Leader / Civ selection

[SevenSpirits]

High difficulty means two things:

1) Population is less efficient an investment. The increased maintenance is mostly keyed off population, so the marginal benefit of each pop point is smaller. This means alternate investments are comparatively better: Pyramids, GLH, Currency, Courthouses, wonders in general, multiplier buildings in a few key large cities... but also cottages. Cottages' growth rate doesn't change while the rate of return on population growth (think farms) is lessened!

2) Techs are more expensive. This means that early game will be more tech-constrained than usual (which is a vote against early religion and thus to some extent in favor of creative and against spiritual). It also means that bulbing before the renaissance is less wasteful.

High difficulty / toroidal sure seems like a nerf to expansive, but I'm not convinced it makes financial any worse.

[darrelljs]

The increased maintenance is mostly keyed off population

I know the civics maintenance is population driven but I thought city maintenance was independent of population.

Darrell

[Lord Parkin]

I know the civics maintenance is population driven but I thought city maintenance was independent of population.

Darrell

Nope. Depends on population as well as number of cities.

[Azza]

I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to remember reading that FIN generates less additional gold than ORG saves through civic maintenance on higher difficulties, not taking into account the cheap buildings of ORG.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to remember reading that FIN generates less additional gold than ORG saves through civic maintenance on higher difficulties, not taking into account the cheap buildings of ORG.

I think you'd have to have very few FIN-enhanced tiles for that to be true.

[Lord Parkin]

Assuming an Industrious leader, we'd probably want to choose out of:

Huayna (FIN)
Roosevelt (ORG)
Ramesses (SPI)
Bismarck (EXP)
Louis (CRE)

Possibly in that order.

[sunrise089]

I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to remember reading that FIN generates less additional gold than ORG saves through civic maintenance on higher difficulties, not taking into account the cheap buildings of ORG.

I think you're confusing a general truth with a specific fact here.

It's true that in relative terms, the economic impact of Org is higher on higher difficulties. The trait helps you relative to the non-Org civs much more on Immortal than Noble, to the point that it probably rises a few spots in the hierarchy. That's because as others have said maintenance costs scale with difficulty but most trait bonuses do not.

That said, and like Seven says above, the best economic trait remains Fin. It's difficult to overstate the impact of +1 base commerce over dozens->hundreds of tiles. Other traits only got close to Fin in power when they were heavily buffed (Exp workers, Cre libraries).

As an aside I think it would be interesting to have some actual alternatives to Fin, perhaps in the form of +1 food to tiles with 5 food and +1 production to tiles with 4. I don't have the skills to balance it of course, but what makes Fin so strong is you're adding base output all game long.

[Shoot the Moon]

If we are going for Ind, would we perhaps consider choosing a civ first, especially depending on what is left? Huayana is the only one that stands out on that list as markedly better than the rest, and I suspect he'd be gone by then, so it might make sense to go civ first and just come back to an IND leader if we are going that route (not that I necessarily think it is the strongest route).

[Lord Parkin]

Maybe... all depends on what's there by the time it eventually gets to our pick. Might be good not to tip anyone off that we're going for IND by choosing civ first - but then that might just make the two sites after us more likely to choose an IND nation if they are rarer.

I just really wish WePlayCiv would get a move on and place their vote. They've been discussing it for days... and I'm pretty sure they originally suggested the "24 hours per decision" thing. How much time do you really need to decide to pick a Financial leader?

[SevenSpirits]

Well if it were me I'd most certainly wait for the difficulty and barb level to be decided!