[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[GermanJoey]

I suppose we might want to lay down how we think various techs look better or worse for our situation compared to normal, with "our situation" meaning our traits and geography, and no consideration given about certain techs being prereqs of others.

Techs that look better than baseline to me:

• Writing - We've got discounted libraries!
  
• Sailing - Water map with islands to settle! Lighthouse for capital and city 2!
  
• Mathematics - we have slow traits, but have lots of trees. Lets chop those damn things down.
  
• Construction - half price Colosseums, Catapults, yada yada yada. On the other hand, we won't be getting a lotta mileage outta the "roads bridge rivers" bonus...
  
• Feudalism - SERFDOM will be crazy important for us, Cha longbows, also we'll want Vassalage until Constitution.
  
• Machinery - Cha Crossbows, Windmills, Watermills. A city around those flood plains could peak out at a crazy-high HPT.
  
• Aesthetics - an early HE would be nice, if we get an 8 Exp unit via barbs; looks like Marble is available to the south.
  
• Monarchy - We apparently have 21352356252535 wine tiles we can build wineries on, on all of which we get a Fin bonus. Might be able to trade some wines for other happy resources? Or sell them? Or just get drunk and cry about our lack of food?
  
• Literature - TGL on a water map, and we do get a discount on libraries.................... that said, there's probably nowhere we can save enough trees to make this a realistic goal tho.
  

Techs that look worse than baseline to me:

• CoL - Caste doesn't look appealing because we don't have any fucking food to feed workshops. We're also slow REXers and so early Courthouses look less appealing. It could be a way to get a religion for OR, though, which could be important if there's a particular wonder we want. (e.g. TGL)
  
• Iron Working - No jungle to chop, no food to work iron mines.
  
• CS - Bureaucracy. For our capital? *breaks into furious laughter*
  
• Engineering - No food for workshops, so the +1h doesn't matter a lick.
  
• Calendar - I see... a single desert incense and a grass dyes. Plus, we're Cha.
  
• Drama - generally the game's most forgettable technology. We actually have a pretty good Globe spot @ City 2, but I just noticed in the changelog that Nationhood is now High Cost (where it used to be No Cost) and also we'll want to be in Emancipation shortly after that comes available anyways.
  

Remember, this is just compared to a "baseline" situation; e.g. I put Engineering in the bottom category, but it's still an incredible important tech.

[GermanJoey]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

[Krill]

Turn 031

Someone has a high GNP, 31. Which is a bit unusual unless someone has hooked up a metal mine already, or is working a couple of seafood tiles in two cities with a trade route researching Pottery with 1.4 modifier? I'm more inclined to believe the latter.




I sent Cavendish to the north because there is a lion in the way if we run straight to the desert for fog busting purposes. We have the turns to run around and get that little patch of fog uncovered, so may as well do it now. Defensive terrain as well, in case there is another barb there. Gilbert is adjacent to the barb lion because I want the XP (still hopeful of getting Gilbert to 4XP).





Avoid growth is on for this turn, it will need to be turned off next turn.





Second city timings: T28: Rusten (EXP/SPI with slavery).
T29: OH/Hitru (IMP), Borsche (EXP).
T30: GKC (Wut? FIN/ORG, what did he do to enable this, he has to have cut corners somewhere).
T31: BeardBeard (PRO/IMP, don't see how he can have a granary), Superdeath (AGG/CHM, same questions as with GKC).

Still no religion. Things are getting dicey, any number of players could have grabbed it so far and made it work well.

[Krill]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

I have a been given the afternoon off by my wife, due to a mix up regarding shifts, so I'll put something together later today. The way civic costs are calculated is explained here. Tl;dr is that the Bureau doesn't scale with map size but making it the only no cost option "fixes that", but it means all of the other civics in that column have to be either low, medium or high cost. Everything else is just guessing the right balance level.

[Krill]

Oh my god, I don't think I've ever been so happy to see a fucking dry corn.

Well, sorry to break it to you, but that is a dry wheat

Math early seems good, and early Currency is always a good idea. What does CoL get us in the near-term, though? Will we really have the hammers to spare for courthouses so early, and will we really be able to expand fast enough to even need them? This is a Huge-size map, right?

Without religion it is not worth rushing IMO, but with a religion it is if we can get it fast enough. Namely, we would have to grab it, and then turn around and grab whatever military techs we needed to not look weak, and rush over to the land bridge (which would be the main beneficiary of court houses). If we were crippled in tech rate, then even if we could grab the religion, we would open ourselves up to a world of pain trying to manage a defense whilst grabbing all this land. We also would have the option to revolt to both Caste and OR for 1 turn of anarchy provided we have 15 cities or fewer: in other words, we could afford to try for a shrine and still have the ability to blitz out another GP for a GA. I can see 18 city sites just on our subcontinent, never mind the islands.

Essentially, Maths into Currency works for us whatever we want to do, and then we can save gold and make the decision later. This is just another option that makes the Maths into Currency plan...tastier.

[Krill]

I suppose we might want to lay down how we think various techs look better or worse for our situation compared to normal, with "our situation" meaning our traits and geography, and no consideration given about certain techs being prereqs of others.


Techs that look better than baseline to me:

• Writing - We've got discounted libraries! - This tech is mandatory to
  
• Sailing - Water map with islands to settle! Lighthouse for capital and city 2!
  
• Mathematics - we have slow traits, but have lots of trees. Lets chop those damn things down.
  
• Construction - half price Colosseums, Catapults, yada yada yada. On the other hand, we won't be getting a lotta mileage outta the "roads bridge rivers" bonus...
  
• Feudalism - SERFDOM will be crazy important for us, Cha longbows, also we'll want Vassalage until Constitution.
  
• Machinery - Cha Crossbows, Windmills, Watermills. A city around those flood plains could peak out at a crazy-high HPT.
  
• Aesthetics - an early HE would be nice, if we get an 8 Exp unit via barbs; looks like Marble is available to the south.
  
• Monarchy - We apparently have 21352356252535 wine tiles we can build wineries on, on all of which we get a Fin bonus. Might be able to trade some wines for other happy resources? Or sell them? Or just get drunk and cry about our lack of food?
  
• Literature - TGL on a water map, and we do get a discount on libraries.................... that said, there's probably nowhere we can save enough trees to make this a realistic goal tho.
  

Techs that look worse than baseline to me:

• CoL - Caste doesn't look appealing because we don't have any fucking food to feed workshops. We're also slow REXers and so early Courthouses look less appealing. It could be a way to get a religion for OR, though, which could be important if there's a particular wonder we want. (e.g. TGL)
  
• Iron Working - No jungle to chop, no food to work iron mines.
  
• CS - Bureaucracy. For our capital? *breaks into furious laughter*
  
• Engineering - No food for workshops, so the +1h doesn't matter a lick.
  
• Calendar - I see... a single desert incense and a grass dyes. Plus, we're Cha.
  
• Drama - generally the game's most forgettable technology. We actually have a pretty good Globe spot @ City 2, but I just noticed in the changelog that Nationhood is now High Cost (where it used to be No Cost) and also we'll want to be in Emancipation shortly after that comes available anyways.
  

Remember, this is just compared to a "baseline" situation; e.g. I put Engineering in the bottom category, but it's still an incredible important tech.

Some important points.

The current tech path is Hunting>AH>Writing. This is set in stone, Writing finishes around eot48. We need a library to pop borders at City 2. Sailing is a 140 adjusted beaker tech that should give us about 6 commerce per turn back by the time we can settle it. We need to work out how we build the settlers by T60, because I'm still struggling to see how we get our fourth city by then. But the point holds, Sailing shoud be useful.

Whether we want to use workshops or not is a moot point. We have almost no river tiles able to use a watermill (we have precisely 7 visible tiles), so it's really a comparison between windmills and workshops. The problem as I see it, is that Serfdom is a lot further away than Caste, and we need to decide what we are doing with great people, even if we want Vassalage, Serfdom and Longbows via 5 improved wines (which, it has to be said, would give us a further 25 commerce and +1 happy). This is really a timing issue in terms of when we want to trigger a GA, how long we need slavery for, when we will need court houses, and longbows

My gut feeling is we need to be in Serfdom, but, and this is a big "But", we can only get into that if we have a local MFG lead or a good standing army.

Construction is a purely defensive measure if we only look at catapults, but as you say, it is the key to building two promo units without civics. I reckon this is more of a want than a need TBH, because the real answer IMO is longbows and Xbows. We also have to have hammer cities with barracks to make any real use out of it (wild whipping with abandon to manage an unseen invasion is not something I want to consider right now).

Engineering is still important due to Castles. We'll need them in coastal cities we think can get boated. They still give trade routes, and frankly, anything that gives us commerce or gold can be considered pretty useful.

Ultimately, our expansion will be slow. The capital is stuck on a 7 turn whip cyle for settlers, we don't have any workers, and city 2 has to double whip a library before it gets a good food surplus (and still has to figure out how to build a lighthouse). So I'd focus on the medium term as commerce is going to exceed our hammer or food output for a while. Any tech that gives us something that does not cost food or hammers, or gives us hammers and food, has a higher value to us. I note that this is Maths (better chops), Currency (trade routes), CoL (free border pops), Monarchy (wineries), and Feudalism (Serfdom cuts down worker requirements and free border pops).

[Krill]

Turn 032

TBW has an opportunity to declare war next turn and move onto our wheat tile. If he does so, we will have a warrior ready to whack him. Joey, you think he'll do it? (I've been wondering if his scout pattern would bring him around this way, once we picked him up a few turns ago I knew it would happen. Haven't said anything because no changes were needed)

Oh yeah, and we found a grass hill sheep under the fog to the north west.





Scout beat the lion easily enough. Main issue is trying to find too more barb animals in the next few turns. That will be down to luck. Next turn we are stuck in a turn split anyway and might need a pause because of it, but the scout moves are fairly obvious to move SE - E and the warrior 2SE (unless we have to attack TBW scout on the wheat). Might be in a turn split for a few turns, actually, if TBW moves NE - N, we have to play T34 after him as well, possibly as far as T38. If TBW moves the scout NE - E and we can attack it, should we? We would have 95% odds of winning and would make 2XP, but is it worth it? I don't think it is, TBH, I think it's wiser to move underneath, or onto the wheat and show him we have the warrior. Joey, really do appreciate your knowledge of the individual on this one.





Please note avoid growth is off (that thing is so easy to miss because usually the interface just kicks me out of the city screen without turning Avoid Growth off).

[Krill]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

The long answer is quite involved. The reasoning is one of those that starts in a completely different area, in this case, cottage pillaging, tech cost scaling and Emancipation being brought forward. Below is the current rule regarding cottage/hamlet/village/town pillaging:

Villages: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission or pillaged. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers)

Towns: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers). Acts as cities. [Identical functionality as forts, for the purposes of rebasing air units, canals, city defense and city attack promotions etc].

So what this means, is that Hamlets and Cottages can still be pillaged into nothing, but Villages can only be removed by being improved over. Towns can get knocked down to Villages but no further (so instead of spending 70 turns to get a cottage back to a Town, it only takes 40 turns, not much of an improvement).

This means that captured cities may well lose city infrastructure (this is something I want to discuss after the game, because we probably want to streamline it a bit and remove randomness) but should not lose tile infrastrucutre that requires turns to regrow. Farms, mines, whatever, these are easily fixable, but to cottages being capturable mean that late game conquests have more commerce avaiable, so tech speed should increase. This is compounded by the tech cost scaling introduction, which lowers the late game tech costs, and suggests that more games should extend being the Rennaisance era, and more games should reach victory conditions such as Space.

Onto Emancipation: This got moved into the Legal civic column, and brought forward to Constitution. It's also free to revolt into, but costs anarchy to revolt out of. Again, players have greater opportunity to fix an economy and to rebuild a tech rate. But the +1 food/-1 commerce to Towns was implemented because without some form of a bonus to the civic itself that limited the opportunity cost of being stuck in the civic longer term. It doesn't matter per se what this long term benefit is, but it is obvious to me that without it Emancipation is still not usable without a definitive plan of how to get out of Emancipation. Emancipation doesn't necessarily speed up the game, but with Free Speech it does give the cottage spam and rush buy economy a longer term opportunity. But with a risk period where Emancipation does not give an economic boost where a civ running it could be invaded.

This puts the Legal Civic Column into an interesting position: All of the civics in this column have a strategic reason to be run. They are not like the Government, Labor or Economy civics, where there is a stepping stone civic (HR, Slavery, Merc) that you want into ASAP because it improves the economy, and out of because thee next bunch of civics are better still. The Legal Civics are like the Religious civics, where you want to pick a civic that fits the strategy you are following at that time.

And so, Vassalage is there for XP in all cities, Bureaucracy is there for the uber capital pushing research, Nationhood is there for quick unit build up and reactivity to others, and Emancipation is there to allow a rebuilt tech output. They are not supposed to be balanced such that any one of these is the "right choice", they need to be balanced such that they are all usable and none of them are invcredibly niche. This also needs to work for various game types (between a 5 player PBEM and a 30 player extravaganza). Some games the civics will be valued differently, but generally it is within the specific game that the civic valuations will be affected by the game state rather than game settings.

Therefore everything else is just finding the right general power level, taking into account the techs that enable the civics. Specifically, Vassalage is almost always available first, but even with a specific tech path, the only other civic available first is Bureaucracy. After that it is Nationhood, then Emancipation. So that weak period that Emancipation has is always going to be able to be exploited by a player running Nationhood unless specifici actiosn are taken before revolting into Emancipation (and dependant on map position, and relative tech, and available MFG and current strength etc etc).

Vassalage got double the unit cost savings. Maybe this was too much of a buff, but really it has to be valued against Emancipation running triple the cottage output. Nationhood had cost increased, because the only way to fit Bureaucracy into this, without giving it additional effects, was to make it scale into a huge map. And making it zero cost does that without changing the core purpose of that civic. Late game Bureaucracy is perhaps not that fantastic in terms of output, but when the saved civic costs go through inflation as well, it makes it a more interesting choice.

Nationhood is perhaps the most swingy of these civics, because the main purposes is to give units, and unless those units are used to take land, there isn't much purpose to it (well, defense from another but you see that is the point of how I am trying to balance the legal civics?)

I'm not saying that this is balanced correctly yet. Perhaps Bureaucracy needs to be no cost with another small buff (ie to city maintenance), and Nationhood needs to be Medium cost. Perhaps Emancipation is broken with the food bonus (although frankly I don't see how because stack the Towns so high and you run out of tiles to use for hammers and you have to run specs, so I think it's self balancing in terms of player recognition and Cash rush penalties. Kremlin times out at Computers, after all).

[Krill]

Joey, I have a question for you: Why is the general unit creation meta in civ 4 based around building units, and not upgrading pre-built units? Why do we focus on building new units and adding them onto a stack, causing an SoD approach, rather than the old mass upgrade strategies that were used in civ 3?



I’ve been looking at the map, and I think we’re going to have significant production problems all game long. I reckon we’re looking at an average of one food resource per city, and not a good food resource at that. I think most cities will cap out at base 20hpt maximum, and that’s with case workshops. What if we just cottaged spammed everything, with the intention to upgrade 8XP units built with Colosseums into gunpowder units? With cheap Stock Exchanges and slightly cheaper Markets, the potential to run Free Speech and get Printing Press, I’m not sure if this stacks up as a better method of…procuring…production during certain parts of the game.



I’m not saying that we will not run workshops, or we aren’t going to try and grab what hammers we can. I’m more focusing on the potential idea of just working as many cottages as we can and eventually capping growth onto hammer tiles. But we can’t get triple promoted gunpowder units unless we upgrade into them: so long as we don’t research Mil Sci, we never obsolete maces or crossbows, so we can upgrade them into red coats at 130 gold/mace or 160 gold/Xbow or pike. 40 production is at best 32 hammers through a forge, which with caste is 8 grass workshops or 4 plains workshops plus 3 grass workshops (we don’t have that many grasslands, most cities would be stuck working plains cottages or plains workshops and plains farms if we were working every tile) and this costs us an additional 8-11 food to work the tiles to get that production…But 130 gold through a stock exchange and market (and obviously a grocer would be nice but I’ll do the calculation without it) is the equivalent to 19 village-turns, or 15 town-turns without any tile enhancing bonuses. What I’m trying to get at, is that I think we will end up trying to stagnate our retarded growth if we try to work hammer tiles, and a straight cottage spam can give us the incidental hammers to build the basic units, and still afford to upgrade what we need, when we need. In this vein, anything that lowers costs could be considered to be giving us hpt (as saved costs means more gold saved which means more upgrades). Then we parlay this into a rush buy economy later on.



The other side to this is we still need to build units. Tl;dr: I think we need to look at the HE in the capital. I can’t see any other cities that are going to help us with unit production in a reasonable timeframe. We also need to transition the capital over to working hill mines anyway (currently thinking after a settler for the copper city and a lighthouse, but that’s just a tentative idea).

[Krill]

Lurkers: Heads up, I can't play T33 until TBW has played, as I am working an early shift tomorrow I am likely to need a pause if TBW does not play in the next 2 hours. Realistically that means I need 8 (in game) hours added to the clock.