Cornflakes Goes Classical ... or Quantum?!

[Cornflakes]

   

Machinery spiked us up to 118 max tax from 88, so net +30. Breakeven research is now a 150bpt.

Scooter finished Aqueduct at his capital so there is a race for Hanging Gardens. It looks like a couple forests disappeared so he may win this race. But I’ll get at least 200 failgold which will then get run through my academies.

[Cornflakes]

Scooter beat me to Hanging Gardens by 1 turn. My consolation prize is 254 failgold (yay Organized Religion + stone bonuses) which is slightly more than 2 turns of max tax. And I know that Scooter shopped a couple forests for it so it was not without cost to him.

[coldrain]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I'm curious about your choice to have so many lumbermills within your capital BFC? Wouldn't chopping have been beneficial in the early game and then build cottages everywhere? Of course, those lumbermills look really nice with bureaucracy too. 

Health bonus seems useful as well, now that I took a closer look.

[Cornflakes]

With a classical era start and lumber mills moved to Metal Casting in CtH, they are unlocked almost immediately. So the choice is chop for 30 hammers, build a cottage, and then get production by whipping off the cottage, or build the lumbermill and get production from the lumbermill. Long term the cottage will come out ahead in commerce. But short term I can convert the production back into commerce via Wealth. And since I have 2 academies I get a very efficient conversion of Wealth into beakers. And since I have production from my lumbersmills, I keep my pop high instead of whipping off of the cottages … especially useful when each city has only 1 food resource.

I have chopped one forest per city in order to rush the Granary without whipping it. Then I have been lumber milling the rest of the forests.

My MFG is now 109 vs rival best 67, or 1.4 pops whipped per turn … and this with 3 of my cities newly founded and just barely finished their granaries and working only 1 lumber mill each. My max tax gold rate is really double the rival best Scooter, and at max research I am 20-30 GNP higher than Scooter despite his culture per turn being be at least 20-30 higher than mine.

[Cornflakes]

Commodore bulbed Machinery which neatly counters my Maces. He then chopped MoM in his tundra border city. Overall I concur with his choice. He is commerce constrained due to his lack of rivers so it makes sense that he would convert the Great Engineer to 1000 beakers and then spend the hammers for the wonder. I still can’t believe that Scooter chose to rush the Great Library at most 2 turns before researching Calendar … which he could have researched 2 turns earlier by slotting it ahead of Literature.

So a maces offensive is off the table before it was even an option. I don’t want to take out Yuri since his border tension is a counterweight against Scooter. And Scooter is too far away across a jungle for the logistics of a maces attack. So upwards and onwards through the tech tree it is!

I have enough gold banked to hit HBR (already 90% researched) + Iron Working (also 90% researched) + Guilds in 6 turns. I left both the prerequisite techs a sliver short of completion over the last 2 turns to give myself extra time to confirm my next tech target. I’ll carry max overflow off both. Instead of Guilds I could target Music also in 6 turns. And in fact I can carry enough overflow forward off of HBR > IW > Aesthetics > Literature that I can 1-turn Music if the Artist is still available when I get there … otherwise dump the overflow into Guilds. Literature would be nice to have anyway for Heroic Epic so I’m leaning that way.

A 3rd option I’m considering is Paper for University of Sankore, followed by bulb-boosted Education (cheap PHI universities + stone-boosted Oxford in my Bureau-cap). UoS will give me a leg up on Spiral Minaret due to the comparative value of having both vs. someone just rushing to get Spiral Minaret. Then of course there’s the Apostolic Palace … and all the temples + monasteries (I have 6-8 already due to culture and happiness needs, and get double production of both from my traits).

Decisions, decisions!

[Cornflakes]

Scooter spent a turn of Anarchy revolting into Hereditary Rule. Two people researched Construction on the same turn, meaning those must be Commodore and Yuri. My guess is that Commodore is going for Engineering with all speed for Pikes and road movement for defense. He has probably the largest natural land area after cutting off Scooter from the blob to the west and therefore has incentive to play for the long game. Yuri is tight on room and must be felling squeezed by Scooter and is getting Catapults either defensively or offensively.

   

I have a settler on the map headed northwest to YELLOW DOT, and another in production northeast for WHITE DOT. Workers on the way to chop granaries and begin improving tiles. YELLOW will get a bunch of grassland farms that I'll later pave over with watermills wherever legal. WHITE has a floodplains and can share the cows so it will go straight to watermills.

I don't see a Knights attack succeeding and therefore I also am planning for the longer game. I will dump my overflow into Theology for Apostolic Palace first (7T build) followed by Paper for University of Sankore (6T). After HBR completes I'm planning to build a couple HA both to flash at my neighbors and show them I'm not skimping on Military tech, and because they make good mobile military police with HR and I'm pushing the happy cap already in many cities.

Tentatively I'm aiming now aiming for Rifles > Cavalry > with my tech plan. Nukes are just too far behind the naval techs which have no immediate benefit. I can reach Cavalry as quickly as Astronomy, let alone Physics > Artillery for the next best military unit > Rocketry for a 18str gunpowder unit > Electricity > Fission ... yeah, I'll die to Cavalry/cannon myself before I reach Nukes if I don't first grab Cavalry. As you can see in the GPP bar at the top of the screen, I added an engineer into the mix at Stoichiometry for a chance at rushing Taj Mahal since I'll be picking up Nationalism along the way. I'm also skipping Shwedagon Paya now that I've decided to pursue the religious wonders via Theocracy, and have to pick up Philosophy on the way to Nationalism anyway. Those hammers will be better invested in Apostolic Palace and UoS.

   

   

Despite Scooter landing Hanging Gardens with 11 cities, I maintain a healthy food lead even though I have 4 fewer cities. According to the Victory screen I have 32% of world pop compared to rival best at 24% ... meaning I have 14 pop more than rival best (56 compared to 42). I am maintaining the #1 demographics position in all stats. My negative imports/exports is likely a function of Scooter/Yuri nuking their trade routes with the war declaration and therefore I'm giving both of them routes. I'm not too worried about it.

[RefSteel]

By empirical I mean derived experimentally, as opposed to theoretical being derived from principles. And really all scientific theories are a mixture of both, converging on a more and more accurate understanding of reality.

Ah - makes sense; I'd imagine that all scientific theories would have to have a combination of experimental and theoretical origins.

Annnnd I'll spoiler the rest again for length.

In recent years there has been a shift such that instead of measuring the speed of light (empirical), the speed of light is now defined with a specific value as a physical constant (theoretical). And instead of measuring Avogadro's number (empirical), Avogadro's number is now defined with a specific value as a physical constant (theoretical). And the defined physical constants are then used to refine the precision of the units of measurement.

Are you saying nobody is still attempting to measure the speed of light? (Avogadro's number isn't a physical constant, but an arbitrary number, or rather a derived number relating atomic masses (which - like the speed of light - people are still measuring in various ways) to an arbitrary mass unit, the gram.) Certainly we've got so many sufficiently-agreeing measurements that we can very confidently use these numbers to refine (and define) other things, but that's been true for a long time, and experiments are still continuing. Also, experimental results for the speed of light line up extremely well with the number derived from Maxwell's equations, so it's another of those derived-both-theoretically-and-empirically things! The recent change you're talking about has just been in the way we define commonly-used units like the kilogram and the meter, without changing their practical value. The change was made because the previous definitions of these units were based on measuring specific individual objects kept under guard in a building in France, and it's better to define a universally-used unit a bit more universally than that - because the whole point of having common-use units, arbitrary numbers that they are, is communication! Thus:

Why define the speed of light "c" as 299,792,458 meters per second (NIST) with 9 significant digits? Why not define the speed of light c as "1.00000000 Lightspeed"?

We do both! Units are arbitrary as long as you're careful to use the same system for each calculation, so we use the ones that are convenient: Sticking a decimal point and a bunch of zeroes in front of each number on a speedometer would be silly, but when actually doing mathematical calculations for which it is helpful, theoretical physicists do set e.g. c = 1 "Planck length" per "Planck time." And yes, this makes one "Planck time" an absurdly small number of seconds: A billion billion billion of them would still pass far too swiftly for us to notice. (American or British billions; either way.) But it's really convenient for certain calculations in quantum physics apparently - as the lecture you attended suggests!

the Photon is to Light Energy as Gallon is to Mass. And yes I understand that gallon is not a normal unit of measure for mass. But compare a gallon of water to a gallon of sand, and then use that analogy to consider a photon of infrared light vs. a photon of ultraviolet light. Or another analogy might be...

Photon : Light Energy :: Mole : Mass

So, it would actually be nearer the truth to say "Photon : Light Energy :: Molecule : Mass" though that would still be an extremely flawed analogy. A photon is in no way a unit of energy: Each photon of blue light carries about twice as much energy as each photon of near-infrared light, and each interacts completely differently. The Webb telescopes NIRCAM can detect incredibly-faint infrared light, but can't "see" blue light at all. Your eyes are the reverse: On a dark night, you can spot blue light at astonishing distances, but even if you're bathed in so much infrared energy that it actually heats up your body and you have to move away, you can't see the light that's carrying that energy: There's way more total energy in the photons interacting with your eyes than in the little flash of blue you were able to see, but photon interactions depend on how much energy is carried by each photon, which differs from one photon to the next, depending on how they originated.

Thus: A bucket might contain a gallon of water, comprising absurdly large numbers of water molecules. A beam of blue light might convey a joule of light energy, which upon interacting with electrons or other subatomic particles would do so as an absurdly lage number of blue photons. You could pour out half the water, leaving half a gallon, or reflect or absorb away half the light, leaving half as much remaining light energy, and if you keep separating it out bit by bit, you can eventually (in principle) get down to just one water molecule or just a single photon. But if you attempt to divide either one farther by the same means, it doesn't work: You end up with either one molecule (or photon) or none. One of the places the analogy falls down is that you can divide your water molecules by pouring energy into them through a chemical reaction (e.g. electrolysis) - thereby getting oxygen and hydrogen, which, if you get them into a bucket together at familiar-to-us-humans temperatures, may spontaneously explode, releasing the extra energy, and "turn back" into water. But if you want a blue photon to "turn into" photons of different colors with the same energy, you have a problem. Nothing you do will turn your beam of blue light infrared. To get IR light out of it, you first have to absorb the blue light, turning it into a different kind of energy, and then use that energy to emit IR light separately.

And bringing this back to the Civ4 game, the above thoughts played into the naming of my 5th and 6 cities of "No Duality" and "It's A Wave": The photon as unit of measure of sorts rather than a physical particle, and thus light as a wave and not a wave/particle duality.

You can debate about the word "duality" - it's probably more accurate to just say, "Light doesn't work like any of the things we're familiar with from our macroscopic world, like particles and waves," though in some respects it's something like each. But light is absolutely not just a wave. For example, photons have momentum: We've actually used solar sails to drive some of our spacecraft, using mirrors to reflect sunlight. You might think e.g. ocean waves can have momentum if your experience of the ocean is at the beach and you've watched surfer or picked up driftwood, but this effect results from the interaction of the ocean waves with gravity and the slope of the continental shelf. Ultimately, it's still just a case of the waves going up and down - driftwood and surfers can't reach any further inland on a wave than the water laps onto the beach. And out at sea, you can't sail a ship or a submarine with a "wave sail" - you have to harness the wind directly. By contrast, the distance a solar sail can "push" you is limited only by the fact that at some point, since the number of solar photons that can reach your solar sail decreases in proportion to the square of your distance from the sun, you're getting too little of a "push" at a time to make this a practical form of propulsion.

And back to the game(ish) - with States of Matter, what about plasma? Well, I assume scooter's talking about the three (wait for it!) Classical states of matter!

Besides, familiar stuff like water doesn't have a plasma state: Water molecules (or any molecules) in a plasma stop being molecules and just fly around wildly as free electrons and atomic nucleii all bouncing off each other wildly until they cool down enough for chemistry to even apply.

[Cornflakes]

We founded Christianity and I carried a full turn of overflow into Apostolic Palace making it a 6-turn build. Meanwhile I’ve now completed HBR and Iron Working which gave a nice boost to the power graph, along with a couple more Phalanxes a dna longbow for the newest border cities. Unit expenses have climbed in recent turns along with supply for the garrisons of the newest cities, but that is temporary and just means when the two new cities are settled they will be net positive for the economy.

Paper is scheduled to complete on the same turn as I finish the AP in the capital, so it can roll right into UoS. I will have enough time to pick up Construction before Paper. Got to keep up with the neighbors in military tech and not just get lost in economy! I’ll have my first HA completed next turn which both Commodore and Yuri will be able to see.

[Cornflakes]

Merry Christmas!

[shallow_thought]

Merry Christmas! 

I am still following this thread, just haven't had the bandwidth to comment intelligently. Thanks for all the reporting so far.