New: The Civ Science Project!

Hello All,

The civ science project (civscience.wordpress.com) is the result of a big recent undertaking of mine, to test some of the mechanics of Civ V with statistics and real data! You can read about the project here: civscience.wordpress.com/about

In a nutshell I gathered data from 180 FilthyRobot games, including information on starting location, religion, social policies warfare and more!

I hope to learn some new things about the game and test some of the commonly held assumptions!

My first post on social policies is just out! Enjoy

Nice project! I enjoyed reading your latest article and analysis, and I'm glad you showed liberty is quite viable for culture and does not put you behind. I suspected this from my own games playing wide with religions. The synergy is powerful.

However, I will note that it is well-known that these balances change based on map size. The science and social policy culture costs for each new city get reduced the more you increase the map size, so you should probably split your data into groups by map size and run an analysis looking for good cultural strategies for EACH map size. I suspect liberty/piety will look really good on large and huge but be less advantaged on standard and below where tradition will begin to look better. This is based on my own experience playing.

At this point you focused on number of policies opened for the most part, but I'd be curious to see which trees result in the fastest victories for different Victory conditions. Such as science, domination, or culture. Esp. interested to see what build results in the fastest dominations (by map size of course) and I'm interested in how effective commerce can be in a wide empire setting at a science victory if you use that tree as your filler. It's a ton of extra gold and at least one tenet directly buffs science in a small way. Most ppl ignore commerce because rationalism and and ideologies hit near the same time but I've had a lot of success growing my empire and generating earlier science with cash-buying science buildings and the extra happiness growing all of the wide empire taller.

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

As it turns out all the games in the dataset are a small map size, so this doesn't vary (the multiplayer community usually play by the same set of rules).

As for your other ideas of things to look at, I like them!! Certainly something that will be worth adding to the list

That is really detailed, nice job!