1000 Beakers! Per Turn!

[Misotu]

However, if you want it easy

Well ... I'd like it fun so yes, that probably equates to relatively easy at the moment and thanks for the pointers on the civs. One more question ... what sort of dates are you guys getting for a science win on the various difficulties/speeds? It'd be nice to have some sort of yard stick to shoot for

Anyway, it's a pleasant change to see a strategy discussion in the Civ V strategy forum

 

[bukalski]

i play on quick and Ive been getting science win around 1500

 

[Roghar]

A side question to the main thrust of this topic – how high do you want your BPT to get to if you’re going for a victory condition other than science?

When looking to win through domination, for instance, I’m typically good with mech inf and artillery to do the damage (playing King post patch). My science tends to ramp up heavily in the last 100 turns or so, but once I have those units don’t find I really need the tech, and I’ve invested very heavily in public schools and observatories and keep picking up non-critical techs. Perhaps I should stop investing in science a bit earlier, put more into military production and sell off tech buildings once I have my key units.

That would delay my key units slightly but I’d have a bigger army to upgrade once I have them, with a substantially better gold output.

Has anyone tried this approach? Might give it a go this week and see how it fares.

In general though, at what stage have you overcapitalised in science?

 

[Monthar]

Roghar, you could try to get what's needed for the GDR after those key techs. Along the way you'd be able to get nuclear reactors to boost production.

Whatever the game plan is, if you have a sizable tech lead, you'll be able to win any victory condition you choose much easier.

 

[dubrown]

Roghar, I'd say it depends. It's always an advantage to have a tech lead, though it's not always needed to win. When going the domination route it surely makes things easier with rifles vs swords but it's not the only way. I tend to focus on research to get where I want as quickly as possible, after that, other priorities comes first. But still, keeping a well developed science base in core cities will help you through out the game, I've never tried to sell of research buildings to fund a warmachine, there's better ways to do it, for me, conquered cities kept as puppets is usually my main incomesource in the late game, connected with trade routes, also selling luxuries, spoils of war etc will boost the income.

In a recent game as England (Immortal, archipelago map) my main research goal was to get ships of the line as quickly as possible, after that, research was secondary for me. With a fleet of triremes quickly upgraded to SoL I had control over the seas and did a quick campaign to cripple the strong AIs of their key cities. The AI where ahead in research in other aspects, but my focus on the naval route won me this game.

Another example, with the Mongols, getting to Keshiks quickly is the key, after that you can beat technologically stronger AIs (atleast until they get mech inf/tanks) With enough Keshiks and a few horsemen on a strike and withdraw strategy even heavily fortified cities falls quickly. True, this was before the latest patch and should likely be a bit more difficult now, but still quite possible.

 

[Misotu]

i play on quick and Ive been getting science win around 1500

That sounds pretty good to me ... what difficulty are you playing & are you using standard settings for numbers of civs and city states?

 

[CHEESE!]

I just got a science win, 1450-ish. 1139 beakers at the end, playing as Hiawatha.

The National College is awesome early-game.

 

[Monthar]

I hit 1080 BPT while working on a cultural victory as Spain. I expect it to climb even higher since I still have some science buildings to construct. Plus I'm trying to max out my population, which will further increase the bpt. This is on Emperor difficulty.

Spoiler :

 

[Tomice]

Very interesting thread!

I play only with Thal's Mods and some other associated/recommended ones since many weeks (one of them increasing RA cost per era), but I've read all this with great interest to understand vanilla better. There are still some things I'd like to know about your strategies:


First of all, is city specialization dead?

OK, we still have production cities for units and wonders, and a huge capital where all kinds of booster buildings and national wonders are concentrated. But the rest seems to be random small cities.

How do you place them, apart from grabbing ressources? Are riverside spots important? I also haven't figured out if they should have more TPs or mines/LMs around them. Food seems to be rather irrelevant outside of the biggest core cities, since you don't let most of yor cities grow anyway?

 

[YYY]

First of all, is city specialization dead?

OK, we still have production cities for units and wonders, and a huge capital where all kinds of booster buildings and national wonders are concentrated. But the rest seems to be random small cities.

I think it's very true that city specialization isn't as much of a 'thing' as it was in Civ 4. Certainly, you have placements that make more sense for hammer or gold cities, but since each city you place has such profound effects on your larger strategic situation, the consideration isn't simply the one niche your city is going to fill, it's how that city will change the strategic situation. That's a big change.

Regarding how to place them, that's almost an academic question. It's impossible to account for all the situations that happen on the ground, so really you have to develop something of a sense for both the city's resources (so you know what it'll look like in 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 turns) and its place in your empire. It might be okay to go ahead and drop a city in a less than prime area if it will provide total control over a choke point, for example.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'not letting your cities grow large', though - unless you're operating under ICS, you want all your cities to be high population. There is no downside now to a large population now that and are gone, and every benefit now that science is directly tied to population. Unless playing ICS, I'm not sure I would even consider a city that didn't have food potential to support at least 10 citizens. Most temperate tiles produce 2 Food anyway, so you have plenty of space to plop down sawmills and trading posts (both of which I would consider more useful than farms in the general case, though there are exceptions).

The meat of it, I guess, is enumerating some of the criteria we use to decide on city placements. Really, you should look at the area 2 hexes around your potential city placement as the city's general 'zone', and the more of these points are within the initial 6 hexes, the better.

Good points:
+ At least 3 production squares (hills or forests)
+ 2+ river-adjacent tiles.
+ 2 or more bonus resources.
+ Access to any luxury (if you have a copy already, you can sell it for 300 gold to an AI).
+ Lots of 2 Food hexes (ideal trading post territory)
+ Access to strategic resources (Horses are especially good because they are common and the AIs will pay good gold for them into the industrial era)
+ Coastal (unless on Pangaea)
+ Choke point

Bad points:
- Abundance of unproductive hexes (desert, tundra, snow, etc)
- Marshlands (stunts growth)
- Too isolated from empire (don't drop cities in the middle of your rivals' territory)
- Requires 5+ road hexes to connect to trade network (don't pay more on upkeep than you'll get from the route)
- Bad visibility (when considering the rest of your empire)

Obviously, not all of these things matter all the time depending on what you need at the time, but it helps to have a small routine you run through your head.

 

[Tomice]

Thank you for your summary. Most points have been clear for me, though, I play on emperor/immortal level.

What I meant was that two players I know as being exceptionally skilled strategists (TMIT and Alpaca) said they have loads of small cities they don't let grow bigger than 4 or 6, depending on the availability of horses for a circus (in addition to colloseum).

I play more like you do, putting big cities on very good locations while having quite large gaps between them sometimes.

The question for me is: Is it better to use the happiness from luxuries etc. on the base unhappiness each additional city has or on extra citizens in your best cities (more than the early happiness buildings can counter).

Also, does the orientation at the happiness provided by early happiness buildings mean that the later buildings are not cost-effective or do they mean that cities should be allowed growing again when theaters are available?

 

[Treso]

When start to spam settlers?

 

[Monthar]

Bad points:
- Marshlands (stunts growth)

Marshlands are just fine. Before you drain them, they'll slow the enemy. After you drain them, they are a 2 food grassland tile. Since you'll be going for coliseums and IW fairly early, that means you'll have have the tech to drain them.

 

[YYY]

The question for me is: Is it better to use the happiness from luxuries etc. on the base unhappiness each additional city has or on extra citizens in your best cities (more than the early happiness buildings can counter).

Ah. Well, that really depends on your strategy. The numerous 4-6 citizen cities you're referring to is what I was alluding to when I was mentioning ICS (Infinite City Sprawl). The #1 consideration with ICS is the proximity to other cities. If you place two cities on the same cardinal direction of the capitol (say, relative northeast and relative southeast), you can connect the 3 cities using a mere 3 hexes of roads, which gives a rather substantial trade route windfall. In this case, it makes more sense to have happiness buildings be the meat of your Happy, since you're getting a lot of gold from trade but not paying a lot on tile maintenance. You won't have very many luxuries since you're so much more compact, but that's okay since you can sell these unneeded luxuries for even more money. ICS works very well on high level play, since you cut out a massive amount of overhead to make cities productive, and their honeycomb defense method means that the AI, still largely incompetent in warfare, will most likely get picked apart by your cities alone.

Also, does the orientation at the happiness provided by early happiness buildings mean that the later buildings are not cost-effective or do they mean that cities should be allowed growing again when theaters are available?

Someone else would probably have a better answer to this than me since I'm not that great at ICS particulars, but my knee jerk is to say that under ICS, at most you're interested in the Theatre. ICS setups mean that cities are fully expected to only have ~6 hexes to work. Even tossing in a couple Specialists for the University and Market, citizens over 8 or so are likely just going to be unemployed/wasted.

Marshlands are just fine. Before you drain them, they'll slow the enemy. After you drain them, they are a 2 food grassland tile. Since you'll be going for coliseums and IW fairly early, that means you'll have have the tech to drain them.

You're absolutely right, but the extra worker turns to drain the marshes is a definite consideration. Also, like you said, they count as rough terrain, don't impede vision, and have a tendency to show up in large clusters. Don't settle on a great natural barrier like a marsh when there's some temperate land a few hexes away, is all I'm saying.

 

[Txurce]

What I meant was that two players I know as being exceptionally skilled strategists (TMIT and Alpaca) said they have loads of small cities they don't let grow bigger than 4 or 6, depending on the availability of horses for a circus (in addition to colloseum).

The essence of this approach is that you can sell all of your luxuries right away and stay happy with most cities in the 4-6 range. These cities are still big enough to have specialists, and tend to build mostly TP's.

 

[Tomice]

The essence of this approach is that you can sell all of your luxuries right away and stay happy with most cities in the 4-6 range. These cities are still big enough to have specialists, and tend to build mostly TP's.

Oh, thanks! That's what I wanted to know

 

[Treso]

After many wars and puppeting a lot of cities. Achieved 1000 beakers per turn on turn 311 with 21 cities. Only 5 not puppet. 300 gpt without gold age.

King difficult, playing as Japan on continents standard map.
Got rationalism of course.

 

[Rittmeyer]

I'm not an advocate to either ICS or a few big cities, but let me add my impressions:

up to IMM, I was always suceeding with 3-4 cities plus a ton of puppets. That also fits the way I like to play more, and since it was working, I was doing that every time.

Now I'm trying to win on Deity more often (only got to wins so far) and I'm tending to use ICS more and more. It really seens to be the way to go on that level.

Actually, I'm not even sure it's ICS, it's more like a craaazy REX in which I try to keep my cities close instead of settling so agressively in the face of the neighbours (as was the case in CIV 4 when you tried to block land whenever possible).

 

[Bibor]

What I meant was that two players I know as being exceptionally skilled strategists (TMIT and Alpaca) said they have loads of small cities they don't let grow bigger than 4 or 6, depending on the availability of horses for a circus (in addition to colloseum).

This is a bit misleading. 4 large cities (20 pop ballpark) with research labs and 8 city-states with Scholasticism is also around raw 1000 BPT. Deity ICS, from what I read, is more radical due to AI's almost infinite supply of gold and units, rather than raw research capabilities of each city.

In comparison:
two pop 6 cities (library + pschool + uni + rlab) = ((6 + 3 + 6)*2.5)*2 = 75 BPT
pop 12 city = (12 + 6 + 12)*2.5 = 75 BPT

Specialists skew the formula in favor of two cities, but the duplicate hammer cost is horrendous.

 

[biohazard72]

Deity is a very different animal than the lower difficulties when it comes to ICS. Some considerations:

1. AIs with more cash.
2. AIs that REX like mad.
3. You have to play tech catchup early on. Need a military tech advantage to win war, unless you have a broken unique unit. So war for land is not a solid early option.

The game constraints definitely steer you towards REXing, because you need luxuries to sell for Research Agreements, which allows you to keep up on tech. You can't get the luxuries from early war because it's simply not feasible most of the time, or has a huge opportunity cost. The AIs are expanding like mad, so if you don't settle quickly, you'll lose out on some luxuries and city-locations.

You're forced to ICS like mad and turtle until you come upon a military tech advantage. This times nicely to the end of your happiness consolidation phase, allowing your excess happiness to be turned into more cities (or more citizens in your current cities).

Emperor difficulty and lower, it's not too hard to grab a military tech advantage much earlier, there is considerably less pressure for Research Agreements, etc. which frees up the ability to play differently (ex: less cities + puppets) and still keep up or get ahead in tech.

This is my issue with Civ5 at the moment - Deity play is extremely homogeneous, but any difficulty below is not challenging enough. I think I'll stop playing Continents, because the impetus for Astronomy for overseas RAs/luxury sales is such a limiting factor on other strategies.