Strategy Thread - for quick strategy questions and answers

[RefSteel]

I think we're talking about what the code calls "plotDistance", and I'm pretty sure it's what culture uses.

Yeah. It's also what the game uses for aircraft range. (Your airship can run an airstrike or recon mission up to "8 tiles away" from its base, so anything in what would be the city's 8th ring.) Novice's explanation above is way better than any of the ones I've posted. (It's probably safe to assume that anytime I say something confusing, it's because I explained it poorly, not because of anything to do with my mental plane!)

Edit: also, based on a superficial understanding, there's also a big penalty for jumping from one landmass to another. (Or maybe from one landmass to another one with a different area, lol. It depends on what the area() function does.)

This is also correct; the penalty is so huge that it took me a long time to discover it could even happen at all. If a tile is on a different landmass than the one your unit started from, you multiply the total effective distance (from EACH of your unit AND your nearest city to the unit on the unit's landmass) by three!

(I should say: After I had figured all of this out by testing it in the game, I discovered that Seven had discovered the formula already by looking at the code and had recorded in one of his old PBeM threads.)

Except!: For ships, the "times three" effect applies to all land tiles (i.e. forts and cities) to which they can teleport. (They don't care which landmass the city or fort is on.) If the ship is on a water tile, the "times three" effect also applies to any tile in a different body of water than the ship's starting point. If the ship teleports from a city or fort though, it prefers to teleport to any body of water rather than another city or fort.

Just one more thing:

Does anyone know of a good post explaining unit teleportation rules due to borders being closed or borders expanding?

(Emphasis mine.) Border expansion teleportation is a horrible, horrible kluge. It works exactly the same way as closing-borders teleportation, except that borders actually pop one tile at a time, potentially resulting in a whole series of teleportations for the same unit on the same border pop! Worse still, border pops into neutral territory are handled separately from changes of ownership in contested territory:

Neutral territory pops start from the bottom left and proceed up each column from left to right. So a second-ring border pop proceeds from [01] to [12] thus:

Code:

[CC] = City Center, [FR] = First Ring
    [05][07][09]
[03][FR][FR][FR][12]
[02][FR][CC][FR][11]
[01][FR][FR][FR][10]
    [04][06][08]

Unlike other north/south/east/west considerations for teleporation, border pops don't care about crossing the world wrap; they're all relative to the city.

Ownership of contested tiles is resolved separately, and is checked from west to east along each row on the map, starting with the southernmost row and proceeding northward.

For some of the weird consequences of all this, see the save games I just reattached to the old RBP3 post to which WilliamLP linked: here.

[LexiSilva]

In no-expansion CivIV, should I farm or cottage flood plain tiles in the beginning of a game?

[WilliamLP]

Yes.

[Fintourist]

In no-expansion CivIV, should I farm or cottage flood plain tiles in the beginning of a game?

Depends if you are Financial and what your other food tiles are

[LexiSilva]

Depends if you are Financial and what your other food tiles are

Yeah, I guess I wasn't specific enough. In the early game, when you don't have farms but you are near floodplains, would it be better to grow your city even faster, or do you start cottaging to research techs faster?

[Fintourist]

What I ment was that if I don't have any food resources in BFC then it's very likely that I farm it. If I already have 2x wet corn and +10 food surplus I probably cottage it. Where the balance between these two goes it's a harder task to quantify and has to be analyzed case by case basis (happy cap, tiles to grow onto, purpose of the city among other things affect the decision). Financial trait pushes the decision into cottaging direction with some what lower food surplus compared to when not playing FIN.

[Mardoc]

It Depends. Standard answer to most strategy questions, in my opinion . That's one of the best things about the game, there aren't many things that are always or never worth doing.

Some factors to consider:

Riverside cottages are really nice and you want them - even more so if you're Financial. But you also want your cities to have enough food to grow fast and whip often. But there's no point in having too much food in a city where you don't have the happiness to use it. So it depends on what other food sources you have in your city, what your happy cap looks like, if there are any other tiles you really want to work.

Also, if you're running a specialist economy, especially if you got the Pyramids and are running Representation, then you can use the food for those instead of cottages. Assuming you've enough hammers for the specialist slot buildings, specialists can be worth more than cottages. Same if this is your GPP pump city.

I've seen a rule of thumb that 6 food surplus is a good amount for a city, but there are always exceptions there too.

And on top, it depends on the rest of your empire. Do you already have enough commerce coming in, that you're keeping up in tech? How are you doing on workers and settlers? Do you have a lot of expansion planned or are you running out of room?

More often than not, you'll want a cottage. But if you play with a hard guideline, it's bound to be wrong sometimes.

[Gavagai]

Cottage it. It is sometimes suboptimal but rarely really wrong. After you have more experience you may start to consider farming in some cases.