OH NO!!! it's another aristocracy thread...this time w/sidar

[Frodius]

Is aristocracy good for the sidar?

If so, when and for how long?

On the surface, you would think that you would want to run as many specialists as possible as soon as possible, but at what point do you folks think you would have enough available specialist slots to make the specialists better that the aristo farms?

I'm thinking you would need at least mysticism and festivals and a city size of at least 4 in most cities to make the specialists better.

 

[Earthling]

Well, you're also then ignoring the huge hammer and gold bonus you get from waned specialists - get some great merchants, engineers, etc... settled in your capital and God King is a huge bonus.

 

[Frodius]

Interesting, I was leaning towards spreading my waned units to 3 different cities, each specialized for a dfferent thing:

1. Heroic Epic city for unit production. This one gets engineers

2. Great Library/Academy city for science (probably the capital so I can get it going first). This one gets scientists.

3. Bazaar of Mammon city for gold production. This one gets merchants.

I would probably want an indepent GP farm as well.


Your idea of putting them all in one city could be really good. Wouldn't you at least want to split out the Herioc epic city though, since if you put them all in one city you may have vastly more hammers than is necessary to build military units in one turn, plus you will be wasting the 100% multiplier a lot whenever you use that city for building wonders?

 

[Emptiness]

Heroic Epic and a Command Post would go in a city other than your capital, and it would produce units. You'd want to maximize hammers there, naturally, but don't settle any GP or waned units there.

Your capital would be your GP farm. Maximize food output, and have lots of specialists. Hammer output comes from Engineers & GEs. The city would focus on building as many + wonders as possible, to further boost the GP farm factor. Between wonders, other useful buildings would be built.

Aristocracy would cut into your capital's food output, reducing your potential number of specialists. This won't be a major problem while your cap is low, because you won't be able to hit full potential anyway. You might be able to benefit from Aristocracy during that time. It is certainly a powerful civic.

Once you have to spare you're probably better off switching out of it for the sake of more specialists.

 

[Frodius]

I am not sure that going with the GP farm in the capital is the right move. It seems like cramming all of the wonders in one city, and then putting the national epic there would reduce the amount of control you would have over the kinds of great people you will spawn.

 

[Emptiness]

Unless you're worried about generating Great Prophets or Great Commanders, I'm not sure GP control is necessary. Waned units can be settled as any other type of Great Person.

 

[xxHammerxx]

wouldn't the happiness cap be more of a factor than health?? Or are you going with a FOL happyconomy leading into the Order once you have hospitals?

 

[Emptiness]

With Octopus Overlords you can use the Tower of Complacency to eliminate unhappiness. After you build it you can switch to another religion if you wish. With Order you can use the spell Unyielding Order for the same effect, but that's only available while following Order. You can also get a ton of happiness by spreading all 7 religions to the city, building all the temples, ensuring access to Incense, and running the Religion civic.

 

[Tasunke]

Thats an interesting take on the Sidar ... to want to collect all the religious tomes for their libraries, so they spread all religions to their cities. Also, it increases the pacifism tendency sense its hard to wield a large army and have a thriving multi-lingual ministry.

 

[Frodius]

I don't really want to spawn any great bards at all in most games.

I don't think you can settle waned units as prophets.

Given those 2 facts, my strategy is to build the national epic in a city in a normal GP farm location, so that I can use it to crank out mostly prophets and hopefully one commander for a command post (conveniently the national epic gives 1 great commander point). The prophets go for building the altar in the heroic epic city, which will get a command post built by the commander and a few waned great engineers. The altar will allow the production of high level units much closer to waning.

I don't think that it is immediately clear that settling/building everything in the capitol early on to maximize the advantage of God King is necessarily much more powerful than specializing 3-4 cities. In most games I find it necessary to switch out of God King for maintenance reasons, but God King plus settled great merchants may more than make up for it.

 

[Emptiness]

I don't think you can settle waned units as prophets.

No, they can't. Which is why I said:

Unless you're worried about generating Great Prophets or Great Commanders, I'm not sure GP control is necessary. Waned units can be settled as any other type of Great Person.

If you are going for an Altar victory, or plan to build multiple levels of the Altar to allow disciple units to be trained that are almost ready to wane, then the method I described would be undesirable. You would want to minimize the amount of non-Prophet sources you have (at least until you have all the Great Prophets you need), so that you can upgrade the Altar as quickly as possible. It's a completely different strategy.

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I don't think that it is immediately clear that settling/building everything in the capitol early on to maximize the advantage of God King is necessarily much more powerful than specializing 3-4 cities. In most games I find it necessary to switch out of God King for maintenance reasons, but God King plus settled great merchants may more than make up for it.

I didn't mean to say that one strategy was better than the other. I was just describing a strategy I might use to someone who, I thought, was looking for a strategy. You didn't mention in your first post that that you were planning on using the Altar, so I didn't think that suggesting a non-Altar strategy would be out of place.

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If your goal is to generate lots of Great Prophets, then Aristocracy isn't so bad. You won't want to fill up every possible specialist slot, just the priest slots - of which there is usually a limited supply. Maximizing food potential isn't as critical when you are dealing with fewer specialists. The extra commerce from Aristocracy would accelerate the research of the expensive techs that unlock the later Altar stages.

Theocracy will give you an unlimited number of priest specialists, but it comes somewhat later, and honestly I think Republic would be a better switch so that you can get the bonus. You can create a lot of priest slots by building as many of the temples as possible, which as I mentioned will also help with happiness generation.

Spreading out your settled Shades isn't so bad if you're not running God King. I would say that you'd probably want your production city (the one you put your Engineers in) to be the same one that is your research city (so that an Academy and the Crown can boost the output of the Engineers as well).