Most super specialists by turn 500?

What's the best way to get the most Super Specialists?

There's no PHI/IND, so I tried Bismark with EXP/IND
(I think I should have gone Peter with EXP/PHI)

Tried to maximize Great Merchants for the +1 food per super specialist

So without editing a map to get the max food, what would your strategy be?

I got 26 on a Tiny map











and Temple of Artemis
Moai Stones
Creative Constructions

(probably should have tried to go for much more wonders, but I was originally trying to go for more Great Merchants)

You might be interested in this thread where Kaitzilla creates a rather large capital with 121 settled Great Merchants (marathon/settler).

elitetroops said:

You might be interested in this thread where Kaitzilla creates a rather large capital with 121 settled Great Merchants (marathon/settler).

Click to expand...

thanks

Did it again with Peter, but only got 2 more @ 28

lol, I had Pacifism on for 2/3 of the game with no religion, so yeah :-(

Try it on a Big and Small map with tiny islands, settle them all to grab all the seafood and found Sid's Sushi. That should allow you to run a lot more specialists in all cities.

Looking at the screenshot above, my first thought was how is it possible that you don't have a lighthouse? Then I see it isn't coastal... Settling one off coast is a huge mistake on T0, if you play a game with a goal like this.

If your goal is to generate as many GP as possible, you don't need those hammer tiles to build 10 unnecessary mech infantries. The watermills could have been farms instead. And you should run Caste System if you want to focus on generating mainly Great Merchants.

Best possible way is to settle on coast with 2 sea food tiles only inside BFC (sometimes possible). Extra 3 Health from seastuff can give nice boost for that kind of city
This city would gain +6 food and +3 health from that

I was once curious how the game would react to/work with an unrealistic number of super-specialists in a regular game. I think the thread-starter means of course how many you can get by playing regularly, so I don't want to talk about a record here. I used one of these memory filter/scan/manipulate tools to increase the number of points so that I got one every turn (a little bit later in the game, of course) for a while.

It was my impression that it was surprisingly useless to have much more than usual. I don't know of the game/AI reacts to that at some point, but it looked like there is some adjustment.

The best way to get the most Super Specialists possible is by playing a PHI leader, running Pacifism with having the State Religion in all cities and generating GP simultaniously in all of them, building the Parthenon and never obsoleting it via teching Scientific Method (keep your enemies under control via espionage and simply keep them from winning, also make sure you stop teching early enough so that you aren't accidentally forced to tech SM) and ofc. build the NE in the strongest city that (perfect case) has all Wonders possible without SM and build nothing but Farms + Windmills + ofc. Pastures or whatever is needed if it's food and play a Big & Smalls map or Archipelagio and found Sushi to again have +50 / city. You then should run 7 GAs as late as possible. The only thing I could imagine that would still be better would require unrestricted leaders, then you can i. e. play Elizabeth of Rome and also build a Forum in every city for again +25% . Also, the larger the map the more cities you'll have in which you can simultaniously create GPs. It's possible to have up to 300 cities on a Huge (preferably Marathon) Big & Smalls map, so if you do all of that and grow every city to size 50 that'd be roughly 100k / turn (non-GA-value, not counting Wonders or national Wonders except for the Parthenon) . I hope this calculation is correct. I only assumed 5 / city naturally, so the real values probably will be higher.

Surely the parthenon isn't worth the unhealth of avoiding future tech. Cities which grow to 50 under the conditions you propose, would grow much larger and increase the base GPP accrued. Could that not beat the +50% (which is effectively +16.7% in ordinary PHI/Pac cities)?

/e Also, isn't Sushi medicine?

Unrelated, I have no experience with the big and smalls script. Thanks for mentioning it, I will check it out.

One could not self-found Sushi but conquer the HQ after an AI founded it, but the from Future Tech is a good argument.

I'm sure a lot of the techniques used in the Largest city challenge would apply here.
Over a hundred great merchants settled.

I gave this challenge a try on Settler, turning it purely into an internal management thing, and decided that I made a lot of crappy early game decisions. Overall the results were impressive, 125 settled merchants and 1 scientist in the capital. I carefully calculated land usage to within the domination limit, 56% with default AI density and normal settings, and topped at 55.38% getting as much rice as I could for Cereal Mills.

Apart from it being on Settler, I kept the game settings very normal:

I used Gandhi because I felt like he had the best stuff for this task. In retrospect I really doubt there's a better choice where leader and civ are concerned.

• PHI - essential for this objective; has to be one of these leaders
• Fast Worker - These are best on Quick. But there is a way to make them shine on marathon. Use big stacks of them and REX at full tilt: they can enter a jungle and chop/rail it in 1 turn, wham
• SPI - zigzag Caste & Slavery; later, Rep & US. The 5 turn switchover is effectively 1.6 Normal speed turns. Very powerful trait.

I used the Rainforest script because the food specials are seeded in tight groups. If one of these groups coincides with your capital, it's a food jackpot start. Since I'm too much of a casual to know anything about hall of fame and map finder, I put on an audiobook and rolled starts for a couple hours until I got one.



Then I made people eat bacon and bananas for 6000 years and watched what they did



What Sucked: A Brief Essay

Basically I think I lost 200 endgame turns dicking around. I was not relentless enough with workers, early enough. Workers come at the expense of tech. I should not have bothered with tech. I should have crashed the economy expanding and just balled through later. No good player who does this ever regrets it. I just thought this map would behave very differently. I thought tech would be cheap on Settler, cheap enough to justify a push on early tech, but it wasn't, not on a Huge map.

I guess the unexplored alternative to my Caste+Chem workshops (which were quite good at spamming workers, settlers, and research) would have been to just lean on slavery throughout the BC's. You can do that with SPI and still coast in Caste system with ad hoc specialists; no need to tech and expensively improve tiles in the beginning. But someone might have better ideas than this. Eh? Eh?

Something else that bothers me is the Pyramids. I admit it. I made them without stone. I have not built this wonder and made a doctrinaire "Specialist Economy" since the early days when it was all the rage. Here I felt it was so useful to the objective, and could use the massive food supply on Rainforest while cottage-sprawl tiles were locked up by the jungle. A notion was to let merchants (33) handle both the maintenance of cities and research. But the wonder is just too expensive. Oh well. Settler is a good place to test things out that are generally disastrous on higher difficulties (reinforcing your awareness of how they are terrible).

Some final concerns. A 20 floodplain site, a late settlement, could have been better I think. The capital does not begin the race upwards until its health and happy cap are pretty high. Before then it has to haul the freight in research and expansion. I would probably have done better with a good commercial Bureau Cap than the pig monster I rolled, and then gone out and located a floodplain later. There are several good map scripts for finding dense floodplains; Rainforest happens to be one of them.


Great people:

1 burned for Academy
1 burned for Shrine
3 burned for golden ages
1 burned for Cereal Mills
1 burned for Mining Inc.
126 settled

More antics:

Retried this with every victory condition except Time disabled, because LOL. I am proud to say that I made entirely different mistakes this time! This time the start is a bureaucap, still running Gandhi, and we can rely on there being a god-tier food site somewhere on the map, since it's rainforest.



Normally the number of super specialists one could possibly settle in a city, before winning at least, would be limited by domination, since ideally you would want to bend the entire map to your needs. Disregarding this, there is still the stupid global warming mechanic that quickly converts the map into desert, just like what happened in real life. But what if we disable some victory conditions and dodge the global warming mechanic by not building any forges? Perhaps under these terms, the player is allowed to cover the planet with a thick, muculent paste and just cook specialists for eons.

The cost of a great person may be expressed with sigma notation. For marathon:

C = 300 + Σ(300 * ceiling(n/10))

Where n is 0 → # of GP generated so far. Basically the GPP cost is 300 for the first person and goes up by 300 for persons # 1-10, 600 for 11-20, 900 for 21-30, ... 2400 for 71-80, and so on.

I guess the idea was saturation. My theory was, the map would be able to keep pumping out GPs rapidly even to the end of the game; it would be saturated with cities that had amassed large reserves of points without coughing up a GP. At the end of the game there were, indeed, a bunch of cities that had been barely-beaten to the last GP and were quickly covering the 4200 points of increased incremental cost. Really, though, I believe I corrected some major mistakes from my run in the prior thread but replaced them with new ones.

If I ever did this again I would instead make a guess as to how many great people could be generated, say 150. And make sure approximately that number of cities was able to reach extremely high population, rather than saturate the map with mid-sized cities. The development here, with 300+ more-uniformly-sized cities, might have made more sense if I went out to 4000 turns rather than 1500.

After teching paper and buying everyone's map, a 20 floodplain site was discovered, occupied by an existing AI.



I donated rice, pig, cow, and deer to Huayna Capac to see if he would grow, saving a settler. Then I blazed a path there and used some heavy horse to apply for ownership of the site. It basically worked out but overall, this session didn't pan out that much better than kaitzilla's game linked earlier.



A general summary of the early game (I sort of tried to stay focused on the workshop tech track):

Iron Working, 2350 BC, expansion may now begin
Currency, 2130 BC, 3 cities
Library pops Great Scientist, 1660 BC
Civil Service, 1240 BC, 8 cities
Oracle Chem, 610 BC, 14 cities
Lib Steam, 30 BC, 24 cities
Communism, 410 AD, 39 cities
Cereal Mills founded, 875 AD, 101 cities
Terrain improvements complete, 1562 AD, 316 cities
Taoism finished spreading, 1612 AD
Golden age initiated turn 702-798 (middle turns)

For some stupid reason I theorized that running a stack of 4 golden ages together, centered around turn 750, would maximize the size of Cuzco. GPs generated this run-

1 academy scientist
1 shrine maiden
1 Mining Inc engineer
1 Cereal Mills merchant
3 scientists, 1 commie spy, 1 music artist, 1 fusion engineer to golden ages

Settled:

130 merchants
4 generals (fascism guy + 3 more)
1 incidental scientist from the National Park city

This comes out to 136 GPs generated by cities, with the 137th requiring 302,400 points.


turn 702/1500 golden age screenie below. There's still a fair amount of growth for even the core cities to accomplish.



Global Warming - The numbers for the global warming computation were as follows.

Number of tiles (Huge map) = 128 × 80 = 10,240
Number of land tiles on this map = 10,213
Number of tiles with forest/jungle = 16
Unhealth from buildings = 1 Forge + 2 Airports = 3
Nuclear events = 0
Constants:
GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB = 20
GLOBAL_WARMING_FOREST = 50
GLOBAL_WARMING_UNHEALTH_WEIGHT = 20
GLOBAL_WARMING_NUKE_WEIGHT = 50

iGlobalWarmingDefense is the forest shield. It is Forests / Land * GLOBAL_WARMING_FOREST = 16 / 10213 * 50
I believe this (~0.078) being an integer comes to zero.

Building unhealth and nuclear history are added together to find the number of times the game "tests" for a global warming event.
Building unhealth is calculated thus: Unhealth * GLOBAL_WARMING_UNHEALTH_WEIGHT / Map Size = 3 * 20 / 10240 ≈ 0.005875
The nuclear event history: Explosions * GLOBAL_WARMING_NUKE_WEIGHT / 100 = 0
The problem with my reading of the code is that numbers may be getting rounded, as integers, during any or all steps of the computation. In any case the value here comes to zero, so no global warming test is performed.

If it were, the chance of global warming in each independent test, would be: GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB - iGlobalWarmingDefense / 100
... Which is 20% per test for my defenseless map. To get from 20 to 19 percent there would need to be 205 forests, and to negate all sources of global warming there would need to be 4086 forests, or more generally, 40 percent coverage.

TL;DR
If my number crunching is correct, a nuke-free, Huge-sized map can absorb 255 from buildings, and I went totally overboard avoiding forges. But I'm skeptical about how much buildings in civ4 really help you, given their cost, and I don't think I lost many— if any— turns in the key development phase by avoiding them. I eventually had to build 1 forge as a prereq for the SoL. But optimally I should have put industrial parks in select cities, after all else was accomplished, to boost GP farming while remaining under this 255 benchmark.



Here's some words about the rainforest script. This is a flat map script by default that generates a massive grassland (green) covered with jungle. Other features include blobs of mountains surrounded by hills, blobs of desert surrounded by plains, and a couple monstrous rivers that zigzag acrosss the map. Banana, Rice, and Pig are the dominant resource clusters on this script. It tends to be metal-poor and quite ridiculously food-rich. The sea level setting affects the map even though it is greyed-out. The climate setting does not.

Example rainforest food resource packing



Archipelago has far more relevant resources to a relatively weaker corp (for our purposes). I wonder if the sushi corp on archipelago can beat the cereal mills + massive farmland on rainforest? Sushi gives less food per resource, and water tiles are inferior to the land you get in rainforest. However, there is far more seafood in total in Archipelago than there are grains in Rainforest.



Turn-by-turn anim: AIs struggle against the jungle, get brushed aside with armor, and 400 Fast Workers sweep in bringing peace, harmony, and trusted brand name products to the area.



I don't mind improving tiles, that part of the game was kind of fun. Do you know what was an absolute Bee Eye Itch? Spreading Taoism and the Corporations. I built 3 monasteries, and two cities spammed mishes for the entire first 600 turns. I bought them airports to help. I knew that dealing with the corps and having to zigzag universal suffrage would be hell, and it was.

Gandhi's SPI trait pulled freight in this game. In marathon you can basically run slavery and caste system at the same time; later rep and suffrage.



National Park site below. The park and the epic were bought directly after the Kremlin was built. The epic may have been a mistake, hard to say exactly.




I built wall street (below) but not oxford. Oxford was useless in this campaign.

Wow, nice work Tristan_C!

Size 129 city is FAT
+39 trade route hehe

The spoiler looks like what is happening to the Amazonas

I forgot to mention issues with religion. I sort of stumbled on this information after selecting "Choose Religions." Taoism screwed me over because not all religions are created equal. The religions are displayed in the following order on the advisor screen, because this is how they are indexed internally:



The chance of religion spread is determined by a city's distance from the holy city; the chance decays exponentially from 10 percent towards zero, per turn. Shrine is either double chances or half-rate decay, can't remember. If the holy city is raised, the distance is no longer definite and the religion no longer spreads naturally.

The order in which the religions are indexed is important because this is the order in which they are checked for spread. Judaism is first. If Judaism spreads to a city, the game stops right there and doesn't check for other contenders. If Firaxis wasn't lazy they would have checked spread for all religions and made a random or run-off selection if multiple religions hit the same city at once.

Instead, if we imagine a city that is equidistant from the shrines of all the religions, and each has an inherent ten percent chance of spreading there, here is what the actual probabilities are.

When a founding a religion (usually CoL or Philo for players), choose for yourself the highest index you can get if you want the religion to spread, and choose the lowest index possible if you don't.

Kaitzilla said:

Wow, nice work Tristan_C!

Size 129 city is FAT
+39 trade route hehe

Click to expand...

Thanks! I respect the headway you made in this little endeavor way back when. You'll notice I didn't really get much further despite deviating from HOF constraints.

Pangaea said:

The spoiler looks like what is happening to the Amazonas

Click to expand...

For some reason civ is railroading me into this behavior >_> Last year I posted a turn-by-turn amazon deforestation gif for Colonization DOS in the Other Sid Games forum. Very mean-spirited games, Sid Meier. You are a bad. I especially like how the environmentalism civic is nothing more than an enabler for spamming coal plants.

Tristan_C said:

The chance of religion spread is determined by a city's distance from the holy city; the chance decays exponentially from 10 percent towards zero, per turn. Shrine is either double chances or half-rate decay, can't remember. If the holy city is raised, the distance is no longer definite and the religion no longer spreads naturally.

The order in which the religions are indexed is important because this is the order in which they are checked for spread. Judaism is first. If Judaism spreads to a city, the game stops right there and doesn't check for other contenders. If Firaxis wasn't lazy they would have checked spread for all religions and made a random or run-off selection if multiple religions hit the same city at once.

Instead, if we imagine a city that is equidistant from the shrines of all the religions, and each has an inherent ten percent chance of spreading there, here is what the actual probabilities are.

Code:

Judaism        10.00%
Christianity    9.00%
Islam           8.10%
Hinduism        7.29%
Buddhism        6.56%
Confucianism    5.90%
Taoism          5.31%

When a founding a religion (usually CoL or Philo for players), choose for yourself the highest index you can get if you want the religion to spread, and choose the lowest index possible if you don't.

Click to expand...

This is amazing stuff. I don’t know if this was known to others, but it’s new to me, almost 10 years and 3000+ hours of playing Civ4, later. Useful information if you have Choose Religions enabled.

You're welcome. I thought I would take this chance to investigate some of the weird inner workings of religions/corps, global warming, and GP cost scaling. The mechanics were easier to perceive and confirm here than they are in "normal" match formats... but who knows when this stuff might come in handy for squeezing through on immortal or deity, eh.

If I remember correctly from some of Seraiel's write-ups, some of the random events are also different based on religions, and for instance there was a rather nice even for Judaism, which was why he chose that religion (used Choose Religions).

I can't help but look suspiciously on that Cuzco city though (capital). Size 1 in turn 310, in such a lush place?

20 floodplains is like 8 unhealth. It's like buying all your water from Sitting Bull.



edit-

I phrased something poorly:

The chance of religion spread is determined by a city's distance from the holy city; the chance decays exponentially from 10 percent towards zero, per turn.

I meant to say that the chance decays exponentially from 10 percent towards zero, as a function of "plot distance." And that it checks each turn.

A plot distance of 1 is approximately a 4 square radius in which the maximum probability applies, which my amateurish reading of the code suggested was either 10 or 20 percent depending on whether the spreader city has the Shrine. Each unit of plot distance away, which are bands approximately 4 tiles wide minus diagonal fuzziness, the probability is reduced in proportion to the size of the map. Thanks to the forceful use of integers and this 1000-sided die roll: (getSorenRandNum(GC.getDefineINT("RELIGION_SPREAD_RAND"))

...the floor value comes to 1 in 1000 per turn, or 2 in 1000 for Shrined religions, for cities located a long distance away from the holy city.

There are rules applying to the selection of a valid target for religion spread that I'm unclear about and wasn't motivated to work out after I killed all the AIs. The only things I know for certain are that wars interfere with the establishment of a valid path between a city with a religion and a city without. And that razing the Holy City prevents all natural spread thereafter.


As an aside, I like to use the word "tiles" or "squares" for individual map squares because "plots" is an awful word, seeming to mean either 1x1 squares, the 4-ish-square radii referenced here, or the 5x5 city catchment areas (BFCs) depending on the context.