Civilization 5 Announced

[luddite]

I think I realized another reason why ICS is so brokenly powerful in this game. Regular citizens suck!

Let's say you've got a large city, and you want to add 4 more citizens. That means you'll have to build a stadium, which costs 450 hammers and 6 maintenence/turn. So you need 3 of your 4 new citizens working trading posts, just to break even! And that's after a long process of building it and growing the citizens. If you use a hospital to grow them faster, even 4 trading posts won't be enough. Gold multiplier buildings obviously help, but they don't help enough, especially since trade route gold isn't affected

If you're using communism, merchant navy, and the forbidden palace, each city tile produces 11 food, 10 hammers, and 2 gold. That's the equivalent of 9 fertilizer farms, 3 mines, and a plains trading post! So the city is like a free 13 citizens! And those citizens produce 13 unhappiness, so you need a coloseum, theater, and stadium (+12 happiness, 15 gold maintenence) The trade route gold will just barely cover the maintence, but now the city can't grow any more. You're out of happiness buildings, so the only way the city can grow more is to make some smaller cities to balance it. No matter how many citizens you have, they'll never catch up to the bonus that a pumped up city tile produces immediately, for free. And the research from just 1 scientist is worth about as much as 20 beakers/turn lol, so you'll want more cities just to run more scientists.

edit- my math above is a little bit wrong, but the basic point is still valid. Adding extra citizens to an already large city has very little benefit.

Anyway the point of all this math is that with tile yields so low and maintence costs so high, regular citizens just barely pay for themselves. That's why if you try to play the game "as intended" with just a few large cities, your economy will be terrible. Even if it didn't require a stupidly large amount of food to grow past size 10, there's still no point in having cities that big.

[uberfish]

The only thing I might perhaps criticize about your game is that you did a horseman rush at the beginning. Given how bad the AI is at warfare, and how stupidly powerful the horsemen unit is, this is almost as abusive as stealing workers from a city state. I don't think it matters much though, since I'm sure you would have still crushed him in any war even without using horses.

Horse rushing is abusive and ICSing isn't?

[luddite]

Horse rushing is abusive and ICSing isn't?

It's a bit different. Horsemen are just one, imbalanced unit. That should be easily fixed with a balance patch (I hope so, anyway). ICS takes advantage of almost every game rule about the conomy. I can easily win wars without horsemen, but I don't now how to run a strong economy without ICS. Usually, when I build just a few big cities, I go broke.

[darrelljs]

My experience is you can have two out of three of Meritocracy, Communism, and Cultural Diplomacy. So I have never taken Meritocracy. You certainly don't want it over Communism, since Planned Economy is as good or better (even non-connected cities get +1 happiness). I don't think it compares favorably with Cultural Diplomacy either. In fact, I would argue Rationalism/Secularism/Free Thought is more valuable than the path to Meritocracy. It also leaves you in position to take Scientific Revolution if you get an extra policy.

Lets say you have 25 cities and 150 population. Let's say 20 cities are midgets working two Scientists. Of the remaining 110 population, let's say 70 are on trading posts. The Rationalism branch is worth (20*2+70)*2 = 220 beakers. Meritocracy gets you 25 happiness and let's say there half on plains trading posts and half on grassland trading posts. Further, lets assume we spend 50% of the game in a golden age. Discounting food, the excess tiles are worth 87.5 gpt and 18.75 hpt. Of course Meritocracy lets you expand faster, but then I don't like to expand that fast until I have Order, and by the time I have Order I have enough production to spam Colosseums.

I guess what I'm saying is I think the priority for Social Policies is:

1. Order
2. Rationalism
3. Patronage
4. Liberty

Due to age restrictions, the actual order will end up being:

1. Patronage
2. Order
3. Rationalism
4. Liberty.

One last point...I typically quad bulb Dynamite to get to the Industrial Age, but Biology is pretty compelling. The nice thing about Dynamite is the military impact of early Riflemen and Artillery.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Let's say you've got a large city, and you want to add 4 more citizens. That means you'll have to build a stadium, which costs 450 hammers and 6 maintenence/turn. So you need 3 of your 4 new citizens working trading posts, just to break even!

Don't discount the beakers from the extra population! Every happiness building pays for itself and then some. My midgets build them non-stop (squeezing in the gold buildings when I have enough happy).

Darrell

[darrelljs]

BTW, there is a great thread at civfanatics that starts to reverse engineer several important game mechanics.

Darrell

[luddite]

My experience is you can have two out of three of Meritocracy, Communism, and Cultural Diplomacy. So I have never taken Meritocracy. You certainly don't want it over Communism, since Planned Economy is as good or better (even non-connected cities get +1 happiness). I don't think it compares favorably with Cultural Diplomacy either. In fact, I would argue Rationalism/Secularism/Free Thought is more valuable than the path to Meritocracy. It also leaves you in position to take Scientific Revolution if you get an extra policy.

Lets say you have 25 cities and 150 population. Let's say 20 cities are midgets working two Scientists. Of the remaining 110 population, let's say 70 are on trading posts. The Rationalism branch is worth (20*2+70)*2 = 220 beakers. Meritocracy gets you 25 happiness and let's say there half on plains trading posts and half on grassland trading posts. Further, lets assume we spend 50% of the game in a golden age. Discounting food, the excess tiles are worth 87.5 gpt and 18.75 hpt. Of course Meritocracy lets you expand faster, but then I don't like to expand that fast until I have Order, and by the time I have Order I have enough production to spam Colosseums.

I guess what I'm saying is I think the priority for Social Policies is:

1. Order
2. Rationalism
3. Patronage
4. Liberty

Due to age restrictions, the actual order will end up being:

1. Patronage
2. Order
3. Rationalism
4. Liberty.

One last point...I typically quad bulb Dynamite to get to the Industrial Age, but Biology is pretty compelling. The nice thing about Dynamite is the military impact of early Riflemen and Artillery.

Darrell

Hmm I think you're really overvaluing patronage and rationalism. The first 3 policies in patronage just save you a bit of gold with city-states, but usually I have no trouble getting enough gold to bribe all the nearby city-states even without it. Cultural-diplomacy is pretty good, but it requires 3 weak policies first to get it, so I think that's too expensive. Also it's just a fixed happiness bonus, so it doesn't scale as your empire grows.

Rationalism- Well, I see two major flaws with it. One is that science is already so fast in this game, and production is so low, that speeding up science doesn't do much except unlock things you can't afford to build. It's good for doing what Sullla did- beeline to globalism and win with the UN- but it doesn't help much in military victories.

The second big flaw is that, when using scientists, the real value is the gpp. Let's say it takes 300 gpp to produce your next great scientist, which is 100 turns for 1 scientist specialist. if that great scientist bulbs a tech worth 2500 beakers, your scientist has effectively produced 25 beakers/turn! add in the 3 normal beakers, and that's 28 beakers/turn! Adding secularism only takes you from 28 to 30 beakers/turn, which is a very minor increase.

I'm not sure how I'd rank the policy branches, but as long as you've got Order you can't go wrong. 1 pick in Freedom is also a good value.

[Jaffa]

It's a bit different. Horsemen are just one, imbalanced unit. That should be easily fixed with a balance patch (I hope so, anyway). ICS takes advantage of almost every game rule about the conomy. I can easily win wars without horsemen, but I don't now how to run a strong economy without ICS. Usually, when I build just a few big cities, I go broke.

Try trading more? Historically, the way to get a strong economy is through trade with other nations.

My pet theory is that the one factor that unbalances this game more than anything is the trading posts. Without trading posts, I don't think the ICS strategy would work. You would have to be looking for city sites with gold bonus to pay maintenance on your happy buildings, and you wouldn't be able to cash-rush all the happy buildings, which would limit the speed of expansion. And you might actually have to go out and work for allied status with the city states, instead of just throwing money at them when you want their food and/or votes.

The most fun I've had in any Civ game was a Civ5 game I played for a diplomatic win on an archipelago map, with just four cities on my island (and later a couple of captured cities), sustaining my economy through trading and running around defending city states as the AI tried to attack them.

I'm curious if one of you more analytical types would like to play through a game without using trading posts and see how it affects game balance as you see it.

[luddite]

Try trading more? Historically, the way to get a strong economy is through trade with other nations.

My pet theory is that the one factor that unbalances this game more than anything is the trading posts. Without trading posts, I don't think the ICS strategy would work. You would have to be looking for city sites with gold bonus to pay maintenance on your happy buildings, and you wouldn't be able to cash-rush all the happy buildings, which would limit the speed of expansion. And you might actually have to go out and work for allied status with the city states, instead of just throwing money at them when you want their food and/or votes.

The most fun I've had in any Civ game was a Civ5 game I played for a diplomatic win on an archipelago map, with just four cities on my island (and later a couple of captured cities), sustaining my economy through trading and running around defending city states as the AI tried to attack them.

I'm curious if one of you more analytical types would like to play through a game without using trading posts and see how it affects game balance as you see it.

I might try but honestly... without trading posts I don't think ANYTHING would work. Cities would barely be able to pay for themselves, even with just the minimum of buildings. You wouldn't be able to afford a military at all. You'd be completely dependant on milking the AIs for gold, and if they decided to go to war with you you'd be completely screwed. I could do it with Songhai, since they get massive gold from conquering cities, but with other civs I'm pretty sure it's impossible.

[Serdoa]

How much gold do merchant specialists provide? Because sure, you do not bulb with them, but if there would be no trading posts, well, instead of science-specs (which you do not really need that much as science is too fast anyway) you could use your merchant slots, couldn't you? I guess then ICS would even be stronger because you could barely play normally, but having only small cities with next to no infracstructure won't cost all that much but they would still provide you with gold through merchant specialists slots - and the buildings you need for those specialists do not even cost maintenance. I think it is 2 gold per merchant spec. If thats the case, then you have basically your "trading-post"-equivalent right there. Sure, not as strong as no food or hammers are provided by this specs - but then, all others not playing ICS do even have more issues, so it still stays the strongest strategy.

Can someone of those who do play more let me know if what I wrote above is correct? I think it is correct, but then I only played some games because I got bored, so I might be wrong.