Micromanagement is alive and well in Civ 4!

[Roland Johansen]

I really like this news about decimating the micromanagement in civ4.

Allthough there are still some micromanagement options left according to Zombie's analysis of civ4. But some things just can't be removed without removing gameplay, I think.

 

[Hans Lemurson]

Huh...When thos extra decimal places of goodness do come in, how will it be stated? The most convenient way I think would be to just put it into the overflow. Else, you might check up on a 3-shield city and see it base hammers rise to 4 for a turn, which would be fundamentally disturbing. No, let us not dwell on such topics, for man was surely not meant to know.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well if the extra decimals are Displayed

ieProduction box: Temple=40.50/80 hammers

Production display: +4.50 hammers

Production Breakdown:
Production=3.00
Forge=+25%
OR=+25%
=+50%=+1.50
=4.50 per turn

and the next turn instead of 40.50, it would be 45.00

Very reasonable.... especially with Forges/OR/Military Academies/Imperial SETTLERS all available early

Because now you can still get a boost of max 0.75 Hammer per turn per city once those things are in play... about 300 hammers per city... significant.

EDIT, well it looks like they dodn't do this, so the "multiples of 4" micro still works (for Hammers)...Multiples of 2 for Bureaucracy Commerce

Worker turns are still rounded off too (can't think of how to improve that.)

 

[Perugia]

Whip 'til your hands bleed

Pop rushing is way overpowered in this game, and should be abused to the max if you intend to master this game. Part of the reason why it's so overpowered is because of a bad calculation that they haven't even bothered to fix in patch 1.61.

With pop rushing at normal speed, you're supposed to get 30 hammers for every pop spent. That's already pretty good, considering that with a granary, a city only needs about 11 (at level 1) to 31 (at level 21) food to grow back the pop you've spent. Spending 11 food to get 30 hammers is already mighty good, but because of the exploit, it gets even better.

Assuming the building or unit is already started (so you don't get a penalty), what the game does is it checks to find how many base hammers you need to complete the build, and charges you an amount of pop based on this. Let's say there is a forge in your city, or you're using organized religion. This means you have a 25% bonus on production. With 30 base hammers, you then get 38 total hammers (small rounding error, should have been 37). If what you need to complete the build is 38 hammers, the game will only charge you one pop.

However, the game always gives you an amount of hammers that's the smallest multiple of 30 needed to complete the build. This is total hammers, not base hammers. So in the case above, you'll get 60 hammers because 30 wouldn't be enough to complete it. Congratulations, you've just received 60 hammers by expending only 11 food (assuming a size 2 city going down to size 1). That's a grand total of 5.45 hammers per food spent! Tell me that isn't overpowered. Even taking into account that normal hammers would receive a normal 25% bonus, you still need 4.36 normal hammers to equal every food used. No improvement anywhere in the game can provide 4.36 hammers to compete with the 1 food a farm provides.

Although there is a bad calculation in pop rushing when bonuses apply to the hammers had anyone noticed that the average number of hammers received is almost correct.

Take the example above where the game charges one pop for 30 base hammers at normal speed and provides 38 total hammers. Although on any individual pop rush you receive either 30 or 60 hammers the average number of hammers 36.3 which is almost the correct 37 hammer value you would expect when rounding down.

So if you do not check how many hammers are needed to complete the build you will be non-exploitative over the long term as follows: Although you have 8 ways to gain 60 hammers (when 31-38 hammers are needed to complete the build) this is offset by the 30 ways (when 1-30 hammers are needed) and you gain 30 hammers instead of the 37 you were expecting for your 25% bonus. Here you are actually losing hammers due to the bug.

The average no of hammers can be calculated as follows:

(30*30 + 8*60)/(30-8) = 36.3

In words: instead of getting 25% bonus for 100% of your pop-rushes. You get 0% bonus for 75% of pop rushes and 100% bonus for 25% of pop rushes which clearly averages out over the long term.

 

[DaviddesJ]

So if you do not check how many hammers are needed to complete the build you will be non-exploitative over the long term as follows

People tend to pop rush when they accumulate enough hammers to reduce the pop cost by 1. This tends to bias the ratio of hammers to pop (in the player's favor).

 

[WilliamOfOrange]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I don't have the time right now to read every page. Can one replace the binary science rate trick with binary culture? Do it work the same way in reducing culture lost to rounding?

 

[malekithe]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I don't have the time right now to read every page. Can one replace the binary science rate trick with binary culture? Do it work the same way in reducing culture lost to rounding?

Yes you can, but it's rarely as relevent. Culturing multiplying buildings only ever give bonuses of 50 or 100%. The main thing about science is you frequently get bonuses like 25 or 35%, meaning there's a larger chance for rounding error.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Yes you can, but it's rarely as relevent. Culturing multiplying buildings only ever give bonuses of 50 or 100%. The main thing about science is you frequently get bonuses like 25 or 35%, meaning there's a larger chance for rounding error.

Binary culture implies that you're also getting something else (gold or beakers) when culture is below 100%, so you would get the rounding benefits for whatever that is.

But this is all pretty irrelevant now that Warlords is out.

 

[kazapp]

This is a thread for those who love micromanaging, for those who don't mind spending 5 minutes working something out just to gain one more beaker, for perfectionist and arguably very anal civ players!

I'd argue this is instead a thread mostly for the Civ designers, so that they can either design away the benefits from the micromanagement altogether (decimal arithmetic -> the 0/100% science rate), improve the GUI to make the micromanagement transparent/automatic or at the very least make the issues behind what makes the micromanagement worthwhile visible so that the player intuitively understands the stakes.

 

[vanatteveldt]

And the fact that this thread was pretty much dead after 2006 until you necromanced it suggests that they've been reading...

 

[Cruiserip]

thank you !!

 

[DMOC]

Are there any other micromanagement tactics I can use other than what's listed here in the thread?

 

[natxavier]

Question about the cancelling worker action with 2 turns left to save accidental overflow:

Okay, so I used this little trick like a charm after first reading about it, but now I'm playing as Gandhi; meaning, of course, the special unit is the Fast Worker. So ... I wait till he has 2 turns remaining, click cancel ... and the little buggar still has a move. I thought it wouldn't matter, so I just skipped his turn, but the next turn rolls around, and sure enough, he still has 2 turns to chop the forest, and I just screwed myself out of some crucial . In this example, it meant that Ceaser ended up getting the Pyramids and I didn't [although I did get a butt-load of cash for it, with which i bought an army and ended his pathetic reign ]

So .. with the Fast Worker, should I just tell him to chop again and then cancel again to achieve the same effect?

Nat

 

[Roland Johansen]

Question about the cancelling worker action with 2 turns left to save accidental overflow:

Okay, so I used this little trick like a charm after first reading about it, but now I'm playing as Gandhi; meaning, of course, the special unit is the Fast Worker. So ... I wait till he has 2 turns remaining, click cancel ... and the little buggar still has a move. I thought it wouldn't matter, so I just skipped his turn, but the next turn rolls around, and sure enough, he still has 2 turns to chop the forest, and I just screwed myself out of some crucial . In this example, it meant that Ceaser ended up getting the Pyramids and I didn't [although I did get a butt-load of cash for it, with which i bought an army and ended his pathetic reign ]

So .. with the Fast Worker, should I just tell him to chop again and then cancel again to achieve the same effect?

Nat

It has nothing to do with the fast worker.

A worker unit can do 1 workerturn worth of work per turn and this costs the unit its remaining movement points for that turn. If a worker still has some movement points, then its turn hasn't come up yet in the unit cycle. At normal speed, it takes 3 turns to chop a forest. A worker with some movement points left can invest a full workerturn worth of work into some workeraction. You could stop the worker 1 turn before it finishes the chopping in the following ways:

1) Give the unit its chopping command. Check on the unit next turn after it has had its turn and has no movement points left and stop its action. It has now spent 2 workerturns of chopping on the forest and thus only a single turn of chopping is needed to finish the job.

2) Give the worker its chopping command and immediately cancel the order. The unit will now have no movement points left and thus 1 workerturn worth of work has been invested in the chopping of the forest. Repeat this another turn and 2 out of 3 workerturns of work have been invested in the chopping of the forest. In this way, you're unlikely to forget to stop the chopping of the forest in time. It does take a few extra mouse clicks.

You can let all units finish their orders for that turn by pressing CTRL-a. This finishes all multiple turn movement orders and makes all workers with orders invest their movement points in these orders and finish 1 workerturn worth of work.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

Okay. But all that matters is the very last tile!

Disclaimer: I realize this thread may be dead. I realize my next point may have been made somewhere before the end of the thread. If so, just ignore this.

No, there is something else that matters besides that very last tile. As you pointed out earlier, when you whip, you get the hammers earlier. If you refuse to whip, you have an opportunity cost from not getting whatever you are building for 10 more turns. Be it a settler, worker, forge, market, temple, whatever, that cost matters and must be considered.

Anything that saves you turns is huge. Left to itself, the AI will win on turn X. To win, you need to finish by turn X-1. Anything that saves you turns matters. This is why building a worker first is a mistake. While a city is building a worker or settler, it isn't growing. Presumably, when a city grows 1, it will put another tile into production, which typically will produce 3 "stuff", 2 food 1 hammer, 1 food 2 hammers, whatever. This gives 1 more production towards a worker per turn, shortening the build time .which means your city stops growing for fewer turns. There is a sweet spot that is situation dependent for when that first worker should be built - when the lost worker improvements hurt more the gain from reduced build time. This varies from city to city based on terrain, resources, available food, etc.

This is also why it's better to trade for tech than it is to research stuff, even with bonuses for multiple AIs knowing a tech. When you get a new tech, shop it around. Say it took you 10 turns to get, and you can shop it for 5 9 turn techs. So, you save 5 different AIs 10 turns each, but you save yourself 45 turns progressing through the tech tree.

Also, it's good to trade the tech to everybody, so they can't then trade it to each other.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

Try just hamlets on rivers with financial, which are more realistic for this discussion : +0F +4C.
Personally, i consider the fact that the hamlet is growing to be worth 2 commerce. If you agree with this assumption (which i actually use in game to decide which tile to work), that makes them worth +0F +6C.

I don't agree, you're counting future value. If you do this, you then have to discount what you get when it reaches town size, or by your math the square will have produced more commerce than it actually did. What you are actually doing is investing in the square; your investment is your opportunity cost -- like working a sea tile. You give up X turns of commerce from the sea tile, and expect to make it up later when it has grown to be a town.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

In a private discussion about this topic with Blake on another forum, he pointed out something I've neglected in the preceding discussion: you can whip more than one person at a time and get more hammers but only one unhappy citizen.

This is true. But while those extra citizens aren't around, he can't be working tiles so you'll have to wait until they grows back to have him work your tiles. And if you've got enough food surplus for them to grow back quickly, why are you working a food resource instead of a cottage?

A way around this is to grow your city past the happy point and whip those citizens, but this requires extra food. And again, if your city has that much extra food, why aren't you working more cottages instead of food resources. And you'll have to pay some (probably small) civic upkeep for those unhappies until you throw them into the Great Wall....

As Blake and others point out, another time whipping is really good is when your massively-fed city is growing and before your workers have gotten around to improving your tiles. That's usually when you need infrastructure too. Whipping and cities growing too fast for their improvements are a good combo.

I like whipping. I just want it to take its proper place in the repertoire of tactics.

You are making an incorrect assumption.

In your example, you have 7 happy in a city, and you whip down to 6, and then grow back to 7 in 10 turns. This costs you production of 1 square for 10 turns, of course.

But that is incorrect.

What you do is let your size 7 city gain food until it is just short of size 8. THEN you whip 2 pop. The city goes to size 5 briefly, but immediately pops back to size 6. You lose 1 square of production, but you whipped TWO citizens.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

I wanted to redo the example I did earlier because, as was pointed out, I had a couple numbers wrong and I'd like to better manage the no-whip case to target a similar hammer output to whipping (to see what it truly sacrifices).

First the whipping case:

Turn	Pop	Basket	Surplus	Comm.	Hammers
1	4	34/28	5	12	96
2	5	25/30	5	16	0
3	6	15/32	5	20	0
4	6	20/32	5	20	0
5	6	25/32	5	20	0
6	6	30/32	5	20	0
7	7	19/34	5	24	0
8	7	24/34	5	24	0
9	7	29/34	5	24	0
10	7	34/34	5	24	0

I've taken 10 turns to return to my previous state. At this point I'd whip again.

In the no-whip city, I'm going to allow them to make use of 2 grassland hills tiles and 2 plains hills tiles. The goal is to convert the excess food from the food resource into hammers as efficiently as possible. To do this, I'm going to work all four mines for all but two turns. During those last two turns, I'm going to, first, work nothing but the food resource and some hamlets in order to grow back most of what was spent working the mines and then I'm going to stop working the plains hills to leave the net food change at 0. The simulation looks like this:

Turn	Pop	Basket	Surplus	Comm.	Hammers
1	8	17/36	-1	12	14
2	8	16/36	-1	12	14
3	8	15/36	-1	12	14
4	8	14/36	-1	12	14
5	8	13/36	-1	12	14
6	8	12/36	-1	12	14
7	8	11/36	-1	12	14
8	8	10/36	-1	12	14
9	8	9/36	5	28	0
10	8	14/36	3	20	6

So after summing the output columns of both simulations, it looks like this:
Whip: 204C, 96H
No-Whip: 144C, 118H

You'll note that the mining city converted food to hammers more efficiently (1:2.33 vs. 1:1.92). However in order to achieve those results, it had to spend population turns performing the conversion. Those population turns were turns not spent generating commerce. Total population turns available in both cases are 61 for the whip and 80 for the no-whip. However, the no-whip had to use 34 of those pop-turns working hills, converting food into hammers. The whip city, essentially, only sacrificed 19 pop-turns performing the conversion. Notice that the difference in non-sacrificed pop turns (15) multiplied by the commerce output of those pop-turns (4) is exactly the difference in commerce output between the two trials.

If you had substituted grassland hills for the plains hills in the no-whip scenario, you would have gotten a higher food-to-hammer conversion efficiency, but you would have sacrificed even more pop-turns, leading to an even larger drop in commerce. The advantage of slavery is that it allows you to convert your excess food in to hammers at a competitive rate while not sacrificing nearly as many pop-turns and therefore commerce.

Edit: Also of note... Pop-turns spent converting food to hammers by working mines cost more (in civic and city maintenance) than pop-turns lost to slavery.

Edit 2: Changed everything to use 7/8 pop. The food totals in the two trials are more in-line in this scenario.

You've made a mistake. The city square makes 1H per turn, so both examples are 10 hammers short.

ALso, when you whip 3 pop after 10 turns, your food box will go to 39/28 for an immediate city pop, so your NEXT "turn 1" will be size 5, 19/28, popping back to size 6 on turn 3. Because you are working all your cottages continually, they will grow and will soon be making FAR more commerce, whereas the hills aren't going to make more hammers.

However, this ignores the possibility of railroaded lumbermills on grassy/plains hills. For grass you get 1F/4H, plains 0F/5H. This will change the example quite a bit.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

I could also add in some calculation to factor in the extra value of hammers now vs. hammers later. But, I don't know a good depreciation rate. If we were to assume hammers next turn are worth 99% (chosen without much analysis) of hammers this turn, then the output for non-whip drop to 88.3 hammers. Whipping efficiency climbs to 115%.

Well, let's say you pop-rushed a settler. So, in a couple turns you plop down a city, which will work two more tiles, presumably at least one of them a resource of some sort. Add this to your whip production.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

Although I haven't actually hand-checked your numbers, I agree with you methodology and your conclusions here.

The reason I keep saying that the happiness-limit affects whether or not you want to be working your food resource can be illustrated by the example you give.

Whip and grow as described above. Whip that 8th citizen on the 9th turn. Now you've got two unhappy people. One for 1 more turn, one for 11 more turns.

Grow again and now, since you're always working the food resource, you can whip again in the 8th turn. (I'm not going through all the numbers, I'm assuming you can get all the food as quickly as you can in the first case.) Now you've got an unhappy who will be unhappy for another 2 turns (he started at 11 turns, not 10, of unhappiness and it's 9 turns after the crack). Whip again. Now you've got 2 unhappy people again: one for 2 turns, another for 12.

In each additional cycle, you have more unhappy-citizen-turns, so your total worked-tile yield goes down. (But really, you're getting so many whipped hammers, maybe you don't care.)

This is actually not that bad at all for the 9-turns to grow case. (I'm glad your post led me to run through the numbers.) Let's say, though, that you have enough food to grow back all your whipped pop in 5 turns.

Whip, get 1 unhappy for 10 turns
Grow 3 pop in 5 turns
Whip, 1 unhappy stays unhappy for 5 more turns, next whipped is unhappy for 15 turns
Grow 3 pop in 5 turns
Whip. First guy is happy again, Second guy has 10 more turns, Third guy is unhappy for 20 turns
Grow 3 pop in 5 turns
Whip. Second guy has 5 more turns. Third guy has 15 more turns. This fourth guy has 25 turns of unhappiness
Grow 3 pop in 5 turns
Whip. Second guy is happy. Third guy has 10 more turns. Fourth guy has 20 more turns. This fifth guy has 30 turns of unhappiness.

etc.

This is the state just 20 turns after we started whipping.

I've had this case happen with an island city that had 3 seafood resources. I misused whipping and was getting next-whip unhappiness above 60 turns.

This isn't that big a problem. With all the excess food, just feed the unhappy guys, then whip them away on turn 10. The unhappy people provide a negative feedback loop on excess growth. They will also affect the city's health,m you might start getting green blobs as well as black smoke, but all it will do is eat up the extra food.