer that question for three reasons. I'm a spoiled lurker, you don't need the help...and I don't really know how I would rank it in a vanilla BtS game.

[SevenSpirits]

Oh give me a break, you don't want to tell me how much you value spiritual because I'm playing in a game? I think you just don't know what to think.

How good do you think it is in RBMod?

[Krill]

I don't want to say it in a thread where the others can't read it

In RB mod though, I think it is the trait I would most want to play with, but I would rank it along side FIN, EXP, ORG and PRO in terms of viability there. It just needs a slightly different play style, but then again, all traits need that.

[scooter]

I believe SPI is king in RB Mod because of how weird the civic rebalancing is.

[SevenSpirits]

[SIZE="5"]Analysis of Industrious[/SIZE]

This will be hard because of the wonder thing. You not only save hammers but also are more likely to win wonder races, and you can get efficient failgold. I guess I'll just say you build a little bit more wonders than a normal position. But first, forges:

40h * 10 forges ... t65 = 42h = 70b.

Now world wonders. Say you build 5 of them in the first 100 turns, centered around t60, at about 50h saved each. That is 31h = 52b.

And national wonders. Suppose you have one of stone and marble, and you build moai, epics and oxford. That's about like building four 167h things on t70 saving a total of about 140h. That's 12h or 21b.

Total: 153b.

[Krill]

Before you do the next trait...can you evaluate the Mids (because evaluating with regatrds to beakers seems a bit...circular) and Oracle to MC (because of the forges thing)?

[kalin]

One more thing about SPI that I didn't see: popping borders with artists. Did you evaluate that?
Kalin

[SevenSpirits]

Before you do the next trait...can you evaluate the Mids (because evaluating with regatrds to beakers seems a bit...circular) and Oracle to MC (because of the forges thing)?

No.

The best evaluations we have for those strategies are that they seem to be worth going for sometimes, and we know the turns (mids with stone = about t50, oracle I don't remember, maybe t38 or so?). We know that no one beelines directly to the enabling techs, and that it's not worth building them before your first settler, which shows that there are additional sacrifices to get them earlier which could be made but aren't, and which therefore demonstrates that the build times we are seeing are close to fair (i.e. the net benefit derived from a t50 mids run is not that high).

What I can evaluate is much more IND benefits from those strategies compared to other players. If IND goes for mids with stone, they are saving 67h on t50, which is maybe 20h more than I had assumed IND would be saving on average in that timeframe. So this earns them an additional 6b worth of value to start.

If IND goes for the oracle-metal casting thing, they are on-track with regard to number of hammers saved on wonders. But they get access to forges earlier, let's say they build the first 4 forges 20t sooner. I would place the average value of those forges at 70h (in other words it wouldn't be worth it for a non-IND player who oracled metal casting to build all of them; such a player would only build 1-2 forges earlier). So by building them early, IND is getting 30h * 4 timeshifted forward from t70 to t50, which is worth 21.2h - 10.6h, so 11h = 18b

I intended to average these values into the value I gave for IND (by shifting forge build times forward a little bit due to the possibility of oracled MC, and by setting the wonder hammers estimate a little high due to options like pyramids and GLH). So the fact that these strategies provide additional value to IND does not increase the estimate I gave in the previous post, or at least not much.