Noble Marathon Space Attempt

[Snowbird]

It gives the appearance of being well argued...but I really don’t think it is.

... that the only feasible reason that would make sense is to open up alternative .. very underwhelming / unrealistic.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts of CHouses being magical the best thing on Noble

 

[pigswill]

I agree .

Courthouses are not magical and the best thing on Noble (or any other level.)

On the other hand the whole CHouse debate is a side issue and perhaps a distraction from the more general question of how to expand and research.

It would perhaps be more profitable to have a discussion about running the Wonderbread economy on noble, a subject on which you are more knowledgeable than I am. For instance does the Wonderbread economy generate enough income to make an Industrious leader more powerful than a Financial or Organised leader. i.e Playing as HC (Fin/Ind) or Roosevelt (Ind/Org) or someone else. What wonders should you aim for? How to balance overflow into failgold compared to overflow into a settler or worker ?

Apart from wonderbread, working high commerce tiles and trade routes are there other sources of income?

Are trade routes important enough to divert research into fishing/sailing and worker turns into road-building?

 

[Snowbird]

Apart from wonderbread, working high commerce tiles and trade routes are there other sources of income?

Overflow gold? (Assuming Buffy).
With Buffy, if hammers into something are higher than 2x of something they are converted to gold. So cheap but useful units can be used. (workboats/quechua/etc )

Same as in strike economy. Oh, and building wealth of course.

 

[civac]

You can transform missionaries into gold if you have a religion. Whip a few to 6x/40 hammers, take them out of the build list then finish 3 missionaries. All hammers in the missionaries get converted to gold. This works without Buffy but is probably only somewhat efficient if you want the missionaries anyway.

For the purpose of a speed run I doubt any of these techniques are useful with exception of wonderbread which has up to 2.5 modifier and even then I'd expand to/capture 30/40/50 cities before bothering with any of that. (Except maybe to get to Currency?)

 

[pigswill]

I encountered this whipping some warriors (warrior+30h+54g iirc) but haven't used it systematically.. Can you sink the hammers into a wonder for +30 failgold (industrious+45g failgold, (non-industrious with resource +60g failgold)). If you time a chop with a whip do you convert the whole overflow into gold (warrior+30h+114/144g)? Certainly useful early game before you have metals, might even justify avoiding metals and relying on mounted units (or elepult).

 

[ZPV]

It would perhaps be more profitable to have a discussion about running the Wonderbread economy on noble, a subject on which you are more knowledgeable than I am. For instance does the Wonderbread economy generate enough income to make an Industrious leader more powerful than a Financial or Organised leader. i.e Playing as HC (Fin/Ind) or Roosevelt (Ind/Org) or someone else. What wonders should you aim for? How to balance overflow into failgold compared to overflow into a settler or worker ?

Apart from wonderbread, working high commerce tiles and trade routes are there other sources of income?

Are trade routes important enough to divert research into fishing/sailing and worker turns into road-building?

City capture gold, pillage gold, AI trades. Others have already mentioned building wealth and overflow gold.
EDIT: Also, stealing gold with spies and Great Merchant trade missions
However, I tend to think of it as generating economy rather than strictly generating income, which means running scientists also makes the list.

For trade routes, well firstly "not connecting your cities" isn't really a serious option. How you do it changes a bit - the tricks with gift cities persuading the AI to build a trans-continental highway are less efficient on Noble since they have fewer workers - but you can't get away with not doing it for long.
But the investment to get island cities, etc? I would suggest that it's more worthwhile on Noble than Deity. On Deity, you have the fail case of lots of AI cities to use for trade routes (at least, until you capture them all) - whereas on Noble you just don't get enough.

As for Wonderbread itself:
Failgold on a resource-doubled wonder is an efficient way to generate gold, especially on wonders that you're going to prioritise anyway (Oracle, MoM, maybe Pyramids), or you expect the AI to build itself in the near future.
The chop+overflow trick also hits a sweet spot for maximizing hammers spent on failgold in just one turn.

Marathon helps a lot for this, because there are really two costs for failgold - the hammers that could have gone into something else, and the city-turns spent on a wonder.
Hammers from overflow and chops are tripled, in keeping with tech costs, but also you have more city-turns to play with: in the time one city on Normal speed could generate 120, you can have three cities on Marathon generate 360 each - a total of 1080

Spoiler :

I know, you probably only get two turns, two cities and 720, because the game is going to finish at an earlier date on Marathon, but you get the point.

Wonderbread, as I see it, is taking this to the max and designing your whole game plan around it - this is different from just taking advantage of some incidental failgold opportunities, so the calculations around opportunity cost etc are also different.
In WBE, you'd want to expand as wide and quickly as possible, so that you have tons of cities (which means tons of potential hammers floating around).
Then you can put a chop+overflow into a wonder every single turn because you have so many cities - this requires extensive planning.

On Noble, there are three things which make this less desirable:
> The AI is slow and won't build you so many workers, cities and population to steal; but additionally you can't pop workers and settlers from goody huts like you can on even lower difficulty levels. This means that expansion is harder, and hammers are scarcer.
> The AI won't build wonders (except maybe Stonehenge) in a reasonable time, so you're limited to Wonders and National Wonders that you build yourself.
> Costs are lower, so you might be able to generate more gold than you can spend.

It's probably still very strong, but you have to find a way to expand to a large enough size quickly.
I'm not sure at this point whether this brings the traditional economy modes back into competitiveness, just using some incidental failgold to supplement it when it makes sense.

 

[pigswill]

As you said on Noble its more challenging to acquire cities: You don't pop settlers from huts and AI build fewer to capture (generally speaking if your stack is big enough to take one city its big enough to take several).

You can only build a wonder in one city at a time and then remove from queue after hammers are allocated so are you limited to one failgold per turn or is there a trick to build a wonder in more than one city per turn.?

If you're restricted to Wonders you build yourself then you have to find a trade-off between getting the Wonder earlier to get more use out of it or delaying it to generate more failgold.

Who said Noble is easy?

 

[sampsa]

You can only build a wonder in one city at a time and then remove from queue after hammers are allocated so are you limited to one failgold per turn or is there a trick to build a wonder in more than one city per turn.?

No, you can put towards a wonder in only one city per turn. You can store overflow though by "building nothing". Select a build in the city screen and click a number.

 

[pigswill]

On a side note its time for a quick update. 240bc. (T326)

Spoiler Boring details. :

Had a revolution after researching CS (five turn anarchy), adopted Buro and Serfdom which certainly sped up tile improvements and forced cities to grow but its delaying universities. Currently having a little war with Bismark. Up to 36 cities, 304 pop. Generating 953 bpt (+2g). Went for scimeth through astronomy, used caravals and scouts for the New World, popped 14 huts for gold, warriors, maps and Drama, seriously underwhelming. Could have been lucky and got music and astronomy but I wasn't. I probably should have gone via chemistry, useful techs for workshops. Interestingly going for chemistry would have given me a choice between lib>bio and lib>communism.

 

[jnebbe]

No, you can put towards a wonder in only one city per turn. You can store overflow though by "building nothing". Select a build in the city screen and click a number.

Huh never knew that. I use wealth/research but that could be useful if you don't have alpha/currency yet

 

[krikav]

I learned that trick in @Lain s most recent charlemange video iirc, quite useful sometimes!
You lose the natural hammers each turn though, so it's annoying to use in cities with alot of hammers.
But all overflow from previous turns are simply rolled over until the next turn.

 

[pigswill]

Sampsa. Thanks for the information/confirmation even it that's what I didn't want to hear. I suppose if you went for early mysticism/masonry you would have three wonders to play with (SH, Gwall and Pyramids). Even if SH (minority interest) or Pyramids (majority interest) were to be completed by a Noble AI first you've still got the option of CDH construction (Cold Dead Hands if you hadn't heard that one before).
Regarding 'building nothing' in the context of wonderbread it would probably be fairly rare to wait more than a turn or two before you could dump overflow into failgold. Given that Buffy notifies you of chops being completed I guess you could choose between losing a worker turn or two by pausing the chop or losing a turn or two of city production (particularly if you have a choice of failgold wonders).

 

[NothingBesideRemains]

Sampsa. Thanks for the information/confirmation even it that's what I didn't want to hear. I suppose if you went for early mysticism/masonry you would have three wonders to play with (SH, Gwall and Pyramids). Even if SH (minority interest) or Pyramids (majority interest) were to be completed by a Noble AI first you've still got the option of CDH construction (Cold Dead Hands if you hadn't heard that one before).
Regarding 'building nothing' in the context of wonderbread it would probably be fairly rare to wait more than a turn or two before you could dump overflow into failgold. Given that Buffy notifies you of chops being completed I guess you could choose between losing a worker turn or two by pausing the chop or losing a turn or two of city production (particularly if you have a choice of failgold wonders).

Keep in mind that the main efforts to steer into failgold are chops and whip overflow (should be maxing food and/or commerce otherwise). It takes time to set those things up - 4 turns for a chop (including walking onto forest), or probably 5+ turns for a whip (regrow, put sufficient hammers in to max overflow, maybe reduce a settler whip from 3 pop to 2 pop, etc). Let's assume a city is ready to 'dump production' every 5 turns*. That means 1 wonder available could feed 5ish cities for failgold, 3 wonders could feed 15 cities, etc., so perhaps a bit more possible min-max benefit than you might have thought.

Also keep in mind - production must be 'cancelled' every turn, so that also gets annoying if you need to use that feature to get timing to line up. Once you get currency or alpha, that gets easier, as you can switch into wealth or research after whipping /chopping until you are ready. By that point, you could chop multiple times while building wealth and dump it into a wonder all at once, meaning you need even less time for each city to 'occupy' the wonder's slot.

It does get cumbersome to line up timing perfectly over many cities, but that's where HoF style play deviates from 'regular' play (and not something I am good at or enjoy).

*These are normal-speed turn counts; for Marathon you can multiply this by 2-3x, so you can fit even more cities into the plan, making it more efficient for maratjon, as already pointed out.

 

[ZPV]

@NothingBesideRemains - I might have downplayed the differences for Marathon a little bit.

The theoretical maximum for Normal speed, using one wonder at a time - where each city puts a full population point of whip overflow and one chop into a wonder and then switches off it after one turn, then you do the same in another city the next turn, and another city the turn after that, etc - is 120gpt plus a little bit for innate production (or 150gpt with IND). It's nice and all, but nothing to write home about, and not enough to design your game plan around. Maybe you can boost it a little by feeding it extra forests every now and again, but it's not enough to pay for your cities on its own.

If you do that on Marathon (which means a lot more cities and workers need to take part), it's 360gpt. 360gpt in the ancient/classical eras is gamebreaking, and I would go to great lengths to achieve it. The micromanagement is quite intense.
So I think I've talked myself into thinking, yes, full Wonderbread is still fantastic on Noble/Marathon.

 

[pigswill]

One of the considerations with Wonderbread is that you don't get a penny/cent/centime ( other small coin of choice) until the Wonder is built. Its not 360gpt as such its 3600gp after 10 turns, 7200gp after 20 turns etc. which funds subsequent deficit expansion/research. The longer you leave it the more failgold you store which probably means that having cash from other sources to delay your first wonder is critical:. The longer you delay the first the bigger the payout which funds your deficit expansion for longer which means you can spend more turns accumulating failgold in your second wonder etc.

Another of the considerations is that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you're investing hammers in failgold you aren't investing hammers in workers or settlers or military units which are also useful for expansion. You need to find the balance between being broke with a twenty city empire and being stinking rich with a five city empire.

You could find yourself putting normal hammers into failgold while growing your city then using your whips and chops to put hammers into workers or settlers which would otherwise stunt your growth. Of course the downside with that is that you're blocking another city from building the same wonder. Its complicated.

 

[pigswill]

Another update. 1ad. The Great Socialist Transformation.

Spoiler The Golden Years of Socialism :

Used Gspy from Communism to launch 24 t golden age.Adopted Confu, switched civics to Bureau, SP, OR, swapped a bit between caste/serfdom and US/rep, finished up with US and Serf.

Popped my third and fourth GP (GS and GM) and got GA from Music.

Research wise picked up music, bombed from guilds through to biology, banking, now researching RP for SP (levees and mechanical serfdom).

Only four more cities for a total of 40, pop c 360 iirc. I built a lot of workers (now up to 71) which still ain't enough and confu missionaries (confu spread in 25 of 40).

Rushed some universities to get Oxford in Persepolis (Capital), completed a few turns ago. Used pre-chopped forests in Constantinople to speed up Kremlin. (just as well I didn't avoid BW ).

Economy doing ok: 1435bpt + 136gpt (post GA).

In terms of world events the German Empire is no more but the Khmer Empire is doing well and is Friendly to us! Portugal remains a one city has-been.

Up to 48.5% land and no more good sites on our continent. Only a couple of supersites in the new world (food, river, forests to chop) but it would take a while to get them going.

 

[pigswill]

I'm in a slight dilemma. I'm certainly doing a lot better than my first posted attempt. On the other hand I've made plenty of mistakes with varying degrees of seriousness so I probably could do better on another run up to 1ad. On the third hand there are plenty more mistakes I'll probably (i.e. virtually guaranteed ) make going forwards from here so it may be better so see how I get on with this flawed attempt rather than repeat an endless stream of marginally improved early game runs.

 

[ZPV]

I'm in a slight dilemma. I'm certainly doing a lot better than my first posted attempt. On the other hand I've made plenty of mistakes with varying degrees of seriousness so I probably could do better on another run up to 1ad. On the third hand there are plenty more mistakes I'll probably (i.e. virtually guaranteed ) make going forwards from here so it may be better so see how I get on with this flawed attempt rather than repeat an endless stream of marginally improved early game runs.

My suggestion would be to play this one out - the position you're in is fine and I think you'll want to see the transition from here to the lategame, and where the pinch points are.

 

[NothingBesideRemains]

If you're investing hammers in failgold you aren't investing hammers in workers or settlers or military units which are also useful for expansion. You need to find the balance between being broke with a twenty city empire and being stinking rich with a five city empire.

Well it's true not all hammers go to settlers/workers, but wonderbread works best when you do indeed want those things anyway - because you need to whip a settler / worker / missionary etc. to get the overflow (if you 3-pop whip a settler at max overflow, but don't want the settler, it costs you 3 population to get 1-population's worth of failgold). So there is good synnergy here with being still expanding.

 

[pigswill]

As ZPV said "Full speed ahead and darn those torpedoes" (or words to that effect). Pinch points/torpedoes much the same thing.

There are a couple of strategy guides for space race but they tend to start at the modern age and don't really explore navigating the industrial age.

Its a tricky tech path to follow and a bit of a maze. On the one hand there's an argument for getting to rocketry to start Apollo asap and a (probably stronger) argument for getting to AL asap to get them factories built asap. Aluminium is a good resource for space construction but one that requires industrialisation which means electricity on top of AL.

Then there's the question of power plants: coal is quicker but full of pollution, hydro is greener, Three Gorges Dam is very green but has yet another tech path incorporating eco-friendly combustion and plastics with an expensive wonder at the end of it.

One thing I am wondering is whether I will ever need oil. Railroads and power work just as well with coal, Ironworks is a significant production boost that doesn't need oil. Planes and tanks and the such need oil but with infantry and artillery and relatively primitive military threats being faced who needs tanks and bombers? Your very first oil well gives you +2 yuck (-2health) in every city which seems a heavy price and one you may not have to pay. To get to rocketry you need to research rifling and either flight or artillery regardless of military considerations. If you go via artillery then you can delay combustion until you need plastics which requires industrialization anyway.

How important are railroads? Yes they whizz workers around and boost mines and quarries but they have to be built and compete for worker turns with farms and workshops which are needed for growth and production.