Epic 48- The Absent-Minded Professor - Reports and Discussion

[Kukulcan]

It looks like you've identified most of your mistakes yourself. 20 workers only?

Yeah, I just checked: 18 workers when France attacked (and they captured two on the initial turn).

I've learned it's better to expand and found as much cities as you can instead of stopping at OCN. You suffer from a little more corruption, but that is more than compensated for by the higher unit support and the better chances to have access to resources (coal, rubber...).

Seeing you next Epic...

-Kylearan

Well, that certainly was true here, at least for the coal. I could have gotten a lot of land in the tundras north of the core if I had just sent settlers there: that area was very slow to be settled. From reading other reports, it sounds like I'd also have been short aluminium (b/c I didn't expand northward) come the modern ages.

[Dark Savant]

Here's a late report from shadowland, as I didn't quite finish the game in time, although I otherwise strictly held to Epic rules. (That's a pattern common to me -- I have this tendency to ALMOST finish things!) I still have my Epic 36 final save and log, maybe I'll report on that someday ...

I founded at the start site. I spent 10 minutes deciding whether or not to move, but this tends pays off poorly if you're not expansionist and not playing RaR.

I popped a settler in 3300 BC and a city in 2590 BC. This didn't help THAT much, though, as I didn't take the time to move the settler to one of the prime city locations and the popped city was in an awful location. I also got a couple early techs from huts.

Since this was just Monarch, I decided to make a play for multiple ancient wonders; the more you build, the easier it gets to build more, as you often end up killing the cascade dead if you do this. I actually delayed building the Pyramids until I had a good number of cities, but still got it. The only other ancient wonder I managed to get was the Mausoleum; I was two to four turns short on the Colossus and the Great Library and the Hanging Gardens (the AI offered Monarchy for Monotheism). That was a heck of a lot of shields flushed down the toilet!

I didn't realize that the barbs were set to raging. Too lazy to look at the map settings, I guess. I was unable to claim all the land to the west because of this, even though I had a city blocking the choke in that area. The barbarians would only sack my size-1 cities there occasionally, and I couldn't be bothered to build a military sufficient for handling the barbs. Too busy buildling libraries, no time for military I don't really need.

I researched Code of Laws -> Philosophy -> free Republic, with the Hittite Republic born in 1250 BC. This was so obscenely early I got a massive tech lead I never relinquished; by launch my lead was about one and a half ages. I could tell, because of the usual AI requests to trade maps with me putting in a whole tech. Yeah right. I built every single Medieval wonder; I even sidetracked to pick up Shakespeare's Theater just to build it in a border city, trying to get a single tile of ex-jungle from the French (I was really worried about having coal, because not getting it would make the late game SUCK under the variant rules). It never happened, even though this was the city site which had coal AND rubber (I unknowingly plopped a settler right next to both); the disputed tile had no resources. Smith's is worth the extra 4 turns of research. Magellan really isn't, but I wanted to sweep the Middle Ages wonders again.

I was never attacked by anything other than barbs, and in fact the entire game was completely peaceful other than Rome being eliminated by an AI dogpile. I did build military sufficient for a defensive war; well, actually, much of that was Knights Templar, but that was still sufficient for me to feel comfortable even though I couldn't make emergency military swaps. I never had big happiness problems either; three lux resources were easy to get by normal settling, and Sistine + Bach + occasionally 10% luxury tax handled everything even when the AI's didn't offer lux-for-lux trades, which happened several times anyway. I did poach a fourth lux on the other continent after Rome got killed (typical for Civ 3 Rome, sheesh), but I could never get a fifth without any other AI-AI wars!

Launch achieved in AD 1818. (I was considering sidetracking for the Genetics wonders, but I was trying to get this done in time, which I didn't.) Surprisingly easy, considering the variant restrictions.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I still have my Epic 36 final save and log, maybe I'll report on that someday ...

[...]the entire game was completely peaceful other than Rome being eliminated by an AI dogpile.

That seemed to be the common theme for all games this time. Some suffered a lot of wars, some none; but Rome managed to get eliminated in almost every game it seems.

-Kylearan

[Dark Savant]

One little bit I forgot: I amused myself in the late stages of the game by completely exploring the map using a carrier holding a couple of fighters. I explored every bit of the map myself; no need for those map trading or stealing shenanigans (though I do like how you can steal maps early in RaR).

Sullla mentioned how he thought the new C3C Forbidden Palace behavior was broken. I think they changed its behavior because the AI would usually build it in a core city, and so the change benefits the AI more than the humans. Too bad they couldn't instead have the AI make an intelligent FP placing decision. It really can't be that hard to program, especially after a few years of expert players had refined strategies behind the game. I'm ok with this if it turns out the Civ 4 AI is superior, however.

[T-hawk]

Secondly, the Forbidden Palace was changed from affecting distance corruption to Optimal City Number only, which explains why so many players put it right next to their capital. So now you can put the FP anywhere and it does the same thing - yeah, that's a BIG strategic improvement.

Should I worry about FP placement? The FP in C3C, as far as I know, increases OCN and alters rank, but not distance, corruption.

Actually, it's the other way around. In C3C, the Forbidden Palace affects only the distance part of corruption. It does not affect the rank of any cities (the "Nth-closest city to the palace" factor.) Soren Johnson has said that this was the way it was intended to work all along but it wasn't coded correctly in Civ3 and PTW.

Now, once you have the FP built anywhere, the optimal-number-of-cities value is increased by a factor of 3/8 for your entire civilization. I'll spare everyone the mathematical details, but it's roughly equivalent to having three-fourths of a extra free courthouse in every city. For a typical civilization, 70% to 80% of the total value of the FP derives from this increased-OCN factor.

Therefore, it's almost always best to build the FP anywhere ASAP, and of course ASAP means in your first ring. This is the source of the conventional wisdom that the FP location doesn't matter at all. That works well enough as a general guideline, but isn't 100% true.

If you have a spare Great Leader available to rush the FP, you _will_ get better results by doing so in a second- or third-ring city. In fact, the farther from the capital, the better, as long as the cities in the FP's area aren't past 2x OCN and totally unsalvageable. (And if you _do_ have cities beyond 2x of the juiced OCN values in C3C, you're a stone's throw away from domination anyway.)

Finally, there's another calculation for the FP city itself. The FP subtracts 70% from the corruption cap for the city that it's in. The normal base for the corruption cap is 90% in C3C, so the FP city itself is never more than 20% corrupted. To this, you can apply the standard effect that a courthouse and police station each subtract another 10% from the cap. So the final result is that an endgame FP city always has a corruption cap of 0%, making it a shield powerhouse. This makes it _appear_ that the FP city affects city rank, because it appears to set itself to rank 0, but this 0 is actually reached through an entirely different mechanism.

[Sullla]

Thanks for clarifying that for us T-Hawk. Even if the Forbidden Palace is now "fixed", I have to say I vastly preferred the way it worked back in 1.29f Civ3. I clearly remembering the placement of the FP being one of the most important strategic decisions that one would have to make in each game. If it's now been changed to have the effect of "roughly equivalent to having three-fourths of a extra free courthouse in every city", well, that guts out an enormous strategic element in my eyes. (And as if optimal city numbers weren't too high already in Conquests! Sheesh - talk about a cure being worse than the disease. )