best civic+improvements combo for Calabim?

hi there guys. I just want to stir up some discussion about what civic/tile improvements combos you prefer as the Calabim. I can't seem to fare very well with them right now, I think I'm not playing them Calabim-ish enough

running Agrarianism for a huge part of the game and trying to get to sanitation asap is a given. but then, what about Aristocracy? it seems unintuitive to use a civic that gives less food as the Calabim, but maybe you need it if you want to get some commerce, since you're probably going to use flatland tiles for farms and NOT cottages? sure you could build cottages on hills instead of mines, but that is only viable on grasslands and seems sub-optimal...

also, XP farm cities. should you try to have as many as possible, or only a couple? and what about the national epic NW? I usually build it in the most food-rich city available and use it as a specialist farm, will this work with the Calabim as well? it doesn't look like a good idea to chomp on your NE city since you're not going to get many specialists running if you do that, eheh.


thanx in advance for the suggestions guys!

i am not the most experienced calabim player (vampires are instant win, i prefer to work for mine) but here are some things i can share:

Farms: Actually the calabim do not really favor farms. You need some food-cities, but the whole rest of your empire can stay dedicated to its normal use. While some players may think it is very foreseeing of them to build farms everywhere: you don't need more food resp. population then other leaders unless you actually have vampires.

Aristocracy: Depends on the size of your empire. until it gets balanced some day city states is required to run any imperium of some area. if you - for some reason (like foreseeing) farmed everything you can try it.
the calabim leaders also play quite differently, organized allows a bigger empire while financial favors huts.

XP farm cities: I prefer to have 1-3 of them, depending on the total size of my empire. they don't do very much but growing while you feast but can sustain some specialists if you don't. i won't let them grow too much above the happy cap if you want to use them for anything else but feasting.
Feasting is a specialisation very similar to a specialist farm from the layout, but it is a specialisation nontheless, you should not try to combine it unless it is really needed.

why calabim should build cottages instead of mines is beyond me though. personally i favor production the most - even with unlimited experience units.

Aristocracy + Agrarianism and Farms is pretty awesome. Without sanitation that's (as Flauros) 3 food and 3 commerce on every grassland farm. That's pretty sweet. Once you get sanitation, you can either switch to Conquest or get 4 food, 3 commerce farms.

The Royal Guard you can build once you reach Feudalism, which is a given playing Calabim (unless you go for the more unorthodox Fanaticism path first), is also great. Nice Fast defenders which you can gift Vampirism once they reach lvl 6, and since they have Guardsman they defend often.

The -40% Costs to Maintenance from distance to palace is a nice additional bonus which brings it more up to par with City States.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to use City States for a big empire. You just need more income, and that's exactly what Aristocracy brings. Also, a Big Vassal is often more useful than additional cities and territory which you have to spend time, money, and effort to make useful. Also if you go for the Order you can negate a lot of the Maintenance problems of a big empire, and so does Law mana (I've had 0% Maintenance with Bannor once in almost all cities).

I usually don't do many XP farms these days. I find a decent amount of Moroi, coupled with an early rush (Burning Blood is great!), which works even with Flauros, combined with the upgrade of Moroi to Vampires, keeping some at lvl 4 with Vampirism which improves upon them, they keep their Burning Blood ability, and you dont need to pay for their upgrades. With some Bloodpet to restore health of vamps, maybe a priest or two which you can give Vampirism as well for extra xp, and maybe some mages which you can boost too.

Your units don't need that many levels to rule the world, that often takes too long time to establish to use their advantage.


For civics I like;
Aristocracy + (Nationhood/Pacifism early) + (Nationhood / Social Order / Sac the Weak late) + Slavery (Granary+Smokehouse+Breedpit quickly) or Mil.State / Agrarianism (Early) / Warfare or Foreign Trade (mid to late) / Undercouncil if possible

I love getting Merchant specialists with Calabim, Alexis works perfect for a Merchant farm. Make food rich city, spam Merchants, Found RoK if you can here, build Bazaar of Mammon, and cash in! Merchants have great synergy with a specialist city cause not only do they give cash, they also give +1 food, paying for half a citizen or a whole citizen with sac the weak! (-Unhealthiness)


I've never played em with Decius but he should work great with a Apprenticeship + Conquests + Command Posts + Form of Titan (+2 Theocracy later) and then spam units. He probably have great synergy with the Fanaticism over Feudalism route too, to get out Losha Valas early. Since it has the same requirement as Religious Law which enables Theocracy and Social Order, and the Basilicas.

I just use the standard city states + agrarianism combo. Start all cities out with a few farms first then branch out from there based on terrain - more farms in a couple grassy cities for GPs and feasting, lots of mines in cities where it's even possible to build a substantial number of them (not common in my experience), cottages in all the rest.

Aristocracy + Agrarianism has worked very well for me with Flauros.

Just make Sanitation a priority (after Feudalism), and then use enough farms to quickly grow as big as you want. After you have enough food (which shouldn't take too long, when you factor in the Breeding Pits), go ahead and use cottages and mines, as usual. The Governor's Manor more than makes up for any production needs, and you can run tons of specialists with all of the extra food, if you want.

Contrary to what slowcar said, I think Financial leaders favor Aristocracy and farms, rather than cottages.

Also, City States is definitely not a requirement. While I agree that it's more difficult to run something like Theocracy or Republic with a large empire, the -40% maintenance from Aristocracy should not be overlooked.

What about war weariness? Shouldn't that be a good enough reason to overlook City States? What's so awesome about city states that makes you wanna get it? I tend to run God king or Aristocracy, Consumption too.

Practically nulling out distance maintenance is awesome once you have a lot of cities. The war weariness penalty isn't too bad, especially for the Calabim who negate it by having a governor's manor in every city (if you don't build one in every city ASAP, shame on you.)

It's hard to say what gives a bigger econ boost, CS with its superior maintenance reduction or Aristocracy with its extra commerce on farms, but CS's penalties are a lot less severe than -1 food per farm, that's for damn sure.

I always start with god king, but switch to city states once I've expanded to 6~8 cities and stay there for the rest of the game.

I'll reiterate a few points that grey fox made and a few more in aristocracy + order's favor:

Early on rushing for aristocracy gets you governor mansions as well, which make for an insane bloodpet or moroi production for an early war.

I love going order and law mana with them(and then abusing aristocracy to the max). With 60% reduction(basilica + gov mansion) and some law mana you really don't need city states anymore. This just means that aristo is all pluses. I think I stopped building law mana once I had 5 or 6, meaning a 85 or 90% reduction on both distance and number of cities maintenance costs(but its been a while, so I don't remember the exact numbers).

Social order is extremely broken with them as well, letting you really abuse a single large town as a feed/production town. (since with 40 vampires giving happy faces, you can have 40 unhappy faces from feeding, and have 40 free hammers). If you have enough good tiles around the city you can have this town grow every turn, build a vampire every turn, and feed that new vampire every turn(with enough exp to get crIII at least, and prob some combat promotions as well), and thus gain a hammer every turn as well. Once you have enough hammers its amusing to use this to grab wonders while you continue to feed up a few super vampires. Then just let it starve down and be unhappy when you move the stack off to war. Even if it starves down to 1 population, it still will have a decent number of hammers for quite a while, letting it continue to churn out units.

For aristocracy to work for them you really need to play differently then you would if you were going for a cottage economy though. Rather than nicely spacing our your cities for a minimum of overlap, you instead want to jam most of your cities as close together as possible(if there is enough flat grassland at least, and not so much at the beginning, but you want to leave the spaces to fill in for later). The big difference is that you will be getting 2 pop per tile, and you really won't have the happiness to support nearly as many tiles per city as you can with a cottage economy. Once you get basilicas you can start to go expansion crazy, and finally once you get a decent amount of law mana, you will have an insane economy with the ability to go conquest and have all of your cities kick out vampires in an emergency.

Was able to jump up a level(to immortal I think) over what I usually play with this and have an extremely easy game besides. Once you have 20 or so size 15 towns, you can build an insane number of mid level vampires in these towns, and just overwhelm people with expendable crIII or so vampires that just have to feed from the city that built them before heading to the front. Since there are so many of these cities and they aren't building the vampires insanely fast, they don't have huge problems with happiness. The big plus is that these semi-feed cities are also producing a nice amount of research as well.

Esp with the slower cottage growth now, I see aristo being a more and more viable choice for more civs. The big problem I have is that it encourages more of a rex style of building cities, since each tile supports more population, which encourages spamming law mana. Since spells are getting nerfed right and left, this just means that the one of the best uses of mana seems to be for the passive effects(law, enchantment, and life) or abusing things like the sun 3 summon's +2 affinity.

In terms of specialists, I tend to like to go the sage route, personally, but merchants can work as well(but aren't really needed if you get enough law mana, they are a nice stopgap in the mid game before you get all of the law/basilica up though), esp before you can run a civic that lets you have unlimited sages(scholarship). I think in that game, I never quite got there, and was running a random mix of merchants, sages and priests in most of my cities, which while not quite ideal, still works out well enough for those normal cities.

Lastly, I agree with the camp that thinks financial favors farms over cottages in the early game, and is about equal(slight cottage bias) later on. Consider that in the very late game you are getting a slightly higher yield from a aristocracy farm as a cottage square(2 commerce + 5 sci vs 5 commerce), while financial increases the yield per tile by 1 commerce for both economies. The only real difference is that its a slightly higher % increase for cottages(5-6 rather than 7 to 8). Early on though, being able to work more tiles faster(faster city growth, and closer cities means that you have higher tile utilization in the mid game) means that gaining one commerce per tile is a bigger advantage for aristocracy.

For all that the synergy of order + law mana + aristocracy looks good in a vacuum, the opportunity costs of the individual parts are just too high.

Order means no Chalid, no Rathas, no Saverous, no Hemah, no Cultists, no tower of complacency... I'd rather have some of those things then a super feeding city. Chalid messes up a stack harder than a swarm of feasted up vampires, same for cultists if the city is by water (a lot of AI cities tend to be)

Massed law mana means no extra happiness from enchantment, no terraforming from water, no courage from spirit, no fireballs, no rust, etc.

Both of our strategies result in nearly non-existent maintenance, so it's a matter of what else we get. Assuming I'm going with Empyrean... I get an uber hero, blinding to tie up stacks that get around him, a diverse selection of adept/mage spells and passive boosts, +1 food from farms. You get an uber feasting city, a little less WW, +2/3 commerce from farms (depending on which leader you picked.) I'd miss that SO-powered feasting city, but aside from that... I've been over the WW, and considering how quickly we should both hit happy caps in all cities (especially me since my farms don't lose food), the food advantage aristocracy farms have over say plains cottages doesn't amount to much, while the cottage gets me an extra hammer and comparable commerce (less at first, more later).

I don't see why overlap is worse with CS than it is with Aristocracy. With both civics you don't really notice it at first when your happy caps are low, but your cities start to chafe when happy cap significantly exceeds number of tiles (specialists are an option for the first few excess points of happiness, but you lack for slots to put them in until pretty late.)

I think SE/aristocrat needs more city to be compared against CE, since under same happy cap (say 10), SE/aristocrat would have 5 farms and 5 scientists (10 commerce and 30 research), while CE can have 10 towns (50 commerce). That is why CE would have better commerce than SE/aristocrat, when given the same number of city and happy cap.
But of course, SE would grow faster and would be more flexible, so building additional cities wouldn't be a trouble, especially when you could negate the maintenance.
But as I refer to my readings from other forums and from my games, building additional cities with CE is quite beneficial too, as you could nurture the cottages using additional cities, and once your main cities' happy cap grew, you could give the fully grown town to the main cities, and have the nurturing cities work based on SE. By doing so, slow growth of cottages could be ignored to a certain amount.

Back to the topic, I believe farm / aristocrat would be nice as many others say, not because SE/aristo > CE (I know many people dislike this words, but it just depends on situation), but because it would be in accord with many characteristics of Calabim, but CE is always be there as a choice, especially with Flauros and the world spell that might neglect the comparatively slow growth of CE.

Edit: Did not know that bulbing order of GP was given in the manual...

I don't think Calabim have a particularly strong combo. As Slowcar pointed out, a vampire XP farm is no different than a GP farm for any other civ. In fact, a city can switch a city back and forth freely if you want. You want 2 or 3 such cities instead of just 1 but that's not enough to build your entire empire's economy around.

Imo the big benefit to being able to have more population per tile is that you have more midsized(~10-15 pop) cities, not just a boost to the few gp/xp farms cities(if you even build any). If you are only concerned about maximizing population in those few cities, it would be better to run just agri without aristo to achieve max population. The main benefit to aristo+agri is to your normal cities(of which you will have more). Lastly, remember with the Calabim every population is worth at least 1 unhappy face, and thus one hammer, meaning that having more population over your empire means higher production as well as being able to spread the feeding out among them.

Hmm,

Playing a game with them in the latest patch, I can't get feast anger to stack? Is this new or a bug?(from what I can tell feast is supposed to be treated like a 3 round whip?), If I feed more than once in a turn, it still only has 1 point of unhappiness. Haven't been watching the changelog as closely as I should have prob.

it may be a bug, I'm not sure... try posting it in the bug thread and see if it's working as intended or not.

My thoughts lie very much in line with Grey Fox about the civics here. Aristocracy + Agrarianism + Farm Spam on green+ is pretty much a no-brainer. The simple fact of the matter is that Aristocracy farms absolutely dominate cottages through the entire game, but especially in the early game when it matters most. The maintenance reduction of city states is not nearly enough to offset the loss in potential commerce in the short run.

The drawback of -1 food per farm is a straw man here. First of all, in all but the most food specialized cities, the penalty is easily overcome by working more farms. But besides that, with the vastly increased commerce you could grab Sanitation after (necessary for farm spam) Construction to cancel that penalty and further boost the synergy in farm improvements. It is unlikely that a cottage heavy economy could justify such a detour early especially with their reduced tech rate (even with city states).

This may be more of a balance question. In my opinion, cottages have gone too far down the drain to be worth the trouble. Even a hardcore cottagephile like DaveMcW would have a hard time loving what they have become in FFH especially given the very solid alternative in Aristocracy.

Wow, those are some pretty complex strategies; and I thought I was doing pretty well using Cultists to launch Tsunamis followed by mobility promoted Vamps! Seems there are many more wrinkles to this mod I have yet to unfold.

I believe the farms versus cottages thing has been debated to death in one of the ancient threads around here somewhere. I have my own way of handling this dilemma, but I remember the conclusion was that they are equal. The argument was incredibly mathematical; this is what I remember:

- With agriculture, aristocracy, taxation and sanitation, a farm will produce 4 food and 3 commerce with a financial leader, which also allows a specialist. With a town, it will produce 2 food and 7 commerce.
- Your hapiness level, and what population can you sustain.
- Your health level, which affects your population growth once you reach double-digits.
- You need advanced techs and buildings to allow for many specialists.
- Farms don't need time to grow, cottages do
- Ashen Veil exponentiates the complexity of the calculations

Take your pick, both would work fine.

Does that make Cottages the warmonger's option? To make the AristoSE function you're going to need Sanitation's Public Baths and possibly Gambling Houses as well as buildings that allow specialists. Unless you have obscene numbers of happiness resources. Not to mention health resources quickly become important. You'd likely need to dabble in Fishing.

But in FFH buildings are more expensive compared to units, and so too much construction can leave you short of unit numbers. A cottager who didn't need to invest in his cities beyond basic growth may be able to sabotage an AristoSE through axeman hordes or Horseman strip pillaging and worker harass.

I'd like to see an AristoSE with Ljosalfar using a Great Prophet to lightbulb Hidden Paths for a fast Guardian of Nature. GoN would solve the Health/Happiness.

It's been a while since I've played the Calabim, but I like combining Agriarianism with Sacrifice the Weak. Get huge cities for your vampires to feed on (is it Feed or Feast? I forget, it's been a while) and increase their XP -- also solves any unhealthiness problems.

sylvanllewelyn said:

With a town, it will produce 2 food and 7 commerce.

Click to expand...

Not true.

End game financial towns produce 6 commerce unless riverside, in which case the corresponding financial farm produces 4 commerce, not 3. So let's start the comparison from the best possible case for cottages (they spring miraculously from the workers plow as fully developed towns with Taxation already in). This is very simple. What is more valuable: two food or three commerce? This question may be complicated by health caps, happy caps, available civics, individual city size and infrastructure, but at the stage in the game where Taxation is likely researched, there are plenty of interesting options for converting food into other resources and I would venture to guess that food in general will be more valuable.

However, that is possibly debatable. But the early game comparison for financial is simple. By the time a riverside cottage catches up in commerce to a riverside farm in 40 (normal speed) turns, they have both produced 120 commerce (with 40 bonus food from the farm). By the time a non-riverside cottage catches up in commerce to a non-riverside farm in 50 (normal speed) turns, they have both produced 150 commerce (with 50 bonus food from the farm). In both cases, the amount of commerce produced before the break even point is significant with the farm getting its commerce front loaded (better in general) relative to the cottage. More importantly, the food can be very valuable depending on each cities state, possibly being worth:
1-2 extra worked tiles in a city, more if a food saving building is in place
up to 60 hammers worth of a whip, more if a food saving building is in place
40 or 50 hammers on a pure one for one conversion of a worked non-farm grassland tile to an equivalent non-farm plains tile.
40 or 50 hammers directly into a worker or settler.
etc.

This varies from city to city obviously, but in general a new farm based city compare with a new cottage based city will:
1. Require fewer turns to reach its happy cap (and in the future fewer turns to reach a newly raised happy cap)
2. Require fewer worker turns to complete needed improvements (for example, early growth boosting farms that are converted to cottages later or chain irrigation passing farms for food bonuses in the cottage city will be needed in addition to the natural cottage and bonus improvements whereas in a farm city, such improvements are already part of the grand scheme)
3. Produce enough commerce to make it a viable contributor to the civilizations economy far quicker and maintain a commerce lead over the cottage counterpart for much much longer than the 40-50 turns indicated by the comparison between a single farm and a single cottage above.
4. Produce a higher output in terms of actual unit production (or building production if this is desired).

Also to address the cottage = warmonger improvement, this is not even close. Given sufficient commerce (and Aristocracy farms will easily provide sufficient commerce), warmongering is driven by production which is driven by food and hammers, not commerce. Simply put, the Aristocratic Farmer will be able to build a larger army than the cottager in the same amount of time.

Also, the 25% WW penalty is relevant. Regardless of Manors, that is a penalty to city states. The culture penalty is also a relevant hardship in that it slows the assimilation of newly acquired conquests and could imply smaller shared borders and thus potentially more distance to travel inside opposing civilizations borders, meaning potentially more supply costs and longer wars.

This is also ignoring the fact that cottages (still) are much more vulnerable to wars on their own soil. They are more reliant on workers, not less. They are more hurt by pillaging as developed cottages are harder to replace than farms, and given the decreased culture (city states), they potentially have smaller cultural radii and thus are more vulnerable to the potential of pillaging.

Also, just to point out one more thing about warmongering. For the Calabim it is very tough to justify swapping from Agrarianism to Conquest after Sanitation. With the Manors and sufficient health, they have an easy way to convert the 2 food from each farm to 1 hammer via unhappy citizens. This hammer is subject to multipliers. With conquest, their farms will only be producing one extra food which will be converted to 1 hammer via conquest. Assuming this works like workers and settlers (I can't say I've tried it so I'm not sure), this is not subject to multipliers, so results in fewer total hammers into the unit than Manors. And Manors are just the laziest conversion of food to hammers available to the Calabim and can easily be boosted by Sacrifice the Weak and/or Slavery. Plus these hammers can be spent on non units.