[PB22 Spoiler] Joey and Borsche puke on the funny pages

[GermanJoey]

If a city has a food resource given to it, I don't think you can call it a filler city...

Food resources are good because they enable you to work other good tiles. For example, a city with a single grass pig and 16 grassland rivers could eventually turn the yield of that grass corn into 16*8=128 commerce from towns. If a second city has a single grass pig, 15 deserts, and 4 coasts, then that same pig is now worth 8 commerce, about 6% of the value of the first pig. So, even with the same food, I consider that the first city is absolutely not a filler, but the second city is. Drop that down to a second-ring 5f or 4f tile, and many people would never consider settling the city, which I've seen widespread in both this game as well as PB18.

That post is just to show people what they're giving up by passing on bad land.

[Ceiliazul]

My favorite takeaway was the "supercottage" concept, I like that. 100h for a cottage is steep, but thats why the city waited until filler time!

I dont agree proposing fillers as a wayward GP pump. If a late game filler pops a GP after running a couple scientists, it means you are not paying.enough attention to your real GP cities. Just your National Epic city should be able to outrun a couple scientists on the caymans. And by late game, you probably should have a crop of middling core cities with built up GPP pools you can milk. Otherwise, good work!

Did you figure the ROI for some of those cities in this game? Thats where the rubber hits the road, after all.

[GermanJoey]

Heh, the ROI on these cities was something like 8-10 turns thanks to Corp + Agg + FM + all my huge internal routes. 21 commerce from city center + routes instantly, minus ~7 or so maintenance times somewhere between 1.4 to 1.6 inflation. On average, that's a net income of 11 cpt, which is equal to about 9 turns to be equal to the amount of wealth that could have been generated instead of the settler.

Yeah, maybe you're right. Greasy Grossman was one of my first fillers, settled around T135ish, in the period before I went to war for more land. I think I had it at max size by T160 or so. Thus it had worked 3 merchants for 50 turns, through three GAs, and then another 2-3 for another 40 turns. Hence, 822 GPP. If we were Phi + Parthenon, that would be ~2604 GPP, or nearing our 23rd great person. That should be just in time for our 5th MoM GA, right? I don't know, I guess I wouldn't rely on it for a GPP but I think it could get close to producing one, whether by accident or not. In this game, I generated 9 out of my 11 GPP out of my NE, which was a pretty good GP pump. I wasn't that good about GPP in general this game, though, I remember my first GA was started very late because of the buildup with my first war with Korea.

[Qgqqqqq]

If a city has a food resource given to it, I don't think you can call it a filler city...

This. Your definition of filler is way too wide. Particularly the island cities - just because a city doesn't have many good tiles doesn't make it a filler, just mediocre, and some of your island cities were really nice.

Any city with a 4/5f tile is something that you should be looking at settling before modern techs (Free Market, State Property, Biology, and other tile-changing techs) hit (as in, they're generally worthwhile before then - it may not be practicable to settle them). Late game fillers are those that need those late games to work.

A filler, to me, is a city that doesn't claim (m)any good tiles. One that doesn't have any food resources and not a dearth of other tiles. (Of course, other terms apply - I would call a squeezed city a bit of a filler, for example.)

[GermanJoey]

Coast isn't a good a tile though. It's just good enough to be better than neutral, and only then if it has a lighthouse. It's better than ice, though, that's why I broke different types of fillers into different categories. Coast is like... coast is like the change in your pocket, that you empty out of your jeans/coat or whatever at the end of the day into a jar on your nightstand. Your daily jingle ain't gonna be worth nothin' real, but once that jar weighs enough to put a hole in the wall you can take it down to the grocery store and get an actual payoff. Make sense?

Like, this city is pretty mediocre, I agree, not terrible - but its only mediocre because it's had about 120 turns to grow and build infrastructure, including the bonus hammers of three golden ages. It's easy to forget how late this game is since it started so far after PB18, but we're really late now. I settled this near the start of the ren period. Is that late game? Well, it's surely not early game, right?




Otherwise, if I settled it more recently, near the start of the Industrial period, it would look like this:




The only real difference here is that AG's food overlaps a food in a city that had finished growing onto all its tiles, while OP's food was isolated. Obviously, I settle for the new food first, but what difference does it make? They're still both sad cities growing onto crappy tiles. With AG, the filler question is more interesting because it poses a tradeoff: do I let the bigger city spend 22 turns growing into 2 more engineers (worth 4*2.25=9 hammers per turn) but also build a public transit to compensate the higher pop, or let this filler city grow onto its windmill and 10 coast? I decided it was better economically to let the filler grow a bit first because I didn't want to bother with the public transist, but that doesn't chance the fact that its a filler with no good tiles to its name besides a copper it could have worked just fine at size 1. Thus, if it is a filler, than OP is a filler too, just ones with different settling order.

[GermanJoey]

Then you get into the question of Sinfest vs Alfie, which are two essentially identical island cities that share a clam. If Sinfest doesn't get to keep the clam, it can't work its hammers, but if Alfie keeps the clam, it will have two food. Do you split the clam or not? Does that change whether Sinfest is a filler or not? Do you still want the spot if you think its better to give Alfie the clam?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Joey said "Finally, I theorize Phi could squeeze Great People out of their fillers..."

(Ceil beat me to this point) By this time in the game, you are very likely so deep into your GPP pool that a new city isn't going to fill the bar, ever. Or, it will be so far behind an established city (National Epic!) that is is never going to catch up. Otherwise, though, I agree. They're very valuable cities, and are good for more than just domestic economy under the right circumstances. I suppose this is covered in your "Strategic Fillers" section. IMO, for a city to be a "Strategic Filler", as you call it, the economic output of the city really is not a factor. Just as tanks and spears are not economically helpful, they are necessary to further other goals of the civ.

Joey said "Finally, SP doesn't shine so much economically compared to the other two, as it only eliminates the distance maintenance."

I pretty much agree here. This is a big reason that I do not have as much relative tech capacity as a certain other gigantic civ in PB18. The extra FM trade routes (and FIN for his small cities) make a noticeable difference. The benefit of SP for these small, mostly foodless cities is that you can churn a bit more coin from Wealth builds because the workshops don't cause as much of a food deficit compared to non-SP workshops.

For your island fillers and the explanation of NFLHC, you can also think about the relatively useless population in terms of expendable, draft-able defense in times of emergency. If you ruin a city and it's too angry to work its water tiles... so what?

But really, if you work a pile of 2c coast tiles, even if you are only gaining 1c due to maintenance, you can squeeze more by adding infrastructure, which IMO is the only real benefit for these kinds of cities for PHI, maybe you get a cheap University. Every bit helps.

[GermanJoey]

Being able to draft those cities down would be a really big deal. I'm still not exactly sure how the RtR Mod Cristo Redentor works - if I get it, can I always swap at least 1 civic anarchy free? God, that would be so great.

Regarding GPP, yeah, probably a pipe dream. Cities in situation like Greasy Grossman aren't likely to come up in normal games, where they have a food yet have such bad land that they have no other tiles to work, and yet you still settle them pre-ren anyways because they're so close to your capital. Oh well.

[GermanJoey]

T254.

When I was a little kid, 254 was a lucky number of mine. I'm really not sure why, but it was, and here we are.

Everything's quiet. Flight is in, Bio is next in 2T. Gavagai has been sending me his Hit Musicals and OB offers every turn, but I've been declining; however, I think my navy is bigger than Gawdzak's (and certainly way bigger than Gav's) at this point so I sent the offer back - just for the borders, not for the musicals, which I don't need. I've actually been gaining about 100k soldiers on Gawdzak per turn even though I've actually switched a lot of builds in my bigger cities over to infrastructure. I will FINALLY build Oxford, worth a whopping 148 beakers per turn, a whopping 3% increase to my total. I'll probably get Wall Street somewhere too, because why not. I'm spamming markets and observatories in weaker cities, the latter in preparation for Labs. Finally, I've started some Airports started in strategically important cities. Everything else is still on units - I gain about as much power as I lost in the GvGG war in total almost every turn now, close to a million troops.

Next tech is Radio, then I save gold for a long bit while I try to figure out what to do next. Gavagai got to Plastics first, while Gawd has been saving gold on it; he gets 2k a turn, and now has 9700 saved up total. Refrigeration is an option for me, which would give an unparalleled advantage on the seas, +2 moves compared to everyone else from cnav and the tech bonus. But how good is that right now, really? If I were to attack anyone I'd get dogpiled by everyone else, I'm sure.

[GermanJoey]

I need to do some world-builder test to figure out how good airplane promos are, to see if they're worth building in non-airport cities. I have such little experience with air units in civ4, except for airships...