EPIC 12 -- pindicator's report

[pindicator]

This was one of the most entertaining Vanilla games I've ever played. You can find the report here.

[Swiss Pauli]

Excellent report: a great read (and a quality title page). It livened up immensely the 'cookie cutter' nature of strategy favoured by the scenario. Well done!

[Sullla]

Now this was the kind of game I was going for when I designed the scenario. Not all the fighting, necessarily, but the adaptation to changed conditions instead of following the same predictable path that others have forged. I especially enjoyed hearing about how you ran alternate civics, moved the palace, and did a lot of forest chopping to make up for the lack of Slavery. This is such a rich game, we sometimes forget just how many ways there are to play it well.

Never thought I'd see someone take out Mansa Musa before Huayna either! Well, there's a first time for everything.

Line of the report:

The man was after blood and he would not stop until Asoka was dead.

(That initial graphic was fantastic too!)

Thanks for playing. I've read a lot of the reports, and this is one of my definite favorites so far.

[FeedBack]

Very nice report, indeed. Congratulations on the win!

I have only one question: where did you find Gandhi on this game???

[darrelljs]

Nice...the first war victory (at least that I've read so far) and a great report to do it justice .

As scientists get less and less effective towards the later part of games, I've been switching my Great Person cities towards running Merchants. The extra cash lets me run a higher slider rate and in my opinion lets me tech faster.

This really depends on the building multipliers. Putting Merchants in your Wall Street city can have a nice impact because they are independent of the slider and can allow you to concentrate food towards your biggest multiplier. I'll sometimes hire Scientist in my Oxford city instead of working Towns when my slider is in the muck. However, I don't believe putting them in other cities will be that beneficial, although I'm willing to be shown the error of my ways .

Darrell

[pindicator]

Thanks for playing. I've read a lot of the reports, and this is one of my definite favorites so far.

Thank you much! These reports are a great way for me to mix my two obsessions: writing & CIV I really enjoy writing them when I give myself the time to do them right.

The title image I had in mind as soon as the game was announced. The first line in my notes reads "Time to climb onto a modified bus and run THE GAUNTLET!" so I knew I wanted to find a movie poster of the Clint Eastwood film for the report. I actually got really lucky on copying over Temuin's figurehead; he lined up pretty well onto Clint's shoulders without any resizing required.

Concerning the choice to war, after I got all the contacts and saw that I was already ahead in technology I knew I already had the game won. I just had to choose which victory I wanted. I hadn't done Domination in a while, so I went with that.

I have only one question: where did you find Gandhi on this game???

D'oh! I kept mixing up Asoka & Gandhi the entire time throughout my notes and in writing the report. I thought I caught all the mistakes but I guess one or two made it to the final version.

This really depends on the building multipliers. Putting Merchants in your Wall Street city can have a nice impact because they are independent of the slider and can allow you to concentrate food towards your biggest multiplier. I'll sometimes hire Scientist in my Oxford city instead of working Towns when my slider is in the muck. However, I don't believe putting them in other cities will be that beneficial, although I'm willing to be shown the error of my ways .

Darrell

I mis-wrote that in the report. I meant to say that Great Scientists get less and less effective, not scientist specialists. Now, I'm not going to back that up with facts and diagrams because I don't really have any But I could have done a better job with my reasoning:

True, scientists or merchants giving the most bang for the buck on an individual basis really depends on what improvements are in that city. However, in my case my reasoning was on an empire-wide level. Dehli was my super-science city: it housed Oxford, tons of cottages, beaurocracy & my only academy. Commerce in Dehli was worth a lot more in beakers than commerce in other cities. (Especially in this scenerio, where we couldn't whip improvements and my other high-food cities didn't have nearly the same infrastructure as Dehli.) So the choice of merchant specialists over science specialists was more of an effort to leverage the advantage of Dehli's beakers by enabling me to run a higher science rate. However, the merchants themselves were really secondary to the Great Merchants that they produced. The 2 or 3 GMs I did get (my notes aren't perfect here) let me run 90% or 100% science for most of the game after 1500AD. It wasn't until I got a couple unlucky Great Engineers that I had to decrease the science rate.

Now, was this the optimal use of specialists? Dunno, I'll let somebody else determine the number crunching

[Kronoz]

Well played game, and the best frontpage of any report ever!

[T-hawk]

True, scientists or merchants giving the most bang for the buck on an individual basis really depends on what improvements are in that city. . . . So the choice of merchant specialists over science specialists was more of an effort to leverage the advantage of Dehli's beakers by enabling me to run a higher science rate.

Now, was this the optimal use of specialists? Dunno, I'll let somebody else determine the number crunching

Numbah krunchah reportin' for duty, sir! Short answer: that probably was the optimal way to manage it.

For every empire, there exists a conversion factor between gold and research beakers. This conversion factor is essentially the ratio of the average empire-wide multiplier for each type of production. (Strictly speaking, we don't directly convert between gold and beakers. We convert future commerce or specialist production to either gold or beakers.) As a simple example, suppose you have one city with +0% gold and +100% science, producing 60 commerce per turn. You can convert that 60 commerce to 60/0 gold/beakers, or 59/2, or 40/40, or 1/118, or 0/120. For this empire, 1 gold = 2 beakers.

This ratio applies across your entire civ's production. Now suppose you have a second city that's producing nothing except for one specialist with no multipliers. If you make that specialist a scientist, that's +3 research. But if you hire a merchant, that's +3 gold, which allows you the opportunity to bump the science slider for +6 science instead in your capital. This principle is continuous - any gold that you generate anywhere in this empire is as good as generating 2 beakers.

This conversion factor can be viewed almost-directly in the game by going to the F2 advisor screen and observing the relative changes in beaker and cash production as you move the slider.

Note that this conversion factor applies after considering any multipliers that operate on the specialist output. Suppose our hypothetical second city also had +100% beakers and +0% gold. Then our merchant would generate (indirectly) the same +6 science in the capital, or we could hire a scientist to directly produce +6 science.

So the pithy observation that "it depends on the multipliers" is correct. What's really key is the relative multipliers - compare those of the particular city in question against the aggregate multipliers of your entire civ. If a single city has a better gold multiplier than the national average, it should run merchants. If it has a better science multiplier, it should run scientists. Your Delhi drastically raised your national average science multiplier, so likely every other city had its local science multiplier far behind the national average, but had a local gold multiplier close to or ahead of the national average. So running merchants was correct.

For most civilizations in practice, the conversion factor is fairly close to 1:1, so any economy you produce is equally valuable, and that's good enough for the casual player or the AI. Even in this hypothetical scenario, you're likely to regress that ratio closer to 1:1 going forward, as your capital fills in the missing cash multiplier buildings.

However, that 1:1 generality is usually at least slightly and sometimes considerably skewed towards beakers. There are several reasons for this. First, the Academy multiplies beakers but there is no comparable building for cash multiplication. Second, research buildings usually come before cash buildings, because an efficient empire is usually running a high science slider percentage, and because the library and university also supply culture. Third is that Oxford University comes earlier than Wall Street, so there is a period of time where your best commerce city has an extra +100% for beakers but not for cash. (Also, Wall Street usually goes in your shrine city which may not be your highest commerce city. Oxford invariably goes in your highest commerce city. So Oxford contributes more to the aggregate civ-wide multiplier than Wall Street, because it operates on more base commerce.)

So if you have an Academy (or several), and Oxford in a city producing a substantial share of your aggregate commerce, then the equivalency ratio skews drastically in favor of beakers, so gold produced elsewhere becomes more dear. Another way to look at it is that you have two different currencies; one has undergone inflation and one has not, so the one that hasn't (gold) is more scarce. So when you can equivalently produce either of them (by choosing which specialist to hire), producing gold is more valuable.

This skew towards beakers is a subtle reason that the monk economy works so well. Gold generated by a shrine typically enables beaker production in excess of the face value of the gold itself.

Finally, the equivalency of gold and beakers only applies as long as you are able to fluidly convert one to the other via the slider. The chief case where this breaks down is in an OCC, where you can't run deficit research (you don't have any expenses), so gold cannot be applied towards research, so your specialists should always be scientists. This is intuitively obvious.

Incidentally, I work for a bank in RL, and my job often involves stuff like modeling interactions between different currencies. So this all comes naturally to me.

[Sullla]

T-Hawk - back when I was working on Warlords before the expansion came out, I wrote an extended piece similar to what you typed here (although not as detailed) explaining why the gold from the Spiral Minaret was often highly useful to a civilization, while the similar beakers from Sankore University were usually not worth bothering with. Alex kept insisting that 1 beaker = 1 gold, and therefore my argument didn't make any sense (despite the fact that everyone actually PLAYING the darn game was saying the same thing).

Thanks for confirming to me that I was not crazy, and that gold pulled out of the ether (via specialists/shrines/etc.) usually have a disproportionate influence.

[mostly_harmless]

@ T-Hawk: Thanks for some very good explained insight.