best civic+improvements combo for Calabim?

that's a good reason to run slavery for a while, nice thought.

sylvanllewelyn: you mentioned spiritual, I guess you were talking about unrestricted leaders?

sylvanllewelyn said:

Aristocracy = farms on crack, so the ratio becomes 15% and 85% in FFH maybe?

Click to expand...

I think in most cities (and this is where Turin and I disagree it seems) it would be cottages on all unforested non-bonus plains that are not needed to spread irrigation, farms on all other flatland. This is probably 95+% farms on lands where there is a choice.

I like cottaging such plains because those tiles become good outlets for excess food if a city doesn't have enough hills in it.

Played from the turn 50 save. Here's mine.

So... at turn 200, I'm about equal to Sylvan's FE, ahead of his CE, and behind Turin's FE techwise. I could smush all of your armies. One thing's clear: I turn off my labs for some turns to upgrade all my bloodpets into moroi, you guys don't. Who knows how much of the tech difference that accounts for, though.

Mmmmmm. My cottages are less mature than they normally are because I would never, ever stay put in the forest Prespur was mired in at the start. I'd use that mobility 2 + sentry 2 the starting settler has and look for a more wide-open spot with some rivers, and there were some on that map. Granted Innsmouth was right on top of us, but that's not normal at all, and I don't think it would have restrained me all that much anyway. I figure.... 2 turns of going north, and I'd have found the area between my Nubia and my Mor'ta'narr. That would have made a much better capital. Or, if I'd had the bad luck to scout east first, 3 turns would have gotten me to around where acaia is, which would still have been an improvment.

Not only did Sylvan detour for calendar, I felt I had to go for crafting + mining right after because how the hell am I supposed to cottage any of that land without chopping. That's a lot of time lost on cottage working/maturation.

I don't stick with forest starts. I find something better so I can go right for education and immediately use it, and I think that's sort of key to making a cottage heavy early game work. Forests like the one around prespur can wait for a second city, when I can chop.

I should try this from turn 1 instead of 50, except that would kind of be cheating since I know the map now. Meh.

I continued my save a bit for 55 turns to address the concerns that the FE would not hold its own in the endgame. In fact the FE is just about to get really started.
I played very sloppily, just amusing myself by building wonders all over the place and founding the 7 religions.
The only wonder I did not get yet was the heron throne, but that one is really crappy anyway.I have run out of important techs to research pulling in ~900 beakers/turn with -2 gold/turn.
Blight has hit, but my cities are still size 20 and growing again. The terrain is hell, because I did not bother with micromanaging sanctify adepts, but health and happiness aren't real concerns for the calabim.

Lets be objective here. The Turin FE save is way, way ahead of your CE save. You have a slightly larger military, but that is the only objective measure where you have any advantage:

Military comparison:

CE
20 moroi
7 workers
3 ecclesiastic

vs.

FE
Rosier
Vampire
2 Royal Guardsmen
13 Blood Pets
7 Workers
1 Slave

Your strength there is in numbers, while his is in a few powerful units.

After that? All comparisons are a total whitewash for the FE:

Research Rate
CE
100% slider : 268 Research, -52 Gold
0% slider : 20 Research, 153 Gold
Break even point is around 75% slider yielding 205 Beakers per turn.

vs.
FE
100% slider : 379 Research, -96 Gold
0% slider: 41 Research, 210 Gold
Breakeven point is around 69% slider yielding 272 Beakers per turn. That is a pretty huge advantage to the FE here. And this is after many turns of potential cottage development.

How about Production
CE
72 Hammers per turn over 10 cities
vs.
FE
86 Hammers per turn over 11 cities

Or population
CE
64 population over 10 cities
vs.
FE
92 population over 11 cities

Admittedly some of those population are angry or citizens, but they also represent stored hammers through slavery at the moment.

Or technology that has been researched.

FE researched to Deception, CE researched to Honor. The costs of those and prereqs either overlap or cost the same. Lots of other overlap But here are the technologies that differ:

CE:
Fishing (239)
Sailing (478)
Cartography (229)
Hunting (687)
Partial Optics (781)
Total of 2414
vs.
FE
Currency (1345)
Mathematics (1419)
Corruption of Spirit (1196)
Infernal Pact (1794)
Knowledge of the Ether (538)
Feudalism (2093)
Partial Engineering (849)
Total of 9230

No excuses. The FE researched Bronze Working before Education. So the CE even had a head start to Education. Same terrain, same amount of time. It can't be any more clear how superior the FE is to CE.

Well, you sound convinced.

I guess not much more can be said other than: I'm still just as confident in my strategy, the test was a fluke for reasons stated that you wrote off as excuses, and we're both past the point of convincing.

People reading this topic looking for answers to the civic debate will find nothing but back-and-forth theorycrafting and a freak occurrence of a comparison game, which probably won't help much.

What a waste of everyone's time.

I didn't need convincing of something I already knew. The saves that were produced only verify the facts of the two economies.

Fluke?

Here is what I you claiming:
1. Part of technology deficit is due to upgrading a bunch of blood pets to Moroi. That is not accounting for 6816 fewer beakers researched over 150 turns. Not even close.

2. Cottages are less mature than would be usual thanks to the need to research Mining before Education combined with the early research of Calendar. I would argue that with Innsmouth being as it is, those would be technologies you probably want before Education regardless. But, let's mark this as a valid complaint that I can address more later.

3. Capital is poor. Yes. Yes this capital stinks. But suppose the game started with you at Innsmouth and the Lanun at your capital. Is that Capital good enough? Yes. Would you still rush the Lanun? Almost certainly. Early tech rate would be improved and the initial tech order may be slightly different, but this Capital is atrocious for FE too (almost no fresh water for pre-construction farms).

Now to talk more about 2. How much more time do you need to mature your cottages? Because functionally, CE and FE arrived at the branch point of Education at similar times. Will more post Education time help the CE catch up? Absolutely not. As has already been shown, the FE is just snowballing away and can achieve fast exponential growth as long as there is room to expand. The Cottage economy just cannot achieve the same exponential growth under any circumstances.

Maybe the circumstances were less than ideal (for both economies if so), and some things were done sub-optimally by all players, but to say the debate has had no resolution is silly. For anyone who has looked at the facts plunking them over the head, the answer is obvious.

Monkeyfinger said:

Well, you sound convinced.

I guess not much more can be said other than: I'm still just as confident in my strategy, the test was a fluke for reasons stated that you wrote off as excuses, and we're both past the point of convincing.

People reading this topic looking for answers to the civic debate will find nothing but back-and-forth theorycrafting and a freak occurrence of a comparison game, which probably won't help much.

What a waste of everyone's time.

Click to expand...

Well feel free to post your own turn 50 save with a start that favours the cottage economy. In retrospect there is quite a lot I did wrong (for example I did not understand gov manors correctly) and I want to see how far I can push the FE if played correctly. Also I'm pretty surprised how well the Cottage economy does in your save.

The other thing that people don't seem to be making the connection is that you get two really useful things with COL for 320 beakers, not only aristo, but governors manors as well. Once you have those up(and unless you are being overwhelmed at this time, I don't see how you wouldn't, as they pay for themselves quickly in hammers alone), you have a huge hammer bonus, which can be put into warriors to partially make up for the lack of bronze if this slows you down this path at all(assuming that in a normal game you do the col before the bronze path). So having to grab COL for aristo isn't a huge deal imo.

I looked at monkeyfingers save in more detail and I was surprised that his infrastructure is actually superior to mine and he is reasonably close in other aspects.

So I decided to replay my game from the turn 50 save to utilize a better tech path and make use of the manors and do more sensible slaving. The new save is vastly superior to the old one with astronomy already researched, more infrastructure a bit more military, 12 cities and +502 beakers/turn with -110 gold/turn at 100% science.

Wow, you guys are very fanatical about this.

Also, a few observations:
- Aristocracy farms are effective... if you can build them. Sort of obvious, but not really, because in starts with not much fresh water, you simply have to rely on cottages and food resource tiles until you find more fresh water. Or until you get construction.
- They need to expand, they can't turtle. You work farms, you work mines, you get hammers and some commerce, and that's all you're getting. You need to expand to get more resources to expand your health and happy cap, either peacefully, barbarian bashing or an invasion. Cottages grow for the turtler, farms stay the way they are.

I just jumped back into FfH recently, and am playing as Alexis. I can't seem to get Sacrifice the Weak to work correctly. As soon as I revolt to it, it kicks me out of Ashen Veil as the state religion (which I think is working as intended, I don't see why that should be a nonreligious civic, but whatever), then immediately switches that column's civic back to whatever the first choice is (state religion?) and back to AV. What is going on here?

Sounds like you are running unpatched FFh2.

you need to download the latest patch, that's a bug.

edit: too slow