Philosophical Trait is mostly Useless...

Philosophical Trait is mostly Useless... Since Industrious Traits Leaders will beat you.

No, it's the Aggressive leaders who will beat you.

Seriously, any trait can be leveraged, if you know how to. With Philosophical, you can generate Great People easily. So build farms and set specialists, even if you can't get any wonders built.

You have it backwards. Industrious trait leaders are useless since the Philosophical trait leaders will beat you. Aren't Great Engineers grand?

All of the traits have their uses except possibly Organized. Industrious leaders are far from useless thanks to fast wonder construction and are also quite good at producing great people. Great engineers are very good, but you need to build some wonders to start with to get them, and there industrious is liable to beat you. Philosophical is more useful for getting several early culture bombs, and pushing ahead on science.

MrCynical said:

All of the traits have their uses except possibly Organized. Industrious leaders are far from useless thanks to fast wonder construction and are also quite good at producing great people. Great engineers are very good, but you need to build some wonders to start with to get them, and there industrious is liable to beat you. Philosophical is more useful for getting several early culture bombs, and pushing ahead on science.

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Organized only works on Larger maps.

I like Industrious better than Philosophical for getting Great People. Being able to build Wonders is a better way to go about it, since not only do you get the GPPs, you also get whatever benefit the Wonder gives.

You get a few more Great People using Philosophical than you do using Insustrious, but the benefits gained from the Wonders override that difference.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence:

That the industrious civ discovered the tech in time to build the wonder.

That the industrious civ has the resource that speeds construction.

That the philosophical civ doesn't have a great engineer ready.

That there's no army massing on the borders of the industrious civ (or worse, inside them!), which has invested so many hammers on wonders.

That the philosophical civ wants the wonder.

Seriously, sometimes I'd rather have an academy or a shrine than a wonder. And if a philosophical civ really does want wonders, they can focus on chop rushing the Pyramids, or discovering metal casting early, and get quite a few great engineers. Then they can spend their hammers on building an army.

The Hanging Gardens, for example, costs 120 hammers for an industrious civ with stone, plus 100 hammers for an aqueduct and worker turns to build a quarry and connect the stone. 220 hammers is a barracks and 4 swordsmen - probably enough to take the Hanging Gardens. Especially if the philosophical civ was smart and grabbed theology with a great prophet, and is now theocratic. How will your industrious builders hold off 4 city raider II swordsmen?

Taelis said:

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence:

That the industrious civ discovered the tech in time to build the wonder.

That the industrious civ has the resource that speeds construction.

That the philosophical civ doesn't have a great engineer ready.

That there's no army massing on the borders of the industrious civ (or worse, inside them!), which has invested so many hammers on wonders.

That the philosophical civ wants the wonder.

Seriously, sometimes I'd rather have an academy or a shrine than a wonder. And if a philosophical civ really does want wonders, they can focus on chop rushing the Pyramids, or discovering metal casting early, and get quite a few great engineers. Then they can spend their hammers on building an army.

The Hanging Gardens, for example, costs 120 hammers for an industrious civ with stone, plus 100 hammers for an aqueduct and worker turns to build a quarry and connect the stone. 220 hammers is a barracks and 4 swordsmen - probably enough to take the Hanging Gardens. Especially if the philosophical civ was smart and grabbed theology with a great prophet, and is now theocratic. How will your industrious builders hold off 4 city raider II swordsmen?

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You just assumed that you have maphack.

Organized is very under-rated. The ability to chop rush courthouses with only two forests is, by itself, very important for the warmonger. I wouldn't discount the organized guy living next to you...it is that much easier for him to afford conquering your culture rich cities.

Taelis said:

Seriously, sometimes I'd rather have an academy or a shrine than a wonder. And if a philosophical civ really does want wonders, they can focus on chop rushing the Pyramids, or discovering metal casting early, and get quite a few great engineers. Then they can spend their hammers on building an army.

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Those are easy to get using Industrious. If you don't have Creative, you're chop-rushing Stonehenge anyways, and that gets you the Prophet for the Shrine. Sure, you'd get more Prophet points if you were Philosophical, but you get the Wonder quicker with Industrious, so it about evens out.

For the Academy, it's easy to build the Great Library in your science city, so that plus the four scientists (2 from GL and two from having a library) gives you 14 GPPs/turn towards your Academy (26 if you have Pyramids), so even though it would be your second GP since you built the Shrine, that still gets you a Great Scientist in 15 turns, or 8 turns if you have Representation from Pyramids. The Great Library duplicates the GPP production towards an Academy that Philosophical gets you and also gives you the extra research on top of it.

You could build Stonehenge for a great prophets, and the Great Library for academies, but that's already a lot of hammers. Even an industrious civ can't build every wonder - unless you're talking about single player on lower difficulties. And a philosophical civ can build still build wonders, in fact with a good start on Noble it's not impossible to discover every religion and build every wonder without industrious. I know because I've almost done it, and was only stopped because I traded away music and Elizabeth rushed Notre Dame with a great engineer.

In multi-player, I'd imagine building wonders is suicide.

I play single-player on immortal, sometimes as Gandhi, sometimes as Isabella. For me, in that situation, the industrious trait doesn't make a big difference.

As for maphack, I didn't even know that existed yet. Does it? (Perhaps I shouldn't ask here). Either way, it's hardly neccessary when you have four, six, eight, or more swordsmen and you see a city nearby defended by one or two archers, in an industrious civ that has built many wonders (these are listed on the F9 screen). That just screams "Crunch time!"

I concede that two humans, always peace, on large maps, favors industrious. Especially Gandhi.

The summary of my point is this: when it comes to building wonders, industrious civs invest hammers, philosophical civs do not.

Organized is hot. While every else is "recovering" from thier Ancient conquests, the Organized leader is like, "chop chop courthouse + grab more cities."

Philosophical, so far, is one of the most misunderstood traits in the game. If you put it to work, it can be the most powerful along side Financial or Aggressive.

Personally, phi is my favorite trait. With a few city upgrades great people come out at a very fast rate. They can be used to build academies, rush wonder production, culture bomb, start a golden age, or gain a technology. I've used them in very flexible ways to either catch up in the tech race, give myself a tech edge in a war, steal a city, or beef up my research.

People that won't give Organized a chance should try playing either Tokugawa, Washintgon, or Caesar on a large/huge map (or Roosevelt, Mao, Asoka, but I like the 2 I listed better), and go for domination victory.

Then.. try it with a different leader without Organized. Without Financial also if you played anyone of the Org leaders other than Washington.

Of course, I'm not saying that it's only useful if you go for domination victories.. but it's definately easier to see the difference.

if you only play on small/tiny maps, then I'd agree Organized is lacking compared to other traits.

I think you should try comparing an Organized and a Financial civ when getting a domination victory. Assuming you use the Financial advantage properly you'll find it much, much better (and use the whip properly of course).

I suspect that Organized is a lot more useful than people think, but coming in ways that nobody thinks to examine. I haven't done enough research to come up with anything concrete, though

Well, it's situational I think. Both have their advantages.

Financial is more of gain over time thing. The more you work at it, the more the gains become. The benefits ramp up slowly, but may very well end up being greater than what Organized can give you assuming you are in a good situation. Yet, in the not-so-good situations, where you are having a hard time with neighbors and don't have a huge lead tech/military wise, it's also easier to take away by the opposition. Ships parked at your coast, pillagers, etc. can all put a damper into the benefits you are getting from the Financial trait.

Organized on the otherhand, the advantage is there the moment you start constructing lighthouses/courthouses or start running into civic costs. It's more of an instant gratification (with the always present half-civic cost & dirt cheap courthouses. Lighthouses to a lesser extent). It's something that's always there, and can't be taken away by any means. It's value will differ depending mainly on 2 things. 1) Empier size, and 2) your choice of civics.

I have tried both going for a domination victory... and frankly, I don't really see Financial being the better of the two. True, like I implied, in a game where I'm comfortably in the lead from early to late game, Financial is better as I don't have to worry about any of the external factors detracting from the benefits. However, in the closer games, I find myself wishing I had the Organized trait instead of the Financial trait sometimes.

Of course, in the games where you either 1) don't run a larger than normal empire or 2) tend to run low cost civics, this point is moot

Organized and financial both add to commerce. In general, financial adds more, and the commerce from financial is modified by markets, banks, libraries, academies, etc., while the commerce from organized is not.

Organized is better than financial when you have a sprawling empire of undeveloped cities, though.