You may be right about Representation, at least on Huge maps. It does pay for itself at minimum, though, so if that means an extra endgame Great Person it may be worth it.
Ignoring Collective Rule means totally rethinking the early game. It looks like you emphasize Collective Rule pretty heavily, but the way I play, I often don't actually make big use of it. I'm in the midst of a 10-city Spain game (which should finish the tech tree by t175 -- don't know if I'll be able to get the Order endgame right for sub-180 though) that provides a nice illustrative example. In this game I cash-bought five Settlers, got one free with Collective Rule, and built three in the capital. This means Collective Rule only contributed about 500 gold and 100 hammers, which is good, but not gamebreaking when it comes after t30.
I know that cash-buying Settlers feels terribly inefficient when you're using Collective Rule, but I don't think that matters much next to raw city-spamming speed. Earlier cities pay back the inefficiency pretty fast. Obviously a Spain game isn't a universally applicable example, but there are other things you can do -- e.g., my Spain game didn't build any Settlers in expos. An early Citizenship Worker could give you some extra chops for these if you have any forest-heavy areas to plant expos.
I think the typical "no Collective Rule" opening would take Liberty, Republic, then Citizenship/Piety as the next two policies. Those are all valuable early-game efficiency policies (provided you have a Temple-heavy gameplan), so it's not like you aren't getting anything from taking a different policy over Collective Rule.
Where do you get the money to cash-buy settlers if you're not Spain? I get something like 500 total from city-states, 100-200 from ruins, 100-200 from an early friendship resource sale. Takes forever for city income to ramp up to any meaningful total, usually not until road connections. My earlier Tradition games would buy maybe four and still have to build the rest. Iron sales help a lot if you can find multiple 6-sources; maybe you have to go Bronze Working second to find the iron before picking the third policy.
BTW Manpanzee, I recognize your name from Civfanatics, thanks for coming over here
I think some of the difference may come from playing smaller map templates. One thing that took me a while to figure out is that "Standard" map size only sets the number of civs/city-states/etc, not the physical size of the map. A "Standard" Lakes is actually much smaller than a "Standard" Highlands, for example.
Most of the people doing fast science victory over at Civfanatics stick to the most cramped map templates (Lakes and Great Plains). This means you meet both CS and AI faster. I am generally very aggressive about taking gold from all AIs as fast as possible. Caravan plunders are 100g, tile pillaging is marginal but adds up if you do it a lot, free Workers are good... then you take gold from them in peace deals. You can sell both resources and embassies for lump-sum gold in peace deals, and can even use this to take loans without DoF. Eventually they will start paying you for peace (they seem more willing to do this if they have more than one city, for some reason). I DOW AIs for peace deal gold even if my units aren't taking anything from them.
You can do this on larger maps, too, but it helps to meet AIs very fast. On the other hand, big maps mean more ruins, more AIs, and more CS gold, even if it takes longer to meet all of them. Similarly, higher difficulties mean more AI gold, but have other drawbacks. It's really hard to know which settings are optimal. I suspect Huge size with one of the cramped templates is probably very strong.
Yeah, all those factors are connected. Smaller maps favor fewer cities and therefore Tradition and therefore all sorts of different approaches to the policy tracks.
I just don't feel interested in abusing the AI. Like, if you're going to do that, don't make it into the farce of a science victory, just go conquer them and be done with it. Also that would make me have to be even more picky and rerolly about what starts to play out, that's another factor where I'd have to get it right or restart.
And I spent some time trying out templates a while ago and couldn't find anything I liked nearly as much as Inland Sea. It just does everything so well. Particularly rivers - Inland Sea has huge amounts of river coverage, nothing spawns big swaths of flood plains like that does.
(December 7th, 2016, 09:18)T-hawk Wrote: I'm playing on huge maps with less of a per-city penalty, and I did the math (can't find it right now though) that Representation only barely gets ahead of itself and in the very end-game.
I found my math on this. On a huge map with 10 cities, the costs are 145% of normal without Representation or 130% with. 17 non-freebie policies is my normal total throughout a game. These 17 policies cost a total of 24760 culture. With Representation, 18 policies cost a total of 26205 culture. So no, Representation doesn't make up its own cost, it doesn't result in an additional policy. It can on smaller maps with a bigger penalty, but not on huge.
Finally cracked my previous record. I've played a few other games since the last time I bumped this thread, check the menu on the site for all of them.
Oh, I meant to mention this too next time I posted here but forgot yesterday. There's another discussion of social policies and my thought process to planning them out.
