Moriarte
Immortal
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Help with some complex math: Optimal # of cities for France opening
- Thread starter futurehermit
- Start date
budweiser
King of the Beers
Piety approach is superior, obviously. Experimentation: last 5 cultural gotm'sThere is simply nothing in Rationalism tree that can compete with reformation and cost reduction policies in Piety. Except for SoH, but it comes too late to matter.
Not so fast. You have to pay 3 social policies to enjoy reformation. Then you have to get a wonder in each city along with all your culture buildings or else you are multiplying nothing. This is doable in some cases and some civs will be better at it (Egypt). However, some maps will force you to take a different path, say expand. France can expand and make culture too. The second half of the tree has Broadcast towers. Those are like Reformation. It has Cristo, which is like policy 4 in Piety. Finally, it has Sydney. All the pieces are there.
budweiser
King of the Beers
So, what are you saying? You can do sub 250 CV with Rationalism? I'd like to see that. I know it can be done with Piety consistently..
Yeah. I think it can be done.
budweiser
King of the Beers
Yes, of course. I think France has a good shot at it. I'm sitting here thinking how it would work.
futurehermit
Deity
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I went down this rabbit hole to begin with to see if I could find a reason not to go tradition every game
If you're only building 3-4 cities and puppeting it seems like tradition is superior imo.
futurehermit
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So, what would you conclude -- only expand to 4 cities as France?
Would this only be for CV? Or same for dom/science?
If yes to any of the above, is there still enough incentive to go liberty over tradition?
Playing by feel (instead of by math), I have had a lot of success with a 6 city liberty opening as France. It's hard (due to neighbours and happiness) to consistently get > 6 cities before needing to war to expand.
futurehermit
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I missed this post earlier -- thanks for doing this!
So...does the France UA overcome the world wonder requirement?
If so, it seems that the other requirements could be possible...
Not even close. There's no way +2 culture in a city (i.e., an extra monument) can overcome the loss of a +33% culture modifier in that city (unless you only expect to generate 6 culture in the city, in which case no culture victory for you).
As I see it, most of the cost for too many cities for optimum cultural cities isn't early on; but later.
(For optimum, your city with the least amount of culture per turn must bring in more than 10% of your capital's culture even in late game when the capital is bringing in a lot of culture from great people & great wonders stacked with the Hermitage)
Great Wonders can sometimes be built in cities with poor production for the Freedom sub policy that works best with 1 per wonder via Great Enginner; but your best off with all extra wonders in one spot for Hermitage. (Fewer cities -> a few more can be located in the capital without forgoing that freedom policy benefit)
(For optimum, your city with the least amount of culture per turn must bring in more than 10% of your capital's culture even in late game when the capital is bringing in a lot of culture from great people & great wonders stacked with the Hermitage)
Great Wonders can sometimes be built in cities with poor production for the Freedom sub policy that works best with 1 per wonder via Great Enginner; but your best off with all extra wonders in one spot for Hermitage. (Fewer cities -> a few more can be located in the capital without forgoing that freedom policy benefit)
And 5. You DON'T have enough bonus culture from happiness/CS/puppets/hermitage/planted artists.
I've only got one old culture game I can find in my saves. I have 4 cities. The basic city has 36 cpt, from monument/amp/cath/opera, 3 specialists, liberty policy, 1 cpt from a wonder, that's 23 x 1.58 (25% from sistine, 33% from wonder) = 36.34
So, there's 144 cpt from basic cities, and I'd need to be above 36 x 9 = 324 cpt in extra culture. My extra culture is:
28 from happiness
48 from 4 CS
3 extra from a wonder in a secondary city
109 extra in the capital thanks to more wonders/alhambra/hermitage/3 planted artists.
That's only 188 cpt, so more cities would definitely make things quicker, provided I had the cash to get them up to speed quickly. That bonus culture is actually significantly lower than I would have guessed. I'm not close to 9 x the bonus. Even if you took away the wonders in the other cities, left it at 23 x 1.25 = 29 cpt, I'd need 261 cpt in bonus culture. And I'm close to archaeology, which increases the base cpt by 16 or more, puts the bonus culture required above 50.
Think I need to play a game and keep track of it, and how it changes at benchmarks like building hermitage, changing era for more CS culture, and unlocking freedom's bonus culture.
You don't have to have a wonder in every city for representation to be worth it. If you're settling all your great artists in the capital then most of the culture is coming from there anyway. And there are other factors about piety like the cheaper cathedrals and the 10% total policy reduction that are really good for wide games.
Anyway I'm playing through a piety game now and it's interesting because I originally planned to mass expand but once I had 6 cities it really stopped being worth it. The 500 gold was much better spent on a amphitheatre than a settler and if you have the happiness to spare then it's better to just take a puppet and then annex when you can afford to buy all the culture buildings.
Anyway I'm playing through a piety game now and it's interesting because I originally planned to mass expand but once I had 6 cities it really stopped being worth it. The 500 gold was much better spent on a amphitheatre than a settler and if you have the happiness to spare then it's better to just take a puppet and then annex when you can afford to buy all the culture buildings.
Magma_Dragoon
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The cost increase isn't compounded?
Anyway, all anyone has talked about so far is the culture side. My experience with science is that explosive wide never catches up to 4 city tall.
Anyway, all anyone has talked about so far is the culture side. My experience with science is that explosive wide never catches up to 4 city tall.
BWS
Big Bradd Wolfe
Nope, the city penalty is a flat 10-15% of base (per city), not compounded.
sufficiency
King
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It's easier to do it with only a couple of cities. It's not really because of the increase cost from having more cities, but CV heavily depends on % culture bonuses to stay ahead of the curve.
Gliese 581
Your average civ junkie
It's also easier to not get drawn into unwanted wars if you're tall rather than wide.
BWS
Big Bradd Wolfe
Just finished an experimental wide culture game in the HOF Emperor Cullture Challenge. Finished turn 1901 AD (turn 321), better than usual for me, but not my personal best. I took a screenshot of my culture production at turn 300:
Breakdown:
The 10% rule notes that each city increases policy costs by 10% (with Representation), so unless the cities also increase culture production by 10% or more, they will slow you down. In this example, the empire produces 704 "core" culture per turn from the capital and other non-penalized sources. To avoid a slowdown, the eleven settled cities must produce 70.4 cpt each or 774 cpt overall.
The N+9 rule states that a new city is counterproductive unless it can promptly produce more culture than E/(N+9), where E is your empire's total culture and N is the current number of cities. In this example, you wouldn't want to found a 13th city unless it could produce more than 1,444/(12+9) = 68.8 cpt. You can also calculate the value for an existing city as (EC)/(N+8), where C is the city's culture, but the simpler formula makes for a close approximation.
Not too surprisingly, every city with a world wonder beats the guideline, thanks to Reformation. What I do find surprising is that even the wonder cities can only pay for themselves because of Reformation, Representation, Cathedrals, and weak core culture (300+ turn pace). Remove any one of those factors, and even the best cities have trouble covering the city penalty.
Now the good news for wide culture: Even though the extra cities didn't help me with culture, they didn't hurt much either. The city penalty in this example is about 774 cpt, and my cities covered 740 cpt of it. My twelve-city empire was only about 2.5% slower than its one-city equivalent, and the extra bulk gave me significant military and economic advantages (not sure about science). Also, the slowdown only happened in the second half of the game: In the early game, the extra cities consistently shaved a turn or two from my policy times.
In conclusion: Twelve cities are excessive for culture victory, but 321 turns still isn't a bad time. Three to five cities seem optimal, but only with aggressive cultural policies and religion. Otherwise, use as few cities as you can get away with.
Spoiler :
Breakdown:
- 457 in the capital
- 146 in puppets
- 101 from excess happiness and city-states.
- 704 core culture (capital + puppets + other sources)
- 740 in eleven settled cities
- 1,444 total culture
- 1,732 Golden Age culture
The 10% rule notes that each city increases policy costs by 10% (with Representation), so unless the cities also increase culture production by 10% or more, they will slow you down. In this example, the empire produces 704 "core" culture per turn from the capital and other non-penalized sources. To avoid a slowdown, the eleven settled cities must produce 70.4 cpt each or 774 cpt overall.
The N+9 rule states that a new city is counterproductive unless it can promptly produce more culture than E/(N+9), where E is your empire's total culture and N is the current number of cities. In this example, you wouldn't want to found a 13th city unless it could produce more than 1,444/(12+9) = 68.8 cpt. You can also calculate the value for an existing city as (EC)/(N+8), where C is the city's culture, but the simpler formula makes for a close approximation.
Not too surprisingly, every city with a world wonder beats the guideline, thanks to Reformation. What I do find surprising is that even the wonder cities can only pay for themselves because of Reformation, Representation, Cathedrals, and weak core culture (300+ turn pace). Remove any one of those factors, and even the best cities have trouble covering the city penalty.
Now the good news for wide culture: Even though the extra cities didn't help me with culture, they didn't hurt much either. The city penalty in this example is about 774 cpt, and my cities covered 740 cpt of it. My twelve-city empire was only about 2.5% slower than its one-city equivalent, and the extra bulk gave me significant military and economic advantages (not sure about science). Also, the slowdown only happened in the second half of the game: In the early game, the extra cities consistently shaved a turn or two from my policy times.
In conclusion: Twelve cities are excessive for culture victory, but 321 turns still isn't a bad time. Three to five cities seem optimal, but only with aggressive cultural policies and religion. Otherwise, use as few cities as you can get away with.
Looking at your screenie, your basic city has 60 cpt. You've got 12? I think. So basic cpt is 720. total cpt, disregarding GA bonus, is 1444. So 724 'bonus', from the wonders in various cities, the puppets, the capital, etc. Therefore more cities are slowing you down, as the base culture would need to be 80.
Looking at your cities with wonders, you could say that the base culture for a city that managed to build one is 78. You've got 5 cities like that, that's 390 cpt. Remove the 424 cpt of the 7 non-wonder cities, remove the 288 cpt from GA, and your total cpt is 1020, 630 'bonus' cpt. So the basic city needs 70, produces 78, and therefore more cities will make things quicker. If they can actually get a wonder, that is.
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