From Emperor to Demigod

tjs282 said:

Because if you go for Philo first, the Republic-slingshot won't work. Remember, in order to get any freebie tech, you have to know all the prerequisites for that tech. So you must research/buy CoL before researching Philo if you want to get Republic as your freebie for finishing Philo first -- as we learned to our cost in our SG...

Did you get offered the chance to choose any other free tech? If so, that suggests that you actually hadn't got CoL after all. If not, and if you know for sure that you were the first to CoL+Philo, then yes, that sounds like a bug.
From my Monarch-level Builder's PoV, nothing at all!

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Thanks for the explanation. Actually I WAS given the chance to choose other techs, but Republic was listed [Edit: Meant to say "was not" but if so it must've been 'cuz another Civ had already researched Philo. Or maybe I didn't research CoL after all. Whatever.] Had to research it myself, another 25-30 turns down the drain. But I'd definitely done CoL before Philo.

Apparently somebody else got Philo first, probably one of the two Civs with which I was at drawn-out war. Stuff happens, eh wot?

Jivilov said:

Thanks for the explanation. Actually I WAS given the chance to choose other techs, but Republic was also listed. Had to research it myself, another 25-30 turns down the drain. But I'd definitely done CoL before Philo.

Apparently somebody else got Philo first, probably one of the two Civs with which I was at drawn-out war. Stuff happens, eh wot?

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If you got CoL and then Philo, and were then offered a free tech, then you must have been first of all the Civs to get Philo. The game doesn't give Republic to you automatically though -- you have to choose it from the list that Professor F6 gives you, and then the game awards it instantly (the same mechanic operates if you manage to build Theory of Evolution in the Industrial Age, except you then get 2 techs for free, not just one!).

It now sounds to me like you might have picked another tech than Republic, either because you didn't realise at the time how the Rep-sling worked, or because you (thought you) needed another tech more urgently instead -- maybe Iron-Working or Monarchy, if you were at war? If so, then yeah, you would then still have had to research Rep from scratch afterwards, which will take a long time, because it has the highest beaker-cost of all the Ancient Age techs.

The irony is, one of the major benefits of taking Rep as the Philo-freebie is that the AI values it very highly, precisely because it has such a high beaker-cost. So getting a monopoly on Republic via CoL+Philo basically gives you a license to print money, because your rivals will bend over backwards to get it from you at (nearly) any price -- gold, techs, Luxes, whatever they have. If you're lucky, you may not need to research any other required Ancient Age techs yourself (except maybe Construction). Instead, you can just trade CoL, Philo, and then Republic for them instead (just make sure that you've sold the same tech to all the AIs in a single turn, or they will re-sell it to each other on the IBT!), while running your Science-slider at 0% to put lotsa gold in them thar coffers. With careful trading, you can also bootstrap your civ into the Middle Age several (dozen) turns before everyone else as well (for yet another freebie-tech, if your civ is Scientific!).

tjs282 said:

I think this only really applies if you're going for HoF-level scores, with as early a launch/win date as possible.

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It sure does! Just as you need to take into account that in (nearly) everything I post here, I take it for granted that the ultimate goal is to optimize for the fastest possible victory. We are not here for fun, right!
(Though I have never played a HoF game. Re-rolling until I get a favorable start position is not my thing. I take what the RNG hands to me and live with it. So replace "HoF" with "GOTM"...)

tjs282 said:

Not according to my food map -- all the available BFC water-tiles were distributed between K'stadt, Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven, with all those cities working 12 tiles in total! K'stadt could only work more wet stuff if it took tiles away from Hamburg and/or Wilhelmshaven, which would then have to take tiles from their neighbours (Aarhus, Fischberg, Waldorf), etc. all up and down the coast...

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Oops, that must have slipped my mind temporarily...

tjs282 said:

If you got CoL and then Philo, and were then offered a free tech, then you must have been first of all the Civs to get Philo. The game doesn't give Republic to you automatically though -- you have to choose it from the list that Professor F6 gives you, and then the game awards it instantly (the same mechanic operates if you manage to build Theory of Evolution in the Industrial Age, except you then get 2 techs for free, not just one!).

It now sounds to me like you might have picked another tech than Republic, either because you didn't realise at the time how the Rep-sling worked, or because you (thought you) needed another tech more urgently instead -- maybe Iron-Working or Monarchy, if you were at war? If so, then yeah, you would then still have had to research Rep from scratch afterwards, which will take a long time, because it has the highest beaker-cost of all the Ancient Age techs.

The irony is, one of the major benefits of taking Rep as the Philo-freebie is that the AI values it very highly, precisely because it has such a high beaker-cost. So getting a monopoly on Republic via CoL+Philo basically gives you a license to print money, because your rivals will bend over backwards to get it from you at (nearly) any price -- gold, techs, Luxes, whatever they have.

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Thanks again tjs. What must've happened is, one of the civs I was warring against (from afar) got Philo first. Too bad...

Jivilov said:

What must've happened is, one of the civs I was warring against (from afar) got Philo first. Too bad...

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Yes, that must have been it. There is no visible difference between being first to Philo and not being first: in both cases the "normal" popup pops up ("Master, our wise men have discovered ... What do we want to research next?" etc.) where you can chose your next research project. If you had indeed been first to Philo, that popup will then appear a second time right afterwards, showing that the one just chosen has already complete and you can chose the next. If someone else had been first, the game just continues (and researches the tech chosen in that popup "by hand").

Lanzelot said:

Re-rolling until I get a favorable start position is not my thing. I take what the RNG hands to me and live with it.

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So even if you start out on a desert island, next to tundra or jungle, surrounded by mountains, etc. you play on anyway?

Jivilov said:

So even if you start out on a desert island, next to tundra or jungle, surrounded by mountains, etc. you play on anyway?

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I don't

I'm not bothered if I don't get a luxury, or bonus food tiles

But I do insist on either a river OR grassland tiles if no river

That's not a lot I feel

Surrounded by Tundra, Mountains, Volcanoes in your starting 9 squares...why bother?

Flood Plains I can deal with as long as it's not the starting square

Jivilov said:

So even if you start out on a desert island, next to tundra or jungle, surrounded by mountains, etc. you play on anyway?

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I did not yet get a completely deserted start (like only 5 tiles all of which are desert, tundra and mountains)... But two games came quite close: in GOTM 102 we had an island of about 30 tiles, where all but 4 tiles had 1 food or less (tundra, hills, plains and mountains)... and of course no fresh water on that island! And of these 4 tiles with more than 1 food, only one tile was good: a cow on grass. The other were a forest-covered grass (chopping forest takes 10 turns in PtW!) and two fish, which had 2f, but no production... And harbors cost 80 shields in PtW, not 60...

The other game was even worse: COTM 100, the anniversary game... To describe the start position, a picture probably says more than a thousand words...



Oh, and another "minor" detail: that game was modded a little bit: the human player was not able to build settlers... And of course on a lonely island again.

So after walking our settler and worker around for a couple of turns in order to find a spot that would actually provide enough food for a city, we had to research Map Making, discover some AIs and then start taking their cities... Difficulty: Regent.

Lanzelot said:

The other game was even worse: COTM 100, the anniversary game... To describe the start position, a picture probably says more than a thousand words...



Oh, and another "minor" detail: that game was modded a little bit: the human player was not able to build settlers... And of course on a lonely island again.

So after walking our settler and worker around for a couple of turns in order to find a spot that would actually provide enough food for a city, we had to research Map Making, discover some AIs and then start taking their cities... Difficulty: Regent.

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I tried that game but abandoned it. Nothing fun about a bad start, it only forces you to move your empire and delay your progress with 100 turns or whatever.

I also didn't finish it, but simply because I ran out of time before the submission deadline. I like challenges like this, but to be honest, this game was "ruined" by some people popping settlers from huts, while others got worthless maps. Between two players of equal skill level, popping a settler from a hut decides the game immediately. Bad RNG luck in combats and leader generation can "even out" over the course of a long game, but an early extra settler cannot be overcome. Especially on this map, where we had 3 excellent settling sites on our island.

walletta said:

Yes, I should have mentioned tjs282 as well. You guys are really awesome. I just came back from reading a few pages of an emperor level succession game featuring Lanzelot and some pretty darn good other players - the complexity and depth of thinking are just amazing. I have such a long way to go!

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@ Lanzelot: The German capital is on a flood plain, no? How do you deal with the risk of disease? Thanks.

Jivilov said:

@ Lanzelot: The German capital is on a flood plain, no? How do you deal with the risk of disease? Thanks.

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That's a really good point. I think we may actually just have been really lucky, because I don't remember anyone ever complaining about losing O'stadt's residents to disease during their turnset. Our many Jungle-cities were similarly unaffected, IIRC.

(That's not to say that disease -- or at least, complaints about it -- never happened, but I'm not going to trawl back through nearly 600 posts to check... I certainly didn't get any disease during my turnsets, that's for sure.)

OTOH, for a Floodplain start, you don't really need to worry about the disease risk, as such. On such fertile land, even under Despotism, any pop-losses to disease are going to be replenished quickly, especially if the city has a Granary. And in this SG, irrigating all those Floodplains was one of our first priorities, and O'stadt was given a Gran early so it could act as a Settler-pump -- I guess you could argue that we thereby dealt with the disease risk, but that wasn't the intended purpose.

Actually, the main problem we had with O'stadt in the early stages was that it tended to grow too fast, before the terrain was fully improved, or before we could build Warriors for MP-happiness, or spin out new Workers/Settlers. There was also a lot of discussion about viable Settler-pump plans, as I think I already mentioned earlier in this thread...

Similarly, since Jungle (and Marsh) is such useless terrain in C3C, it always gets cleared ASAP to turn it into (mined) Grassland -- which coincidentally eliminates the disease risk.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply tjs. Much obliged to your informed advice.

ahman said:

I tried that game but abandoned it. Nothing fun about a bad start, it only forces you to move your empire and delay your progress with 100 turns or whatever.

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Spot on this

And as for Flood Plains, for me I'm ok with them

I won't Settle on them, which does cause me to lose a river ocassionally

But they're some of the most powerful food tiles in the game

They can make awful tiles like Mountains or Dessert useful

With wheat, even more so

I think only wheat or cattle on grassland comes close

I have done the exact maths, but when irrigated in Republic, those things produce 5, 6 food per tile

Not sure if I've ever seen 7

RS8 said:

And as for Flood Plains, for me I'm ok with them
*snip*
Not sure if I've ever seen 7[FPT]

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Floods give a base 3FPT (i.e. 2FPT in Despot before irrigation), +1FPT with irrigation, +2FPT with Wheat, and +1FPT with rails.

That means an irrigated+railed Flood can give 5FPT in all Govs except Despot (but who's still using Despot by the time they have Steam?!?). And an irrigated+railed Wheat-Flood will give a delicious 7FPT At Pop6, that would be enough excess food to support mines on 5 Plains/ Hill-tiles and still get +2FPT from the city for further growth if needed (City + irWheatFlood + 5 mrHills => 14 FPT, 21 SPT).

(And wouldn't you know it? In our SG, the Vikings had a Wheat-Flood on their turf which none of their nearest cities could actually use -- silly Ragnar! After Trondheim had fallen and the Vikings were on the ropes, we founded Weizenheim ('Wheat-home') right next door to that tile (it could also access 2 more Floods as well.)

So Floods are indeed powerful tiles; even though Flood-starts will inevitably have poor initial SPT, once they've grown to Pop3-4, the shieldless Floods can easily be compensated by mining the nearby Plains/Desert tiles, i.e. this is one instance where the 'mine green irrigate yellow' rule of thumb doesn't hold -- in this case it's more like 'irrigate Floods, mine everything else!'. And if you're lucky enough to get a Wheat and/or some Oases on the neighbouring Deserts (as we did in our SG), a Monarchy/Republic Settler-pump should be relatively simple to set up.

(Our SG Settler-pump plans were only so complicated because we got stuck in Despotism for a lot longer than we'd intended: Philo got researched before CoL, cocking up our Republic slingshot, so Prof F6 had to slog to Republic the hard way -- it took about 35T.)

tjs282 said:

That's a really good point. I think we may actually just have been really lucky, because I don't remember anyone ever complaining about losing O'stadt's residents to disease during their turnset. Our many Jungle-cities were similarly unaffected, IIRC.

(That's not to say that disease -- or at least, complaints about it -- never happened, but I'm not going to trawl back through nearly 600 posts to check... I certainly didn't get any disease during my turnsets, that's for sure.)

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You must have indeed been very lucky. Just recently I tried another Demigod and settled on floodplains. After Rome grew to size 4 it got hit on two successive turns with disease. Then after it got back to 3 it got hit AGAIN. So I finally threw in the towel; never even got my granary finished .

Question: If you don't settle on floodplains, but they're in the city's BFC are you still at risk? Seems it happened to me quite a few times, but I'm not sure. Thanks.

Jivilov said:

You must have indeed been very lucky. Just recently I tried another Demigod and settled on floodplains. After Rome grew to size 4 it got hit on two successive turns with disease. Then after it got back to 3 it got hit AGAIN. So I finally threw in the towel; never even got my granary finished .

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That really does sound like bad luck. And yeah, I imagine that at DG-level, that kind of Pop-loss could well set you back a long way...

Question: If you don't settle on floodplains, but they're in the city's BFC are you still at risk? Seems it happened to me quite a few times, but I'm not sure. Thanks.

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According to this (Vanilla 1.29) thread, yes -- and the general opinion there is that disease risk is related to the number of citizens you've actually assigned to work the Floods. If so, then planting a city on a Flood tile would itself have an inherent risk (because the city-tile is always 'worked' for 2FPT,1SPT), and sending your citizens out to grow food on the Floods would only increase that risk.

Combined with the city-governor's insistence on reassigning citizens after city growth/shrinkage to work enough food tiles to get at least +2FPT, then yes, you could easily get hit twice in a row with disease, if the pRNGods are being particularly unkind to you.

It might therefore be sensible in the very early game to limit yourself to using only 1-2 Floods, and use that food excess to send your 3rd and 4th citizens to work (mined) shield-tiles, to get a Gran built ASAP, at the cost of slower/zero city growth. At least that way, if (/when!) you get a disease-hit, you wouldn't have to harvest as much food to get your Pop back up again. That might also have helped us in our SG -- we had 2 (mined) Oases in O'stadt's BFC, so we weren't 100% reliant on the Floods for food, except while we were Settler-farming (and then the Pop was shrinking regularly anyway).

I don't think there's a tech/improvement that eliminates all disease-risk in C3C, is there -- unless maybe Medicine or Sanitation/Hospitals?

If you get hit by floodplain disease, then you always get hit in two successive turns. That's the mechanism.

I also remember it in such a way, that a citizen must be working on a floodplain tile in order to run the risk of disease. Not sure, whether the city center tile counts as "a citzen working on it", though?! (After all, there is no citizen working on that tile...) I always thought that founding on a floodplain doesn't matter?!

Also, what I'm not sure about: does the risk increase with the number of floodplain tiles the city is working?

Researching Sanitation eliminates the floodplain disease.

Lanzelot said:

I also remember it in such a way, that a citizen must be working on a floodplain tile in order to run the risk of disease. Not sure, whether the city center tile counts as "a citzen working on it", though?! (After all, there is no citizen working on that tile...) I always thought that founding on a floodplain doesn't matter?!

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I think so too, based on that I've never had disease in a city built on a flood plain but not working any more of them. I've always thought of the center square as a grassland or plain with a constant 2 food, because if you settle on a hill you can irrigate through to the other side.

Thanks folks. Amazing how complex this game is, eh ?