Rat45 CCM - Gideon's Band

LKendter said:

WOW - if that holds out for the game in CCM, it would explain why the worker can't keep up. For a monster map, I need 2X the number of workers vs. the base game?

I was already thinking the best thing for CCM would be a way to get more bang for the buck out of workers, even letting me merge them (if possible) into a super worker.

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Actually, this is how Civinator wanted it. He found the endessly roaded and railed tiles of most games to be a bad thing. So he increased the map size, limited worker production during the first two ages and increased the base cost of laying rails.

We have a lot of slaves because of how much city razing we are doing this game.

On my turns, the first two turns are long as I try to get a grip on what is going on. I will bring as many workers/slaves as I can back to the capital sorting grounds and seperate the two. For me, stacks of 36 work well. I'll park them nearby, send all the wounded from the prior turn back to the capital to heal, wait for the new units to be produced, gathered and sorted near the capital and then begin to plan in detail the warfare of the turn, once I know what forces are available to use. Once the combat stops then I cycle through the cities, improving as I go.

By the time the third turn comes around I leave many of the non-combat related workers in the field to work on a tile near to the one they were on. I don't (always) bring them back to be parked and reallocated.

1837 AD (7)
Wawat is razed, and we gain 3 workers. Now I feel like something has been accomplished in my set.



Dr. Radek Zelenka replaces that city.

My bad luck with partisans continues as I lose to a musket on flatlands. I'm going to have to be more paranoid what these attack.

It is time for the serious battle to begin. I declare on Portugal. Time to play whack a stack.
Stack Whacking Early Tank is formed. Staging Point gets rushed electric power.
Lee's Early Tank is formed. Dr. Allision Blake gets rushed electric power.
Cannon Killing Cavalry is formed. Rogue gets rushed electric power.
Yet Another Leader Cavalry is formed. Jack O'Neil gets rushed electric power.
This unit should have been named clueless cavalry. 5 HP elite lost to a 1 HP rifle.
Alcacer do Sal is razed and replaced with Colonel Steven Caldwell.
Sao Paulo is razed netting 4 workers.
Sagres is razed netting 8 workers and a supply shipment.
Guimaraes is razed netting 9 workers.
Oberoth is founded.
Another blood bath, but Lagos is razed netting 7 workers.
You know the turn is a monster, when you make 4 during turn saves.
(IT) We lost a few tanks to counter-attacks. Pretty weak for first turn after war declared.

1838 AD (8)
Guarda is razed for 2 workers. No clue how I tripped a stack attack.
Evora is razed for 6 workers.
Richard Woolsey is formed.
<end session 3>

You know you are leader fishing when you built rails just to attack and out of range stack.
Leader Fishing 1900 Infantry is formed. Staging Point gets rushed light industry.
We liberate Libson with the obsolete Great Lighthouse and 10 stinking resistors. An artist is "not to be" for this city.
Castelo Branco is razed with 2 slaves. There is no new city at the moment, as the spot is culture choked.
Cavalry Carnage does it again during the assault on Oporto. This was the final kill razing the city for 9 workers. Jack O'niel gets a rushed rail yard.
Braga is razed gaining 3 workers, and that ends the annoying cities behind our lines.
Emerita is razed for more workers and some ships were sunk in port.
Leiria is razed gaining 9 workers. Fried Flounder is founded to replace it.
Coimbra is razed gaining 3 workers.
Sheriff Andy is formed near two cows.

LOL+++ Portugal is down to 3 known cities, but they don't want to talk to us.


Summary:
I made a strong building push. We are down to 60% to stay around break-even. I don't see us getting a lot of GPT from the AI at this point. Every town that can is building markets and banks. The huge advantage in CCM is you don't have to wonder if they pay off. With maintenance of zero, every building helps. The only question is the degree.

We should decide which coast for the overseas invasion so that we can consolidate our fleet. Right now two stacks on opposite side ports, plus the small stack that took the Arabian city.


This sums things up well.


And multiple new cities were built that haven't expanded borders yet.

There are still workers fortified near Jerusalem, in case you want more rails by the Portuguese front before wrapping up the turn.


Northern Pike (up)
Greebley (on deck)
CommandoBob
THeRat
LKendter (just played)

Lurker:

CommandoBob, did you mention industrial as well as RP? If she has that trait and you don't, her workers are innately faster by 50% iirc.

Guess the save would help.

CommandoBob said:

Replacement Parts, that glorious tech that gives Artillery, Infantry and speeds up workers, would be responible for the shorter build time (I think...I'm going on memory at the moment).

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I'm thinking it has been a while since you played a standard game with a non industrious Civ. It takes only 3 turns to road. Ind. does it in 2.

Sorry didn't mean to interrupt your game... trundles off to the cheap seats again

Good work plodding through all that bad terrain in Nubia.

I've got it.

Northern Pike (up)
Greebley
CommandoBob
THeRat (swapped--on deck)
LKendter (just played)

Northern Pike said:

Good work plodding through all that bad terrain in Nubia.

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Plodding is the correct word.

I was glad to have large stacks, as several of those cities were being moved on for several turns with large stacks. Fast units ground to a halt with all those forest and hills.


I hope I left enough troops, including infantry, that we don't feel the need to strip out cities again.

CommandoBob said:

Actually, this is how Civinator wanted it. He found the endessly roaded and railed tiles of most games to be a bad thing. So he increased the map size, limited worker production during the first two ages and increased the base cost of laying rails.

We have a lot of slaves because of how much city razing we are doing this game.

On my turns, the first two turns are long as I try to get a grip on what is going on. I will bring as many workers/slaves as I can back to the capital sorting grounds and seperate the two. For me, stacks of 36 work well. I'll park them nearby, send all the wounded from the prior turn back to the capital to heal, wait for the new units to be produced, gathered and sorted near the capital and then begin to plan in detail the warfare of the turn, once I know what forces are available to use. Once the combat stops then I cycle through the cities, improving as I go.

By the time the third turn comes around I leave many of the non-combat related workers in the field to work on a tile near to the one they were on. I don't (always) bring them back to be parked and reallocated.

Click to expand...

Yes CommandoBob, one of the features I wanted to do with CCM was to give the road back the value of a road and a railway passing through a continent the worth of such a railway. If you have a road and a railway on every tile, in my eyes in fact you have nothing that a railway should present. If you manage to destroy a tile with a railroad on a map with a railroad on every tile this is next to no loss, but if you manage to destroy a part of the only intercontinental railroad of your enemy, this can have a massive strategic impact to the game (and is much more realistic than a world with every tile railroaded on earth).

About the slaves: Please don´t forget, that you can upgrade your slaves with steel (if I remember well). In the next version this upgrading will become possible with enlightenment again.

Outside of one or two spots (staging areas), a ton of this map still has plenty of tiles with no developments.

Some areas still have a thin-net and get bottlenecked. I can't tell you how many times I had to rail around units, or lawyer them out if weak enough. The rail-net is far more fragile then base civ.

If the speed of workers doubled, I still can't see this map being fully railed. Even with an absurd 1000+ workers I can't even keep up with tile development for cities. I stopped building workers due to lack of real-time to use them, not out of need.

Slaves upgrading earlier may help. The default to built garrisons was slaves as they weren't as effective. The question is how many slaves would be around at enlightenment?


@Civinator -is there anyway to create worker groups within the game engine. I'd be willing have some wastage of worker actions if a single click would mine, irrigate, etc. The number of clicks to complete laying 20+ rails in a turn is massive. I can group move them to the tile, but I still have to manually click them all.

My favorite of CCM is no building maintenance. It gets rid of the MM of is this building justified in the city. That is a major time saver.
My original dislike for CCM is no armies, but I've learn to adapt.
My new dislike is worker action time. That last set probably included 10+ hours of worker management. That is way too much for an 8 turn set. That doesn't count rails in the middle of the combat session as I move toward the next town.

I've dreamed of those worker groups for ten years, but I imagine they're beyond the limits of modding.

I think the limited supply of workers early in the game is one of the strongest features of CCM, since it forces important decisions on the player, e.g. whether mines should be built at all when they take so long. In straight C3C any good player can escape these trade-offs just by spamming out workers, so there's less real thought involved.

Northern Pike said:

I think the limited supply of workers early in the game is one of the strongest features of CCM

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It is a trade off - it makes early plans a lot more critical. Pillaging far more painful.

However, once you can build workers without losing population, worker spam is the way to go.
I would have built a lot more during my set IF I thought I could find the time to use them!

Hi guys,

great fighting and eliminating some foes. That's the way to speed the game up. I have a feeling our continent will be ours by the time NP has played his turns.

To add my 3 cents to the discussion. I have to admit that the worker actions around the Industrial Age really spoil the fun of the game. It's all fine if you need them for railing etc to speed up the conquest. However, the trillion of actions for tile improvements really get on my nerves.
Same goes for the production cycle in the late game.

It would be great to be able to stack the workers into a super worker. Guess it's not possible.

Well, since we are really advancing fast, we will again not get deeper into the tech tree. A pity really. I am sure once we made a proper landfall onto the other continent, we will achieve domination real fast.

If you could separate worker actions, you could make some kind or railing user that is the only unit that can rail. You could make railing cheap but the unit expensive.

So
Workers can do anything but railing - cost 10
Rail Unit can only do railing - cost 80 and railing costs 1/8th what it does now.
At a cost of 80, its competing against full military units or buildings to make.

This would simulate worker groups.

An alternative would be a unit whose worker speed is 6x or 8x for all worker actions with a cost of 60 or 80 and otherwise keep times the same.

One thing that may break down is the industrial ability. If a normal civ could rail in a turn with 1 of these units, then industrial isn't the best. Maybe it would take 3 turns for non-ind civ before 2x workers or 2 with ind civ. Then when 2x, a single unit could rail for a ind civ, and a non-ind would have to add some workers to complete in 1.

Thank you all for your highly appreciated input about workers. This is a good time for you giving suggestions about improving the gameplay of CCM, as the next version of CCM (what in reality becomes more and more a kind of CCM II) is "in the making". I agree that to manouvre with 1.000 plus workers is an unfun element, that must be changed.

Unfortunately it is no solution to separate workers by their actions (p.e. some workers that can perform railroad-jobs and some that can´t do it), as the AI wouldn´t use such a "limited" worker. For using the terraform-strategy by the AI, all worker-jobs from Civ 3 vanilla plus adding pop-points to a city must be flagged. If a "limited" worker doesn´t have the "build railroad-flag", the AI wouldn´t use such a unit, even not for building roads or mines or other allowed worker-jobs.

What seems to be doable, is the "super-worker". There is a flag in the editor for worker-units to determine their efficiency. The scala for this flag goes from 0 to 1.000. The normal worker in standard C3C and CCM has an efficiency of 100. The "loved" slaves in CCM have 75. It would be possible to do a worker, that is 10 times as efficient as the normal worker. Of course such a worker would have a price: 1000 shields and 10 pop-points to keep gameplay somewhat in balance.



Such a unit can´t be simply named "worker". I need a good name for such a unit (railway brigade? or something better). The worker should appear about the tech "Steampower".Of course I see some civers here thinking " I have enough money to rush-build such a unit in a conquered city and to push down the potential of foreign citizens in that city." This would help against another unfun element of C3C, the "starving down of population".

Lurker:

I like that, but man you had better ground that super worker. (giganto)

Civinator said:

Such a unit can´t be simply named "worker". I need a good name for such a unit (railway brigade? or something better). The worker should appear about the tech "Steampower".Of course I see some civers here thinking " I have enough money to rush-build such a unit in a conquered city and to push down the potential of foreign citizens in that city." This would help against another unfun element of C3C, the "starving down of population".

Click to expand...

How about John Henry or John Henry Railing Machine? Background is from the Wikipedia:

John Henry is an American folk hero and tall tale. He worked as a "steel-driver"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock away. He died during the construction of a tunnel for a railroad. In the legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. The story of John Henry has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels

Click to expand...

Civinator said:

What seems to be doable, is the "super-worker". There is a flag in the editor for worker-units to determine their efficiency. The scala for this flag goes from 0 to 1.000. The normal worker in standard C3C and CCM has an efficiency of 100. The "loved" slaves in CCM have 75. It would be possible to do a worker, that is 10 times as efficient as the normal worker. Of course such a worker would have a price: 1000 shields and 10 pop-points to keep gameplay somewhat in balance.

Click to expand...

I like the idea of this unit but the details are bothering me.

Ten city population points to have a unit that can do the work of 12 normal workers in one turn...that might be a bit steep. It would wreck havoc on city production in those cities large enough to build such a unit. In one turn they would drop from 14 to 4. Ouch! Core cities that can build one turn Early Tanks would be reduced from powerhouse production centers to mere hollowed out shells as they tried to regain their population back.

And one unit costing more to build than the Great Wonder Hoover Dam, which only cost 800 shields?

I would build one on these just for the novelty but probably not more than 2 or 3. The cost to benefit ratio is just too high.

What If..
Normal workers cost 10 and it takes 12 of them to rail any one tile. Lots of clicking, lots of units, and lots of upkeep.

If this unit became available with Compund Steam Engine, the tier 1 Industrial Age tech that allows railroads to built, and cost 130 shields (same as an Early Tank), needs Iron and Coal (required to build rails) and cost the city 3 population points, that makes it much more appealing to build and use.

At 130 shields it is the most expensive land unit in play at this time, so it won't be spammed out like normal workers are. The cost of 3 population points is a bit of bite, too, quite unlike the CCM norm of worker and settlers not affecting population in any way. That will prevent 'casual' building of this unit. And if you cannot build railroads you cannot build this unit either.

If this unit had a movement of 1, which would limit it somewhat, I think that would be okay. I don't see this unit being able to build a road and a railroad in an unimproved tile in one turn. I see it moving onto a road and railing that road in one turn. To do that, 1 movement is enough. If it can road and rail in one turn, then it would need two movement points so that it can move into an unimproved tile and road and rail.

I don't see how this unit would affect gameplay any. Like current workers, this unit would need to be protected from attackers, both seen and unseen. But then, I am not thinking of how the AI would use this unit, either.

CommandoBob, what I have drawn up in my last post concerning the "superworker", are the maximum limits that are possible with the editor in shield-costs and worker-efficiency.

The maximum in worker efficiency is 1.000 in comparison to the normal worker of 100. Therefore a worker with an eff. of 1.000 equals 10 normal workers, a worker with an eff. of 500 equals 5 normal workers. Given that a normal worker costs 1 pop.point, a worker with an eff. of 1.000 should cost 10 pop.points, a worker with an eff. of 500, 5 pop.points, and so on. The maximum of population point costs that is allowed in the editor is 255.

For normal production costs, the limit in the editor is 1.000 shields. Therefore I can´t set Hoover to be more expensive (edited: than 1.000) - and I don´t want to make workers cheaper. There is much too much money in the late CCM game in gameplay and I need something to "draw some money out of the game", especially as I plan to restrict spionage missions for reasons of better gamespeed and avoiding unnecessairy actions like stealing army plans by the AI. So the normal worker must become more expensive, too, to hold the relations.

CommandoBob said:

If this unit became available with Compund Steam Engine, the tier 1 Industrial Age tech that allows railroads to built, and cost 130 shields (same as an Early Tank), needs Iron and Coal (required to build rails) and cost the city 3 population points, that makes it much more appealing to build and use.

At 130 shields it is the most expensive land unit in play at this time, so it won't be spammed out like normal workers are. The cost of 3 population points is a bit of bite, too, quite unlike the CCM norm of worker and settlers not affecting population in any way. That will prevent 'casual' building of this unit. And if you cannot build railroads you cannot build this unit either.

Click to expand...

Considering that you have more than 20.000 gold in this game, wouldn´t you try to rush build 1.000 or more workers, when this would be possible for you? In such a case nothing of the problem would have been fixed, as instead of spending time with giving orders for 1.000 workers, you would have to manage 1.000 super-workers. As a negative side effect, your maps would become like "Coruscant" even more early than in the present games. 3 pop-points as a price for a unit that gives an output of ten workers needing nomally 10 pop-points, wouldn´t that be a very good deal in your eyes, worthy nearly every rush-buy that is possible?

O.k., 130 x 1.000 is 130.000 (gold), but on the other side, not all of them would be built in turn 2. On the other hand, for civers, playing CCM on lower difficulty levels than you, it wouldn´t be a problem to have more than 70.000 gold when reaching era 3.

In my eyes the solution of the problem of spending an enormous amount of time with commanding workers in era 3 and the needed reduction in the number of workers on the map must be mainly achieved by the number of costs in population points - all other limitations here would have very limited effects. May be this superworker will have an efficieny of 500 with a cost of 5 population points or something other (up to the limit of 10 pop-points for an efficieny of 1000). Here gametesting will show the best way to handle the settings of such an unit.

I agree with the resources of building railroads (coal and iron) as an additional perequisit of the "superworker". It would appear with the tech steampower (or compund engines). The AI would build it when it will become the only normally buildable worker. With other words: The normal worker as you know it in your current games, will only be received by autoproduction by the palace and upgrading of slaves. You can boost up the number of workers by normally produced "superworkers", that will have their price. The normal production of normal workers wouldn´t be possible any longer in cities that have access to coal and iron.

I made a request for a steam roller unit to do the job of such a "superworker" in the modding forums: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12363220&postcount=1052