Philosophical and a Great People strategy

[pholkhero]

Do many peple use this strategy, i.e., going for many specialists as a phil. civ. to generate lots of GPP and spam GP's? If so, whtat is the logistics of this? Obvsiouly, you need a high food yield and lots of farms, but to me, it seems like it just isn't as viable an option as cottage spamming.

anybody have any feedback/observations/experience on this/??

[mutax2003]

Representation (prefereably through pyramid) +caste system, specialists and abundant farming strategy works well with philosophical trait. Chainable irrigation through civil service is vital for your farm spamming approach (also you get macemen with machinery, which are quite nice to use for cracking some skulls). Another upside is that you are not as susceptible to pillaging, since you can rebuild a farm in matter of turns, whereas it takes a long time for a cottage to mature to town. You will have high production as well due to all the mines that you can work, so it is best you conquer a vast tract of land before the industrial age, that way you will keep ahead in tech and power compared to those financial civs. Between lulls in your wars, switch to pacifism for extra GP generation. It is important to keep running representation + caste system game long, otherwise your science rate will suffer. If you have conducts your wars properly, you will have plenty of happiness resources to offset the unhappiness from emanciation late in the game, so there won't any need to adjust the cultural slider. Overall, this strategy is well suitable to domination victory, or pseudo-diplomatic victory by controlling most of the votes yourself.

[TCGTRF]

I just won a Prince-level Cultural victory using a GP-strategy with Fredrick. In the past, I've used the GP-strategy with Catherine, too, so it is not dependent that much on the Philosophical trait.

What you need are several cities that produce an over-abundance of food, but still have one or more production resources within their fat crosses. I've found that the optimal situation for this is a long river with hills on either side in which I can plant a string of cities with 5 tiles between them.

The trick is to grow them as large as possible and use the spare population to set up the kind of specialists you want at a given time in order to give you the proper GPs. When not making GPs, they're very useful as commerce cities if at the river delta or as moderate production centers depending on how you allocate the worked tiles.

Caste System is part of the key, since it allows as many specialists as you can afford. If you couple this with Pacifism, you can ensure an endless stream of GPs throughout the game. [As the game progresses, so does the population of your cities, which allows you to add more specialists to the city to generate GPs faster.] This means that ideally, you could have the same number of turns between GPs being popped FOR THE ENTIRE GAME.

Why three, you might ask? During the late game, you are often faced with having to switch to Emancipation and Free Religion. If you specialize one of the three in Science buildings, one in Financial/Religious buildings and one in Artistic buildings, you can then choose which of the types you need at that time, even into the Space Race period.

Many people underestimate the power of this, depending instead on the money from cottages. Obviously, you're going to have to have cities that are REALLY devoted to production or commerce. The GP cities are designed to give you specific people for specific things. Great Artists are designed to aid in the culture bombs needed to pump an early Cultural Victory or to quickly assimilate captured lands in a wartime strategy. Great scientists give you an Academy early on, important techs in the mid-game and specialists late in the game, while priests give you Holy buildings if you're pursuing a religious or financial strategy.

Tom

[atreas]

I have posted a strategy to win a game with Alex (Greeks, Phi+Agg) which consists of the following:

Build 2 early wonders (Stonehedge + Pyramids).
Grab land (Aggressive helps, but preferably choose the opponent with the holy city).
Exploit specialits to the end.

On Emperor this works exactly like that, on Immortal I sometimes have to include some extra early cottages to make up for the increased cost - but after a while it can end in the same way.

So it is very viable, at least in my games. But to make things simpler, I lately use a mixed strategy (mostly cottages with just some specialist cities, both GP farms and later production centers) where the advantage seems clear: if I manage to have just 2 extra academies in cities with 100 beakers (not much to ask for), then you need to have A LOT of extra cottages to break even, despite being financial. The whole point is just to grab some extra land and money at the start.

One of the most overstated traits IMO is Financial in connection with Cottage spamming; in the first phases it is extremely strong, but if in the long run one manages well a mixed cottage+specialists strategy then the extra GP of philosophical becomes seriously strong or possibly stronger (think of it in numbers: in the start the financial advantage is 1 commerce for every two, but in the age of Towns it becomes 1 for every 7 commerce). On the other side, the value of each Academy increases with the time, and I could have also "cashed out" with 2 extra techs...