Minimalist Balance Mod?

[Serdoa]

I thought the tradeoffs between cottages and other tile improvements obvious to most veteran players...

Definitely not one of those veteran players. Just saying, even that I am pretty sure you didn't mean me anyway.

2 major considerations here:

1. Happy cap. Any reasonable early city will have a bonus food resource and can grow easily.
2. If you want production, you farm + whip (or work mines as available). If you want research, you either use the farms for specs or you cottage.

The 70 turn thing is assuming you are cap limited...which is frequently the case in the early goings. If it isn't, you can definitely consider spamming cottages everywhere, but unless everyone else is also not cap limited you're going to win no matter what if you play well otherwise. While capped surplus food gets dumped into...well whips.

If I understand that right, you mean due to the bonus food resource which every city in the beginning will have anyway, there is a time when you have, for example, 5 pop, which is your happy cap. At that time you still make +4 food / turn which you then can invest in a spec. Meaning there is no need for two farms and you can compare cottage to spec?

If so, I think I still need to take into account the two food I am not gaining for growth -> potential whip. Therefore (at quick speed) the cottage simply produced 1 commerce for 6 turns, 2 for 13, 3 for 26, 4 after. Food-neutral, not costing, not gaining anything. The spec on the other hand does cost me 2 food per turn and gains me 3 commerce per turn. So, obviously after 70 turns I have produced 210 commerce with both ways, the spec providing some of that earlier then the cottage (which might help in its own ways of course). But the spec did cost me 140 food in this time as well. I need 21 to grow to size 6, so if I used that for whips, I would have gained 6 2/3 whips or 133.3 hammers. I cannot use whips for producing wealth but I could have pre-built a wonder, waiting for someone else (or another city) to finish it, or just use the whips to build some infra and the time inbetween to produce wealth. For this reason, I simply take those 133.3 as producing wealth = commerce.

Now, adding that up, the cottage produced in 70 turns 343.3 commerce, whereas the spec only produced 210. I therefore go back in time till they match up again. If I do that, then the cottage has produced on the 7th turn 21.3 commerce whereas the spec produced 21. Obviously that ignores GPP - it is hard to quantify them and probably getting that first scientist for an academy is worth it anyway, but if one has several cities with a Library (not totally unusual I would think) not all of them will produce a scientist. And for all those cases, I really can't see why I would ever run a spec.

(I understand that later in the game stuff changes around quite heavily with Emancipation, PP, Representation etc., but with that question I was thinking about early game, not what you do when you have already quite an empire, but rather what is the best course of action to reach that).

And sorry for derailing the thread, but I would really like to understand that. Maybe I should make a new thread for that? We could talk about why working a grass hill is better then whipping as well - because thats another of those things I accepted but never understood.

[darrelljs]

Unless you do what nospace did in PBEM17, specialists are not going to tech on par with cottages. Once you've improved your specials and ensured you have enough food to grow, they are generally all you should be building. Remember, this is MP, not Deity level SP . Two pertinent differences:

1. GPP are greatly devauled. First off, most games are NTT. Second, even if they are TT, you aren't going to N:1 rape a human very often.

2. Using HR is cost effective. At Prince difficulty the unit and pop upkeep costs are significantly lower, it makes perfect sense to grow onto grassland cottages.

Darrell

[TheMeInTeam]

What are good MP times for:

1. Civil Service
2. Education
3. Liberalism
4. Nationalism
5. Rifling
6. Demo or communism

and/or other key techs?

I ran a sloppy test game and got assembly line ~late 1500's AD on prince/quick w/o tech trades. I only cottaged the capitol and the capitol was plains cow + 1 flood plain + 5-6 riverside cottages. Everything else was farmed/mined/later shopped. Also only had 1 luxury in 4th city for most of the early game.

Had mace/cata available by 500 AD or so also though it slowed me down a bit. Obviously more medieval safety = less tech but that should be true for anybody.

[Krill]

Think earlier. Feud T75-T80. If you played with HA/cats instead, and beeline them, looking at T65-T70 on a standard size map, but that's with a high-ish food start, low food obviously slows that down. After then, tech timings depend on other peoples actions and your reactions to them. Maces are mostly junk and don't matter most of hte time.

[darrelljs]

There are a few threads on the ladder forum talking about Liberalism by 1 A.D. It typically lasts a bit longer so a better tech can be selected, but 500 A.D. is probably par. I got it t95 (650 A.D.) in pbem17. It kind of comes down to what techs you are willing to ignore, and how many GSs you are willing to burn.

How many cities did you have at 500 A.D., what was your break even tech rate, and how many total beakers had you researched? Post the save and I'll play it as I played pbem17 and we can compare at that point.

Darrell

[NobleHelium]

Cottage is food neutral. Workshops are -1 food. I'm not sure what the difficulty here is. It's like saying a workshop or a grassland hill mine "makes" 1 food/turn. That's just silly...what we care about is the yield of the tile after the cost of both growing onto it and working it (for example it's been mathematically proven that the best way to set up a cottage city with infinite worker turns is to farm it all, let it grow to cap, then switch improvements...that just doesn't happen in practice because worker turns are far more scarce than that).

Cottages are food neutral, and workshops are -1 food, but specialists are -2 food. You don't seem to be taking that into account in your comparisons.

[TheMeInTeam]

Cottages are food neutral, and workshops are -1 food, but specialists are -2 food. You don't seem to be taking that into account in your comparisons.

I did a little later, but it gets nearly impossible to compare the better long-term against the better short term + reaching multipliers faster, especially when you have other options like mines too.

How many cities did you have at 500 A.D., what was your break even tech rate, and how many total beakers had you researched? Post the save and I'll play it as I played pbem17 and we can compare at that point.

I don't have the 500 AD save but won't mind having another go. I'll try to mimic PBEM 17 settings. Not today but in the next few (probably tomorrow).

Think earlier. Feud T75-T80. If you played with HA/cats instead, and beeline them, looking at T65-T70 on a standard size map, but that's with a high-ish food start, low food obviously slows that down. After then, tech timings depend on other peoples actions and your reactions to them.

I don't doubt that scientists will reach HA/cat first, but HA cat keeps you alive...rarely wins the game outright.

I only mentioned maces because I was able to draft them and in emergencies that's better than nothing.

[Tasunke]

so instead of maces ... crossbows and cats?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I think we're considering maces trash because I'd rather be building universities/markets/grocers/banks around that time. Plus, they're not *that* much better than axes.

Regarding par times for techs, I think that's mostly map dependent. A lush high commerce/river map with safe borders like PBEM17 or PBEM19 is going to tech much faster than something like PBEM18 (or PB4, though LP was a special case). After all, on Noble/Prince difficulties, every new city you add to your empire can become productive very quickly, meaning the decision matrix to maximise tech pace leans towards horizontal instead of vertical growth. Not to mention it's much easier to add citizens to an empire going horizontal instead of vertical.

Regarding the role of non-FIN rivers, I think it has less to do with the commerce than the improvements. If it's a classic riverside commerce city, I'm going to work on getting both sides of the science/gold slider improved, using both libraries and markets. If it's a low commerce city I want to whip or run scientists, I'll just get the science multiplier side of the equation improved.