How do Social Policies and other benefits scale?

I've been musing on various points.

- The faster the game speed, the fewer Barbarians you'll encounter (but the more their individual deaths will offset the cost of opening Honor).

- The faster the game speed, the larger the portion of the game a CS quest's benefits will last and the more it will contribute to a milestone (for instance, gaining enough Faith for a GPro). This kind of ties in to the Barbarians point.

- Lack of scaling in CS introductions means locating a Religious CS will found the first Pantheon in a Quick game.

- The more turns it takes to build a military unit, the more expensive a loss they are. On longer speeds, player units feel like an investment to be carefully protected, whilst AI units are a massive hammer sink that is easily wasted by contact with a human tactician.

- Logistics Ranged units have a certain production time (which includes XP farming) and a certain lifespan (once cities are big enough, Crossbows barely scratch the paint and even Cover2 + March makes Machine Guns a risky play). Military Tradition makes production time less tight on Quick (and on the way spawns a GG that can Citadel a CS to further reduce production time); on Marathon, it's not really needed.

- Longer speeds make pillaging less useful as you can't cycle repairs so much. On Quick, Pyramid & Citizenship enables you to cycle repair-pillage every turn.

- Longer speeds make a Worker capture a much bigger bag of free hammers.

I haven't drawn an awful lot of major conclusions, but I'd like to hear what thoughts other may have

Now that I've played Marathon, there's an awful lot of ground to cover here.

Pillaging is still useful (on marathon), but in more the way it was intended: to cripple your enemy. It takes them longer to repair, too; and their workers are all captured. Likewise you don't want it done to you.

Barb camps are a much bigger deal. They spawn camps just as often, but yield 3x more gold, and even on raging barbs they only spawn units 1/3rd as much so they can be taken with just 1 unit much more easily.

Machine guns with 2 range, 2 shots are deadly; especially when they come in pairs. I don't find them delicate at all, except to planes. You've got artillery to take down turtle cities. MG's cut through units like butter (including navy). And frankly, most of the time they're not so bad on cities, either.

If you're on an Ancient marathon start, odds are the game will already be decided by gatlings anyway (270bc domination victory, Germany, deity, large map, 10 civs, theology was the only Medieval tech researched. Nuff said...)

Oh, yes, well promoted MGs remain lethal in the field and defence. Arsenals seem to obsolete their use in siegecraft, but as you say you'll get artillery soon after then so no biggie

I had war in information era with well promoted bazookas. They were eating everything including cities.

Mutineer said:

I had war in information era with well promoted bazookas. They were eating everything including cities.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I guess that a few upgrades sees them overtake defence. I've usually had my heavily promoted ranged units sit back and act as anvils once artillery and vehicles come to fore, I'll have to try keeping them in the front line sometime

Here's something that seems amiss: playing as America on Marathon, I'm pretty sure my World's Fair lasted as long as on Standard, and my Minutemen only got 6 GApts per Crossbow killed. So, that's something to consider - unless I'm mistaken about WF, it's a massively increased investment in exchange for a very low yield, and it appears Brazil and America's UUs are severely nerfed.

Of course, the opposite is true in Quick speed

Wee update: Spain's UA doesn't scale. In Quick you get an even more preposterous sum for finding a NW, in Marathon you can only just afford a flippin' Archer.