[SPOILERS] scooter's PB53

[Charriu]

Your peace time trade modifier increases by 3% every turn during peace capping at 150%. So you reach 100% after 34 turns.

[pindicator]

Your peace time trade modifier increases by 3% every turn during peace capping at 150%. So you reach 100% after 34 turns.

Dang it, I was too slow!

[scooter]

So I opened this thread with the intent to say that I think I solved the mystery, and I found that all 3 of you solved it in the last 30 minutes . Cornflakes settled an island on his new turn, which means that's an international IC route. This resulted in the following two pictures. The first is taken from my capital, the second is my next city.








Aha. So, I get a 3c route now because it's an island city. I get 100% for capital + traits, which is what was getting me to 2c. The IC route gets another 100%, which gets me to 3c. However, I'm only 87% at sustained peace. That leads me to believe that when that increases 13% more (or in 5T), this route will be worth 4c. I think this means that all of Cornflakes' other cities are only worth 2c, and I'm guessing the game defaults to domestic routes when the international routes are not more lucrative. In short: Cornflakes declaring war to scout will end up costing me quite a bit of commerce!


This would also explain why Cornflakes is profiting. His routes are normally 1c + 25%, so 87% puts him into the 2c range, while I'm still 13% short of 3c. Ironically, I'm about 5T away from settling my own island city, which I think will continue to drown out the rest of Cornflakes' mainland cities for quite awhile?


Interestingly, I think this means I need to change Protective to 0 for a couple turns. I may have to retroactively change the last few turns since signing OB. I believe I would be getting 2c routes nearly everywhere even without the trait right now because Cornflakes' mainland cities would be worth 2c anyway. That's a side effect I hadn't considered. I suppose Protective would be worth more like 2c because I wouldn't be able to fill every city with his routes. I'll try to figure it out precisely and update my running tally accordingly. This may actually cause FIN to catch PRO faster than previously expected. We'll see. Am I parsing this correctly? Please shout at me if I'm missing something.

[Charriu]

You are correct on all of these

[scooter]

Cool. To go a step further, I believe that if I were to sign OB with Commodore right now, I would immediately get a 4c route to his freshly settled island and a 3c route to all his other cities because we've never been at war, and therefore our sustained peace should clear the 100% threshold, which I assume starts accumulating from T0, not from the turn you meet. However, those mainland 3c routes might disappear for awhile when I settle an island city of my own which will be worth 3c. At that point, it would be quite awhile before his mainland trade routes were worth anything to me because all of my cities would just collect the domestic 3c island route.


Anyway, signing with him would probably massively help his economy, so that's not going to happen. It seems to me that OB with a non-Protective player will often but not always benefit them more than you.

[sunrise089]

I demand complicated math to update/correct the FIN PRO comparison!

[Charriu]

It gets even more complicated. All of those calculation assume a base trade value of 1, which only gets doubled with 100% trade modifier to 2c.

But for example a base value of 1.1 would only need 82% trade modifier to reach 2c.

But I would need to check the implementation again to be sure I'm right about that

[sunrise089]

What gives higher base values than 1?

[pindicator]

What gives higher base values than 1?

I believe it depends on if the city you're getting a trade route from has population greater than 10.  I've seen reference to distance between cities before but I don't think I've ever seen that affect a trade route in my games.

[scooter]

Turn 41

Another turn, still no religion founded. Guaranteed at least a coin flip. I mean, I guess that's not true. I'm guaranteed at least a D6 roll should the wildest coincidence in Civ4 history occur, but probably a lot better odds than that.






My not-so-secret neighbor finally said hello, and he immediately asked for Open Borders. I thought about it, and then remembered this was a brain-dead obvious no. The last thing I'd like is to let him scout out my reinforcement line if he's thinking aggressively.






Cairo is actually the person I'm most worried about. He's got some real units as evidenced by his TBS raze, and he made peace immediately, so he likely kept all those units. I've got a CG/Drill Archer, C1 Chariot, and a warrior in there for now. I'm going to sim out a few scenarios and see how much more I need for a reasonable defense. Another Protective Archer is on its way now, and I swapped to a Spear here and would theoretically be able to whip it 1 turn after hitting size 2 if its looking necessary prior to the work boat. I'm really hoping I get lucky and Buddhism pops here to give me more border awareness. I'm vaguely tempted to war-peace him in an effort to ensure I've got some time, but maybe I shouldn't give him any ideas.


The reason I'm so paranoid here is I've locked him out of the middle. He apparently just finished punishing TBS for doing the same exact thing, so why not do it again? Being the top middle and bottom middle are real mixed bags. The upside is I have access to everything. The downside is... I have access to everything. I think Bigfoot is the literal center of the map. The side players can still access the spokes, but he's going to get nothing but a crab/wine spot unless he hurries up and loads units on a galley to take that barb city. I think he'd be foolish to attack me instead of building Imperialistic settlers, but that's easy to say where I'm sitting.






Cornflakes settled this spot on the island. That's good news. I'm going to settle on the far east side of this island on one of those flat grassland tiles. I'm hopeful the fact that we're further apart means we can peacefully coexist on this island. I won't even pump culture or anything - I just want a chill Wang Kon paradise city, and this is definitely that. I can probably get Moai in here actually. Two hills and a massive food surplus for whip overflow + stone access? That's actually very doable. Every double whip would be worth a net ~45h of overflow into Moai. 4 of those + 7T of stone-adjusted 7hpt would do it, for example.