"Don't move or the bunny gets it" - German Joey plays Cyrus the Virus of Khmer

[Krill]

GermanJoJo

[GermanJoey]

[*] Huayna Capac (Fin/Ind) - HC's traits make the bottom half of the tech tree more atrHUAUEHUAHUAHAUHAHUYa no. Upon my honour, I will not play as HC in a game of Civilization 4.

What, do you think is is boring to play or something?

Boring? No, just not............. honourable...

[GermanJoey]

oh wow, here's my start... I typed this up first, so I'll post it as-is before I speculate it. only 2 more traits to go, whew!

Expansive
Direct Changes: No longer receives +25% to worker production.
Indirect Changes: Between Agriculture beingc heaper in base beakers and the "tech scaling" option turned on, Pottery is much cheaper overall.
TLDR version of below: Small nerf.
Thoughts:

Well, this is just a straight-up nerf, although perhaps not a huge one. Still gets the +2 health and +100% granary production, the latter being the trait's main feature anyways. Most early workers are produced with food, so the +25% bonus really only made a difference by giving particular starts a 3-5 turn head start (on normal speed) depending on their starting tile and surrounding land. After that, it was just a couple shaved turns here, couple there - which is nice don't get me wrong, but you're picking Expansive for the granaries, not the worker.
Leaders under consideration:

• Mao Zedong (Exp/Pro) - Greatly improved over the original flavour, Mao retains his worker bonus and then some - this trait combo gives bonuses on basically every single thing you want to build early. My test experience is that Mao is very good at growing-into and then working lots of improved tiles. Great guy if you want to REX, although he's probably not my top pick here because this map is supposed to be pretty contentious, at least as far as the setup thread indicated.
  

Charismatic
Direct Changes: Each city receives +3 free happy citizens instead of +1.
Indirect Changes: None
TLDR version of below: Encourages vertical growth, makes Monarchy skippable, needs extremely high food, allows stacking multiple 1 pop whips, difficult to use.
Thoughts:

Charismatic is a trait I'm not sure what to think of yet. My initial impression was that it was a good, but "secondary" trait that could help you grow vertically while skipping HR. And yes, it can do this - I've tried a few games of Hannibal to 1AD with decent starts, and, while indeed my capital was insane by this point, I was deeply under-expanded and my periphery underdeveloped. These games made me feel like I wasn't properly unlocking this trait's power, like as if they way to play this optimally was some sort of non-traditional tactic. After thinking about it some, I think my mistake was trying to work cottages too early. Rather than assistant, Charismatic should be a *defining* trait. What I think you want to do is just get insane amounts of food with an early granary, and then just start stacking 1-pop whips (possible due to the extra happy cap - meaning you can work strong tiles for longer) of workers, settlers, military, and new granaries as fast as you possibly can in as many cities as you can. Initially, workers just puke out farms and pastures like you were running Agristograrianism in FFH2. Once your 2nd and 3rd cities can start doing this, only *then* can you start vertically expanding by replacing farms in your core with cottages. You want to hit happy cap in *ALL* your cities, one way or another. Put another way, your empire's whip unhappiness should be like a shockwave that forms when a stone is dropped in a pool of water.

I hope I can practice this a bit more before we do our picks, in case my start has a lot of food available. Has anyone else given this trait a shot? What do you think?

addendum: I mean 1-pop AVERAGE PER TURN, or 2-pop whips every other turn to produce 30 slave hammers per turn per city if you have the requisite insane amounts of food available at low pop. The idea got totally garbled on its way from my head to paper, but in my defense I've been pretty sick lately!

Leaders under consideration:

• Washington (Cha/Exp) - If we're gonna 1-pop whip like crazy, better to do it with the guy who gets cheap granaries! This guy is next on my list of leaders to try.
  
• Boudica (Cha/Agr) - Washington might better for jump-starting a wave with high velocity, but Boudica the Bold rides peaks higher than anybody. Surf's up, babe!
  
• Cyrus (Cha/Imp) - Sort of a case of "opposites attract" here, I've found that Cha and Imp have a nice synergy together as each shore-up the other's weaknesses. Imp helps keep you growing while Cha helps you compensate under-development.
  

Imperialistic
Direct Changes: Now also gives double speed production to markets and banks.
Indirect Changes: The changes to starting techs and the "tech scaling" option both mean that one can REX harder without crippling oneself of the very basics.
TLDR version of below:
Thoughts:

I think the idea with the changes here this: Imperialistic civs like to REX. Spam out settlers everywhere. Therefore, they tend to like a currency beeline at the end of the early game. With currency comes markets, and now they're cheaper for you. You can get some extra happiness in your core, and +25% wealth is pretty good when your equilibrium slider is probably pretty low. Imp is also helped a lot by the "tech scaling" option, wherein early techs are cheap and later techs are more expensive. Expanding hard can leave your economy gutted, but this is ameliorated by the fact that you're getting all the early techs easier. Probably not my favorite trait but I wouldn't be surprised if it has immense power under the right conditions.

Leaders under consideration:

• Victoria (Imp/Fin) - As a Financial civ, Victoria can make the most of the half-priced markets and banks. Well, that's all I got here, ahaha..
  

[Krill]

Slavery is not nerfed, so why ever 1 pop whip in ToW?

[GermanJoey]

GermanJoJo

This looks pretty good... I'm exceptionally happy to see livestock because I *REALLY* like Hunting in ToW for the extra scout movement (an advantage that should not be underestimated), and both Hunting and Agricultural are almost free in ToW if one wants Animal Husbandry early because the extra prereq bonus shaves off almost as many turns as the tech costs itself. Plains hill start too... very nice. I think if I start with one or the other (Hunting or Agriculture), and then get the other, I can get Animal Husbandry before the worker pops, although I'd have to check to make sure.

Moving the scout... I guess NW? Looks like it'll reveal some coast and some mountains. If I start with Hunting, I could move it S->SE and see if there's any more food I can grab by moving my settler 1S. Something I'll have to think about, as I haven't made any decisions about my Civ choice yet as I didn't know what starting techs I'd need.

This might be enough food to try a Charismatic leader if my test game tonight works out the way I hope... another possibility is using a Productive leader, which would get a ridiculous 7 turn worker here. But what would I do with it?

[GermanJoey]

Slavery is not nerfed, so why ever 1 pop whip in ToW?

Well, the idea is that with Charismatic, you have this big ass happy cap that's not being used for anything. If you 1-pop whip, you could work good resource tiles for longer, which could be the case if you have a size 3 or 4 city. With a granary and the right tiles, there's the potential to have a large-enough food surplus to whip-and-regrow every single turn for a few turns in a row, sort of like a mini-globe for the ancient era. However, I haven't checked the math on this yet, nor tried it out.

Essentially, I'm trying to ponder if Charismatic is worth anything if you play a high-food start differently than how it would otherwise be optimal to play it, because I haven't been too impressed with my attempts with it so far!

[GermanJoey]

Does anyone out there (if anyone is out there at all?) have a list of the base tech costs under tech scaling for this game speed/difficulty handy? I want to play around with a spreadsheet on my lunch hour, and I don't have the game here at work. The one I know off the top of my head is that agriculture/hunting are 40->46 beakers, and thus mining should be 57.5 (58?). However, I'm not sure how the second tier of techs scale: specifically, pottery, AH, and BW.

[Krill]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...sp=sharing

[GermanJoey]

Wow, thanks !!!

[aki]

Good luck, Joey