Settings:
Deity, Quick, Inland Sea, Std map, Peter against S.Bull, Gandhi, Musa, Pericles, Eliz, Lincoln.
1corn, 1gems, 1FP, lots of grassland forests start.
Result:
1510AD victory (turn 141). Gandhi had 2 Legendary cities and the third was at 20000 culture when I won, he was 6 turns away from victory. The UN had been built around 1200AD and Apollo completed around 1400AD.
Highlights:
Run out of space very soon, so I had 4 cities and 2 miserable cities just to get to 6. 2cottage cities+the GPFarm became Legendary. Failed to get Oracle. I built the Pathenon. 2religions spread, I founded another 2 (CoL+Philo), 8 cathedrals built. Gandhi was my neighbour and put so much preassure into my GPFarm that it lost half its tiles to him. 17GL born. The first 3 were GS, used to bulb Philo and the whole Education. Stopped research at Liberalism, so I didn't try Corporations or the Natural Reserve, which look promising.
Even being expansive I failed to build enough workers, so my cottages were built late, so at 1AD I was doing 100bpt instead of the desired 175-200. That's what I tried to win the Liberalism race by bulbing 3GS and by getting Paper without researching CS (nor Alpha, nor Lite, nor Music). I failed by 3 turns anyway.
I revolted to slavery+OR once to whip some cathedrals and missionaries, then back to CS+Pacifism. I think I should have used one of my GA to start a Goldan Age. That way, I would have saved two turns of anarchy and I would have improved my culture, hammers and GPP. On the other hand, I would have lost 2680 culture, which was just 2 turns in the end of the game. So single-GL Golden Ages must be used.
I added the first 2 GA to the second city around 500AD. That was a mistake, since I built the Hermitage in the capital. In order to add a GA to a city it has to be much much sooner or it has to be in the Hermitage city. Otherwise it is better to bomb them. I bombed 12 GA, 0-4-8. Culture multipliers were 5-4-2.
Differences with Vanilla:
Although I played just as it was a Vanilla game, I found very interesting differences.
- They went for Alpha quite soon.
- Parthenon is veeeery easy to get now.
- The 2 hammers from AP-religion buildings come in handy, specially for hammer poor cities like the GPFarm.
- You must actively and quickly spread the AP religion to your cities.
- There is not so much room for mistakes. The AI will win the game by culture much sooner than it used to win by spaceship.
- There are a bunch of useless WW giving 10cpt and 2GPP(flavour GA). If you have the required resource, you should be able to build a couple of them.
- GP pool purity is not mandatory anymore. You can risk to get a GL of the wrong kind, since it can start a GA now and save some anarchy turns. Spiritual is less important a trait now because of this.
- When building culture the rules are very different from Vanilla. Where I would be building yet another monastery in Vanilla, I was already building culture in BTS.
- Even though Theology is out of the research path, it is maybe possible to get a GPro and use him on Theo, getting a religion and a good chance for the greatly improved Sistine's. EDIT: I take this back, Sistine's needs Music now, no Theology.
- Chopping mistakes are less common.
My ideas on specialists:
I have been thinking lately about the value of a specialist. Let's use normal speed conventions and let's think about a cultural game, although the calculations are valid for GS instead of GAs too.
In a normal game I get 15GL. That means that I have transformed 13500 GPP (100+200+300...+1800+2000) into GLs. But at the end of the game there is always some GPP in the cities. Those are wasted. Let's say 2500 wasted GPP at the end of the game. For the sake of simplicity let's say that every GL in my game is a GA and that I use all my GAs as cultural bombs. So I get 60000 culture out of my 15 GA. Of course, in a real game, I can decide to add a GA to a city or to get a GS instead of a GA; if I am not stupid I am doing that in order to get a better result than getting a GA and bombing it. So let's say 64000 culture instead of 60000.
So, I build 16000 GPP and I get 64000 culture in exchange. That means every GPP I generate is worth 4 culture. EDIT: Please note that the culture generated via GPP is not attached to the city that produced it, but can be transported to other cities.
This figure is very important. Let's call it the UAV, Universal Artist Value. UAV=4. Please, see the figure at motion in these examples:
Example1: is it better for this city to run Mercantilism or FreeMarket? It can have 3 6commerce per turn routes or 2 1commerce per turn routes and 1 artist. At 100% cultural slider, if this is a Legendary city, it is 18*4cpt (let's imagine culture multipliers are 4 in this city) against (2+4)*4cpt plus 9 GPPpt (I am Philosophical and I run Pacifism), which according to my UAV is 72cpt against 24+9*4==60cpt. FM is better! But, what happens if this city is not one of the 3? Then the commerce transformed into culture is useless, while the GPP are useful as long as this city pops a GA eventually. In this case is 0 against 9*4==36 cpt. If you make this calculation for every city in the empire, you can get to know what is better.
Example2: is it better for this city to work the plains-hill gold or to hire an artist? Food is the same. I will lose some hammers if I choose the artist. The artist will give me 1bpt instead. What about culture? The gold is 7*4==28cpt. The artist is 4*4+9*4=52cpt. So, if the value of the hammers is not very big, it is better to leave the gold alone!
Ok. You now understand the importance of this figure. But, is it accurate? I have made a lot of assumptions, haven't I? Let's see how the figure changes when the assumed parameters change.
- The optimizator. The optimizator only wastes 1000GPP at the end of the game and knows how to handle his early GLs to get an optimum result, 8000 additional culture. Optimizator's UAV = 68000/14500 = 4.69
- The easy going. The easy going never cares to starve his cities in the last turns and doesn't want to calculate the value of a GS compared to the value of a GA, so he wastes 3000GPP and 2000 culture. Easy going's UAV = 58000/16500 = 3.52
- The lazy. The lazy wastes 2500GPP and gets 4000 additional culture out of his early GLs, just like me. But he gets only 12 GL per game. Lazy's UAV = (12*4000+4000)/(8100+2500) = 4.91
- The farmer of GLs. The farmer wastes 2500GPP and gets 4000 additional culture out of his early GLs, just like me. But he gets 20 GLs per game. Farmer's UAV = (20*4000+4000)/(26500+2500) = 2.9
So your UAV depends on your playing stile and the way your particular game is developping. Your UAV is a number between 3 and 5. If you optimize a lot and you are going to get few GLs, then it is probably around 5. If you never care about MM and you are getting a lot of GLs, then it is probably around 3.
I would appreciate your pointing out any mistakes. If you have different ideas about cultural games in BTS compared to Vanilla or about the value of a specialist, I am willing to read them!
Thanks for reading.
Deity, Quick, Inland Sea, Std map, Peter against S.Bull, Gandhi, Musa, Pericles, Eliz, Lincoln.
1corn, 1gems, 1FP, lots of grassland forests start.
Result:
1510AD victory (turn 141). Gandhi had 2 Legendary cities and the third was at 20000 culture when I won, he was 6 turns away from victory. The UN had been built around 1200AD and Apollo completed around 1400AD.
Highlights:
Run out of space very soon, so I had 4 cities and 2 miserable cities just to get to 6. 2cottage cities+the GPFarm became Legendary. Failed to get Oracle. I built the Pathenon. 2religions spread, I founded another 2 (CoL+Philo), 8 cathedrals built. Gandhi was my neighbour and put so much preassure into my GPFarm that it lost half its tiles to him. 17GL born. The first 3 were GS, used to bulb Philo and the whole Education. Stopped research at Liberalism, so I didn't try Corporations or the Natural Reserve, which look promising.
Even being expansive I failed to build enough workers, so my cottages were built late, so at 1AD I was doing 100bpt instead of the desired 175-200. That's what I tried to win the Liberalism race by bulbing 3GS and by getting Paper without researching CS (nor Alpha, nor Lite, nor Music). I failed by 3 turns anyway.
I revolted to slavery+OR once to whip some cathedrals and missionaries, then back to CS+Pacifism. I think I should have used one of my GA to start a Goldan Age. That way, I would have saved two turns of anarchy and I would have improved my culture, hammers and GPP. On the other hand, I would have lost 2680 culture, which was just 2 turns in the end of the game. So single-GL Golden Ages must be used.
I added the first 2 GA to the second city around 500AD. That was a mistake, since I built the Hermitage in the capital. In order to add a GA to a city it has to be much much sooner or it has to be in the Hermitage city. Otherwise it is better to bomb them. I bombed 12 GA, 0-4-8. Culture multipliers were 5-4-2.
Differences with Vanilla:
Although I played just as it was a Vanilla game, I found very interesting differences.
- They went for Alpha quite soon.
- Parthenon is veeeery easy to get now.
- The 2 hammers from AP-religion buildings come in handy, specially for hammer poor cities like the GPFarm.
- You must actively and quickly spread the AP religion to your cities.
- There is not so much room for mistakes. The AI will win the game by culture much sooner than it used to win by spaceship.
- There are a bunch of useless WW giving 10cpt and 2GPP(flavour GA). If you have the required resource, you should be able to build a couple of them.
- GP pool purity is not mandatory anymore. You can risk to get a GL of the wrong kind, since it can start a GA now and save some anarchy turns. Spiritual is less important a trait now because of this.
- When building culture the rules are very different from Vanilla. Where I would be building yet another monastery in Vanilla, I was already building culture in BTS.
- Even though Theology is out of the research path, it is maybe possible to get a GPro and use him on Theo, getting a religion and a good chance for the greatly improved Sistine's. EDIT: I take this back, Sistine's needs Music now, no Theology.
- Chopping mistakes are less common.
My ideas on specialists:
I have been thinking lately about the value of a specialist. Let's use normal speed conventions and let's think about a cultural game, although the calculations are valid for GS instead of GAs too.
In a normal game I get 15GL. That means that I have transformed 13500 GPP (100+200+300...+1800+2000) into GLs. But at the end of the game there is always some GPP in the cities. Those are wasted. Let's say 2500 wasted GPP at the end of the game. For the sake of simplicity let's say that every GL in my game is a GA and that I use all my GAs as cultural bombs. So I get 60000 culture out of my 15 GA. Of course, in a real game, I can decide to add a GA to a city or to get a GS instead of a GA; if I am not stupid I am doing that in order to get a better result than getting a GA and bombing it. So let's say 64000 culture instead of 60000.
So, I build 16000 GPP and I get 64000 culture in exchange. That means every GPP I generate is worth 4 culture. EDIT: Please note that the culture generated via GPP is not attached to the city that produced it, but can be transported to other cities.
This figure is very important. Let's call it the UAV, Universal Artist Value. UAV=4. Please, see the figure at motion in these examples:
Example1: is it better for this city to run Mercantilism or FreeMarket? It can have 3 6commerce per turn routes or 2 1commerce per turn routes and 1 artist. At 100% cultural slider, if this is a Legendary city, it is 18*4cpt (let's imagine culture multipliers are 4 in this city) against (2+4)*4cpt plus 9 GPPpt (I am Philosophical and I run Pacifism), which according to my UAV is 72cpt against 24+9*4==60cpt. FM is better! But, what happens if this city is not one of the 3? Then the commerce transformed into culture is useless, while the GPP are useful as long as this city pops a GA eventually. In this case is 0 against 9*4==36 cpt. If you make this calculation for every city in the empire, you can get to know what is better.
Example2: is it better for this city to work the plains-hill gold or to hire an artist? Food is the same. I will lose some hammers if I choose the artist. The artist will give me 1bpt instead. What about culture? The gold is 7*4==28cpt. The artist is 4*4+9*4=52cpt. So, if the value of the hammers is not very big, it is better to leave the gold alone!
Ok. You now understand the importance of this figure. But, is it accurate? I have made a lot of assumptions, haven't I? Let's see how the figure changes when the assumed parameters change.
- The optimizator. The optimizator only wastes 1000GPP at the end of the game and knows how to handle his early GLs to get an optimum result, 8000 additional culture. Optimizator's UAV = 68000/14500 = 4.69
- The easy going. The easy going never cares to starve his cities in the last turns and doesn't want to calculate the value of a GS compared to the value of a GA, so he wastes 3000GPP and 2000 culture. Easy going's UAV = 58000/16500 = 3.52
- The lazy. The lazy wastes 2500GPP and gets 4000 additional culture out of his early GLs, just like me. But he gets only 12 GL per game. Lazy's UAV = (12*4000+4000)/(8100+2500) = 4.91
- The farmer of GLs. The farmer wastes 2500GPP and gets 4000 additional culture out of his early GLs, just like me. But he gets 20 GLs per game. Farmer's UAV = (20*4000+4000)/(26500+2500) = 2.9
So your UAV depends on your playing stile and the way your particular game is developping. Your UAV is a number between 3 and 5. If you optimize a lot and you are going to get few GLs, then it is probably around 5. If you never care about MM and you are getting a lot of GLs, then it is probably around 3.
I would appreciate your pointing out any mistakes. If you have different ideas about cultural games in BTS compared to Vanilla or about the value of a specialist, I am willing to read them!
Thanks for reading.
wow, I've read a few BTS refereneces, but didn't see that. I'm gonna have to think about how to abuse that. Is there a good article somewhere on new BTS stuff?
