TerraForm and "perfect building"

My goal: produce the most efficient large scale civilization possible by any and all means the game engine provides, including but not limited to:

• pre-scouting maps to find huts
• luck manipulating hut events
• luck manipulating battles
• abusing "fast settler" glitch

I play with Chieftain, the level most conducive to "building", and 7 civilizations. Once I devise what I believe to be the most efficient strategy I will adjust to work within Emperor. Though I believed I had reached this point in the past, the added pressures of Emperor have a tendency of making me rethink the best way to approach even the most basic strategies.

Previous attempts equated "efficiency" with population size, as large populations factor heavily into final scoring. I have, however, about maximized that route (at a hair over 320,000,000 citizens). Future Tech factors even more heavily into "large population" scoring than population, so my current track is to maximize city production by attempting to utilize every usable tile.

However, maximizing tile usage worldwide is virtually impossible without planning all 127 cites at once. Until recently, my best method of doing so was overlaying city span graphics over earthmap.gif, but this presented a few problems as earthmap.gif

• differs slightly in terrain (different grassland generation, some arctic tiles differ)
• necessarily contains no special resource or hut tiles (and adding them myself is unnecessarily time consuming)
• brings GIMP to a crawl because I place each city on its own layer (=128 layers)

However, the biggest issue was syncing changes between my planner and what recently happened in the game. Because GIMP became so sluggish with lots of layers, a minor map modification took minutes instead of seconds.

TerraForm greatly assisted me in that I am no longer required to write terrain notes onto earthmap.gif, but I could not use it as a complete planning tool because TerraForm lacked a mechanism to dump map contents into an editable graphic file. Hoping the functionality might be possible, I contacted Dack, author of TerraForm, to request its addition, and he was gracious enough to add it.

Along with helping to achieve my goals, this new functionality is great for providing quick snapshots of games in progress. Below is my current play through exactly 50 turns in (3000BC):

3000BC.png

Some vitals:

• 27 cities
• 34 technologies
• 10 rivals conquered

Next is the above map with my city planning overlay (in two formats):

civplanner_3000BC.png
civplanner_3000BC.xcf.7z

Unused tiles (other than arctic, tundra, desert, and ocean):

• Africa: 1
• Asia: 2
• Europe: 4
• North America: 4
• Oceania: 1
• South America: 1

Other possible inefficiencies:

• Sea tiles may be underutilized
• The planned city currently occupied by Washington will spawn phantom taxmen
• This line of planning and the map itself may not be conducive for large trading cities, which could lead to suboptimal trade routes

Finally, the autosave that represents my progress:

CIVIL4.7z

I thank Dack again for the addition of a much desired feature.

Despite some missteps and miscalculations, I have built my most efficient civilization ever at 100 turns, and, for the first time, I have built a manufacturing plant in 100 turns or less.

2000BC.png
CIVIL5.7z

Vital stats:

• 53 cities
• Future Tech 19
• 1 Mfg. Plant (a 100th turn gift)

Selected demographics:

• Population: 5,940,000
• GNP: $0 million
• Mfg. Goods: 460 Mtons
• Land Area: 666,000
• Pollution: 100 tons/year
• Military Service: 0 years

Observations and concerns:

City resource competition thus far is less of a factor than expected.

Pollution in Americas may become a hassle even with luck manipulation and fast settlers.

For the past 20 turns or so I would have done better with two more settlers and/or two less cities. I can barely cover shifting emerging size 5 cities from growth to production within one turn and must soon focus on creating caravan routes and cleaning pollution I cannot luck manipulate away.

Maintaining 53 manufacturing plants will consume 80% of trade-based revenue in an empire bereft of banks, marketplaces, and taxmen!

You aren't playing v03-05, are you?

How did you render 2000BC.png? That overlook is simply amazing. Wish I could do the same, what tool are you using?

I play v5.

The overview was produced by Dack's TerraForm as a BMP then converted to PNG.

Then you must run into serious happiness issues after a while, with 127 cities and double-unhappy people and whatnot, no?

In the 2000 BC shot you'll notice most cities are levels 4-6. This is by design because, as you say, if I allow them to become much larger, then I'll be raked by unhappiness (especially aggravating are retroactively unhappy citizens). To prevent growth I shuffle city resources toward production to speed up Mfg. Plant building. The perennially unpopular Cure for Cancer is usually my second or third built wonder since 127 additional happy citizens (or about 60 at the stage it is built) is a real boon to my civilization. J.S. Bach's Cathedral is another valuable investment, but that enhances only the Asia super-continent.

Once Mfg. Plants are built and enough wonders are cleared to access the menus once again, Marketplaces and Banks are near the top of the construction list. At this point, enhancements come so quickly I don't need to worry about unhappiness, but...

Now I enter the phase where I must manage mass We Love the President Day growth, which is far more complicated than managing unhappiness.