Misty Shades of Grey [SPOILERS]

[Aurorarcher]

To be honest, I think my knowledge came pretty much from civilopedia (not sure if I even settled GM):

[RefSteel]

Yup - but that can be deceptive: When you go to Civilopedia from the main menu, it shows the "normal" values for everything - e.g. 40 beakers for Fishing in BtS, and 1fpt + 6gpt for settled GM in both - but when you check it from in-game with a save actually loaded, it shows the correct information for that game, taking world size, difficulty, and yes, buildings (so long as they affect your entire civ) into account. So Fishing might show as 63 beakers, and in a Sidar game, the GM specialist appears as above. To confirm this, I started a game in BtS, added Sistine Chapel to my city via Worldbuilder, then checked the Civilopedia, and...

...no, GMs do not normally generate culture. That's the Sistine effect showing up.

[Aurorarcher]

I knew the beaker stuff (and hammers) but didn't know the pedia updates other stuff like that. Thanks, Ref. Now that I think of it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

[Aurorarcher]

T73. Just settled my 5th city, mack is still, same with Dave/Cairo. Some other news:



I'm going to settle this one for another 10.5 gpt. Or then I will save it up for later... to bulb something cool. At the moment I could bulb HBR (418 beakers). That could actaully be very useful. Hmm, need to think about this. Certainly GA at this point is useless. Of course bulbing is way better but I think short term profit is going to be important here. I have one warrior with 10 xp so that's the next shade coming up. I am going to revolt to Nat/App now though, need warriors soon. I was able to avoid putting any hammers to warriors during my Pacifism trip. This shows in demos, where I am last in power. I am getting TRs to Dave soon, we opened borders and traded maps. So I was able to see his way of handling the start:



His cities are 6, 6, 6, 2 (the one furthest right). The cities are very close together.

My empire (sorry about all the signs, I was too lazy to re-load the save and remove all the signs so yeah...):

[Aurorarcher]

Well, we got 2nd turn today so quickly so I didn't have much of time to think. I decided to settle the GM; long-termly that was a foolish play (only worth ~400 g if the game last say 40 more turns) but short-term it was the right play. Now saving gold with full research.

[Mardoc]

Well, we got 2nd turn today so quickly so I didn't have much of time to think. I decided to settle the GM; long-termly that was a foolish play (only worth ~400 g if the game last say 40 more turns) but short-term it was the right play. Now saving gold with full research.

Personally I think it was the right call. 400 gold is approximately 500 beakers, after all, plus you get food out of it (which makes your next Great Person easier to get), plus you get to put those beakers into anything you want rather than being restricted to only HBR. So they also help your snowball.

And there's always the chance the gold buys you a good result from an event, on top .

Might have been a different story if you had a way to cash the Merchant in for a trade mission.

[Aurorarcher]

400 gold -> 500 beakers? Care to elaborate? Or do you say approx. 500 because of prereqs (+20 %, so that makes it 480)?

I actually had a small chance for a trade mission. I have OBs with Dave now but I was a bit afraid I couldn't really bring the GM there safely. Plus he could've just declared war and I'd have lost 4c from TRs (not to mention the GM). Not sure how he would've reacted to seeing my GM arrive. Actually, now that I think more of it, there was one spot on our border where I could've sneaked my GM to his city without him even noticing it! Now thinking back I probably should've considered that option more... I don't remember how much cash a trade mission gives but I do remember it depends on the distance from my cap + the size of the foreign city. Not sure how much a size 6 city, 9 tiles away from my cap, would've netted. Certainly not more than, say, 500 gold?

[Aurorarcher]

I did a bit of research on XML (I'm a total noob at this) and found:

<iBaseTrade>500</iBaseTrade>
<iTradeMultiplier>200</iTradeMultiplier>

So I guess the minimum is 500 gold? And then there is a multiplier of 200 (no idea what that means here to be honest...).

[Aurorarcher]

Soon getting my 2nd shade, hopefully, the warrior is at 15 xp and one barb warrior is coming my way...

Some thoughts of the moment:

God King is starting to cost me a lot in city maintenance. Or more like the lack of City States. As I am currently only doing full science I get +10 gpt and +9 hpt because of God King. While saving gold I'd get +24 gpt due to GK. City maintenance is now 26 gpt (17 for number of cities and 9 for distance). City states would save about 16 gpt so that's more than I am getting from God King... though those hammers come in handy as well and I'm likely getting another merchant (shade) soon as I just said. Once I settle another merchant I will be getting +14 gpt. Of course the more I settle cities the more the city maintenance will grow and the more expensive it'll be to stick with GK. Eventually I need to switch, and that might come quite soon. I'm still at Pacifism because I haven't built any warriors in ages. Maybe I should, the top power is 63K while I have 36K...  . Revolting to Nat/App would be perfect to do when switching to City States at the same time.

[The Black Sword]

Great Merchant trade mission gets you 500 + 200*T

where T = the value of a trade route the target city has with your capital. If you're at peace for a while, they generally get a 2c trade route to your capital so it would be worth 900g. If you were at war recently then they generally get a 1c trade route and you'd get 700g. Further multipliers like harbours, intercontinental bonus and city size can get you even more.