FP in 1.15

I have been away from these boards and the game for quite som time.

I have seen the discussions but can't figure it out.

Has the FP been fixed in 1.15 ?

Thanks.

It has been fixed, yes. But not to how it was in Vanilla Civ/PTW. The programmers had actually never intended it to act like a 2nd palace
Here is everything you ever needed to know about corruption (inc the FP), in the latest version of C3C
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=76619

Originally posted by Gainy bo
[...] The programmers had actually never intended it to act like a 2nd palace
[...]

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That must have been the reason why it was stated to act as a second palace in the civilopedia....

The civelopedia will have been written after the game was made. It reflected how the game worked, not how they wanted it to work. Don't know why they couldn't get it right first time, maybe they didn't know how to.

Anyways, CT is the one who told me that, so save yer sarcasm for her

Originally posted by Gainy bo
The civelopedia will have been written after the game was made. It reflected how the game worked, not how they wanted it to work. Don't know why they couldn't get it right first time, maybe they didn't know how to.

Anyways, CT is the one who told me that, so save yer sarcasm for her

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IIRC, that statement was made after in the course of bug-fixing the FP ceased to work as we were familiar with. I think, it was Tavis who stated this and additionally that the FP *now* works more in the way Soren liked it.

I guess, nobody ever intended to have Radio technology in the tech-tree, either

Yeah he said that in that new.... patch stuff... list... thing. So... now that means that no matter what, because of the palace distance calculation added on to the other form which is based on the SPH and FP, cities on other continents will never be as corruption free as the core cities?

I guess, exactly that is the message.
To be honest, I have no clue were (and when) to place the FP as it currently is. All I know is, that placing the FP somewhere very far from the capital it has almost no effect on the surrounding cities. Period.

I have found that building a FP in a city, no matter how far away from my capitol, along with a courthouse and police station in Democracy yeilds ZERO corruption, just like my Palace. So I guess it does act like a second palace in some ways...

Yes, but this effect is very much limited to that particular city. The surrounding cities seem not to benefit from the FP at all - at least that was what I noticed when building the FP (1.15) on another continent

In my opinion the placement of the Forbidden Palace has now become a ho-hum element of the game. You will generally do best by building it so that it completes (via a Palace prebuild) before you reach OCN cities. E.g. start building it in one of your core cities after you have a bit of initial expansion done, say 5 to 10 cities on a standard size map. Pick a city which is near your Palace but is in the general direction from your Palace of your main intended expansion. And that's it. Generally you won't want to consider moving your Palace or FP, won't want to consider putting your FP far from home, and won't want to consider using a military leader for your FP. You might want to start building it later, after reaching OCN, if you want all of your early production for other purposes, e.g. wonder building. When to build it is about the only interesting choice left.

But that's just my opinion. Here are two quotes from Soren Johnson about the new FP model (quotes I obviously disagree with ):

'This "new" model allows for two cores, with the second being weaker than the first. One interesting aspect of this system is that it doesn't matter how far the two cores are apart from each other as distance-corruption is calculated from the FP and city rank is an absolute number (9th city, 10th city, etc.). I mention this only to show that building one's FP on a new continent can be very worthwhile.'

and

'FP placement is now more of an art, which makes it more interesting strategically (as well as more balanced with other build options).'

played a few epic games on 1.15 now and i must say i like the 'new' method, i normally build my FP one or two cities away from the palace and by using forest plants/chops/hurrying to build the now more effective courthouses and later police stations and specialists end up with a very productive empire, more now than before it feels like. Also the method as it is now, takes away a huge advantage that the human had over the AI, perhaps that's why people don't like it so much, i don't know.

Originally posted by zurichuk
played a few epic games on 1.15 now and i must say i like the 'new' method, i normally build my FP one or two cities away from the palace and by using forest plants/chops/hurrying to build the now more effective courthouses and later police stations and specialists end up with a very productive empire, more now than before it feels like. Also the method as it is now, takes away a huge advantage that the human had over the AI, perhaps that's why people don't like it so much, i don't know.

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What you describe is, I think, the best way to play the game now almost every time. And that is what I don't like about it. Before this change there was no single best way to approach FP and corruption problems. It was an interesting challenge with a number of solutions, each involving different tradeoffs. I can see how at first you like the new way. But I'm curious to see how much you'll like it 10 or 100 games from now when you're still doing things just the same way. (It is easy to guess what my prediction is about that )

I think that the best place to put your FP under PTW was quite obvious as well: Right next to your Palace, which in turn you move to the moon.

But even without the FP rank bug it was straightforward. You wanted one core around your old palace and one as far as possible from it. With Great Leaders, your empire got more and more efficient as you moved your palace around, while the AI could do nothing like that. Not only was this procedure fairly automatic, but it relied on luck to get the necessary leaders.

So IMO it was not the choice of placement which was harder before, it was that you had to fight more wars to get the best placement.

I think now you have equally interesting decisions, but if you don't get a leader the effect is not as devastating (assuming it's too late for a Palace jump). If you build your palace in one of your core cities, it will not give you optimal efficiency. If you wait until you defeat an AI to place the FP in their capital, you miss the early OCN boost. And what if the easiest AI to defeat is not the best one in terms of FP placement? Not all AI territories are the same for FP placement. The best place for the FP is close to the center of the continent, as long as it's not too far from the Palace. Sure, you could always build the FP early next to your Palace, which you then move to an AI core by a jump or leader, but that's exactly what you did before. You just don't have to keep moving your Palace around now, unless you moved it to the wrong AI core initially.

As a bonus to the new FP model, you now get a more competitive AI in the late game where it needed the most help.

Of course with Communism so strong now, the FP placement doesn't matter anyway, but that's another matter!

Madbone1,

Short answer: no, not fixed, but redefined and stabilized. Now you just need to have it and it does not seem to matter much were it is, just that it is.

Others,
Am I the only one using a weird FP placement? I don't know if this is a good practice or not, but it's fun. I try to put my FP in the city with Colossus or Pyramids. Naturally this usually means waiting as I am not the civ building the wonder. But it does have a nice effect once it is built.

Is this a good or poor habit to have?

PF

Interesting points Alexman.

Originally posted by alexman
But even without the FP rank bug it was straightforward. You wanted one core around your old palace and one as far as possible from it. With Great Leaders, your empire got more and more efficient as you moved your palace around, while the AI could do nothing like that. Not only was this procedure fairly automatic, but it relied on luck to get the necessary leaders.

So IMO it was not the choice of placement which was harder before, it was that you had to fight more wars to get the best placement.

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I don't agree with your conclusion above. Yes you wanted two cores, you wanted them fairly far apart, and Great Leaders were very helpful in accomplishing this. But this still left me feeling that I had many strategic options in each game. Should I build FP near home and jump the Palace? That approach has one set of costs and risks. A lot of people don't like that option and consider it an exploit so, though I don't feel that way, let's suppose that option had been excluded (not important how, there are a few possibilities which work.) Next choice, should I build by hand or take a calculated risk on getting a leader and rushing it far from home? Building by hand has tradeoffs in how close to the capital vs. how effective. Taking the calculated risk (or going for luck if you prefer - IMO the odds are barely predictable enough to make this a viable calculated risk) raises some tradeoff issues - go for the best second location even though a brute of an AI currently holds it? Go for a less fertile easy location held by a backward AI who can be leader farmed? Go for an AI who is already being ganged up on?

I've had games where I've placed the Forbidden Palace using each of the variants above and where it worked out well. I've Palace jumped, I've built quickly close to home, built slowly far from home, gone for a leader rush at a productive location, gone for a leader rush at a weak AI location. Late in one game I entirely abandoned my original Palace region and built up a new one. In one game I moved my Forbidden Palace four times to help chase a fast 100K culture goal.

Originally posted by alexman
I think now you have equally interesting decisions, but if you don't get a leader the effect is not as devastating (assuming it's too late for a Palace jump). If you build your palace in one of your core cities, it will not give you optimal efficiency. If you wait until you defeat an AI to place the FP in their capital, you miss the early OCN boost. And what if the easiest AI to defeat is not the best one in terms of FP placement? Not all AI territories are the same for FP placement. The best place for the FP is close to the center of the continent, as long as it's not too far from the Palace. Sure, you could always build the FP early next to your Palace, which you then move to an AI core by a jump or leader, but that's exactly what you did before. You just don't have to keep moving your Palace around now, unless you moved it to the wrong AI core initially.

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I don't see all these options for placing the FP now because:

1) Building it quickly near the Palace gives enough early game boost that I don't see an advantage to delaying - a slightly larger boost later on won't offset the compounded result of an early advantage.

2) The further the FP is from the Palace, the greater the chance that you'll end up actually losing from its placement vs. having it near the Palace. Further down in this note I'll use a picture from my current game to try to clarify this problem.

3) Even without allowing for the above, it seems very complicated now to work out just how far from home one can build the FP before it starts getting worse to go further vs. better. The optimum distance is far from obvious.

4) If you wait till later to place the FP in an enemy capital, you are presumably still relying on the Great Leader approach, right? But with the reduced value of the FP's particular placement (because its location affects only the distance part of corruption which is usually the smaller part), combined with the increased value of armies, I have a hard time imagining using a military leader to squeeze a bit more out of my FP. I have 12 armies at the moment in my current game. Even with 12 of them, there's no doubt of what I'll do with the next military leader. A 13th army will increase my strength much more than a slight increase in productivity by moving my Palace or FP. I'm not sure if this tradeoff would remain as clear-cut if armies were depowered a bit (as they should be.) I suspect I'd still feel the same.

A number of my points above apply more to a warmongerer than a peaceful or semi-peaceful game. That doesn't seem to me to help though, it just makes it all even harder to explain and to understand

Originally posted by alexman
As a bonus to the new FP model, you now get a more competitive AI in the late game where it needed the most help.

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I sure is a very nice effect of the new model. However I do want to note for other readers that we'd discussed and suggested to Firaxis other models which would have also had this effect while keeping the previous two-core feel. And would have done it by strengthening the model for the AI, vs. by weakening the model for the human which is what the current model does.

Originally posted by alexman
Of course with Communism so strong now, the FP placement doesn't matter anyway, but that's another matter!

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That sure is true! I'm still debating whether to go to Communism when it becomes available in my current monster game. I've precalculated what I should gain from it and the result is almost silly. I haven't decided yet whether it would feel too cheesy. I may rationalize doing it because an example seems to be necessary - some people, including Firaxis, seem to need an example before they'll believe that the new Communism is way overpowered


More about FP placement in the current scheme, using my current game as an example. Here's the minimap at 520AD. It is a huge/Sid map, I'm purple.



The yellow arrow points to my Palace. The green arrow points to my Forbidden Palace, which I built fairly early and fairly near my Palace. The yellow circle is the area where I estimate that an FP would, at this moment, do me the most good. (Or maybe a bit further NE would be better? It sure is hard to figure now.) Now, the problems with putting it in that yellow circle:

1) It would have taken quite a bit longer to build there than its current location. The gain from that location would be small enough that I doubt I'd have broken even on gained production by the current date.

2) If I'd placed my FP in that yellow circle, what happens later on when I attack my neighbors' areas in the blue circles? The usefulness of the FP in the yellow circle would go down. I suspect it would eventually go down to less than its current placement.

The calculations to work out which placement is best are quite tedious, and vary over time depending on what else one has built. And all this for a relatively small gain, just in the distance corruption component.

Seems to me that just slamming the FP in where I did, near home, is best by far. Works nearly as well as anything else. Maybe as well or better. And is a heck of a lot easier than trying to work out the consequences of other placements

Originally posted by planetfall
Am I the only one using a weird FP placement? I don't know if this is a good practice or not, but it's fun. I try to put my FP in the city with Colossus or Pyramids. Naturally this usually means waiting as I am not the civ building the wonder. But it does have a nice effect once it is built.

Is this a good or poor habit to have?

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I'd say yes for Colossus, no for Pyramids. Yes for any wonder which affects productivity of only the city where it is built, e.g. the science wonders. By putting that wonder together with FP you increase its effectiveness a tad by having it multiply less corrupted earnings. But I don't think the effect is strong enough to overshadow appropriate placement, it should only be used when both purposes (FP and the other wonder involved) are already each well served by the same location.

Originally posted by SirPleb

I'd say yes for Colossus, no for Pyramids. Yes for any wonder which affects productivity of only the city where it is built, e.g. the science wonders. By putting that wonder together with FP you increase its effectiveness a tad by having it multiply less corrupted earnings.

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And don't forget the Iron Works!

Sir Pleb, perhaps I'm missing something, but it looks to me as though you have a few options in your game, even with the current FP model.

You could sit as you are, as you propose, using your leaders for Armies.

But you're also in good shape to use your next leader to move your Palace to the yellow circle. It should improve the efficiency of your empire in the long run, and when you acquire the blue circles, the efficiency of your FP area will remain the same.

Or perhaps you could even use a leader at a later date to jump your Palace to the red or green continents to develop those areas. You might lose some productivity from your FP core in that case, but as long as you can prevent the FP core cities from max corruption, you shouldn't lose in terms of empire-wide production.

In any case, it looks like you're right and the best strategy is to slam the FP near home, unless perhaps you are close to attacking a neighbor. (I have found that you need a half-way productive city to build the FP anyway, therwise the surrounding cities are quite corrupt. You might be able to get good production from a former AI capital by rushing a courthouse and sending it into WLTKD). But building the FP close to home was what was usually the best case in PTW as well, unless you got lucky with an early leader.

By the way, I agree about the power of Armies being too great. I would definitely use more leaders for Palace and FP if Armies weren't that poweful.

Good discussion!

Can you see I haven't played much C3C yet?
I don't think leaders can rush city improvements (Palace) can they?
If not, forget what I said above...

@Alexman-Military leaders can rush small wonders (which includes the palace, AFAIK), just not the Great Wonders. So it is a valid option (although I would agree that an army is more valuable in almost all circumstances, with their new characteristics).

I guess I'm still somewhat undecided, as most of my C3C games have involved the Conquests, only a few epic games, so I don't have a good enough feel for the possibilities. SirPleb's strategy sounds like what I do. Most important, I just build it as quickly as I can! Generally, by the time I get the FP message, I have a 2nd ring city identified, in a general direction that I think I will be growing toward, that has good potential and rush a market (for possible WLTKD), then get started. If I can finish it by the beginning of the Middle Ages, I think the increased OCN effect and a few more productive cities that early make more difference than any late, "other continent" type placements.