The Dark arts - C&D Master Thread

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Is CFC simply not whipping? It seems they would be losing pop, not gaining. Maybe the Spanish really are that weak.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Isn't our high approval rating partially a function of having several new (small) cities with a high happy cap? That's probably padding a few percentage points to the tally. But I agree, it's a good stat to have a lot of leeway in. Just as our life expectancy shows that we've built a wide empire and gathered a lot of health resources (with HG helping too), having a lot of happiness resources isn't hurting our approval rate at all. I think both of those stats feed back in to the wide gap in land area we hold over the average rival. We have a lot of good tiles in play and it bears out in the demographics in many categories.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

My worry is, who is that person with the 193 crop yield, and what is their GNP?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

CFC has the highest known pop of neighbors. That leaves only CivFR as the alternative. I'd guess CFC for now, as CivFR went vertical in two cities early on, and this has likely cost them in expansion.

[Sullla]

The high approval rate comes from having 6 different happy resources connected. We haven't seen any other teams with more than 2 luxuries. Apolyton was a really common example:



Everyone has gold, and most teams have one other resource of some kind. We have gold, gems, silks, spices, wines, and ivory. There's tons of vertical room to do lots of whipping, drafting, or whatever we want.

[kjn]

No, it's not because we have many developing cities. Right now, the only size 1 city we have is Ditchdigger - everything else is size 4 or larger (with the exception of the just-whipped Eastern Gem Dealers). Our average city size is 6, more than any other team than CivFr.

It's CFC that is the current rival best in food - just checked APTmod. I think the difference there is that they have plenty more flood plains to work - they have at least 15 compared to our 10 (of which one is unworked this turn). On the other hand, they got shafted on happiness resources compared to us.

[kjn]

Well, that's a whipfest. Univers just whipped away 22 score (9 pop) in 4 2-pop and one 1-pop whip. They have 50 total pop right now.

No idea what they are up to, might be something for Scooter to investigate. They did finish a classical tech last turn, so one possibility is that they have researched Code of Laws and just ORG-whipped a bunch of courthouses. We should be able to see that in their EP generation next turn.

[Sullla]

Those are 100% courthouse whips. They definitely teched Code of Laws and then whipped out their unique building rathauses. (Remember they are playing as Holy Roman Empire with Exp/Org leader Mehmed.) For whatever reason, less experienced players always seem to think this is an amazing combo, grabbing HRE and then rushing rathauses as soon as possible everywhere.

Fair warning: get whatever data you can from the graphs now, because we'll likely lose chart visibility with UniversCiv very soon.

[T-hawk]

For whatever reason, less experienced players always seem to think this is an amazing combo, grabbing HRE and then rushing rathauses as soon as possible everywhere.

It IS pretty damn good and a better investment than our ballyhooed missionaries. Those rathauses are about 6gpt/60h plus the EP compared to 1gpt/40h of missionary. Even just the difference between a rathaus and a regular courthouse amounts to 2gpt/60h, better than our missionaries.

You've had an opinion before on combining a doubler trait with a UB. ... "Korea ... you could do Fin/Phi with Elizabeth to get cheap seowons. It would be a pretty strong option."

As for the whipping, we've been full of ourselves all along for doing it so solidly and consistently, how can we slam another team doing the same?

[kjn]

You can't fight in here! This is the cloakroom!

Anyway, I grabbed all the APTmod graphs I could get now for Univers, though I imagine we will have visibility on them for a few more turns. But now I can do the analysis at my leisure later on about how Univers opened their first 110 turns.