Late game SE vs CE, a direct comparison

Oh come on are we going to have to start getting used to this FEUSS/PARCS crap? Seriously, if you must use new acronyms please show the courtesy of saying what they mean for a while.

Actually I was just poking fun at Dave. I think the guy is an awesome part of these forums and his thread made me giggle all week so I just wanted to give him a nod. =)
 
Could you elaborate on this please? My reaction was almost the opposite - 'why keep production cities in a CE at all outside the ones that benefit from national wonders'?
Even without the Kremlin, a town going towards rush-buying outperforms any hammer improvement short of workshops with State Property AND Caste System... with the additional benefits that this can be used anywhere and that gold modifiers are cleaner and available earlier.
If we're talking about the late game production then don't forget Slavery and the Kremlin. For small cities, farms are the most productive way to use a grassland tile. Let's compare the late game production methods.

Towns: With best gold multipliers (+100%) a Grassland town gives 1 hammers and 7 commerce = 14 gold (with research and espionage sliders at 0%). With the Kremlin that can be 8 hammers, 7 of which can be spent anywhere.

Workshops: With reasonable production multipliers, (+110% forge, factory, power, and SP) a grassland workshop can give 4 hammers under Caste System and that becomes 8.4 hammers. Those hammers are also able to pick up further multipliers Police State (+25% units), drydock (+50% ships) and Military Academy (+50% units) and also bonusses from resources (stone, iron etc) and traits (+100% courthouses for Org) that rush buying with US can't get.

Farms: A grassland farm with Biology produces +2 food and the same production multipliers apply as with workshops. The Kremlin also gives a +50% hammer bonus for Slavery. So a grassland farm in a size 10 city will produce a basic 3 hammers for 2 food and with Kremlin that becomes 4.5 hammers per turn. Using the basic 110% production bonus this becomes an average of 9.45 hammers/ turn and can be harnessed every 10 turns with Slavery. For a size 5 city we get a fabulous rate of 12.6 hammers / turn and for a size 20 city 6.3 hammers / turn for the output of a grassland farm. Of course the big advantage of the Slavery approach is that it can be combined with any source of food, so seafood cities and food corporations can be combined with grassland farms, something workshops can't easily do.

***

Last not least, about tile efficiency: If we're just looking at dirrect yield with food going to feed specialists (drafts would make this quite silly...), the strongest improvements would be windmills and watermills with the appropriate economic civic, feeding priests with all the frills... effective yields of 3:hammers:4:commerce: or 2:hammers:6:commerce:.

Watermills and windmills are good when combined with their favourite civics, but don't really compare with drafting and whipping (with Kremlin). Grassland farms are still the best way to use that tile in many cases.
 
For a cottage economy I can only see FM being viable with at least one good corps. Sushi or CM with CivJ/CreCon/AlCo let's you spam corps without worrying about costs, making 100% slider viable. Even if you have just CM and CivJ, the two easiest corps to snag the performance of cottages increases massively. Sending AlCo off to the AIs (and the backwards AIs love it before industrialization) can make this truly insane.

Secondly, if you have no shrines, the best use of WS in a CE is to flip back to caste and run WS/NP in a heavily wooded lot; tundra forests being ideal. Now this means fighting emancipation. While emanicipation is good for maturing the cottages, once they are towns you gain nothing from it but higher happy caps. Using cultural slider with the caste NP/WS combo powering becomes a better trade off to just lower slider if you truly have specialized all your science cities (which is rare for me as a riverside science city generates far more than enough :hammers: to get the :gold: infrastructure).

Third, actually when I'm trying to max out science production I don't hammer :science: I hammer :gold: so that I can up the slider more (unless I'm already at 100 between shrines, corps, tech trading deficit spending, etc.). Doing this in just a few of your cities in the hammer :science: save resulted in quickly getting 100% slider and peaking at just over 4k science (I also changed around some spec/marginal tile working pairs but no changes to improvements, buildings, or civics).
 
yes, running merchants in a wall street city is a good idea, both in a SE and a CE. For a better comparison, though, you ought to have built commerce multiplier buildings in all the commerce cities for the CE. In a CE you don't have science buildings and money buildings, you just have commerce buildings (the only exceptions being Oxford and Wallstreet cities), and you should build all the infrastructure.
Also, the issue about the health resources...you're acting like it's not a big one. I have a lot of experience running SE's. I like to run them because I find them fun, and let me tell you getting a city to 40 pop with no health problems (or happy problems) is very difficult. Yes, sure, late game you have genetics and recycling centers and environmentalism....but I mean throughout the WHOLE game, how do you manage the requirements of your cities? That's probably the most difficult part of all for a SE. Sure, on a per tile basis, a 4 food farm can feed a scientist, getting 6 beakers, which looks not bad compared to a town with 7 commerce...but the problem is one city needs 20 pop and the other needs 40. It's not realistic to assume you'll have EVERY resource in the game.
 
yes, running merchants in a wall street city is a good idea, both in a SE and a CE.

Actually its generally better to use cottages for the SE's Wall street city as long as your total combined :science: and :culture: and :espionage: sliders are 50% or lower.
 
Watermills and windmills are good when combined with their favourite civics, but don't really compare with drafting and whipping (with Kremlin). Grassland farms are still the best way to use that tile in many cases.
I was under the impression that SP watermills were possibly the best :hammers: tile in the game. Its half the whip of a farm with 2 :hammers: / turn on top of it.
 
Third, actually when I'm trying to max out science production I don't hammer :science: I hammer :gold: so that I can up the slider more (unless I'm already at 100 between shrines, corps, tech trading deficit spending, etc.). Doing this in just a few of your cities in the hammer :science: save resulted in quickly getting 100% slider and peaking at just over 4k science (I also changed around some spec/marginal tile working pairs but no changes to improvements, buildings, or civics).
Yeah I knew in the back of my mind that this was going to be the case. In my own CE's mid-late game I am fond of taking a decent production city and making it produce :gold: to support a higher slider. This obviates the need to build any :gold: infrastructure in any city (except WS) and maximizes your oxford city ... effectively letting you specialize your cities just as much as an SE without needing the additional :health: and :) infrastructure. Actually a part of me wonders if you couldn't support a CE with no Wallstreet at all and instead maximized Ironworks city producing gold? This might be the way to go to run a CE under SP.
 
Actually its generally better to use cottages for the SE's Wall street city as long as your total combined :science: and :culture: and :espionage: sliders are 50% or lower.

Ehh depends. When I run a SE based EE combined it is close to 100%. I have espionage multipliers, I lack happiness and gold modifiers in many cities, and often I'm going caste/SP in order to outbuild the AI.

Likewise if I'm on a late game Kremlin whipping binge, culture slider will hit up to around 100% and stay there for a LONG time (oftentimes my whip anger will stack up to more than my pop anger or eman anger); whipping every 2 turns will do that. Likewise draft anger can get quite high with me. Also non-FS/B cottages are rather weak compared to rep merchants post-bio.
 
Yeah I knew in the back of my mind that this was going to be the case. In my own CE's mid-late game I am fond of taking a decent production city and making it produce :gold: to support a higher slider. This obviates the need to build any :gold: infrastructure in any city (except WS) and maximizes your oxford city ... effectively letting you specialize your cities just as much as an SE without needing the additional :health: and :) infrastructure. Actually a part of me wonders if you couldn't support a CE with no Wallstreet at all and instead maximized Ironworks city producing gold? This might be the way to go to run a CE under SP.

You can, but why? IW is your wonder pump or the second of you major unit pumps (IW + WP works quite well). Having to tank my economy to get the internet is not sounding like fun, losing out on 3GD can require an early trip to ecology and large :hammers: investments in recycling centers, missing the Eiffel can mean having to tech MM yourself (and perhaps losing religious :hammers:), and let's not even get into the diplomatic issues with respect to the CR and UN.

Also there is a little dirty secret in the game. If you really want to make gold with IW:
1. Build the IWs in a coastal HE.
2. Build a drydock.
3. Get a military academy (the free GG from facism is good here).
4. Adopt PS.
5. Delink your oil/uranium (i.e. farm/WS over it)
6. Spam caravels.

The overflow :gold: is greater than just hammering it directly. Inland options include imp settlers, expansive workers, and for everyone - chariots (just do not research HBR or AdvFlight).
 
CE outperforms SE in this example.
CE SCC has 78 hammers vs. 54 in SE
WS-CE has 41 hammer vs. 31 in SE

I don't see any reason for dedicated production cities to have differing values. That means CE has a big production advantage over SE. SE requires high health and happiness. Deployement is another factor; obviously growng cottages takes time, but taking a city to 32 pop, that takes a long time.

What would really help, is the F1 city overview screen. That would allow a better comparison.

PS. The oxford city should/could be working an additional 2 plains towns (currently unworked lumbermills), for 15 commerce, reducing the number of scientists to 3.
It would, after accounting for the lost specialist, get another 6 base beakers, translating to an added 21 (250% bonus) overall.
 
@ UnconqueredSun: thanks for clearing that up. I guess I was reluctant to accept State Property as a given, as corporations are usually the final tool for me to secure a win. If I make it this far, it's rare that I'm so far ahead that going directly for a win beats inflating my economy to a ridiculous degree, and even rarer that I'm not able to.

@ UncleJJ: I already mentioned I'd retain super-production-cities boosted by national wonders like the Ironworks or HEroic Epic. I suppose naval/military cities with military academies and/or drydocks are good enough to count as well.
My point was that a dedicated cottage empire has little use for 'vanilla' production cities before we're building spaceship parts. It's not truly bad under State Property/Caste System... but really, one advantage of a cottage-heavy economy is that we aren't giving up much by staying in Emancipation and as I said above I consider cutting ourselves off from corporations a pretty hefty sacrifice.

Whipping is a strange beast in a lategame CE... if we can take the Emanicipation hit without problems, it's the least bad use for excess corporation food we have. However... building farms specificially for whipping if we're running Free Speech and Universal Suffrage anyway seems dubious. Sure, 2 food towards whipping beats the output of a town for rush-buying in small cities - in theory. In practice, not all of that food will actually go towards the whip and instead be converted into something else by non-Representation specialists, at a horrible exchange rate (formerly marginal tiles to be whipped away usually end up too good for that in the late game).

I will gladly support a farm-driven economy with Kremlin-assisted whips... and I'd say the transition from farms supporting boring old specialists over whipping to workshops for direct production is fluid enough that it doesn't feel like I'm running a different economy type - unless we actually spam workshops and end up building gold/science as a matter of course (inefficient in the long run but it means we can make do with only one multiplier type in new acquisitions).
After all, I can farm over workshops and vice versa with no problems while changing from or to cottages is usually wasteful.
 
I added sushi and some science/gold buildings to that CE save... 6974:science: /turn
:rolleyes:

Edit: Obviously gold buildings didn't do much since the empire is at 100% science with +0 gold/turn.
 
Most late game SE's run 10-30% culture slider which combined with theatres and colloseums really amp up the happiness. Health is a bit more of an issue but you can reasonably hit 30-35 :health: in cities with water and/or forests. Beyond that you need environmentalism which I didn't bother with here but it might have been an idea. Again I didn't explore it much beyond the basic swapping cottages out for farms and comparing.

The majority of late-game health bonuses (recycling plant especially) come extremely late-game. This is why I got into the thick of a lot of debate with people about chopping, because in the mid industrial era when you have all the health penalties but nearly none of the mitigating factors. It's quaint to hear a lot of talk about how you "don't need a high population" but then when scenarios like this illustrate the optimal, especially the optimal SE, you see ridiculously high pop all of a sudden which never matches what can really happen during the industrial era.

A CE commerce city might not need any trees at all since it's off-spec to build any factories or drydocks there (and the later airports can be balanced with late-game health buildings), so its health situation will be better, but a late-game SE, IMO, will need to keep some trees, even if you forego the factory's ability to flip engineers.
 
As a big SE player for a long time, I'd like to chime in here with a few thoughts that I didn't see covered.

A SE can easily mesh with the most powerful early game civic, Slavery, in that they both utilize Food as their main resource. The problem with the CE is that it takes time to grow to its max potential, where as a Farm takes X turns and is done, no more waiting. Sure the city may take time to grow, but a few early Farm-resources makes your city grow very fast.

Knowing that it takes active tile working time to get the Cottages to mature, once early cities are at their max sustainable size, I tend to hybridize. This means I may even stop working the Farm-resource to maximize future potental. Knowing that I may do this, during the early game I tend to keep my cities very close to each other, even overlapping a lot. This lets me have City #2 work City #1s Food resource once City #1 is done growing. Also, when I start whipping things, I could have City #2 work City #1s towns while waiting for the whipping unhappiness to wear off.

Proper spacing (read: overlapping) of early cities lets me utilize both Cottages and Slavery the way I used to Specialists and Slavery. This trick really gave my CE game a huge boost.

Now for a comparative taste of the SE vs the CE, it's all in the numbers.

A Post Biology Farm nets you +2 Food on that tile. Two food is equivilant to +1 Specialst. +1 Specialist is equivilant to 6 Beakers or 3 Gold 3 Beakers at best.*

A Post Liberalism Town nets you +7 Commerce +1 Hammer on that tile at best.*

*I am assuming the appropriate Civics are being run at this time.

One thing I'd like to note here is that you need far fewer +gold buildings in a Specialist Ecenomy, because you only need those buildings in the cities (city?) where you will be running Merchant Specialists. However, this is offset by the need for the SE to build more Health and Happiness buildings.

So if the SE is outmatched by the CE, why does anybody play the SE?

The answer is time and flexability.

The SE requires far less dependancy on both Civics and your Slider, which lets you be more flexable with many other aspects of the game. The fact is, a CE almost forces you into a single set of Civics predetermined by the game, where as the SE does not.

Since only one Civic is truly necessary for a SE, you can easily get away with running many fun civics for a lot longer than you could if you were running a heavy CE. Do you need more Scientist Specialists? Whip a new Scientist building with your Slavery Civic! Or you could do the peaceful thing and revolt into Caste System, but I prefer whipping if I'm going Food Crazy.

In many games I have tanked my Economy and been in the red at 100% Gold yet still trudged along in tech due to the SE's naturue. Also, If I ever feel that I need to defy a resolution or two in a SE I can! I simply tick up the Culture Slider a bit, and let the Theatres and Collesums keep my uppity citizens content. In fact, there have been a few games where I have turned down the Science Slider to turn up the Culture Slider and seen an increase in my science!

A few final things to note:

Look at the timeframe when a SE and a CE really shine
A CE is fully mature after Printing Press, Liberalism, and Democracy are learned.
A SE is fully mature after Biology.

Also examine the build-up to each separate economy.
Can you grow Towns before Free Speech and Universal Suffrage? Yes! This means that once your US and FS civics are unlocked, you can easily reap the full benefits of your Tows.
Can you grow your cities to the same size they would be post Biology Farms? No. This means that even after you tech Biology, which comes later than Democracy most of the time, you still have to wait for your cities to grow.

The SE also has diminishing returns in two ways, Great People and Growth Time.
The SE nets you Great People like you wouldn't believe. For a while. Then the number of GPP necessary to net the next Great Person gets so high, you may as well not be producing any GPP. In a CE, with one National Epic'd GPP farm, you can easily produce many Great Persons.
Growth Time is another factor that bears looking into. Post Biology, as you grow in size, the amount of time it takes to get one size bigger increases in a way you wouldn't believe. Since each city size takes more food than the last, and each time you grow one size bigger, your positive food is reduced by 2 (because that food is now being eaten by the new citizen) you will sometimes take 40, 50, or even 60 marathon turns to grow a city to it's final size.

Almost everything I have said are factors which have not been taken into account in the first post's comparison. A CE is much better than a SE in terms of pure tech, but a SE wins out in its ability to be flexable.
 
1. Build the IWs in a coastal HE.
2. Build a drydock.
3. Get a military academy (the free GG from facism is good here).
4. Adopt PS.
5. Delink your oil/uranium (i.e. farm/WS over it)
6. Spam caravels.

While nice to generate money, this is a waste of your IW and a GG imo (I mean stacking so many prod multipliers doesn't make sense, it's better to just split them in three cities, to avoid wasting the bonus producing other stuff than troops and because the diminushing returns...). But I am sure you know that already and it's a little OT ;)

Cheers
 
Moreover, I'm pretty sure the same can be done spamming workboats instead of caravels. For some reason even workboat build speed is increased by all the same multipliers.
 
You can spam workboats as well as they get the "military unit" bonus so Police State, HE, drydocks and MA all boost their production as well as forge, SP and other normal production multipliers. The problem with spamming caravels and workboats is that they have a limited use so most of them are just deleted, thereby wasting the hammers.

I have used a similar trick building airships in a high production city, at least I have a use for about 12 of those at the right time as scouts and light bombers. They don't get the drydocks bonus but all the other bonusses can apply and they can be built in any city rather than only a coastal one. Later fighters can give a very useful unit and although there is an even smaller hammer overflow for gold, getting a very useful unit and some cash is a better outcome than mass building caravels or workboats that need deletion.

Finally the best late game unit to spam is the guided missile. That can even be done in many cities with forges, factories and power bonusses giving +100% with Police State and SP adding another 35%. It costs only 60 hammers so any production city with more than 25 base hammers can build them in one turn and the overflow will gain 2.35 gold per hammer. And the guided missile can be very useful if used en masse, better than tactical nukes in the sense that it doesn't cause diplomatic or global warming problems. They can be used in situations where the AI has lots of fighters or SAM defences and although they have horribly short range of only 4 tiles they don't count towards the aircraft stacking limit and any number can be massed in a city or fort. They can be made much more mobile by carrying them on a submarine (3 GM) or a missile cruiser (4 GM).

I would not normally build guided missiles (due to their low cost effectiveness) but the ability to build an expendable unit and make plenty of gold at the same time is an attractive alternative to the nuclear option. Nuclear weapons need the Manhattan Project and causes diplomatic problems and can be intercepted, and while the guided missile is much weaker it is practically an automatic hit and can weaken any land or naval unit so other units can make an easy kill. Although a one shot weapon it is the best possible support an army and navy can have. By using them up you are reducing your unit maintenance and the enemy's at the same time :lol: that lets you keep making them.
 
UncleJJ I totally agree about the GM as a better cheap unit to spam.

One thing about workboats though... Could they possibly be used effectively as decoys? You could use them to get in way of enemy ships, or possibly to draw them away. Attacking a workboat means you can't attack another unit in the same turn, except for Blitz I guess.
 
I usually run a hybrid Hammer economy. Repre/Beauc/Caste/SP. Cottage in capital. Watermill or workshop or windmill everywhere else. I use the hammer overflow trick to pay my empire. The hybrid balances research and hammer well. HE builds spaceship way faster than CE or SE, and parts can't be rush bought. Corporations usually aren't a big deal. When corporations start to make profit, my spaceship is almost finished.

Some other comments:
1. CE won't need to control UN as much as SE.
2. slider come with a cost for SE. End game trade routes can bring a lot commerce.
3. Don't assume you have almost all the resources, or needed wonders. If you do, then you are in good shape, and would win anyway. One reason I am not SE is because I seldom have the pyramids.
4. I usually disconnect coal for health reason.

More cities also allow more opportunities for drafting and whipping since each one is recovering from the unhappiness in parallel. That is where the much greater productivity of an SE comes from, more cities whipping and drafting, while a CE city has to work its cottages to make the most of its improvements and civics.

I found your approach of small cities makes much more sense than unrealistic huge cities. But

1. Won't SE be running caste system?
2. Could whipping anger cause problem?
3. To make these small cities, your spacing must be pretty huge. So won't it hurt your early game?
4. How much profit would these small cities make till victory?
 
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