Faster Early Expansion

Originally posted by budweiser
...I usually try to build a temple first. This is on emporer. ... Why? Because I can get it before 3000bc and it rakes in culture. This can get you started on a cultural victory.
This surprises me. Doubled culture is really cool, but is doing a "double-culture push" on a single city really worthwhile? I mean, it's like getting a free Temple's worth of culture, but only one Temple's worth. And that's for stunting your initial growth.

Are we talking about the 100k victory or the 20k version? I concede that I have neither the patience nor the knack for winning the game culturally. That said, I honestly can't imagine winning a 20k victory on Emperor. How do you get enough Wonders built to do that?

I know my post sounds critical, so I hope you're not annoyed. I really am interested in hearing your tales of cultural victory, though. My cultural finesse has decayed rapidly ever since I stopped playing on Monarch, so I'd like to hear some ideas. Thanks.
 
I generally don't try for an early temple unless religious. Temples are really really expensive for nonreligious but the culture is incredible.
 
JustBen, the whole story would be quite long. I was England, emporer standard continets. Like I said, I built a temple first. Then I just kept an eye out for building cultural buildings first as they became availabe. I didnt put any wonders in until Shakey's, then I built pretty much every other one after that; Newtons, smiths, TOE etc. I call these the english wonders. When the 1800s rolled around I was able to forecast that London would hit 20K by around the year 2000. But I never got that far, my empire reached 100K in 1932.

All along I made sure that my cities built all the cultural buildings before they did anything else important. I even paid money for rushing some stuff. Overall my milt was smallish but it was poewerfulk enough to beat my neighbors into submission. I pretty much had a 2 or 3 tech lead over all of them for the whole game. You need to be careful what you let them acquire. In retrospect it might have helped to seek out and destroy some of the other cultural wonders to help keep the ai down. In this case it was not necessary.
 
one thing:

if you don't have food bonus resources around, you wont grow faster with more citizens. While it will indeed increase your production, you will expand faster if you make settlers whenever you reach 3 pop.
 
Granaries are way too expansive.

Both in civ 2 and 3 on deity, the happiness is such a restriction to your growth that you grow enough without granaries. I don't go for the pyramids either.
(in civ2, i rather go for the collosus, in civ3 i don't go for the early wonders at all.)
 
IMHO rasing the luxury rate and building a granary is a better way to expand fast on deity than building a temple to get less unhappyness and expanding without a granary, even if you're religious...
 
AI makes settler faster than you even on regent is because they pop rush. AI is actually pretty good at that.
 
Originally posted by WackenOpenAir
Granaries are way too expansive.

Both in civ 2 and 3 on deity, the happiness is such a restriction to your growth that you grow enough without granaries. I don't go for the pyramids either.
(in civ2, i rather go for the collosus, in civ3 i don't go for the early wonders at all.)

If you build a granary, even if you do need to use the luxury rate, you make more money. Each citizen (if working on a roaded tile), brings in at least 1 commerce which will pay for him to be happy if you need to use the luxury tax. If the citizen is working river tiles, you come out ahead. And not to mention that you spend far less time at size 1 or 2, and much more time at size 3, 4 or 5. Granary=More gold + more production + less food needed.

Granaries are priced about right considering how powerful they are.

Fastest you could possibly build settlers (when averaged out in the long run).

Without granary:
+2 food (no bonus food)=settler/20 turns
+3 food=settler/14 turns
+4 food=settler/10 turns
+5 food=settler/8 turns
+7 food=settler/6 turns

With granary:
+2 food=settler/10 turns
+3 food=settler/8 turns
+4 food=settler/6 turns
+5 food=settler/4 turns!!!

Yes, when you are first building the granary (when you only have 1 city), the luxury rate will be high, but as soon as you start sending out those settlers and have the new cities build more military police for your capital, and get luxuries hooked up, you can turn down the luxury rate quite a bit and with how fast that city is now spitting out settlers the other cities can focus on other things instead of having every city build settlers.

If you play tiny maps or pretty congested maps, then building a granary first may not be the best move, but in many standard map conditions they are.
 
Hi WOA,

we discussed this a little on Apolyton, but I think the Granaries question is important enough to discuss a little more.

I'm not good enough at maths to go into it like Bamspeedy, but suffice to say that indeed, if you know how to use the luxury slider (actually the "entertainment slider" in Civ3 but yes, I too am a Civ2 veteran and can't make myself stop calling it the lux slider), happiness concerns are almost NEVER a reason to slow down growth. If you haven't done so yet, I suggest you read the "Power of the Luxury Slider" thread over at Apolyton -- it's a bit old, so the easiest way to find it is to first look for Mountain Sage's fairly recent "best threads of the past year" thread, which includes a link to that thread.

Again, I, too, moved into Civ3 from Civ2 (or more precisely from SMAC). And I quickly saw -- especially thanks to forum tips -- that Civ3's approach to growth, especially on the higher levels, is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from Civ2's. Consider:
- the luxury slider is TWICE as powerful as in Civ2 (but for some reason feels EVEN MORE powerful than that -- perhaps due to the existence of 40-turn research and the existence of luxuries, due to the fact that filling the food box no longer gets "harder and harder", and due to the inability to gold-rush during despotism).
- the food cost of "vertical" (city-size) growth has finally been reduced to a level small enough that investing in growth pays off, and above all there is no longer the ridiculous situation where every step of vertical growth makes the next step harder
- the food cost (citizen cost) of "horizontal" growth has been raised, once again helping to finally make it worthwhile to let cities grow at least a little in the pre-republic period
- (as much as I loved it and based my entire Civ II games around it) the ridiculously overpowered rep/dem growth benefits (a citizen per f*in' TURN if you knew how to milk them) and their twin brother, demo's ridiculously overpowered anti-corruption benefit are GONE. So unlike in Civ 2, your granaries will be providing a real service throughout the game, not just in the period when they are.... the least useful (Civ II's long, long deity-level "size 5? fuggedaboutit" period, which ends with Republic, which is precisely where Civ 2's granaries become "obsolete"). And since the new corruption model and fast AI expansion encourage numerous, quickly built, fairly tightly packed cities, you might as well just accept it... and granaries often help with that route. Just don't do like me and build too many (though I do now at least delay until after the first settler, allowing me to <b>trade for</b>, not <b>research</b>, pottery, to support 8 units for free, and to quickly grab one nearby prime-quality spot).

Otherwise, I find it hard to add anything Bamspeedy didn't already, so I'll just repeat the point of his I liked the most: unless building a granary will lose you the opportunity to expand (due to an extremely cramped starting position), you will generally come out ahead by building the granary. And with tight enough city packing, even a cramped position needn't be cramped.

UnityScoutChopper
 
thx that actually helped me a bit i keep forgetting rush build =)
 
unlike maybe you have some very special start position, i do not agree.

in the beginning, i generally only want to bulid 8 cities.
the advantage of a granary only comes with your 3th or 4th settler or so. the first 2 or 3 are later if you build a granary. my cities generally don't build more than 2 settlers, maybe 3 for the capital. A granary does not make expanding faster.

building more than 8 cities early on is generally too costly an investment early on, since they will be outside the first ring and have very high corruption. Not only for the loss of citizens is it too costly, also because i need my production to build military units and barracks.

of course it depends on play style, but i don't think a non warmongerer playstyle can be anywhere nearle as efficient on deity. (it would require you to build the GL in order to get your techs instead of getting them by fighting your opponents. building the GL without leader requires a HUGE investment on deity.)

building 8 cities goes fastest without granaries. these 8 cities are perfectly suited to build your horsemen / swordsmen army. building granaries or more cities ruin the production of that army.
 
Hi WackenOpenAir,

I want to build a lot more than 8 cities.

Fundamentally.

So I guess there is not much more to talk about from there.

USC
 
This thread started in 2001. It has good advice in it about early expansion.
 
Generally speaking, a Granary will help you make the most of a bad food situation, so creating one in a capital that has no special other resource and needs to make Settlers fast is advisable. Having said that, there are many special tiles and civ traits in C3C that largely invalidate this and even make Granaries bad investments.

Granaries increase population growth by halving the time it takes to create a new citizen. If you cannot make use of this new citizen, your Granary is a waste of shields and upkeep. Generally speaking, any civ start position with a significant food bonus resource will not require a Granary as its production value will never be able to match the Granary's projected output. This is doubly so for Agricultural civs.

Agricultural civs generally start with an extra food to their capital, as if they had a bit of a food resource bonus. The fact that this bonus is only one is quite awkward at first, but unless you have significant production bonus tiles, a Granary is probably an ill-advised investment in the first few turns.

This is, of course, offset by the Industrious trait which allows you to build Settlers and Workers much, much faster. I find that the Agricultural trait overshoots the resource bonus of Industrious a bit in the Settler/Worker production line, but not by much. If you're Mayan and have no bonus food tiles on your start position, a Granary will probably be worth the investment, and will help you to secure an immediate dominant position on anything lower than Monarch. No civ REXes like the Mayans can. A Mayan on full power acquiring a few bonus tiles of any sort in his secondary cities can directly overpower even Expansionist AI civs that pop 2 Settler or city huts.

The concept is really quite simple when stated twofold:

1. Increase your population to the maximum useful size. (Including effects from sliders, luxuries, granaries, food bonuses, etc.) Food makes you population grow, happiness effects make them useful.

2. Coordinate improvements and unit build times with population growth schedules. This is as true for an early Granary as it is for Aqueducts, Marketplaces, Temples, Cathedrals, and Hospitals later on.
 
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