Civilization V Solo Reports

[T-hawk]

Well, it's not that desert is inherently great, it's that so many adders stack up on top of it, Desert Folklore and Polders and Petra. Those are each meant to turn desert from bad to palatable, except they don't operate in a vacuum, they all stack together to put desert way over the top. If there existed Marsh Folklore and a Swamp-Petra, I'd be rolling wet jungly maps instead.

[NobleHelium]

How exactly does CFC enforce the don't "intentionally" let your resources get pillaged rule?

[T-hawk]

I don't know exactly, but I presume by looking at the deal history data which is persisted in the save.

On another topic, I uncovered a mechanic that was driving me crazy. When building a settler, food conversion to hammers isn't quite always 1:0.25. Sometimes it's 1:1 or something else and the behavior was all over the place. I couldn't figure it out until I looked at the code in the SDK.

The first 2 food converts 1:1 to 2 hammers.
The next 2 food converts 1:0.5, to 1 hammer.
Any food beyond 4 converts 1:0.25.
The result is truncated to integer.

So for example 11 surplus food becomes 2 + 1 + 1.75 = 4.75 hammers truncated to 4. Yeah, really intuitive.

[timmy827]

Cool stuff, few thoughts -

In your vanilla Greece game, your policy order mixed some of Liberty and Tradition before doing all of Piety, even saying

In my France game, I tried completing Tradition early to get the food bonuses when they would matter, but that was the wrong approach. To get food, just buy city-states and build farms.

whereas here went all Tradition first.

Part of that I assume because the Liberty settler was pushed further down, but can you elaborate why all Tradition first?

As for resource pillaging with AI selling - I tried on my last playthrough to just track my deal history if a pillage looked possible, and refund the AI if it happened. (IE if the deal was 240 gold up front for a lux, and it was pillaged after 20 turns, refund the AI 80 gold); seems like that is fair house rule to handle it.

Re: the -Production for too many units early - never seen that, although it's sort of blast from the past (SMAC, civ2) where unit support was paid in production, not gold.

[T-hawk]

The free aqueducts added to the Tradition finisher in G&K. Tradition now clearly dominates Liberty for anything short of max ICS. I'm actually already working on a full-blown article on this topic.

15% food wasn't enough in vanilla, but aqueducts are functionally 40% which is huge (and multiplicative with the 15%.) Also the expansion environment of increased happy headroom from religion and luxuries and CS quests makes Tradition and its food more attractive. Liberty's Meritocracy was previously sorely needed for any wide build, but with bigger cities from all the extra happy, Tradition's Aristocracy and Monarchy combined actually beat Liberty.

[T-hawk]

So where do you go from here with Civ5, now that you have a nearly unbeatably fast cultural game?

Why, unbeatably fast science, of course.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/civ5gkscience/

Which also ties in with a full analytical treatment of Tradition vs Liberty.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/index/tradition.shtml

[MJW (ya that one)]

So where do you go from here with Civ5, now that you have a nearly unbeatably fast cultural game?

Why, unbeatably fast science, of course.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/civ5gkscience/

Which also ties in with a full analytical treatment of Tradition vs Liberty.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/index/tradition.shtml

Pretty good. As always. Both are very good. Pretty much all I have to say is that you can still explore what the best move is without desert to abuse desert folklore. It would probably just be like vanilla Civ5 though but it might be worth going over a game or two.

As an aside, the "expoilt" you used to get free gold, getting it by loaning GNP to a civ that is about to die, reminded me of an amusing incident in Civ3 were sulla raged-quit a game were one of the AIs he had a GNP deal with legitimately died before the deal ended. In Civ3 if a civ who you are giving GNP dies that counts as a deal break. (I'm counting a shadow game as a DNF so there. )

[Qgqqqqq]

Have you beaten deity yet?
Did that analysis take into account the snowball effect?

[Commodore]

That AC link was unholy. I'd forgotten how many abuses I self-banned to keep it interesting even on Transcend.

[T-hawk]

Best move without Desert Folklore? Well, Spain and restart until you find the Great Barrier Reef, then take the One with Nature pantheon. That's 24 faith in all and would keep up with Desert Folklore at least for a while. Another approach could be Siam or Greece and get faith from religious city-states instead of a pantheon, though that's still map dependent to find them of course.

There's no approach to religious snowballing that doesn't involve map cooking. Building shrines and temples and stonehenges just can't ever keep up with the big chunky faith sources. The Celt UA or Maya UB aren't enough either. And religious snowballing is required for high-end competition; you can't beat the dozens of happy or gold or culture from a founder belief that spreads itself widely and passively without additional investment.

All this flows from how religious pressure is so much better early than later, thanks to how cities convert much more easily when small. Anything that doesn't found a religion by turn 50 to start freely converting size 1-2 cities can't compete. To fix this, make cities convert at a constant rate regardless of size, and then slower faith has a chance.

I haven't beaten Deity, but not really sure I feel like trying. I'm sure I'm good enough to win but it's mostly hours of slogging through AI carpets of units.