Play With Me: Rome - infinite style

That is correct. A size 1 city counts as 1000 people, a size 2 counts already as 6000 people, and from there on the numbers just keep getting higher.

gaiko said:

Forgot to add that at the end of the "Conquest REX" phase, managing happiness to annex the puppets asap is top priority. Consequentially I immediately TP over all puppet farms. No puppets for long in this strategy! It is crucial to micromanage city growth (I practice strict pop control, unemploying if necessary, and TP'ing over the puppet farms also controls this) and build order, over the long run. Courthouses follow and since the AI already developed the city, it's not too long.

When the above is finished is when I enter the "equilibrium happiness REX" phase.

Note that like others, I never build the promotion bonus buildings, and would question the early barracks build in Rome. I'd sooner build a granary in the early capital, another building I almost never build, relying on the Maritime CS instead. Likewise early farm-hills will be converted to mines once the CS food is fully online.

But, thanks to this strategy, this is the first game where I can see the advantage for building Forges, and that gives iron another advantage in city placement beyond the renaissance.

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The barracks was really useful as it gave me an additional instant heal for two of my swordsmen. It also allowed me to buy a few additional units with experience level 1 later on. I think it was worth it to spend a few turns where (except for maybe a granary) I couldn't have built anything worthwhile.

gaiko said:

Last post for today. Of special note is the trade route yield, which about equals Rome's net gold. That is one of the features of this strategy that attracted me to it, as it enormously raised the Gold/road hex ratio - Arabia would be a killer!

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Indeed. I actually started developing this kind of strategy independently a few days before pir8 started an ICS thread, as a way to maximize Arabia's unique ability. A hidden bonus is that the way the Bazaar is coded, each city within two tiles of a luxury will provide one copy of it, so you can multiply luxuries not only by two but sometimes by three or even four on occasion. If I may make a suggestion: If you REX with conquest, why not let the cities stay at puppet but refrain from researching Bronze Working? That will seriously cut down on the number of useless buildings they can build but still allow you to go for the cavalry unit types up until knight. Research agreements might still pop it, though.

aimlessgun said:

Pulled up my last deity game where I placed cities "normally". At about the same time I was running 436 science, 292 GPT, 337 MFG goods (#'s during golden age like yours). I was playing a non-interference game but as you said your conquests have had minimal effect probably.

I don't claim to be a great economy manager, but all your numbers compare extremely favorably. Sort of botched my policies so I don't have secularism, but with far less cities it would probably only be like 50-60 science.

EDIT: Haha looked at the land/population ratio, you can definitely see the difference between sprawl and a normal settling pattern, you have more than double my land but I have 1 million more people I think that is because it counts larger cities more heavily though? Not just a citizen count.

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In deity you probably have to play even more robust, things like the mistake I made against Bismarck are why I prefer Immortal (I have a feeling that I wouldn't really be able to pull through on Deity without reloading). My science rating fluctuates strongly with specialists since I don't really micro in this game but let the AI handle the specialists. When you go into unhappy, the AI will pull all the citizens off the fields and into the libraries, which makes a difference of 200 or so research. In the modern era, I'm now researching techs within 4 turns and can set anything between 600 and >1000 science to avoid wasting beakers. If I had anything significantly better to choose, I'd just skip Free Thought, I'll have to think about it a bit.

The population figure is mostly irrelevant as it scales exponentially, and it has been in all civ games. Crop yield is a lot more representative of your total population (times 2.x obviously).



It is interesting to note that, with China, I would have an additional +120 gold in this game at this point: 4 per city.

alpaca said:

My science rating fluctuates strongly with specialists since I don't really micro in this game but let the AI handle the specialists. When you go into unhappy, the AI will pull all the citizens off the fields and into the libraries, which makes a difference of 200 or so research.

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Wow haha.

Yeah I micro my specialists to avoid wastage, but with that many cities, I definitely wouldn't bother either!

aimlessgun said:

Wow haha.

Yeah I micro my specialists to avoid wastage, but with that many cities, I definitely wouldn't bother either!

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Actually I just checked, the difference is even larger. If I really try to avoid wasting beakers I can scale anything between 600 and >1000 science at the expense of some commerce and growth. Secularism makes it possible as we Germans say.

Thank you for posting this: I suppose Rome isn't as weak as some people say it is in Civilization V.

Centurio said:

Thank you for posting this: I suppose Rome isn't as weak as some people say it is in Civilization V.

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Rome is by no means a weak faction but I wouldn't say it's top tier, either. I'd put it on a level with factions like Russia but it definitely doesn't reach powerhouses like France or China.


Something I just noticed is that Freedom looks a lot more useful than I realized. I'll pick it up as my next policy: +1 happiness per specialist is approximately 2 happiness per city, which puts it on par with Theocracy but without any prerequisites apart from not running Autocracy. It also makes running artists far more juicy, especially if I also pick up Civil Society to go nuts with a specialist economy.

After playing with this for a few turns, sign me impressed. Freedom in this set-up is so incredibly flexible that you can generate 40 excess happiness and more out of thin air just by assigning specialists.

I see two applications, apart from the obvious creation of cities that have a positive happiness balance, are to absorb war unhappiness effects and to generate a large excess of happy faces to bring about a golden age, then switch to the minimum while it's going. This is probably the policy I've been looking for to enable happiness golden ages for the ICS strategy and to avoid running too many wasteful excess happy faces while the golden age is on.

Sorry guys, I'm too excited to finish the write-up for the current game at this point (maybe later). Need to play Persia.

By the way: Seeing that this is my first public game I would be interested to know how you like it and if I should make an effort to maybe post some more in the future.

This game was very nicely done, alpaca. I came to the same conclusions as you, and I've found the same massive city-spamming strategy to be completely unstoppable. I don't think the game designers really understood what they were doing with Civ5...

My favorite stat: in the 100 turns from Turn 100-200, your science increased from 28 beakers to 519 beakers. That's an increase of almost 2000%!

Sullla said:

This game was very nicely done, alpaca. I came to the same conclusions as you, and I've found the same massive city-spamming strategy to be completely unstoppable. I don't think the game designers really understood what they were doing with Civ5...

My favorite stat: in the 100 turns from Turn 100-200, your science increased from 28 beakers to 519 beakers. That's an increase of almost 2000%!

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Yep, a result of the maritime city state food. I don't think the game is actually badly designed for the most part, it's just that there are some problematic oversights making these broken things possible. As is often the case, I think that the Civ 5 designers tend to play the game like it's meant to be played, so they don't actually realize many of these issues until the game goes public and a million sets of fresh eyes and brains dissemble every nook of the game.

Some things are inexcusable, though, like horsemen or the maritime CS. Everybody who tries a rush with them once or twice should realise they're too strong

In this case, the designers probably overlooked the influence of providing happiness buildings without prerequisites for each city.

alpaca said:

...
Some things are inexcusable, though, like horsemen or the maritime CS. Everybody who tries a rush with them once or twice should realise they're too strong

In this case, the designers probably overlooked the influence of providing happiness buildings without prerequisites for each city.

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Agreed. Your post was awesome; thanks for the insight. And yes, you're completely right about the horsemen rush. Just did one on Deity yesterday -- AI is so busted right now.

Nice game. You seem to have good insight in the mechanics of the game and how they interact.

SO are you posting your game with Persia? I'm curious since I like to opt for Freedom myself. It's too bad that most games are allready settled by the time I have Freedom+Rationalism and SoL...Never get to actually get any resistance with my economic powerhouse.

About ICS: I wonder if not Firaxis did a mistake with minimum city distance.

I wonder if it makes sense to ally up a ton of culture city states after you have a good bit of gold coming in. If you're not in a war, you could stop your expansion for 10-20 turns, use all of your extra gold to ally all the cultural city states in the game and gain a few extra policies. Then turn the expansion back up after you have the policies you want. You might need to play as the Greeks for this to work though. If you burn through 2 social policies to gain the city state bribing discounts that defeats the purpose.

alpaca said:

By the way: Seeing that this is my first public game I would be interested to know how you like it and if I should make an effort to maybe post some more in the future.

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Very much yes! I don't know if this playstyle would suit me since I have a hard time just keeping up and managing 3 or 4 important cities, but I'm very intrigued. Even if you didn't do another game in this style, I do like the step-by-step progress illustrated along with the helpful screenshots.

haha, good job alpaca. If this game doesn't show that the economy in Civ5 is broken, I don't know what would. I used to think that you need Order policies to do this, or at least the forbidden palace, but you did a good job of doing it right from the start. btw you're correct hat planned economy also reduces the annexed city unhappiness by half, so with that and the forbidden palace, annexed cities produce no extra unhappiness except a slight penalty from their population. You can annex everything!

I tried some form of ICS yesterday in my King game as Persia. I basically overrun my continent with horses and got stuck with +- 13 cities spread too thin until Industrial era.
Then I quickly amassed something like 36+- cities...

I went with full Piety and full Order for achievements. Allied 4 maritime CS, around 4 culture ones, pulling something like 500 culture/turn near the end. Last 100 turns of game I was whole time in GA . At the end I produced something like 1.8k science/turn and around 1300 gpt.

But it finally feeled like empire and not bunch of cities thrown around the world. Dunno what the devs was thinking when they designed this game.

edit:
btw satrap's court with it's +2 happy is awesome for this strategy ;-).

skallben said:

Nice game. You seem to have good insight in the mechanics of the game and how they interact.

SO are you posting your game with Persia? I'm curious since I like to opt for Freedom myself. It's too bad that most games are allready settled by the time I have Freedom+Rationalism and SoL...Never get to actually get any resistance with my economic powerhouse.

About ICS: I wonder if not Firaxis did a mistake with minimum city distance.

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If you're interested I can make a post about it but not in a "fromt he start" fashion because the start doesn't differ a lot from this one. I was just setting up a few peaceful cities when the vicious and betrayal-prone Catherine the Great decided she needs more living space. Suffice it to say, I was going for horses quite early, as usual, for strictly defense purposes (), bought two of them with money I had accumulated and luxuries I sold to other AI nations, and conquered her three cities.

I've been expanding a bit more slowly to get that first happiness golden age and will pick up Theocracy instead of Meritocracy this game, because of the -25% golden age discount on the way. I want to try if it's possible to get ICS and happiness so it's micro heavy.

I might start posting around the time I get to the Renaissance and can pick up freedom to highlight that part of the strategy.

vranasm said:

I tried some form of ICS yesterday in my King game as Persia. I basically overrun my continent with horses and got stuck with +- 13 cities spread too thin until Industrial era.
Then I quickly amassed something like 36+- cities...

I went with full Piety and full Order for achievements. Allied 4 maritime CS, around 4 culture ones, pulling something like 500 culture/turn near the end. Last 100 turns of game I was whole time in GA . At the end I produced something like 1.8k science/turn and around 1300 gpt.

But it finally feeled like empire and not bunch of cities thrown around the world. Dunno what the devs was thinking when they designed this game.

edit:
btw satrap's court with it's +2 happy is awesome for this strategy ;-).

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Yes if you take over a whole continent you can get an abusive number of cities. In one game with China I had 61 and counting, but the game started crashing two turns further in so I left it. I had similar gold figures, more culture, but less science because I was trying the homogeneous approach in that game.

I don't think the Satrap's Court is that great. Sure, +2 happiness per city is nice but it's equivalent to a bank otherwise, a building that I don't necessarily have in each city until turn 250 or so. That said, the Persian golden ages pull their weight for such a high-yield ICS strategy, even if you just get them with great people.

Satrap's Court is great if you wait until you have communism or merchant navy to do ICS, which give your cities a lot of production. Otherwise, yeah you probably won't have enough hammers to build it. The persian golden ages are great though. The +1move means that your seige units can move, set up, and fire all in the same turn, and then your melee can move in to take the city from 3 tiles away, without getting hit at all.

Played a ICS yesterday: Prince, Pangea, China. Very powerful strategy. My commerce, science, and happiness were highest that I have ever had them, but my production may have been the lowest. I bought a lot of stuff! As well, did not have any difficulty allying with the marintine CS. Do people tend to ally to more than one?

Feanor01 said:

Played a ICS yesterday: Prince, Pangea, China. Very powerful strategy. My commerce, science, and happiness were highest that I have ever had them, but my production may have been the lowest. I bought a lot of stuff! As well, did not have any difficulty allying with the marintine CS. Do people tend to ally to more than one?

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You might want to focus a few cities on production and give them all the tiles they need, that should solve that problem

I normally ally with 2 maritime CS at least, sometimes as many I can get. It depends on whether you can afford the happiness to get the research boost.

Actually there's something about the Satrap's court. The +2 happiness just push it over the edge where it's really worth purchasing for money. I rarely buy banks but I find I buy the court a decent amount of time.

alpaca said:

By the way: Seeing that this is my first public game I would be interested to know how you like it and if I should make an effort to maybe post some more in the future.

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I really liked it. It was very informative and now I want to try it myself.

I've also been thingking and it seems like many of the civs have something that synergizes well with ICS.

Arabia has +1 gold per city (as small as this benefit may be) and luxuries in range of multiple cities get duplicated by Bazaars.

China has the Paper Maker which pays the upkeep for both itself and a Coliseum.

Egypt has Burial Tombs, which are Temples without upkeep that give +2 .

France can still get policies at a good rate. Or you can skip building Monuments, which saves some gold and allows you to set up the other infrastructure faster.

India is a mixed bag. As long as average city size is greater than 4 you get extra , but if it's lower you will have less . Probably a bit harder to get going, but good when your cities grow to a decent size. At average size 10 you get extra equal to 3x the number of cities you have.

Persia has the Sartrap's Court for extra happiness. Not as good as Burial Tombs, but still an option for extra .

Rome has the faster buiilding so you can set up the infrastructur in your cities quicker. That said, I think France is better for this because skipping Monuments gives similair if not better results.

Songhai has Mud Mosques, upkeep free Temples that give +5 culture instead of +3. Not quite as good as France, but has a similair effect.

So China, Egypt, and France would be my first picks.