[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks, RefSteel.

Edit: I want to point out that that spreadsheet says the following regarding this game:

'Experimental PB to be conducted not with full diplo, but full real diplo. Realms Beyond will fund plane tickets so everyone can convene in a room in person to hammer out the gamelong NAPs.'

Looks like logistics just got a lot more complicated.

[shallow_thought]

Thanks for all the comments. I actually missed building culture off my list of raw sources, although I suspect it's weak at best. A lot of this can probably be answered with a fairly simple sim. I'll try and knock one up over the next few days and actually get some facts.

As FinTourist said, most of this is far-future thinking. I think that the only real early decision will be whether to space the core slightly more than normal; wherever culture best comes from, other than GArts it has to be produced by the three best cities individually. In the absence of actual map (and leader, and civ) knowledge, it's all theory. I just felt it's worth thinking about what the "ideal" start for a culture victory would look like and getting a feel for the trade-offs against fast growth and actual survivability.

[RefSteel]

I should note, since my bare assertion that specialist culture goes through multipliers could use some evidence, that all my knowledge about culture generation and cultural victories comes from my second-ever victory in a game of Civ4: It was a long time ago, but it was quite memorable, and I reported it in some detail: My Adventure 45 play-through with the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty!

(I've been slowly going through all my reports and re-hosting the pictures whose links were broken, and I finally got to this one today for exactly this reason!)

[Mardoc]

My apologies for the confusion! It must have been simply the difference between FFH wonder-boosted artists vs. FFH barely-boosted towns, and BtS not-particularly-boosted artists vs. BtS wonderful towns.

[shallow_thought]

My apologies for the confusion!  It must have been simply the difference between FFH wonder-boosted artists vs. FFH barely-boosted towns, and BtS not-particularly-boosted artists vs. BtS wonderful towns.

FWIW it's worth, preliminary results of simming: wonderful RtR towns - 1; RtR not particularly boosted artists - 0.  Even although bth do, indeed get affected by multipliers. Free speech in RtR opens the gap even further, if anything, with its buff to commerce from towns and villages.

[Old Harry]

Now that is how you start a thread! The primacy of cottages is an assumption I'd never have thought to question and I believe I owe you approx 2 commerce on this issue.

I'll take the most simplistic way of figuring out the comparison - a biology boosted farm can support one specialist, so we have the town tile vs the farmer+artist combo (assuming grassland, I suspect it gets more complex with plains and hills and at heart I'm lazy).

An artist makes 4 culture, 6 with sistine.
A town makes 4 commerce, +1 for Printing Press, +1 for FIN, +1 for river, +3 for Free Speach (+50% for a bureaucap, but the limiting factor is likely the other two cities so I'll ignore that) = 8 to 10 commerce.

At that point in the game it might be possible to push the slider to run 80% with wealth builds, in which case the town is producing about 6-8 culture. But the specialist also might be producing useful beakers with Representation, and - far more importantly - is also contributing to the Great Artist counter (at a gradually decreasing rate, but still contributing).

For the 800 GPP artist (likely to be the first of the deliberately produced artists) each artist turn worked is worth 3GPPs (x2 in a GA, x2 with Pacifism, x2 with NE, x1.35 with a Forum) so somewhere between:
4000/(800/3)=15 culture per turn
4000/(800/9)=45 culture per turn

For the 2000 GPP artist (likely to be the last GP produced based on no evidence I can point to) the range is:
4000/(2000/3)= 6 culture per turn
4000/(2000/9)= 18 culture per turn

Meaning a town gives 6 to 8ish cpt (before modifiers) and a Farm/Artist combo gives 10 to 50 cpt.

Obviously a high happy cap, time to grow, Sistine and Biology are necessary to get top-end returns, so that nerfs the specialists somewhat. But it's too late in the evening for me to go into how to get the cities to the appropriate size, at what point in the game we start going for the CV and how we plan to land that wonder, so I'll just finish by saying: Specialist good, cottage bad, m'kay?

(Okay, what did I miss?)

[Mardoc]

With the specialist route, at what point do you swap off the farms to take advantage of the starvation limit of one citizen per turn? How does that change the ratio? How long does the victory take once you start the final sprint?

How hard is sistene to get? How do artists work if you miss the chapel? Is it chapel or swap to space?

[Old Harry]

1. If we get a spi leader then we can do 5 turn bursts of starvation/pacifism, but the real answer is dunno - we'll need to make a spreadsheet.
2. Dunno, probably tilts slightly towards specialists, but this is something we'd do with towns too.
3. Dunno, depends how many of our cities get razed. Assuming a size 40 city, with 20 biology-farms we'll make 20x(10 to 50) base cpt before multipliers (ah, but the gpp culture doesn't get multiplied, so that's going to make the model more complex). Assuming a size 20 city, it may be best to run towns since they only use one pop each.
4. Dunno, Mackoti is a fan of getting music early, but I don't think many other players are likely to be competing.
5. The range becomes 10 to 48 cpt, so it doesn't make a huge difference to specialists.
6. But Sistine gives useful  culture to religious buildings too, so it might cut 10% of the end date?

Fintourist, your model-building skills are required!

[shallow_thought]

A nice, busy thread this early is certainly good. I wonder what the other players are thinking?

I'm simming rather than just doing the calculations because:
a) I'm lazy, and hitting "next turn" a lot while watching TV and drinking a nice glass of wine is easier than actually thinking.
b) I'm trying to generate some feel for how much buildings and wonders contribute directly, particularly as they age.

I had actually assumed that we probably wouldn't get as far as biology before starting the culture run - and I never really thought much about starvation cycles. I need to throw that in, and look at the effect of removing some of my (gratuitous) amount of rivers. The point in the game at which you feel able to start the run is actually quite important - you need Economics (for Free Speech), and some sort of defence (Gunpowder + ???), and (possibly) time to mature all those towns, but could you start to make a move a long time before biology? As I said, worth bearing in mind that, if I understand the changes in the new version of the mod correctly, we won't be able to replace villages/towns with farms.

I'd also been assuming that we would be able to get to 100% culture slider with wealth builds from the rest of the empire. Possibly quite badly optimistic in the actual game. Oh, and I swapped into Free Religion, losing the Sistine per-building culture .


I'm not sure how meaningful my sim actually is given my completely distorted run (heavy use of worldbuilder, AI trapped behind mountains to keep them crippled and unable to compete for wonders or contact me), but I'll throw out the numbers once I've tried the biology setup.

[Old Harry]

I heartily approve of simming, I'd be doing likewise if I had anything more powerful than a phone to use this week...

As I can't make further contributions to the cv discussion right now I'll move things on to a more important issue - our naming scheme!

We decided in chat we'd go for games we've played and someone said that Civilization IV would have to be the capital. Beyond that do we go for chronological order, favourites or alphabetical order?

Here's my first pass at a vaguely chronological list:

Harrier attack (Spectrum)
Football manager (between the lack of saves and a dodgy power pack I can't believe I kept playing this one...)
Match Day 2
Lords of Chaos
Civ 1
Footballer of the year 2
SWIV
Cabal (Amiga)
Colonization
Sensible Soccer
UFO enemy unknown
SWOS (pc)
Master of Orion 2
Mario cart 64
Super bomberman
Doshin the giant
Mario sunshine
Winning eleven (pro evo with Japanese commentary)
Civ4
Rome: total war
Faster than Light
Wesnoth
XCOM

That doesn't include a bunch of games I only played a bit of and an enormous list of flash games. What about you guys?