0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
I have a bad feeling about this one's usefulness. Any bets on how poorly it will fare in my evaluation? Place them now, I guess.
My guess:
100b
IMP has two benefits. The major one is settler production. Settlers cost 65h and IMP covers up to a third of that, but usually less. I think in the average case - even considering adjusting your play to favor IMP strategies like whipping and building extra mines - you are putting 10f into the settler, and producing an odd number of hammers on a couple turns, and losing 1h to overflow on average, and therefore getting just 17fh (1/3 of 51) out of IMP. IMP also prevents you from 3-whipping settlers, which is a serious penalty for high-food cities and IMO merits a 1fh deduction. So 16fh per settler, 13 settlers, centered on t45, we'll say. 43fh, or 86b.
IMP's other benefit: GG points. There is only one thing in the game that this can be compared to, and that is the great wall. I believe the great wall is building around t60 if you have stone, so for 50h. I believe a great wall variant that gave no culture or gpp, but also affected combat outside your borders, would be worth 75h, and that making it be a national instead of world wonder would probably delay its construction until e.g. t80, but that this approximately cancels out the fact that IMP gets the benefits of it from t0. So my estimate of value: 75h on t60. That is about 10h which comes to 15b, giving us a total value for IMP of 101b.
It's worth noting that this is less than the value of ORG even if you never build a single lighthouse, courthouse, or factory. However on Noble difficulty, this would barely no longer be true, as ORG's maintenance reduction would be worth about 10% less. But yeah, if you are building buildings and stuff, ORG >> IMP.
I believe it's one of the best along with expansive and creative (organized competes with them only on the most favorable maps, and I don't know what map you are putting me on).
In the game where I only get one trait, my rate of growth is naturally going to be lower than in a normal 2-trait game. This shifts the equations slightly in favor of later payoffs, and therefore away from the early traits of EXP and CRE.
Well I can try, it's obviously a lot harder though and I won't place much confidence in the result.
Spiritual has two main benefits.
1) Saving anarchy turns you were going to face anyway. Let's call this 4 turns. Being generous, that's enough for a non-SPI player to get religion, and two swaps for slavery, OR, monarchy, CS, if we are willing to delay a couple of them, and also do one late-game swap outside of a golden age. In reality a normal player will not do so many swaps and will instead defer the benefits of civics until swapping won't cost so much, but I believe this is pretty fair and it lets us skip measuring the value of getting OR up earlier, for example.
2) 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.
First column: while there can be some value from swapping to police state if you've built the pyramids for representation, I will count this as not having any value.
Second column: You can get some extra XP, and you can draft while still using bureaucracy much of the time. Also you can easily swap to nationhood in an emergency. Supposing you have access to nationalism near t90, I think it's worth an extra 15hpt starting then. (Supposing both are about equal value, even just the drafted units on the turn you swap back to bureau are worth an additional 100h or so per 10 turns when drafting muskets. (33 each, it's the difference between the 20h you get from whipping and 53 you get from drafting.) But also, being able to draft 18 units in 10t is close to your sustainable maximum anyway. So 15hpt from t90+, that's 15 * 30 / 2^4.5 = 20h = 35b.
Third column: Being able to use caste system freely is both incredibly strong and frustratingly hard to measure. I had to pause here and think about this a bit, and I think the best way to figure it is to consider caste system, like slavery, as a method for convering population to other things. Except in caste, we are converting 1 pop to 60gpp say, for example by starting a size 11 city that has a typical 100% gpp multiplier, working all scientists. (Other than the major food leakage, hammer/beaker output of the city should remain comparable.) Suppose (I am trying to estimate a typical benefit here) we use this to get our 201gpp GP and our 335gpp GP, i.e. total of 536gpp spent = 9 pop, for two great people. (I'm actually assuming that the GPs we get are earlier ones, but trying to account for the fact that doing all this increases future GP costs.) So we lose 180h and gain 2000b, let's say on t75, in one of your usual scientist bulb plans. That is worth 126b.
Fourth column: There's nothing particularly special here.
Fifth column: Here you can get (compared to OR all game) extra XP, extra gpp, or even extra beakers. I've actually already included the possibility of pacifism in the caste system thinking. But just being able to switch between OR and theocracy is quite nice; it's approximately worth +1 barracks in every city (we'll say +70% since it's not there all the time, and we'll say it starts at about t80). With average bonuses under OR, barracks is 24 base hammers, and we're talking like 10 barracks here, so 0.7 * 10 * 24h / 2^4 comes to 10.5h or 17b.
3) Other benefits: the discount on temples and cristo redentors could be worth a bit, about 5b let's say.
So: (35 + 126 + 17) / 2 + 84 (that's four turns) + 5 = 178b.
While this happens to be a value that sounds reasonable, I promise that's utter coincidence. I mean did you read the caste system section?
Heh. My question was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but thanks anyway! After all, SPI is probably the trait that requires the most active player to get much out of it (IND is probably the only comparable trait).
I'm really curious about creative so I'm going to try it, even though it's quite hard to evaluate.
Three main benefits:
1) You get free monuments everywhere, and they're better! Let's just call this 20h per city upon founding, as monuments do get overshadowed by missionaries later on, and the creative culture doesn't do everything religion does. BUT creative gives twice as much culture, and allows you to delay religion spread until later when it's much more comfortable. 20h * 13 cities centered on t44 (2t after our settlers are born according to the IMP analysis... but then 3t sooner since CRE pops borders in 3t while monuments pop them in 6)? That's 57h = 94b.
2) You can delay researching mysticism for like 20t. That is equivalent to a 50% discount on it, and assuming you normally want it t20 or so (or would want it, if it enabled these monuments that are free!), that is worth about 12b.
3) You get a discount on libraries. I think you probably want 10 libraries, centered around t60, and we are saving 30h on each, for a total of 30 * 10 / 2^3 = 37h = 62b.
4) I said there were 3 benefits, but it also gives a discount on coliseums and theaters. Supposing you build 1 of these in an average game, it's saving you about 5b.
Total: 173b. Not as high as I expected. So either my understanding of CRE is wrong and I have in this exercise underestimated the value of the 2 culture in every city (or something else), or my previous estimation of CRE's power was too high. I guess it's still pretty high, but I was treating it as comparable to EXP.
Interestingly for this game, CRE is 1t (21b) cheaper than EXP and FIN. According to the numbers I produced, 2t cheaper would pretty much tie it with EXP.
kjn Wrote:Heh. My question was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but thanks anyway! After all, SPI is probably the trait that requires the most active player to get much out of it (IND is probably the only comparable trait).
I figured so, but that doesn't stop me! Tongue in cheek or not, I think it's a useful exercise. For example, I believe I'd once claimed that EXP's value was 60% from the granary bonus. Having actually looked at my beliefs in a methodical way, we can see that I actually think that 80% of EXP's value is from the granary discount. At the same time, my estimation that EXP and FIN are about equal was proven to be at least self-consistent.
Tongue in cheek or not, I think it's a useful exercise. For example, I believe I'd once claimed that EXP's value was 60% from the granary bonus. Having actually looked at my beliefs in a methodical way, we can see that I actually think that