The Premise
Recently I've been pushing the idea of a late game SE with :science: powered by scientists and :gold: powered by cottages run under FS/PP. The idea is that late game an SE can simply out-specialize its cities compared to the CE counterparts and as a result at least keep up despite cottages being slightly more efficient per tile. The irony here is that CE and SE trade places when it comes to their financial capital. The SE cottages the hell out of a decent city and the CE farms the hell out of a big food city and runs as many merchant specialists as possible. Both drop WallStreet and there you go ... empire wide :gold:. But for research both economies invert with SE's running as many scientists as possible and CE's supporting as many cottages as possible.

The Setup
Using a save from the same game I just ran a tutorial for I went to town with WB. Out of 20-25 cities I kept 5 production cities as they were. I had one SSC, one Wall street city, one espionage city, and the rest were research cities if possible. I tested SE using Rep/FS/CS/SP/FR and tested CE using both US/FS/EM/FM/FR and US/FS/EM/FM/FR. I did my best to optimize both economies (this took hours ... a lot more than I anticipated). I found out a lot of interesting things about them along the way ...

As for buildings all cities got forge/granary/courthouse/airport/supermarket. All water cities got lighthouses/harbors/custom's houses.
All river cities got levees.
All science cities all got labs/libraries/Universities/Observatories
All production cities got barracks/stables/drydock(if water)/factories/power
All gold cities got banks/grocers/markets
SSC got Oxford
Wallstreet got Wallstreet
Espionage city got all of the EP buildings.

In addition I had to fudge one of the CE cities to try and get it as close to 0 :gold: / turn so it has both financial and research buildings.

I added :health: and :) buildings as necessary although needless to say SE took a lot more than CE so total :hammers: invested were higher on the SE.


First of all here's the early shots of the Super Cities
SE-SSC
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/SE-SSC.jpg

CE-SSC
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/CE-SSC.jpg

SE-WallStreet
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/SE-Wallstreet.jpg

CE-Wallstreet
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/CE-Wallstreet.jpg

As you can see the SSC's are in a virtual dead heat. As for the wallstreet cities the SE is kicking the CE in the nuts. In fact initially I had to run 2 extra merchant cities to support the CE at an 80% slider. Due to that ridiculous Wallstreet city the SE was able to run a 50% slider with 10% culture to mitigate unhappiness.


Test #1: No Research from hammers
The first test I ran had every city producing :culture: to see what the raw research production was. This favored SE since we were not really giving the CE any benefit from it's US. I don't have any good screen shots from this test but the SE handily out-performed the CE. I believe the SE scored just slightly over 2900 :science: / turn while the CE was in the mid 2600s. However what was more instructive was that the SE was running a 50% science slider so I decided to abandon the WallStreet city altogether and turned it into another science city. This actually got the SE to just barely break 3000 :science:/turn For the rest of the tests I ran an SE with no wallstreet city at all. 0 towns period.

Test #2: Add Research from hammers
Things got a lot closer once I changed all of the cities to producing :science: instead of :culture:. CE became far more competitive, although it still couldn't quite catch SE. At this point I had been running CE under FM and I thought to run it under SP. SP yielded more :hammers: which helped in the production of research but it also reduced maintenance costs enough that I was able to eliminate almost all of the CE's extra merchant cities and it was able to run an 80% slider on virtually the Wall Street city alone. I've included screen shots of all three (SE, CE-FM, CE-SP) below

CE-FM
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/CE-FM.jpg

CE-SP
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/CE-SP.jpg

SE
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd99/feralminded/SEvsCE/SE.jpg


So SE wins? Not quite ... first of all the SE required quite a few more buildings to support happiness and food ... this was not accounted for. Second of all if instead of happiness and food buildings like the SE had to build, if the CE had built some markets or grocers in some of its better research cities the CE *might* be able to push up to a 90% slider ... which should push it into a slight lead. I'm not certain about that one but I'd say they would be damned close in any case. But finally this was Ramesses ... who is notably NOT FIN. I counted just shy of 200 tiles on that map which would yield an extra 1 :commerce: under FIN ... which run through the gambit of multiplier buildings and sliders will yield the CE approximately 250 more :science:. Of course here we are building research which may not be realistic.

So the conclusion ... well I think they're damned close when fully optimized but I doubt this is terribly realistic to expect. Regardless I think its very hard to definitely say either is that much better than the other.

Why are you settling scientists instead of building academies?

Why aren't you building gold when Oxford University is running at 80% commerce?

I know that in a SE you can make one super city that will outperform any city in a CE, however, the average city in a CE will outperform the average city in a SE. This is why SE is better for a small empire and CE better for a large one. How you got a SE to outperform a CE on a large scale escapes me. It's just not possible. You screwed the data up somehow. With the slider at only 50% why did you not build markets/grocers in everty city for the CE? Heck...some cities should have banks, and not just the WS city. Your method is dubious, at best.

Seems they're both pretty viable. Really, I think again, it's just a "play the map" case. You could probably get better by cottaging everything, but maybe keep a couple GP farm cities.

Actually, for this empire here, the best thing to see is that at least for this empire, SP really doesn't help enough, especially if you added on Sid's Sushi, for example.

Hey, Guys - check out the trade routes. They're getting shuffled around in a way that favors the SE. Could that be the factor everyone is ignoring?

- good point. The trade routes are worth nearly double for the SE due to the larger population.

One factor that makes no sense is why he made the CE have a sucky wallstreet city...huh? There's absolutely no need to farm Merchant specialists - if you were setting up a specific great person farm (common in a CE) that would be something I could understand, but it's not necessarily the Wall street city.

Second, I'd really like to know a bit more about the actual hammer deficit (in buildings) the SE was running. You're kinda cheating by just worldbuilding in all the unis/banks/etc... there is no way in a real game that you can get all of these. The lack of hammers from US would be very significant in that case. Similarly you lose the ability to buy rush, which can be quite significant (on the other hand you could also account for more total GP throughout the game from the SE - perhaps granting academies proportional to what would be expected). Overall, I'm sorry to say, not impressed with this "test."

However, this certainly made me interested in some sort of new Silly Economy vs. Crazy Economy contest - if we could get enough players. I'm always up for defending the Crazy Economy side.

@Earthling:
What would you do with your Wallstreet city while running 100% science?

Shrines, Corporations, in short. You don't just build Wallstreet in a city with like 8 merchants... Also, it's very rare that you can run 100% science, with things like military costs and inflation (in fact, the OP's example does not have 100% science).

I thought we were discussing the tile development. Shrines and Corporations do not dictate what improvements you build.

Yes, but as the OP mentioned he saw a significant difference when he actually made the Wall Street city into just a regular science city - in other words Wall Street had no beneficial effects on the comparison, and was just causing him to waste a whole city in the CE version. Also, he even suggests there are other "merchant cities" out there? Given all the other simplifications the OP might as well have just turned both sliders to 100%, had no Wallstreet, and look at it from there. Not trying to criticize him though - it's just worldbuilding this comparison is tough and I don't think it's very realistic.

oh he did this in worldbuilder? Wellt that explains it. The problem with the SE is getting enough population to actually make it work. A CE city is at maximum power with 20 pop. The SE city needs 40+ population. How you get that much happy and health bonus is...well...good luck

Yes, but as the OP mentioned he saw a significant difference when he actually made the Wall Street city into just a regular science city - in other words Wall Street had no beneficial effects on the comparison, and was just causing him to waste a whole city in the CE version. Also, he even suggests there are other "merchant cities" out there? Given all the other simplifications the OP might as well have just turned both sliders to 100%, had no Wallstreet, and look at it from there. Not trying to criticize him though - it's just worldbuilding this comparison is tough and I don't think it's very realistic.

Oh really?

I believe the SE scored just slightly over 2900 :science: / turn while the CE was in the mid 2600s. However what was more instructive was that the SE was running a 50% science slider so I decided to abandon the WallStreet city altogether and turned it into another science city. This actually got the SE to just barely break 3000 :science:/turn For the rest of the tests I ran an SE with no wallstreet city at all. 0 towns period.*
*Bold by me
OK SE with no wallstreet city

At this point I had been running CE under FM and I thought to run it under SP. SP yielded more :hammers: which helped in the production of research but it also reduced maintenance costs enough that [B]I was able to eliminate almost all of the CE's extra merchant cities and it was able to run an 80% slider on virtually the Wall Street city alone.


CE was able to get to 80% slider with just the wallstreet city running priest and merchants and being in SP.

Neither city with a shrine or corps. When you are running a high science slider farming your wallstreet city and running merchants and priests will yield more cash then cottages since the cottage commerce gets turned into beakers.

Granted, you want shrines and corps but it is not always possible. In this instance he is running SP so corps are out. He does not have a shrine but so what he is maximizing what he does have and it doubles as a secondary gp farm... if you do not care about gps anymore just settle the GP or GM and get the best multipliers for them.

So if you can do this in a shrined city and add corps you are really going to well off. Rather then wasting the +100% to gold.

The SE wallstreet city did so well with cottages because it was running at a low cash slider so a greater percentage of the commerce from the maxed out cottages was being converted to gold.

I think you did not read the OP very well and are being entirely too closed minded about specialist. They do have a place out side of the gp farm, they allow you to maximize the NW no independent of the slider.

Wow ... didn't realize I was going to step into a giant pile of dung with this one. This was purely theoretical ... I wasn't trying to prove anything beyond support my assertion that SE's can be competitive late game on a per tile basis ... at least on paper. I was not trying to prove anything else. The map is likely not as optimized as possible and no corporations or shrines were used because those could in theory benefit both empires equally. Also food corporations explicitly favor SE late game as SE can put the food to better use. I also don't believe the empire current has every resource for happiness and health reasons ... again I wasn't trying to overly maximize anything ... just lay down a comparison. I understand this is pure theory here.

Here's the saves if people want to check them out. I meant to attach them in the first place but was pressed for time. I'm sure there's optimizations I could have laid down for both empires but even just doing this took several hours and I basically ran out of steam. I was not surprised to see the research rates compare ... I WAS surprised to see the SE have little to no need for a wallstreet city.

The GPs that are settled were done over the course of the game before I opened it up for WB. Again this was an existing empire that I was playing in another game that I decided to just farm/cottage over to see how it would do. I mean its easy enough to show how they compare once city at a time (see the SSC and WS cities above) ... but I wanted to see how they compared on an empire-wide basis.

As to the person saying an SE can out-produce a CE city in pure :science: ... I think you might be a little wrong. See the first post and compare the SSCs ... the CE actually marginally out-produces the SE at 80% slider and this is a non-fin leader. I guess if you had infinite happiness and a major food corp the SE could out-produce the CE but I don't know. If you run the slider at 100% for the CE I think that SSC produces close to 600 :science: / turn. Honestly where the SE comes out way ahead is in those fishing villages that support a lot of pop but not a lot of cottages.

Again I was simply exploring if the SE could keep up with the CE ... which I now believe it kind of can. I think things get complicated with shrines and corporations and its obvious that CE's I believe have a higher top end. If you can get the CE to run 90 or 100% slider there's no honest way for an SE to keep up without a major food corporation or a ton of sea-side fishing villages. However if you are stuck at 80% slider I think its a very close race. SE's are tricky like that because they are slider independent and in fact the wall street city starts to perform dramatically BETTER for the SE as the slider goes down unlike the CE's wall street city which is slider independent.

oh he did this in worldbuilder? Wellt that explains it. The problem with the SE is getting enough population to actually make it work. A CE city is at maximum power with 20 pop. The SE city needs 40+ population. How you get that much happy and health bonus is...well...good luck

Most late game SE's run 10-30% culture slider which combined with theatres and colloseums really amp up the happiness. Health is a bit more of an issue but you can reasonably hit 30-35 :health: in cities with water and/or forests. Beyond that you need environmentalism which I didn't bother with here but it might have been an idea. Again I didn't explore it much beyond the basic swapping cottages out for farms and comparing.

A nice comparison on the whole, but there are a few shortcomings which are hard to ignore...But I am not an expert so take my comments with a grain of salt.

feralminded you have said before that in a SE one tends to hyper-specialize cities more, and this works well.

One possible flaw I see with the comparison you did was that in the CE you had science cities and gold cities only build the relevant buildings. In reality, in a CE your commerce cities will tend to build both gold and science buildings, leaning more towards the type of building that you run the slider highest on.

Personally I would not have added labs to every science city. IMO that will inflate the benefits of the SE a bit more than should be done in a fair comparison.

As others have said, without other significant costs (unit costs in particular), the results could be a bit off. Also, having every one of those buildings by that date where inflation is not yet a problem will also bias results potentially.

And the extra health/happiness resources you needed for the SE looks to be significant. That it was only mentioned in passing at the end of your analysis was IMO not the best way to handle it.

EDIT
By the way I noticed a nice feature of the SE version was the much higher score due to pop - this could be worth mentioning...

Yeah I did think about inflation but I don't have the patience to sit there and click 300 times to hit the 1900s. Again I was mostly being exploratory here. Also I did think about trying to calculate out exactly how many :hammers: in extra :health: and :) buildings the SE took and reward the CE with an exact number of markets and/or grocers to make up for it ... but that would have taken a lot more time and if I was going to go that far I would have been better served playing a game on fast speed to 1900 so at least I could get the inflation part right.

There's A LOT of variables here and as I said in my initial conclusion I think FIN-CE would have flat out beaten SE, at least in this empire. As for unit upkeep costs I'm pretty sure those hurt CE more than SE. The thing about this setup is the SE's research rate is mostly slider independent. So if we have to drop the slider to support a massive army big deal. The CE is far more slider-sensitive. That said ... the CE is indeed far more slider sensitive and if we can reasonably run a 90% slider again I don't see how SE can keep up without a lot of fishing villages or food corps.

I guess I should have put up a big disclaimer non-scientific analysis inside. To be fair its easy math to see that an SE can keep up on a per tile basis ... a 6 :science: scientist is equal to a 7 :commerce: cottage run through an 85% slider or an 8 :commerce: cottage run through a 75% slider. That was less interesting to me than finding out that the SE didn't really much need a Wallstreet city. I mean you'd be crazy not to build it ... the ROI on a cottaged up Wallstreet city when you know you are going to be running a slider in the 10-30% area is obvious ... but still I had assumed it would NEED that city. I guess all that extra commerce from all those river tiles and windmills and whatnot add up.

I'm not denying the analysis was flawed but that fact doesn't make it totally useless. There IS some INTERESTING information there that at least before I did it I was not aware of. I wasn't sure if other people were aware of it either.

The CE is more slider-insensitive but a good CE player will (I assume) work with that in mind. Slider flexibility is possibly the strongest pro the SE has going for it (I dont' do SEs too often so I'm guessing this), and if you put too much emphasis on that feature then the SE will always look more attractive.

In this particular game, I think you had a dominating position in terms of the amount of land you had, so happiness/health resources were abundant. In a game where the lategame is just as critical in terms of trying to get the edge on the AI, it might be more worthwhile considering a greater limit on these resources. Having all three of the hit movies/singles/musicals is IMO a bit odd.

I think if you were to put banks in most of the science cities in the CE version it would look a lot nicer in comparison with the SE.

The Wallstreet cities for the two economies should look more comparable under the assumption that they are used for shrine/corporations. Without either, the CE one will look considerably weaker. I'm not entirely sure but if you usually run your science slider no higher than about 80% in a CE, then wallstreet is better of working as many cottages as possible before employing merchants (I think). With science buildings the city could produce a decent number of beakers as well, just as the SE-Wallstreet would too.

I guess I should have put up a big disclaimer non-scientific analysis inside. To be fair its easy math to see that an SE can keep up on a per tile basis ... a 6 :science: scientist is equal to a 7 :commerce: cottage run through an 85% slider or an 8 :commerce: cottage run through a 75% slider. That was less interesting to me than finding out that the SE didn't really much need a Wallstreet city. I mean you'd be crazy not to build it ... the ROI on a cottaged up Wallstreet city when you know you are going to be running a slider in the 10-30% area is obvious ... but still I had assumed it would NEED that city. I guess all that extra commerce from all those river tiles and windmills and whatnot add up.

I'm not denying the analysis was flawed but that fact doesn't make it totally useless. There IS some INTERESTING information there that at least before I did it I was not aware of. I wasn't sure if other people were aware of it either.

The way you approached the problem seemed very scientific. ;) It's nice for a glance comparison but IMO there are some issues which are more likely to favour the SE over the CE. But I agree it's very difficult to do a completely level comparison without having to make some practical assumptions somewhere along the line.

Well the problem is if you are running an 80% slider in a CE if you start working cottages instead of merchants in wall street you will find yourself running a 70 or 60% slider right quick. I mean take my save there and try and you'll see. That said what I personally do in CE is try and settled 2 or more great merchants in the wall street city and they definitely go a long way to helping the bottom line. I think expecting a shrine is a bit over the top, but it is safe to expect at least Sids. I cannot remember the last CE I played where I didn't get sids. That said internal corps don't help you a ton in terms of :gold: ... at least not unless you've got and Ikhandra or Rathaus. Its really the shrine that can make the huge difference in your wallstreet city but I personally rarely see a shrine I didn't conquer. I don't know, I'm not a deity player ... but in my CE's its a lucky day that I can build wallstreet on top of a shrine.

The way you approached the problem seemed very scientific. ;) It's nice for a glance comparison but IMO there are some issues which are more likely to favour the SE over the CE. But I agree it's very difficult to do a completely level comparison without having to make some practical assumptions somewhere along the line.

Yeah I might have been setting the wrong expectation here. I guess what I might do is try and do this with a smaller empire. I mean difficulty level and game doesnt matter for this so I can easily just put it on a stupid low difficulty and fast-forward through a bazillion turns. If the number of cities is low enough it will be easy to calculate the equivalent :hammers: worth of buildings for each empire to give them both a fair shake ... however its still not truly comparable. SE still has marked advantages in fishing and tundra villages with food, and CE still had marked advantages under FIN. Also in a smaller empire I think SE gets an unfair advantage from a much stronger WS city. Again not sure how to do this in a "pure" fashion that could satisfy everyone. I mean people earlier in this thread thought it was unfair that SE got more from trade routes without thinking about how little SE cares about :commerce: in the first place. Only 40% of those trade routes were applying to the :science: / turn calculations whereas CE was getting 80%. And in the end this is really the bottomline ... :science: / turn. As for the SE's happiness that's less of a concern than :health:. Honestly I was probably very inefficient with the SE by dropping all those temples and crap around when I could simply run the :culture: slider up to 30% or whatever. It's 3 :) / Culture bump and its not going to affect the research rate that much.

Sigh. As much as I like numbers it sounds like a LOT of work for very little return when I already know in my head ... its going to be a very close wash.

I'd think having a shrine city by the lategame is a fair assumption with CE or SE. Only on the hugest of maps might you not have the opportunity to capture one. Whether or not you will have a shrine by the time you want to be building your Wallstreet is another issue.

I loaded up your save for the CE, and without changing anything at all except a few farms in your Wallstreet city to towns, this is the CE-Wallstreet I got. It runs at a lower population , meaning less resources needed and less maintenance, but also less score. Unless I missed something this would be a far better way to run the Wallstreet city in that scenario, though it has less GPP.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=203786&stc=1&d=1234588939

I more than doubled the the :science: output of the city, and with some cheap science buidlings this will be even better obviously.

Yours produced 84.26:science: and 118.3:gold:, compared with this one producing 175.5:science: and 129:gold:.

Basically, running so many priests in a CE-Wallstreet is IMO not optimal.

Second, I'd really like to know a bit more about the actual hammer deficit (in buildings) the SE was running. You're kinda cheating by just worldbuilding in all the unis/banks/etc... there is no way in a real game that you can get all of these. The lack of hammers from US would be very significant in that case. Similarly you lose the ability to buy rush, which can be quite significant (on the other hand you could also account for more total GP throughout the game from the SE - perhaps granting academies proportional to what would be expected). Overall, I'm sorry to say, not impressed with this "test."


US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings.

oh he did this in worldbuilder? Wellt that explains it. The problem with the SE is getting enough population to actually make it work. A CE city is at maximum power with 20 pop. The SE city needs 40+ population. How you get that much happy and health bonus is...well...good luck

It's not about luck, it's about skills not related to economy management, namely reading the map, warfare, and diplomacy.

Although I do think a SE can be competitive late game I do not think it's more powerful than a CE with all the bonuses.

Random thoughts....

When I use a SE, which is a lot, my norm is to run the :culture: slider 20-30% and my :science: slider from 0-20%.

When I use a CE, which is often :), my norm is to run the :culture: slider 0-20% and my :science: slider 40-50% till around Corporations then I can normally bump my :science: slider to 50-60%.

I like to run all kinds of economies but imo, the examples you gave don't fit well into what actually happens in a real game. I'll stick with my opinion that SE is well suited for early-mid game while a fully powered CE with all the perks is scary.

The SE would also need to control the UN to prevent adoption of US.

Feralminded: congratulations, good work.
I was double replaying a game (CRE, non-PHI,non FIN) with farms or cottages,
but your example made it not necessary.
Your post #14 was very important to me:
Does a food corporation helps more SE than CE? It looks so,but may be the
opposite. And above pop.20, CE/SE loses its meaning. Let's say the same city
with 25 or 40 pop., better with cottages than not (if possible,of course).
Infinite happiness does exist; with a price: HR costs one time hammers,gold for
troops maintenance and beakers due to lack of Representation; the slider costs
gold and/or beakers, unless on the final way to cultural victory.
The same food corp. just gets somewhat weaker by unhealth.
Perhaps your study opens the door to a new domestic strategy:
Choose CE or SE (or its sub-divisions) as the map says; later use a food corp.
to have both. Timing of grow and Civics to be discovered,of course.
Best regards,

fed1943: I think he thinks it´s more beneficial under SE, because under SE you run representation, while under CE under US (most of the time I think). When CE would run representation, it would be more beneficial to CE imho. More great people (because it didn´t produce as much as in SE) and less unhelthiness.

I don't have many games that I cant run the slider at 100%, SE or CE. Maybe I need to build wealth in two side cities, but that's it.

True 1943. I'm not sure which Corporation would help more tbh. I was trying to elude to the OP example which had the SEs :science: slider at 50% and the CEs :science: slider at 80%. In most games the SE would only be at 20% and the CE would be at 50%, not 80. That means the SE would only pull in about 200 :science: to the CE 300 :science:. Of course this would apply for every city empire wide.

Anyways, both are very good. SE earlier imo and CE later. Lot's of debate all around lol. What about this..........

US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings. It's not very difficult to use binary research in conjunction with building wealth during 1 or even 2 Golden ages. When they're over you can quite literally have 10,000 or more gold and rush buy 30 or more top tier units. That's nothing to sneeze at.

I just don't like the one is better lol. I like to play with all them! They all have strengths and weaknesses.

A great 1st try, but I think the biggest missing component in this comparison is the treatment of hammers.

The game rules give a very unfavorable conversion of hammers to beakers, and often in the late game it is far more preferable to take the hammers as they are. With the lower pop cap of the CE, you save on hammers by requiring less infrastructure (as you stated already). But apart from that, if you have US then your towns also provide extra hammers.

Furthermore, farms are not the only source of food in the late game. Corporations can also be a major source of food. So you have your Towns, and have your Specialists as well when using the CE. That's why I sometimes prefer to use Representation when running a CE, because I get the bonus +3 beakers from my specialists, which I can have through extra food from corporations. But aside from that, settled Great People (and Great Generals) require no food but still gain the +3 beakers from Representation.

US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings.

Could you elaborate on this please? My reaction was almost the opposite - 'why keep production cities in a CE at all outside the ones that benefit from national wonders'?
Even without the Kremlin, a town going towards rush-buying outperforms any hammer improvement short of workshops with State Property AND Caste System... with the additional benefits that this can be used anywhere and that gold modifiers are cleaner and available earlier.

***

Food corporations are tricky. Enabling us to cottage every elegible tile is sweet... but any more than that goes to waste (replacing windmills with mines or running non-Representative specialists doesn't really do much for us).
A SE doesn't get the huge rewards for the first few food, but can make good use of almost any amount.
If I use corporations, I religiously build filler cities, and consequently don't find the growth caps all that limiting... in a CE they often end up with a footprint of 1 tile and only exist for per-city-bonuses (since my established cities with better multipliers get more out of the land). In a SE they take over tiles from established cities until the latter are just at their growth cap.

If I can get utterly ridiculous amounts of food, I might turn to heavy whipping... which, however, can mess somehwat with the rest of the economy.

***

Last not least, about tile efficiency: If we're just looking at dirrect yield with food going to feed specialists (drafts would make this quite silly...), the strongest improvements would be windmills and watermills with the appropriate economic civic, feeding priests with all the frills... effective yields of 3:hammers:4:commerce: or 2:hammers:6:commerce:.

The art of running a SE for the late game is to deal with the implications of very high food incomes with Biology and food corps. It is wrong to compare a CE to a SE and assume that all the cities will be in the same place with the SE ones being much larger. If each cottage was replaced by a farm and supported a specialist that would make the city 1 pop larger and require +1 health and +1 happiness. But if there are more cities sharing the the farms the average size of cities can be the same and no more health and happiness infrastructure is needed. More cities also allow more opportunities for drafting and whipping since each one is recovering from the unhappiness in parallel. That is where the much greater productivity of an SE comes from, more cities whipping and drafting, while a CE city has to work its cottages to make the most of its improvements and civics.

In my SEs I usually have a few very large cities with lots of health and happiness infrastructure. They are useful for the internal trade routes and with high production are where wonders and national wonders go. But the bulk of my cities are middle sized and crammed together with moderate amounts of infrastructure. They are limited by the available tiles. In an area where a CE player would put 3 cities I'll probably put 5 or 6 and have nearly double the total population once Biology boosts the farms.

While these findings are good in spawning discussion I find the findings to be incomplete at best.

Especially claiming under the addition tests that one economy outperformes the other is a useless statement as you did not add screenies and failed to provide all the info relevant. If we cannot see wat the pro's and con's are between the two, how are we to say which one is best?

Also, this thread fails to give an insight into what choices to make in what situation. It lacks to give insight into the situation leading up to the late-game and therefore this becomes more an excersive of thought rather than useful info - unless talking and learning about the game mechanics is the info you were looking for. I think however that not so muh the numbers are relevant but it is the game as a whole that this research should have a place in. As long as the whole perspective is unclear I think no one can make claims about one economy being better.

Also you fail to provide insight as to the criteria of one economy being better. Do you compare hammers/results, total beakers generated/turn, or whatever else you may choose, you may want to provide more insight for a more complete discussion. Right now this whole thread is number-crunching for the sake of number crunching.

I know that in a SE you can make one super city that will outperform any city in a CE, however, the average city in a CE will outperform the average city in a SE. This is why SE is better for a small empire and CE better for a large one.

Are you sure about this? Bureaucracy towns (7.5-9 commerce without FIN) often outperform rep. scientists in a small empire where the slider is high. It's not difficult to get 15 towns in you Bureaucrac capital, but to get 15 scientists or more you need population of ~30. This may be hard to obtain in a small empire without much health resources. Of course there are also settled great scientists, but you can settle your GSs in cottaged SSC too.

I'd think having a shrine city by the lategame is a fair assumption with CE or SE. Only on the hugest of maps might you not have the opportunity to capture one. Whether or not you will have a shrine by the time you want to be building your Wallstreet is another issue.

I loaded up your save for the CE, and without changing anything at all except a few farms in your Wallstreet city to towns, this is the CE-Wallstreet I got. It runs at a lower population , meaning less resources needed and less maintenance, but also less score. Unless I missed something this would be a far better way to run the Wallstreet city in that scenario, though it has less GPP.

I more than doubled the the :science: output of the city, and with some cheap science buidlings this will be even better obviously.

Yours produced 84.26:science: and 118.3:gold:, compared with this one producing 175.5:science: and 129:gold:.

Basically, running so many priests in a CE-Wallstreet is IMO not optimal.

Yeah I'm embarrassed that I missed that ... goes to show how single minded I was when doing that. I still think it behooves you to run as many merchants as possible since they will yield more :gold: / tile than cottages with that high of a slider and ultimately that's your goal here. But yeah ... its not hard to drop the research buildings in there as well and have a general high output city.

A great 1st try, but I think the biggest missing component in this comparison is the treatment of hammers. Well it was the only "easy" way I could directly compare the two. Before when I started out I had everyone producing :culture: and SE compared unfairly well in this scenario since US wasn't doing much of anything useful (I believe SE was ahead by over 10% total :science: / turn). So the obvious was to take US into account was to produce raw research everywhere.

True 1943. I'm not sure which Corporation would help more tbh. I was trying to elude to the OP example which had the SEs :science: slider at 50% and the CEs :science: slider at 80%. In most games the SE would only be at 20% and the CE would be at 50%, not 80. That means the SE would only pull in about 200 :science: to the CE 300 :science:. Of course this would apply for every city empire wide.

If you are only running a 50% slider in CE then SE is going to knock your socks off ... SE doesn't much care about the slider. 0%-100% a scientist still produces 6 :science:. Yeah the rest of the :commerce: goes either way and it does help the production but the majority of the research in an SE comes from slider independent specialists. Without being able to hit 70%+ in the slider department under a CE, SE is clearly dominant in terms of pure :science: / tile.

That said there is one major advantage to CE's which I notice when I play ... the AI exclusively builds cottages. So when conquering AI civilizations under SE I have to either run a scorched earth campaign when attacking (which can be VERY lucrative ... but does require a small army of calvary) ... or I just have to take the cottage cities as they come. More often than not I am lazy about it and just switch over to FEUSS and spam cottages. I personally don't have the sand to plow over cottages with farms.

Even without the Kremlin, a town going towards rush-buying outperforms any hammer improvement short of workshops with State Property AND Caste System


Hammer economy is all about running SP and Caste.


...with the additional benefits that this can be used anywhere and that gold modifiers are cleaner and available earlier.


Hammer modifiers come from a single set of buildings and workshops start as mature improvements. HE is very fast and easy to develop. Granted, a completely static empire that somehow enters the industrial age with full sets of commerce buildings and grown towns everywhere can certainly rushbuy. But that'd be rare.

Hammer economy is all about running SP and Caste.

You know I hadn't even really thought much about an HE ... but I guess in a way running an SE under SP/CS could hybrid itself into an HE anyhow. Regardless its a tough comparison at that point.

feralminded you are right about running as many merchants as possible.

If you assume that with the slider that high 1:gold: is worth more then 1:science: then the yield is better.

If we only assumed the city had a library, obs and uni, then the Wallstreet would pull in 9.8:science: + 2.8:gold: per tile from 7:commerce:towns, or a flat 12:gold: from your farms.Since the city for some reason had 7 religions, the science multiplier is even higher so the figure I gave is probably a bare minimum. I know it's the Wall Street city and it should be specialised but to what extent? 9.8:science: and 2.8:gold: still seems nice compared to 12:gold:. But I have to agree with running merchants though.

... or I just have to take the cottage cities as they come. More often than not I am lazy about it and just switch over to FEUSS and spam cottages.

Oh come on are we going to have to start getting used to this FEUSS/PARCS crap? Seriously, if you must use new acronyms please show the courtesy of saying what they mean for a while.

Oh come on are we going to have to start getting used to this FEUSS/PARCS crap? Seriously, if you must use new acronyms please show the courtesy of saying what they mean for a while.

Actually I was just poking fun at Dave. I think the guy is an awesome part of these forums and his thread made me giggle all week so I just wanted to give him a nod. =)

Could you elaborate on this please? My reaction was almost the opposite - 'why keep production cities in a CE at all outside the ones that benefit from national wonders'?
Even without the Kremlin, a town going towards rush-buying outperforms any hammer improvement short of workshops with State Property AND Caste System... with the additional benefits that this can be used anywhere and that gold modifiers are cleaner and available earlier.


If we're talking about the late game production then don't forget Slavery and the Kremlin. For small cities, farms are the most productive way to use a grassland tile. Let's compare the late game production methods.

Towns: With best gold multipliers (+100%) a Grassland town gives 1 hammers and 7 commerce = 14 gold (with research and espionage sliders at 0%). With the Kremlin that can be 8 hammers, 7 of which can be spent anywhere.

Workshops: With reasonable production multipliers, (+110% forge, factory, power, and SP) a grassland workshop can give 4 hammers under Caste System and that becomes 8.4 hammers. Those hammers are also able to pick up further multipliers Police State (+25% units), drydock (+50% ships) and Military Academy (+50% units) and also bonusses from resources (stone, iron etc) and traits (+100% courthouses for Org) that rush buying with US can't get.

Farms: A grassland farm with Biology produces +2 food and the same production multipliers apply as with workshops. The Kremlin also gives a +50% hammer bonus for Slavery. So a grassland farm in a size 10 city will produce a basic 3 hammers for 2 food and with Kremlin that becomes 4.5 hammers per turn. Using the basic 110% production bonus this becomes an average of 9.45 hammers/ turn and can be harnessed every 10 turns with Slavery. For a size 5 city we get a fabulous rate of 12.6 hammers / turn and for a size 20 city 6.3 hammers / turn for the output of a grassland farm. Of course the big advantage of the Slavery approach is that it can be combined with any source of food, so seafood cities and food corporations can be combined with grassland farms, something workshops can't easily do.

***


Last not least, about tile efficiency: If we're just looking at dirrect yield with food going to feed specialists (drafts would make this quite silly...), the strongest improvements would be windmills and watermills with the appropriate economic civic, feeding priests with all the frills... effective yields of 3:hammers:4:commerce: or 2:hammers:6:commerce:.

Watermills and windmills are good when combined with their favourite civics, but don't really compare with drafting and whipping (with Kremlin). Grassland farms are still the best way to use that tile in many cases.

For a cottage economy I can only see FM being viable with at least one good corps. Sushi or CM with CivJ/CreCon/AlCo let's you spam corps without worrying about costs, making 100% slider viable. Even if you have just CM and CivJ, the two easiest corps to snag the performance of cottages increases massively. Sending AlCo off to the AIs (and the backwards AIs love it before industrialization) can make this truly insane.

Secondly, if you have no shrines, the best use of WS in a CE is to flip back to caste and run WS/NP in a heavily wooded lot; tundra forests being ideal. Now this means fighting emancipation. While emanicipation is good for maturing the cottages, once they are towns you gain nothing from it but higher happy caps. Using cultural slider with the caste NP/WS combo powering becomes a better trade off to just lower slider if you truly have specialized all your science cities (which is rare for me as a riverside science city generates far more than enough :hammers: to get the :gold: infrastructure).

Third, actually when I'm trying to max out science production I don't hammer :science: I hammer :gold: so that I can up the slider more (unless I'm already at 100 between shrines, corps, tech trading deficit spending, etc.). Doing this in just a few of your cities in the hammer :science: save resulted in quickly getting 100% slider and peaking at just over 4k science (I also changed around some spec/marginal tile working pairs but no changes to improvements, buildings, or civics).

yes, running merchants in a wall street city is a good idea, both in a SE and a CE. For a better comparison, though, you ought to have built commerce multiplier buildings in all the commerce cities for the CE. In a CE you don't have science buildings and money buildings, you just have commerce buildings (the only exceptions being Oxford and Wallstreet cities), and you should build all the infrastructure.
Also, the issue about the health resources...you're acting like it's not a big one. I have a lot of experience running SE's. I like to run them because I find them fun, and let me tell you getting a city to 40 pop with no health problems (or happy problems) is very difficult. Yes, sure, late game you have genetics and recycling centers and environmentalism....but I mean throughout the WHOLE game, how do you manage the requirements of your cities? That's probably the most difficult part of all for a SE. Sure, on a per tile basis, a 4 food farm can feed a scientist, getting 6 beakers, which looks not bad compared to a town with 7 commerce...but the problem is one city needs 20 pop and the other needs 40. It's not realistic to assume you'll have EVERY resource in the game.

yes, running merchants in a wall street city is a good idea, both in a SE and a CE.

Actually its generally better to use cottages for the SE's Wall street city as long as your total combined :science: and :culture: and :espionage: sliders are 50% or lower.

Watermills and windmills are good when combined with their favourite civics, but don't really compare with drafting and whipping (with Kremlin). Grassland farms are still the best way to use that tile in many cases. I was under the impression that SP watermills were possibly the best :hammers: tile in the game. Its half the whip of a farm with 2 :hammers: / turn on top of it.

Third, actually when I'm trying to max out science production I don't hammer :science: I hammer :gold: so that I can up the slider more (unless I'm already at 100 between shrines, corps, tech trading deficit spending, etc.). Doing this in just a few of your cities in the hammer :science: save resulted in quickly getting 100% slider and peaking at just over 4k science (I also changed around some spec/marginal tile working pairs but no changes to improvements, buildings, or civics). Yeah I knew in the back of my mind that this was going to be the case. In my own CE's mid-late game I am fond of taking a decent production city and making it produce :gold: to support a higher slider. This obviates the need to build any :gold: infrastructure in any city (except WS) and maximizes your oxford city ... effectively letting you specialize your cities just as much as an SE without needing the additional :health: and :) infrastructure. Actually a part of me wonders if you couldn't support a CE with no Wallstreet at all and instead maximized Ironworks city producing gold? This might be the way to go to run a CE under SP.

Actually its generally better to use cottages for the SE's Wall street city as long as your total combined :science: and :culture: and :espionage: sliders are 50% or lower.

Ehh depends. When I run a SE based EE combined it is close to 100%. I have espionage multipliers, I lack happiness and gold modifiers in many cities, and often I'm going caste/SP in order to outbuild the AI.

Likewise if I'm on a late game Kremlin whipping binge, culture slider will hit up to around 100% and stay there for a LONG time (oftentimes my whip anger will stack up to more than my pop anger or eman anger); whipping every 2 turns will do that. Likewise draft anger can get quite high with me. Also non-FS/B cottages are rather weak compared to rep merchants post-bio.

Yeah I knew in the back of my mind that this was going to be the case. In my own CE's mid-late game I am fond of taking a decent production city and making it produce :gold: to support a higher slider. This obviates the need to build any :gold: infrastructure in any city (except WS) and maximizes your oxford city ... effectively letting you specialize your cities just as much as an SE without needing the additional :health: and :) infrastructure. Actually a part of me wonders if you couldn't support a CE with no Wallstreet at all and instead maximized Ironworks city producing gold? This might be the way to go to run a CE under SP.

You can, but why? IW is your wonder pump or the second of you major unit pumps (IW + WP works quite well). Having to tank my economy to get the internet is not sounding like fun, losing out on 3GD can require an early trip to ecology and large :hammers: investments in recycling centers, missing the Eiffel can mean having to tech MM yourself (and perhaps losing religious :hammers:), and let's not even get into the diplomatic issues with respect to the CR and UN.

Also there is a little dirty secret in the game. If you really want to make gold with IW:
1. Build the IWs in a coastal HE.
2. Build a drydock.
3. Get a military academy (the free GG from facism is good here).
4. Adopt PS.
5. Delink your oil/uranium (i.e. farm/WS over it)
6. Spam caravels.

The overflow :gold: is greater than just hammering it directly. Inland options include imp settlers, expansive workers, and for everyone - chariots (just do not research HBR or AdvFlight).

Wow ... that's some seriously dirty little secrets right there. I thought I was bad for abusing Pro-walls ... but wow.

CE outperforms SE in this example.
CE SCC has 78 hammers vs. 54 in SE
WS-CE has 41 hammer vs. 31 in SE

I don't see any reason for dedicated production cities to have differing values. That means CE has a big production advantage over SE. SE requires high health and happiness. Deployement is another factor; obviously growng cottages takes time, but taking a city to 32 pop, that takes a long time.

What would really help, is the F1 city overview screen. That would allow a better comparison.

PS. The oxford city should/could be working an additional 2 plains towns (currently unworked lumbermills), for 15 commerce, reducing the number of scientists to 3.
It would, after accounting for the lost specialist, get another 6 base beakers, translating to an added 21 (250% bonus) overall.

@ UnconqueredSun: thanks for clearing that up. I guess I was reluctant to accept State Property as a given, as corporations are usually the final tool for me to secure a win. If I make it this far, it's rare that I'm so far ahead that going directly for a win beats inflating my economy to a ridiculous degree, and even rarer that I'm not able to.

@ UncleJJ: I already mentioned I'd retain super-production-cities boosted by national wonders like the Ironworks or HEroic Epic. I suppose naval/military cities with military academies and/or drydocks are good enough to count as well.
My point was that a dedicated cottage empire has little use for 'vanilla' production cities before we're building spaceship parts. It's not truly bad under State Property/Caste System... but really, one advantage of a cottage-heavy economy is that we aren't giving up much by staying in Emancipation and as I said above I consider cutting ourselves off from corporations a pretty hefty sacrifice.

Whipping is a strange beast in a lategame CE... if we can take the Emanicipation hit without problems, it's the least bad use for excess corporation food we have. However... building farms specificially for whipping if we're running Free Speech and Universal Suffrage anyway seems dubious. Sure, 2 food towards whipping beats the output of a town for rush-buying in small cities - in theory. In practice, not all of that food will actually go towards the whip and instead be converted into something else by non-Representation specialists, at a horrible exchange rate (formerly marginal tiles to be whipped away usually end up too good for that in the late game).

I will gladly support a farm-driven economy with Kremlin-assisted whips... and I'd say the transition from farms supporting boring old specialists over whipping to workshops for direct production is fluid enough that it doesn't feel like I'm running a different economy type - unless we actually spam workshops and end up building gold/science as a matter of course (inefficient in the long run but it means we can make do with only one multiplier type in new acquisitions).
After all, I can farm over workshops and vice versa with no problems while changing from or to cottages is usually wasteful.

I added sushi and some science/gold buildings to that CE save... 6974:science: /turn
:rolleyes:

Edit: Obviously gold buildings didn't do much since the empire is at 100% science with +0 gold/turn.

Most late game SE's run 10-30% culture slider which combined with theatres and colloseums really amp up the happiness. Health is a bit more of an issue but you can reasonably hit 30-35 :health: in cities with water and/or forests. Beyond that you need environmentalism which I didn't bother with here but it might have been an idea. Again I didn't explore it much beyond the basic swapping cottages out for farms and comparing.

The majority of late-game health bonuses (recycling plant especially) come extremely late-game. This is why I got into the thick of a lot of debate with people about chopping, because in the mid industrial era when you have all the health penalties but nearly none of the mitigating factors. It's quaint to hear a lot of talk about how you "don't need a high population" but then when scenarios like this illustrate the optimal, especially the optimal SE, you see ridiculously high pop all of a sudden which never matches what can really happen during the industrial era.

A CE commerce city might not need any trees at all since it's off-spec to build any factories or drydocks there (and the later airports can be balanced with late-game health buildings), so its health situation will be better, but a late-game SE, IMO, will need to keep some trees, even if you forego the factory's ability to flip engineers.

As a big SE player for a long time, I'd like to chime in here with a few thoughts that I didn't see covered.

A SE can easily mesh with the most powerful early game civic, Slavery, in that they both utilize Food as their main resource. The problem with the CE is that it takes time to grow to its max potential, where as a Farm takes X turns and is done, no more waiting. Sure the city may take time to grow, but a few early Farm-resources makes your city grow very fast.

Knowing that it takes active tile working time to get the Cottages to mature, once early cities are at their max sustainable size, I tend to hybridize. This means I may even stop working the Farm-resource to maximize future potental. Knowing that I may do this, during the early game I tend to keep my cities very close to each other, even overlapping a lot. This lets me have City #2 work City #1s Food resource once City #1 is done growing. Also, when I start whipping things, I could have City #2 work City #1s towns while waiting for the whipping unhappiness to wear off.

Proper spacing (read: overlapping) of early cities lets me utilize both Cottages and Slavery the way I used to Specialists and Slavery. This trick really gave my CE game a huge boost.

Now for a comparative taste of the SE vs the CE, it's all in the numbers.

A Post Biology Farm nets you +2 Food on that tile. Two food is equivilant to +1 Specialst. +1 Specialist is equivilant to 6 Beakers or 3 Gold 3 Beakers at best.*

A Post Liberalism Town nets you +7 Commerce +1 Hammer on that tile at best.*

*I am assuming the appropriate Civics are being run at this time.

One thing I'd like to note here is that you need far fewer +gold buildings in a Specialist Ecenomy, because you only need those buildings in the cities (city?) where you will be running Merchant Specialists. However, this is offset by the need for the SE to build more Health and Happiness buildings.

So if the SE is outmatched by the CE, why does anybody play the SE?

The answer is time and flexability.

The SE requires far less dependancy on both Civics and your Slider, which lets you be more flexable with many other aspects of the game. The fact is, a CE almost forces you into a single set of Civics predetermined by the game, where as the SE does not.

Since only one Civic is truly necessary for a SE, you can easily get away with running many fun civics for a lot longer than you could if you were running a heavy CE. Do you need more Scientist Specialists? Whip a new Scientist building with your Slavery Civic! Or you could do the peaceful thing and revolt into Caste System, but I prefer whipping if I'm going Food Crazy.

In many games I have tanked my Economy and been in the red at 100% Gold yet still trudged along in tech due to the SE's naturue. Also, If I ever feel that I need to defy a resolution or two in a SE I can! I simply tick up the Culture Slider a bit, and let the Theatres and Collesums keep my uppity citizens content. In fact, there have been a few games where I have turned down the Science Slider to turn up the Culture Slider and seen an increase in my science!

A few final things to note:

Look at the timeframe when a SE and a CE really shine
A CE is fully mature after Printing Press, Liberalism, and Democracy are learned.
A SE is fully mature after Biology.

Also examine the build-up to each separate economy.
Can you grow Towns before Free Speech and Universal Suffrage? Yes! This means that once your US and FS civics are unlocked, you can easily reap the full benefits of your Tows.
Can you grow your cities to the same size they would be post Biology Farms? No. This means that even after you tech Biology, which comes later than Democracy most of the time, you still have to wait for your cities to grow.

The SE also has diminishing returns in two ways, Great People and Growth Time.
The SE nets you Great People like you wouldn't believe. For a while. Then the number of GPP necessary to net the next Great Person gets so high, you may as well not be producing any GPP. In a CE, with one National Epic'd GPP farm, you can easily produce many Great Persons.
Growth Time is another factor that bears looking into. Post Biology, as you grow in size, the amount of time it takes to get one size bigger increases in a way you wouldn't believe. Since each city size takes more food than the last, and each time you grow one size bigger, your positive food is reduced by 2 (because that food is now being eaten by the new citizen) you will sometimes take 40, 50, or even 60 marathon turns to grow a city to it's final size.

Almost everything I have said are factors which have not been taken into account in the first post's comparison. A CE is much better than a SE in terms of pure tech, but a SE wins out in its ability to be flexable.

1. Build the IWs in a coastal HE.
2. Build a drydock.
3. Get a military academy (the free GG from facism is good here).
4. Adopt PS.
5. Delink your oil/uranium (i.e. farm/WS over it)
6. Spam caravels.


While nice to generate money, this is a waste of your IW and a GG imo (I mean stacking so many prod multipliers doesn't make sense, it's better to just split them in three cities, to avoid wasting the bonus producing other stuff than troops and because the diminushing returns...). But I am sure you know that already and it's a little OT ;)

Cheers

Moreover, I'm pretty sure the same can be done spamming workboats instead of caravels. For some reason even workboat build speed is increased by all the same multipliers.

You can spam workboats as well as they get the "military unit" bonus so Police State, HE, drydocks and MA all boost their production as well as forge, SP and other normal production multipliers. The problem with spamming caravels and workboats is that they have a limited use so most of them are just deleted, thereby wasting the hammers.

I have used a similar trick building airships in a high production city, at least I have a use for about 12 of those at the right time as scouts and light bombers. They don't get the drydocks bonus but all the other bonusses can apply and they can be built in any city rather than only a coastal one. Later fighters can give a very useful unit and although there is an even smaller hammer overflow for gold, getting a very useful unit and some cash is a better outcome than mass building caravels or workboats that need deletion.

Finally the best late game unit to spam is the guided missile. That can even be done in many cities with forges, factories and power bonusses giving +100% with Police State and SP adding another 35%. It costs only 60 hammers so any production city with more than 25 base hammers can build them in one turn and the overflow will gain 2.35 gold per hammer. And the guided missile can be very useful if used en masse, better than tactical nukes in the sense that it doesn't cause diplomatic or global warming problems. They can be used in situations where the AI has lots of fighters or SAM defences and although they have horribly short range of only 4 tiles they don't count towards the aircraft stacking limit and any number can be massed in a city or fort. They can be made much more mobile by carrying them on a submarine (3 GM) or a missile cruiser (4 GM).

I would not normally build guided missiles (due to their low cost effectiveness) but the ability to build an expendable unit and make plenty of gold at the same time is an attractive alternative to the nuclear option. Nuclear weapons need the Manhattan Project and causes diplomatic problems and can be intercepted, and while the guided missile is much weaker it is practically an automatic hit and can weaken any land or naval unit so other units can make an easy kill. Although a one shot weapon it is the best possible support an army and navy can have. By using them up you are reducing your unit maintenance and the enemy's at the same time :lol: that lets you keep making them.

UncleJJ I totally agree about the GM as a better cheap unit to spam.

One thing about workboats though... Could they possibly be used effectively as decoys? You could use them to get in way of enemy ships, or possibly to draw them away. Attacking a workboat means you can't attack another unit in the same turn, except for Blitz I guess.

I usually run a hybrid Hammer economy. Repre/Beauc/Caste/SP. Cottage in capital. Watermill or workshop or windmill everywhere else. I use the hammer overflow trick to pay my empire. The hybrid balances research and hammer well. HE builds spaceship way faster than CE or SE, and parts can't be rush bought. Corporations usually aren't a big deal. When corporations start to make profit, my spaceship is almost finished.

Some other comments:
1. CE won't need to control UN as much as SE.
2. slider come with a cost for SE. End game trade routes can bring a lot commerce.
3. Don't assume you have almost all the resources, or needed wonders. If you do, then you are in good shape, and would win anyway. One reason I am not SE is because I seldom have the pyramids.
4. I usually disconnect coal for health reason.

More cities also allow more opportunities for drafting and whipping since each one is recovering from the unhappiness in parallel. That is where the much greater productivity of an SE comes from, more cities whipping and drafting, while a CE city has to work its cottages to make the most of its improvements and civics.

I found your approach of small cities makes much more sense than unrealistic huge cities. But

1. Won't SE be running caste system?
2. Could whipping anger cause problem?
3. To make these small cities, your spacing must be pretty huge. So won't it hurt your early game?
4. How much profit would these small cities make till victory?

While nice to generate money, this is a waste of your IW and a GG imo (I mean stacking so many prod multipliers doesn't make sense, it's better to just split them in three cities, to avoid wasting the bonus producing other stuff than troops and because the diminushing returns...). But I am sure you know that already and it's a little OT ;)

Cheers

This was in reply to a suggestion to use your IWs to hammer out :gold:; which I do not support either. Heavy production should be used to produce heavy units, wonders, and projects. Thus I'm a huge a fan of having at least 2 dedicated :hammers: cities; IW (possibly with WP) and HE. Most often I throw in Maori/RC and often the B cap with mass watermills.

Kesshi:
1. A SE is not fully mature until you can get the health to max out food production. If you go for the heavily overlapped SE, then I'd definately toss in Medicine/Corporation for Sushi or Refrig for CM. All told this may be as late as ecology/genetics. Some games just don't have the health to maximize a SE before then.
2. A CE can be fully mature without democracy. Eman is nice, but it is quite possible to work up all your cottages by the time you get there. Just as long as you have the mids, a mature CE can skip on demo until happiness becomes a problem (if ever).
3. A SE EE can compete late game with spies. Firstly, you get a bonus 25% off the top with nationalism; CE cannot take that long term without losing out. Secondly due to the magic of espionage the rate of return on espionage can compare insanely well with direct research. Lastly, all the espionage buildings are relatively cheap and you are going to build two of them anyways.


PoM: I didn't think WBs got the PS bonus; but then I've never actually been building WBs when I've been in PS except replacements for burnt boats and those are always 1 per turn.

UJJ: Yeah, when I need overflow gold I'm normally jumping straight to GMs; most often though I'd rather just pump out units with high promos to go conquest more gold. GMs actually are not that great at boosting your power rating and are rather expensive to mothball.

PoM: Yes you can use WBs as decoys. Better if you have a movement bonus (either from circumnavigation or refrig) you can lead AI naval units on a long and fruitless chase with them. You don't, strictly speaking, need the movement bonus, but it is exceedingly useful. As long as the unit doesn't have another specific target you can lead away huge amounts of naval forces with just one WB (also damaged units work well).

I found your approach of small cities makes much more sense than unrealistic huge cities. But

1. Won't SE be running caste system?
2. Could whipping anger cause problem?
3. To make these small cities, your spacing must be pretty huge. So won't it hurt your early game?
4. How much profit would these small cities make till victory?

1. Only very rarely, lots of food from farms and Slavery is more flexible and allows lots of infrastructure to be built in better cities and units built in lesser cities. Late game I find Biology farms + Kremlin + Slavery > Caste System + workshops.

2. Not if properly managed, that is the art of using this approach, knowing when to whip hard and when to recover ready for another burst of cruelty.

3. Not really, my spacing will tend to be closer right from the start and I emphasise courthouses for cost cutting and to get an EP advantage. What happens early on is that all cities are about the same size, limited by the health and happy caps, and then as the game progresses the best cities grow bigger and take the tiles from their neighbours until they are only working about 6 tiles. But 6 Biology farms (grassland and plains) are quite potent when you intend to whip and draft once every 10 turns.

4. The output of these small cities is mainly EPs (from the suite of espionage buildings and a few spies using spare food) and units from drafting and whipping (including , workers, missionaries and spies). That specialisation allows my big cities to provide most of the beakers and gold. The big cities will concentrate on improving their efficiency by building infrastructure as much as they can and the best will try for a few wonders.

To the same questions Tecibbar raised:

1. I only tend to use Caste System in a lategame SE if I'm also using State Property (and not always wen I do). Whipping + Corporation food + Kremlin is more impressive, but sometimes I want to knock heads now instead of mucking about with corporations, and build spaceship parts later.

2. With enough overlap, you can have asymetric whipping cycles and shuffle tiles around... it might take a little micromanagement, but if you're willing to put in the effort you can work most useful tiles and still whip like mad.
If your spacing is tight enough or you're willing to sacrifice commerce for culture, you can stack whip anger quite well for ridiculous bursts of production. This isn't without its costs but often worth it.
Also: Monty rules.

3. This depends... spamming cities like mad in a tight pattern can work straight from the start. Trade routes (especially with the Great Lighthouse), religion, more efficient whipping and hammers saved on monuments vs. excessive maintenance.
Usually, I end up with a very tight core empire, some far-away blocking cities and little in between until later.

4. As UncleJJ said, lots of espionage and hammers, little in the way of beakers and gold. I usually don't even try for the latter because I want more immediate returns and have better things to do than build things like universities and marketplaces.
If the filler cities remain small (i.e. my caps are generous enough that my established ones take up most tiles) they'll get Industrial Parks and run lots of engineers.

Without caste, how do you have enough specialist spots?

And about the espionge bonus. Since you aren't full EE, how useful is the extra espionge bonus, and how do you use them. I don't usually do active mission, as the "spy got caught" accumulate very fast and don't go away.

Tecibbar,

Slavery solves that problem quite nicely.

Without caste, how do you have enough specialist spots?

And about the espionge bonus. Since you aren't full EE, how useful is the extra espionge bonus, and how do you use them. I don't usually do active mission, as the "spy got caught" accumulate very fast and don't go away.

The specialist slots are not a problem. Typically by the time we have Biology and Kremlin online most of my small cities will have granary, courthouse, forge, jail and be building intelligence agency and might have a library to boost the Rep beakers. That gives plenty of options for specialists and I'll want to run spies most of the time anyway, until I've stolen all the techs I want from any AIs that are ahead in technology.

A typical small city might be tile limited to 3 grassland and 3 plains farms and with Biology that will have a food surplus of 11 and produce 5 hammers, with forge. Each 10 turn cycle under Nationhood and Slavery it will draft a rifle and whip a cannon (for 2 or 3 pop with Kremlin bonus) and maybe build something else with overflow hammers. The food excess will be used to run several spies. At size 6 it only takes 16 food to grow and most of the time the city will vary between size 7 and 9 and be running 1, 2 or 3 spies. A jail, courthouse and IA will give 14 base EPs and a 100% bonus, with Nationhood that becomes 31.5 EPs. Each spy will add 9 EPs, so this little city with 3 spies will give 31.5 + 27 = 58.5 per turn. In hammer terms we have a rifle (110 :hammers:) and a 2 pop whip (112 :hammers:) and the 50 :hammers: from tiles which totals 272 :hammers: over 10 turns, and dividing by 6 tiles this is 45 hammers or 4.5 per tile per turn. That compares very favourably with workshops under Caste System and SP, which would need to run a farm in this city to avoid starvation.

Using espionage in the middle and late game is a great way to use newly conquered cities. If you have 20 cities most of which have jails and IA then you'll be raking in 1000 EPs every turn just from the passive bonusses and running a few spies. At that rate it is not difficult to gain a EP advantage over most of the AIs.

Spies will not get caught much if you wait until you reduce the target to 80% of your EP spending. That will also give you a 20% discount on active missions, including tech stealing. I often get to a 35% advantage in EP spending without raising the EP slider. But once you have the 100% EP modifier in your big cities it can be worth raising the EP slider and stealing a tech instead of researching it. Even though we have a SE there is often quite a lot of spare commerce floating around and turning that into EPs can be just as effective as gold or beakers, you have a strategic choice at this stage of the game as to where your spare commerce (after meeting costs) should go.

About the need to control the UN under SE to prevent being pushed into US:

You have a lot more population under SE, and so a lot more votes, so it is hardly ever a problem. And if it is a problem, you probably are not big enough at that point in time to win the game either under SE or CE.

I don't think the added infrastructure cost is that much of an issue comparing SE to CE. First, an SE produces more food, so you have more population to whip into buildings early on, probably up to markets and grocers, second, you don't have to grow your improvements so you can change a few farms to workshops to provide a production boost and change them back later, something which is fairly expensive with cottages.

About the need to control the UN under SE to prevent being pushed into US:

You have a lot more population under SE, and so a lot more votes, so it is hardly ever a problem. And if it is a problem, you probably are not big enough at that point in time to win the game either under SE or CE.

Calouste,

Two points. First the quote above.

Even if you don't control the UN under an SE because defying a resolution is not a problem. You can use the Culture Slider to keep your uppity citizens content as you do no rely very much on commerce to tech.

I don't think the added infrastructure cost is that much of an issue comparing SE to CE.

The infrastructure costs is about the same. You will need more happiness buildings, but fewer science and gold buildings. In fact, I almost never build gold buildings in my SEs except for one or two high gold cities then the minimum number of Banks necessary to make Wall Street. I then try to make the high gold city(ies) into high commerce cities, at which point I'll settle all GA, GP and GMs there that I wouldn't be otherwise using into the Wall Street city. The return on my investment is incredible, as I have ended up with cities pumping out over 1000 gold per turn on Marathon.