RB Pitboss #2 - Postgame Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

I guess you always built farms to make enough of a gain of atleast +6 food per city is that right?

Or even higher...they put a lot of cities at +8 which was surprising to me. My rule of thumb has always been farm until +5 but because of their happy cap and large number of Fast Workers it really did make sense to have more food per city.

Darrell

[Dr. Nomadic]

Also, I suppose being Philosophical was a factor in pushing for a higher growth surplus.

[athlete4life10]

Very Interesting! I have never really valued having a farm unless it's on a resource, or perhaps to spread irrigation to one...I've always chosen slower growth but working a cottage on a green tile rather than farming...just cause until Biology farms don't seem worth it and I've almost never played until biology!

I had a chance to read a couple more pages and made it to Sullla's overview of my civ shortly after trading maps (P196 I think)...very insightful. So here's a few questions:

How did you tell what buildings I had and where? Was it just through looking at the graphics or some other method?

If the game had continued long enough would you have eventually cottaged over the excess farms and run emancipation to grow them fast? Or used them for rep specialists? What would have happened to those farms?

[Krill]

How to grow your city for maximum cottage growth:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=301724

[athlete4life10]

Thanks for that link Krill! I'll have to spend some time reviewing that I think.

Just finished reading P196 and the overview of the HRE. I finally got to read something positive about me which was nice. Even if it was only confirming Sullla considered me a larger threat than the HRE. Truth be told once you had annexed Greece's territory I don't think you were ever really under threat unless everybody remaining could be turned to dogpile you (again) but that was never going to happen. I suppose if I hadn't backstabbed Slaze either and used his help to fight you I may have been able to atleast slow you down. I certainly have no illusions now that the final outcome would have been any different.

Seeing as you guys never did secure the prophet for your shrine...here's what I did. Upon capturing Hoth (former byzantine capital) it had the oracle in it so I let it slow build a prophet at 2gpt/turn and then went for the academy via library scientists in Clak'dor VII I think. It's probably a little hard for you to tell but do you think it would have been better to just ignore the priest and go straight for the academy?

After typing this up I think I did it in the right order but I should have gotten a temple and hired a priest to accelerate that first GP along. Any thoughts?

Athlete

[Sullla]

Hey, glad to see you had the time to read through our thread, athlete. It's indeed quite a monster! Let me go through some of your (excellent) comments.

* On farming versus cottaging and such. The article by DaveMcW that Krill linked to is quite good. My one nitpick would be that it presents things a little bit too much in terms of absolutes; for example, if you have a city with some insane food surplus (+10 or more; maybe double fish + pigs or something) it can indeed be worth your while to throw down some plains cottages in the early game. Even the lowly plains farm can be useful sometimes. Heck, we did great things with the atrocious 0/2/0 plains workshop at our Heroic Epic city!

On a standard map, you probably won't see too many grassland farms thrown down, but an occasional one or two helps a lot. With a super-green map like this one, adding grassland farms in key locations was a non-brainer. Even one extra food per turn makes a noticeable difference. Here's how long it takes to grow from size 1 to size 6 at different food surpluses:

130 food needed
+2 food/turn = 65 turns
+3 food/turn = 44 turns
+4 food/turn = 33 turns
+5 food/turn = 26 turns
+6 food/turn = 22 turns
+7 food/turn = 19 turns
+8 food/turn = 17 turns

Diminishing returns, to be sure. Why bother? Well, because this sort of analysis overlooks the fact that growth is exponential in Civ. The faster you get from size 1 to size 2, the faster you can start working a second tile and grow even faster (or build faster, or whatever). You also get that granary food box filled up quicker, and that gets to the next size even sooner. And then you can turn food into shields via the power of the whip. It's just like the explosive start we had by chopping forests. Get your food up and running first, and everything follows from that.

Take Fredericksburg, as a great example of the value of some grassland farms:



If we do the standard Civ play, we'd be working the cows + sheep + gold resources. Together, that makes for a food surplus of only +3 food/turn, which is very slow growth. That would provide a lot of commerce, yes, but it would take forever to grow, and have little production due to lack of Slavery whipping. Instead, we added a farm here and often swapped off the gold tile, allowing us to reach the desired +6 food/turn mark and jump to new sizes every 2 or 3 turns. It also allowed us to whip like crazy and survive (barely) when attacked.

Fort Henry was an even better example of how to utilize space without food resources:



Irrigate up to size 6, work cottages, and then whip for production. Note that you can only do this on a highly fertile map though - on a plains-heavy map you're pretty limited until the later eras.

Now, in your territory:



This was a very strong city location, but it really needed more irrigation badly. The (unirrigated) rice tile was only worth +4 food/turn, and that's not where you want to be with so many grassland tiles around. We threw down some additional farms and got this city growing significantly faster. If the game had gone on much longer, all of the Ottoman cities would have regrown into size 15+ powerhouses. The lack of any farms - at all! - in Ottoman territory was one of the weaknesses we saw on your side.

* Hereditary Rule is an amazingly strong civic, especially since it combines so well with Slavery civic. It's one of the reasons why I tend to view the Pyramids as somewhat of a sucker's build; ok, even leaving aside the high cost of the wonder, wouldn't you be better off just sticking with Hereditary Rule anyway? Representation's not all that great unless you're doing a One City Challenge or some kind of variant. HR saved our economy from total collapse, keeping our cities up and running when they were each carrying some -4 or -5 unhappiness penalty from whipping. Without those garrisons, Chancellorsville would have been unhappy at size 3!

Skipping Hereditary Rule - or having Monarchy tech and not adopting it - rarely works out well. We were shocked when we saw that Whosit was still missing Monarchy tech well into the game.

* OK, how to tell what builds are where. This isn't too widely known, but one of the effects of the Civ4 graphics engine is that all of the city buildings are displayed visibly on the map. While people see the Pyramids and Stonehenge and such, they rarely think that EVERYTHING shows up there, even down to the most basic improvements. You just need to have visibility on the city's center tile. Once you know what the buildings look like on the map:



I can glance at Spartansburg here and see that the city has granary, barracks, library, forge, courthouse, market/grocer, theatre, plus the National Epic and Apostolic Palace. It just takes some practice.

Now this isn't worth the time and effort 99% of the time. It only really works with a slow-moving game like Pitboss or PBEM. I did the big comparisons with the other teams more because I was bored than anything else.

* What would we have done with tile improvements if the game had gone on longer... good question. The farms probably would have stayed where they were, or potentially have been converted into watermills/workshops. Our economy was shifting towards a heavy Production emphasis, as new cottages don't have time to grow into towns in the late game. There were no plans to go into Emancipation... we were thinking either Slavery for continued whipping, or lategame Caste System for ultra-powerful workshop tiles. We had the most cities and the most territory, and on that green map, the idea of blanketing the landscape with 2/4/0 workshops (equal to a grassland iron tile!) and 2/1/6 Uni Suffrage towns was a frightening thought. Right at the very end, we swapped into State Property and Universal Suffrage:



....yeah. Granted, this was a Golden Age, but all of our riverside towns would be 2/2/7 anyway with levees. And State Property erased the last barried that was holding us back, by removing all the distance maintenance costs. Mmm, love that lategame State Property workshop spam!

* No, we were never seriously threatened once we broke up the alliance against us. The Ottoman/Rome attack on Inca was absolutely perfect for us from a macro standpoint, seeing our biggest rivals waste their strength against one another while we devoured Greece with no losses. I do believe that your Ottomans were a bigger threat than the HRE, because you had the land and Food to be competitive. We knew that HRE had research power and only research power - their island cities couldn't be defended in a true war, and they didn't have the Production base to compete with us. And of course that's exactly what happened later on.

If HRE, Ottomans, and Rome had allied with Inca against us, that's about the only thing that could have changed the outcome of the game, I think. But that was probably unrealistic, expecting that the whole world would do nothing but collaborate against India for the entire game.

* We did get a Great Prophet for our shrine. We were running a Priest specialist in Spartansburg the whole time, and figured one would eventually pop out, which did take place. If not, no biggie. I know a lot of readers criticized us over how we negotiated with Dantski for his Prophet, but honestly, it was a low priority for us. We were too far into the game for the Shrine to be a huge factor anymore. We just didn't care that much.

Since your empire was high on gold-producing buildings, a Shrine was slightly less useful for you, although still worth getting. I think the error wasn't in the order of getting Great People, but rather not building a temple in Hoth and then running a Priest specialist. 5 GPP/turn is a heck of a lot faster than 2 GPP/turn! You had the right idea there in that last comment.

Guess that's it for now. I will try to type up another part to this game's report sometime in the next week or so. Seems like there's still some interest.

[sunrise089]

Sullla, several times you've mentioned HR civic. Obviously it's strong, and in always war MP anc games the Oracle is really just another word for early HR 90% of the time. BUT...you're also a high-level SP guy. I don't know how much time you spend on Immortal and Deity games these days (probably not much since if anyone is entitled to SP burnout it's you) but one thing I've been taught recently is that HR becomes much less powerful in the jump from Immortal to Deity. Basically the rationale is that on Deity non-financial non-river cottages aren't ever worth working if it means you have a make a MP unit to do it.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Sullla, several times you've mentioned HR civic. Obviously it's strong, and in always war MP anc games the Oracle is really just another word for early HR 90% of the time. BUT...you're also a high-level SP guy. I don't know how much time you spend on Immortal and Deity games these days (probably not much since if anyone is entitled to SP burnout it's you) but one thing I've been taught recently is that HR becomes much less powerful in the jump from Immortal to Deity. Basically the rationale is that on Deity non-financial non-river cottages aren't ever worth working if it means you have a make a MP unit to do it.

Diety does not count for anything. It was made to be unwinnable so it is extremely unbalaced. (It should be noted that it is not unwinnable. Check out Obsolete's IND Diety series if you have doubts.)

[Cyneheard]

Basically the rationale is that on Deity non-financial non-river cottages aren't ever worth working if it means you have a make a MP unit to do it.

My take on that:
In most Deity-level games, you're not terribly likely to win a war if it happens before Rifles. So the MP unit is essentially a worthless hammer sink; that's far less true in an MP game where military is highly valued. Also, maintenance costs are a lot higher on Deity than at lower levels, even Monarch, so the MP unit and the pop are eating a lot more of the commerce being generated by the non-Fin, non-river cottage. The cottage doesn't really pay its investment costs until it becomes a village! That's just a little too long to wait.
I don't think that really removes the case for heavy use of HR (especially on Noble), as much as making it clear that a farmer's gambit Deity game is...different.

Noble: 75% Distance Maintenance, 70% Number of Cities, and 50% unit cost. The military unit's cost: 0.5gpt. If the pop is also 0.5gpt, before those deductions, then we're paying 0.8gpt to fund the new cottage. Instant cash profit. And the archer's not a bad unit to have, either.
Deity: 100% everywhere. So 1.5gpt in costs: Simply paying off the losses of working the 2/0/1 cottage takes 10t of a hamlet, and then there's the 25h cost to pay for. Still, the key cost is definitely the MP unit. A new city may cost an arm and a leg (especially because of its effects on every other city), but the new pop doesn't really.

[athlete4life10]

Thanks for the comments Sullla. There's definitely interest here to read your write up. I simply needed a break from PB2.

Your thread is pretty hard to get through the first 150 pages or so from a competing players perspective. Combine that with all the end game drama and I just needed a breather before I tried to continue with this game.

I do think I've nailed down how you managed to get through the other players threads so quickly and while I haven't read the others yet apart from a couple of pages (and Jowy's) I'm willing to bet there's not nearly as much detail in our threads as there is in yours. I actually have to sit and read for a good few minutes just to get through a page whereas I can normally skim through a few pages pretty quickly. It does make for a very educational read though!