Simple Little Expansionistic Trait Idea

I think everyone would agree that the cheap granary is a fantastic benefit, the cheap harbor is OK... nice certainly, but not of great value. Plus two health is also nice... but it's perhaps the equivalent of plus two food which either doesn't take effect until late game or takes effect in low health sites such as a flood plain. So basically it's a decent trait, but perhaps to help it compete with financial or w/e other nice traits there could be a couple simple changes. To me the +25% worker build rate is just silly, a token bonus. Either have it at +50% or don't have it at all. So my simple idea was this:

-No bonus on building workers, but start with one free worker
-Cheap aqueducts

Thoughts?

Starting with a worker is sooo overpowered. You can build that farm on the corn before anyone else or mine that gold or chop that forest all without wasting production AND growth on buiding a worker. Simply to powerful.

Rename the trait to "Deity" and start yourself with a Settler, too.

Expansive as well as Spiritual tend to be underdog traits, however having mysticism at start fixes the latter.

As pointed out before free Worker at start is too much. I think free scout might be a bit more in line.

I am however not too sure if expansionistic really does need a boost.

The +2 health is a very good bonus and together with the rest of expansives bonuses it's pretty good IMHO so I can't see any real reason to improve it more. As with all traits, it's about to utilize it to full effect that's the trick.

But that's just my opinion.

Yeah, truthfully, I've never though of the expansionist trait as underpowered, or in need of a boost. extra health can be good mid-late game, cheap early buildings good early game - what's not to like?

In all seriousness, I think most of the traits are useful - I think that a few of them I personally don't use very well, so to me they feel underpowered, but I'm certain that in the hands of some of the experts here on the forums they'd be fine... I guess to sum it up - it's all how you use them...

Since on emperor the best way of winning is warmongering, as well as on immortal it is the only way of winning traits are good if they serve well to warmongering, either as support, or directly. Philosophical, Spiritual, Expansive, Creative might be cool, but they do little to fuel your war effort. Imperialistic gives you cheaper settlers which might fuel your early expansion, but on larger maps the GG bonus is not as significant, if not with synergy with charismatic. And on immortal it is likely you won't be able to use this early advantage fully. Protective is mostly for turtlers, but cheap walls and castles are an excellent thing. Industrious: well on high levels you don't build wonders as often, but the forge bonus is cool.
Thus you should focus on traits like charismatic, aggressive, (who enable you to fight well and by warmongering you will fight a lot) organized, financial(which allow you to support an expanding empire and by warmongering your empire is going to grow big and it costs much more on high levels).
The other traits might work in synergies with those, but if your civ has neither of them, it's like playing on a slightly harder level.

Exp is a fine mid-low tier trait as it is. Worker at start is too overpowered (well spoken, OTAKUjbski!), and cheap aqueducts is silly. Cheap grocers would be more like it...

Mik:

Creative; Best trait for landgrabbing. You can block off sections for yourself and choke and AI. This helps on all levels (many Deity players consider this an amazingly important thing).

Philosophical: Awesome. One great way to keep up in the tech race is lightbulbs- both Snaaty and Unconquered Sun do this (see: Snaaty's guide for Emperor up and US's Justinian's University game (also featuring landgrab))

Spiritual: Spiritual is amazing, what the heck? Have you never wanted to switch into Theo to get out some highly promoted units, or into Nationhood for the draft, but didn't want the 2-4 turns of switching? It gives you amazing versatility.

I can't make a case for expansive at higher levels.

Aggresive, I can't make a case for being good. Awesome, a free promotion (albeit one that unlocks many good promotions) and cheap barracks? I'd take Industrious or Imperialistic anyday.

And onto Expansive:

My most recent games reached the industrial age.

5 unhealthy for coal power. 1 unhealthy from a lab. 1 from a forge. (Perhaps) 1 (or is it 3?) from Industrial Parks. Want to know what 2 extra food is? An extra guy working a mine. So that's what, 12 production before build specific modifiers. Cool I guess.

I always thought the Expansive Trait should get Cheap Settlers, Explorers & Caravels.

a "worker" never really made sense for Expansive. Industrious, maybe, but not Expansive.

Expansive is fine. cheap granaries are great.

Now, Imperialistic, that needs a boost. Cheap settlers is a losing preposition compared to cheap buildings. Once you have a decent production city or two, cheap settlers is virtually a non-issue, while cheap buildings in new. low-production cities will ALWAYS be helpful.

Quotey said:

Mik:

Creative; Best trait for landgrabbing. You can block off sections for yourself and choke and AI. This helps on all levels (many Deity players consider this an amazingly important thing).

Philosophical: Awesome. One great way to keep up in the tech race is lightbulbs- both Snaaty and Unconquered Sun do this (see: Snaaty's guide for Emperor up and US's Justinian's University game (also featuring landgrab))

Spiritual: Spiritual is amazing, what the heck? Have you never wanted to switch into Theo to get out some highly promoted units, or into Nationhood for the draft, but didn't want the 2-4 turns of switching? It gives you amazing versatility.

I can't make a case for expansive at higher levels.

Aggresive, I can't make a case for being good. Awesome, a free promotion (albeit one that unlocks many good promotions) and cheap barracks? I'd take Industrious or Imperialistic anyday.

And onto Expansive:

My most recent games reached the industrial age.

5 unhealthy for coal power. 1 unhealthy from a lab. 1 from a forge. (Perhaps) 1 (or is it 3?) from Industrial Parks. Want to know what 2 extra food is? An extra guy working a mine. So that's what, 12 production before build specific modifiers. Cool I guess.

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Creative: 2 bonus doesn't mean much in the late game and it's no competition for the best way of landgrabbing: conquest.

Philosophical: a GP on marathon can't get any tech discovered by himself since middle ages, later, renaissance age: a +3000 bonus for a tech that costs 10000? egrhem? and on larger maps join city really sucks you give i.e. a great merchant orders to join a city +1 +6 , yeah, like when I have 15 cities and I'm earning 400 gpt I'm really gonna feel the difference.

Imperialistic: your general can be turned into a warlord, giving you a good unit, but great instructor?? what's the difference of enhancing the exp of units in one of 5 core unit producing cities? 80% of your military production ain't gonna benefit from it and this toll will get even lower as your empire grows.

Spiritual: you have to wait 5 turns with every switch anyway and org rel is the standard civic before industrial age, theo unless in a total unit rush ain't worth it. 5XP provides your units with 2 upgrades, as well as 7XP. The org rels +25% is silent, but very effective bonus.

Mik1984 said:

Philosophical: a GP on marathon can't get any tech discovered by himself since middle ages, later, renaissance age: a +3000 bonus for a tech that costs 10000? egrhem? and on larger maps join city really sucks you give i.e. a great merchant orders to join a city +1 +6 , yeah, like when I have 15 cities and I'm earning 400 gpt I'm really gonna feel the difference.

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If you have 15 cities, you shouldn't have one city with 400 great person points points coming in... You should have 10+ cities with a reasonable number of points coming in. Between your civ, you will have a consistent great person pop rate all game... And those settled great people you're dismissing add up when you have dozens settled across your civ, and add up *hugely*. Each one with its natural bonuses, priests with Agor Wat bonuses, and all of them with rep bonuses, and you have an extremely robust, flexible economy that snowballs the more great people keep on cranking out.

There's a reason why there are quite a few guys playing on Deity playing philosophical civs, running specialist economies, and actually winning...

Mik1984 said:

Spiritual: you have to wait 5 turns with every switch anyway and org rel is the standard civic before industrial age, theo unless in a total unit rush ain't worth it. 5XP provides your units with 2 upgrades, as well as 7XP. The org rels +25% is silent, but very effective bonus.

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OR the standard civic? Uh... No. It's one of the most commonly used one, but far from the only change that one might be inclined to make before the industrial age - and some people, when they get their hands on spiritual, milk it for all its worth.

Not to mention that you left out one of the biggest perks of spiritual - the cheap temples. People write this off so easily without thinking about it, but, look at it this way... If you're aiming for a cultural win, all of the sudden, you're going to find yourself building a *ton* of temples so you can build various cathedral type buildings - and the spiritual temple bonus ends up saving you as many hammers as the organized building bonus would.

gpt- I mean gold per turn.

I never aimed for cultural wins. The problem is that every time I fall into the development frenzy and I forget about the need to get prepared for the next war, I lose the window of opportunity eventually and I waste time.

Maybe it's a solution to win on deity - turtle down to a couple large cities, survive until medieval age become a vassal of someone big, spam culture and wait to eventually win 1000 turns later, while still being much backwards. But it's boring.

Cheap temples?
Temples are cheap enough in the industrial era without it. With standard 100% production bonus(forge+factory+power), the next 100% that comes from the trait only diminishes the production cost by 1/6 of its base value - just as it doesn't make much difference weather you have stone or protective, or both.

Early temples?
What for when you have marketplace and forge?
And with monarchy you can build 3 units instead and leave one for ?

first of all, Not all people are warmongerers...

Maybe it's a solution to win on deity - turtle down to a couple large cities, survive until medieval age become a vassal of someone big, spam culture and wait to eventually win 1000 turns later, while still being much backwards. But it's boring.

Click to expand...

You can't become a vassal of somebody...

Heh, sorry to say, the fact that you say "I never go for cultural wins" and then go on to tell me that the benefit to temple production isn't good kind of invalidates your position. I could tell you that Charismatic kind of sucks, but I am a peaceful builder exclusively, and I'm sure you'd jump on it

You get cathedrals with music and temples way before that - if you're sitting there telling me that the bonus isn't helping you when you get to the industrial era, it's pretty obvious that you're just ignoring the very great boon to a type of victory that this bonus is helpful for. If you want a cultural victory, getting things early pays off - not "Well, I'll just build my temples when I have forges, factories, coal plants, levees, etc etc etc - then the bonus from spiritual is useless!"

And I wasn't meaning that philosophical is helpful in going for cultural wins by people "turtling down and becoming someone's vassal with the plan to win 1000 years later." I was meaning that it's can make for a very powerful, flexible specialist economy that is in many was much more resilient to enemy incursion and much faster to reach full speed than a cottage economy. Philosophical is very powerful on deity because A) you don't need any particular terrain type to make it work outside of having food production, B) you can switch scientists to engineers in a pinch if you need production, and vice-versa, while cottages are pure money until you hit US, and B) you can't pillage specialists and camped super specialists, unlike cottages. For this type of economy, philosophical is *incredible*, and frankly, it's simply not a weak trait - just doesn't suit your playstyle.

As for your "boring" comment... Believe it or not, I find the cookie-cutter rush tactics most warmongers use to be boring as hell. Cultural and diplomatic take *so* much more planning and finesse, I tend to find them much more interesting victory options.. And I usually go space race ahead of late game military victory just because any game I win via space race is one that I'll have played a full game, not won by the time I've got riflemen.

I wait with those temples to industrial era, since this is usually the time when I have to squeeze out the from all possible sources for my large cities, before that more effective sources for gathering are available.

Well, an engineer produces 2, while mines and workshops are much more effective.
Specialist economy? Having more than 3 cities focused on GP causes the effect that you keep accumulating those points in void. What you need is to specialize the cities. At beginning only one, then two, eventually 3 GP producing cities, the rest either financial or absolutely industrial, so you can save a lot of time by not having to equip them with or buildings, not mentioning buildings

Mik, I think you're missing why those temples are being built. You need several temples of a certain religion to produce one of that religion's cathedrals, which in turn gives you a 50% culture bonus. Getting as many cathedrals as possible is obviously a *huge* boon for a cultural victory, and at several temples per cathedral, and ideally multiple cathedrals per each of your three great cities, that's a ton of temples to be built. The earlier those are being built, the earlier you can start loading out some very impressive culture from those cities. Basically, the happiness from the temples is not the point.

I didn't suggest that all of the city's production come from engineers... That's more or less impossible. Workshops/mines get pillaged and can be rebuilt quickly and don't have to grow back like cottages, still making SE's more resiliant - but if you're working just a few food and production squares and have a civ full of cities loaded with merchants, scientists, priests, spies, and a few artists and engineers, you will have *way* more than three great person producing cities. With a philosophical SE, you'll oftentimes find great people popping out from all over the place, not just your top three or four great person cities.

Anyways, you should read a few of the guides on specialist economies in the war academy, as well as some of the debates on great person farms. There's a lot of math out there that support some playstyles you're dismissing outright. Some of the highest level players in these forums rely on strategies you're arguing against.

The real way to boost Expansie (and Imperialistic) is to make Production bonuses apply to "Food production" of Settlers and Workers.