Late game SE vs CE, a direct comparison

I'd think having a shrine city by the lategame is a fair assumption with CE or SE. Only on the hugest of maps might you not have the opportunity to capture one. Whether or not you will have a shrine by the time you want to be building your Wallstreet is another issue.

I loaded up your save for the CE, and without changing anything at all except a few farms in your Wallstreet city to towns, this is the CE-Wallstreet I got. It runs at a lower population , meaning less resources needed and less maintenance, but also less score. Unless I missed something this would be a far better way to run the Wallstreet city in that scenario, though it has less GPP.



I more than doubled the the output of the city, and with some cheap science buidlings this will be even better obviously.

Yours produced 84.26 and 118.3, compared with this one producing 175.5 and 129.

Basically, running so many priests in a CE-Wallstreet is IMO not optimal.

Earthling said:

Second, I'd really like to know a bit more about the actual hammer deficit (in buildings) the SE was running. You're kinda cheating by just worldbuilding in all the unis/banks/etc... there is no way in a real game that you can get all of these. The lack of hammers from US would be very significant in that case. Similarly you lose the ability to buy rush, which can be quite significant (on the other hand you could also account for more total GP throughout the game from the SE - perhaps granting academies proportional to what would be expected). Overall, I'm sorry to say, not impressed with this "test."

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US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings.

noto2 said:

oh he did this in worldbuilder? Wellt that explains it. The problem with the SE is getting enough population to actually make it work. A CE city is at maximum power with 20 pop. The SE city needs 40+ population. How you get that much happy and health bonus is...well...good luck

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It's not about luck, it's about skills not related to economy management, namely reading the map, warfare, and diplomacy.

Although I do think a SE can be competitive late game I do not think it's more powerful than a CE with all the bonuses.

Random thoughts....

When I use a SE, which is a lot, my norm is to run the slider 20-30% and my slider from 0-20%.

When I use a CE, which is often , my norm is to run the slider 0-20% and my slider 40-50% till around Corporations then I can normally bump my slider to 50-60%.

I like to run all kinds of economies but imo, the examples you gave don't fit well into what actually happens in a real game. I'll stick with my opinion that SE is well suited for early-mid game while a fully powered CE with all the perks is scary.

The SE would also need to control the UN to prevent adoption of US.

Feralminded: congratulations, good work.
I was double replaying a game (CRE, non-PHI,non FIN) with farms or cottages,
but your example made it not necessary.
Your post #14 was very important to me:
Does a food corporation helps more SE than CE? It looks so,but may be the
opposite. And above pop.20, CE/SE loses its meaning. Let's say the same city
with 25 or 40 pop., better with cottages than not (if possible,of course).
Infinite happiness does exist; with a price: HR costs one time hammers,gold for
troops maintenance and beakers due to lack of Representation; the slider costs
gold and/or beakers, unless on the final way to cultural victory.
The same food corp. just gets somewhat weaker by unhealth.
Perhaps your study opens the door to a new domestic strategy:
Choose CE or SE (or its sub-divisions) as the map says; later use a food corp.
to have both. Timing of grow and Civics to be discovered,of course.
Best regards,

fed1943: I think he thinks it´s more beneficial under SE, because under SE you run representation, while under CE under US (most of the time I think). When CE would run representation, it would be more beneficial to CE imho. More great people (because it didn´t produce as much as in SE) and less unhelthiness.

I don't have many games that I cant run the slider at 100%, SE or CE. Maybe I need to build wealth in two side cities, but that's it.

True 1943. I'm not sure which Corporation would help more tbh. I was trying to elude to the OP example which had the SEs slider at 50% and the CEs slider at 80%. In most games the SE would only be at 20% and the CE would be at 50%, not 80. That means the SE would only pull in about 200 to the CE 300 . Of course this would apply for every city empire wide.

Anyways, both are very good. SE earlier imo and CE later. Lot's of debate all around lol. What about this..........

US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings.

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It's not very difficult to use binary research in conjunction with building wealth during 1 or even 2 Golden ages. When they're over you can quite literally have 10,000 or more gold and rush buy 30 or more top tier units. That's nothing to sneeze at.

I just don't like the one is better lol. I like to play with all them! They all have strengths and weaknesses.

A great 1st try, but I think the biggest missing component in this comparison is the treatment of hammers.

The game rules give a very unfavorable conversion of hammers to beakers, and often in the late game it is far more preferable to take the hammers as they are. With the lower pop cap of the CE, you save on hammers by requiring less infrastructure (as you stated already). But apart from that, if you have US then your towns also provide extra hammers.

Furthermore, farms are not the only source of food in the late game. Corporations can also be a major source of food. So you have your Towns, and have your Specialists as well when using the CE. That's why I sometimes prefer to use Representation when running a CE, because I get the bonus +3 beakers from my specialists, which I can have through extra food from corporations. But aside from that, settled Great People (and Great Generals) require no food but still gain the +3 beakers from Representation.

Unconquered Sun said:

US hammers and rushbuy are very weak compared to Hammer Economy. HE is not SE, but they are easily mixed to get buildings.

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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.

***

Food corporations are tricky. Enabling us to cottage every elegible tile is sweet... but any more than that goes to waste (replacing windmills with mines or running non-Representative specialists doesn't really do much for us).
A SE doesn't get the huge rewards for the first few food, but can make good use of almost any amount.
If I use corporations, I religiously build filler cities, and consequently don't find the growth caps all that limiting... in a CE they often end up with a footprint of 1 tile and only exist for per-city-bonuses (since my established cities with better multipliers get more out of the land). In a SE they take over tiles from established cities until the latter are just at their growth cap.

If I can get utterly ridiculous amounts of food, I might turn to heavy whipping... which, however, can mess somehwat with the rest of the economy.

***

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 34 or 26.

The art of running a SE for the late game is to deal with the implications of very high food incomes with Biology and food corps. It is wrong to compare a CE to a SE and assume that all the cities will be in the same place with the SE ones being much larger. If each cottage was replaced by a farm and supported a specialist that would make the city 1 pop larger and require +1 health and +1 happiness. But if there are more cities sharing the the farms the average size of cities can be the same and no more health and happiness infrastructure is needed. 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.

In my SEs I usually have a few very large cities with lots of health and happiness infrastructure. They are useful for the internal trade routes and with high production are where wonders and national wonders go. But the bulk of my cities are middle sized and crammed together with moderate amounts of infrastructure. They are limited by the available tiles. In an area where a CE player would put 3 cities I'll probably put 5 or 6 and have nearly double the total population once Biology boosts the farms.

While these findings are good in spawning discussion I find the findings to be incomplete at best.

Especially claiming under the addition tests that one economy outperformes the other is a useless statement as you did not add screenies and failed to provide all the info relevant. If we cannot see wat the pro's and con's are between the two, how are we to say which one is best?

Also, this thread fails to give an insight into what choices to make in what situation. It lacks to give insight into the situation leading up to the late-game and therefore this becomes more an excersive of thought rather than useful info - unless talking and learning about the game mechanics is the info you were looking for. I think however that not so muh the numbers are relevant but it is the game as a whole that this research should have a place in. As long as the whole perspective is unclear I think no one can make claims about one economy being better.

Also you fail to provide insight as to the criteria of one economy being better. Do you compare hammers/results, total beakers generated/turn, or whatever else you may choose, you may want to provide more insight for a more complete discussion. Right now this whole thread is number-crunching for the sake of number crunching.

noto2 said:

I know that in a SE you can make one super city that will outperform any city in a CE, however, the average city in a CE will outperform the average city in a SE. This is why SE is better for a small empire and CE better for a large one.

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Are you sure about this? Bureaucracy towns (7.5-9 commerce without FIN) often outperform rep. scientists in a small empire where the slider is high. It's not difficult to get 15 towns in you Bureaucrac capital, but to get 15 scientists or more you need population of ~30. This may be hard to obtain in a small empire without much health resources. Of course there are also settled great scientists, but you can settle your GSs in cottaged SSC too.

PieceOfMind said:

I'd think having a shrine city by the lategame is a fair assumption with CE or SE. Only on the hugest of maps might you not have the opportunity to capture one. Whether or not you will have a shrine by the time you want to be building your Wallstreet is another issue.

I loaded up your save for the CE, and without changing anything at all except a few farms in your Wallstreet city to towns, this is the CE-Wallstreet I got. It runs at a lower population , meaning less resources needed and less maintenance, but also less score. Unless I missed something this would be a far better way to run the Wallstreet city in that scenario, though it has less GPP.

I more than doubled the the output of the city, and with some cheap science buidlings this will be even better obviously.

Yours produced 84.26 and 118.3, compared with this one producing 175.5 and 129.

Basically, running so many priests in a CE-Wallstreet is IMO not optimal.

Click to expand...

Yeah I'm embarrassed that I missed that ... goes to show how single minded I was when doing that. I still think it behooves you to run as many merchants as possible since they will yield more / tile than cottages with that high of a slider and ultimately that's your goal here. But yeah ... its not hard to drop the research buildings in there as well and have a general high output city.

Artichoker said:

A great 1st try, but I think the biggest missing component in this comparison is the treatment of hammers.

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Well it was the only "easy" way I could directly compare the two. Before when I started out I had everyone producing and SE compared unfairly well in this scenario since US wasn't doing much of anything useful (I believe SE was ahead by over 10% total / turn). So the obvious was to take US into account was to produce raw research everywhere.

Crusher1 said:

True 1943. I'm not sure which Corporation would help more tbh. I was trying to elude to the OP example which had the SEs slider at 50% and the CEs slider at 80%. In most games the SE would only be at 20% and the CE would be at 50%, not 80. That means the SE would only pull in about 200 to the CE 300 . Of course this would apply for every city empire wide.

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If you are only running a 50% slider in CE then SE is going to knock your socks off ... SE doesn't much care about the slider. 0%-100% a scientist still produces 6 . Yeah the rest of the goes either way and it does help the production but the majority of the research in an SE comes from slider independent specialists. Without being able to hit 70%+ in the slider department under a CE, SE is clearly dominant in terms of pure / tile.

That said there is one major advantage to CE's which I notice when I play ... the AI exclusively builds cottages. So when conquering AI civilizations under SE I have to either run a scorched earth campaign when attacking (which can be VERY lucrative ... but does require a small army of calvary) ... or I just have to take the cottage cities as they come. More often than not I am lazy about it and just switch over to FEUSS and spam cottages. I personally don't have the sand to plow over cottages with farms.

Iranon said:

Even without the Kremlin, a town going towards rush-buying outperforms any hammer improvement short of workshops with State Property AND Caste System

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Hammer economy is all about running SP and Caste.

Iranon said:

...with the additional benefits that this can be used anywhere and that gold modifiers are cleaner and available earlier.

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Hammer modifiers come from a single set of buildings and workshops start as mature improvements. HE is very fast and easy to develop. Granted, a completely static empire that somehow enters the industrial age with full sets of commerce buildings and grown towns everywhere can certainly rushbuy. But that'd be rare.

Unconquered Sun said:

Hammer economy is all about running SP and Caste.

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You know I hadn't even really thought much about an HE ... but I guess in a way running an SE under SP/CS could hybrid itself into an HE anyhow. Regardless its a tough comparison at that point.

feralminded you are right about running as many merchants as possible.

If you assume that with the slider that high 1 is worth more then 1 then the yield is better.

If we only assumed the city had a library, obs and uni, then the Wallstreet would pull in 9.8 + 2.8 per tile from 7towns, or a flat 12 from your farms.Since the city for some reason had 7 religions, the science multiplier is even higher so the figure I gave is probably a bare minimum. I know it's the Wall Street city and it should be specialised but to what extent? 9.8 and 2.8 still seems nice compared to 12. But I have to agree with running merchants though.

feralminded said:

... or I just have to take the cottage cities as they come. More often than not I am lazy about it and just switch over to FEUSS and spam cottages.

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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.