Some Social Policy questions?

[Dushku]

I agree with joncnunn that Consulates is better for warmongering than Warrior Code.

Why is this? If you're friends or allies with a CS, you won't notice a change. If you're not, then it won't get you there. I don't see the benefit at all, but would like help seeing what I'm missing.

 

[Athenaeum]

How many times can you do that? You need your cultural borders to be just 2 tiles away from the city tile itself, so unless you plant multiple citadels you realistically can't do it for a capital, and you may be able to do in with an expo but again you really need the right circumstances.

I've seen this done countless times.

Yes, this is useful, but if you need build roads after grabbing the territory, this will delay your attack and give the opponent time to organize a defense.

Which is why you should bring workers with you. You should already be doing this.

If you already have your mind set up on this issue, why did you even start a thread debating this?

I have my mind set up that Generals are awesome. My question is whether it's more beneficial to use extra policies on Warrior Code or Wagon Trains.

 

[Athenaeum]

Deleted

 

[FrostK]

Lets consider some realistic MP conditions (quick speed):
lets say you close tradition on turn 60-80
I guess before even closing it you shall make decision:
-you are leader and gonna try play peacefully. Here you, of course, should not take honor at all since this will just slow you. I prefer to either open Patronage (if you already have several friend-allied CS and for Forbidden Palace ofc.) and Commerce (aiming to Big Ben), or u can just take Commerce x2 going for later easy discount for purchases
-you are far not leader, then again no honor. Try to develope.
-you are not leader, but close in some sense to it. You have strong opponent nearby and want to kill him - then take honor, of course. You can either rush with xbows or rush art - in both cases extra generals will help a lot. In fact I consider nearly impossible do defend mass xbows on flat terrain on turn ~90-100 if your opponent has advantage in generals.
-you are top1 for sure, but you have mongolia/arabia/not bad china close to u? take honor just to survive, why not?
-you cities are mostly naval - here no choice: exploration towards +3 prod to coastal cities, otherwise you are doomed by reasonable opponents. (Frigs crashes all units before art, and even with art it can be hard to hold cities - you can recaptue them, but defend? not always)

By the way, if u go solid tradition (fast 3-4 cities without early wonders), you should consider open honor after opening tradition if you spawn +/- in the center of land. Some barb killed will refund culture spent at least in early game and you may have extra general when you need.

 

[reddishrecue]

Agree with Dushku - how would Consulates be useful for war mongering? City-state allies are very inactive during war (as long as they're not being attacked directly.

Militaristic city states become really useful when going to war with someone because once in awhile they might gift you a unit or two while you keep your cities building buildings that are really useful depending on what your empire might need. Since technology is something your empire might need, food focus buildings for libraries and building better science buildings are both worth producing while military city states gift you units that you can send in to war. That's what I would guess consulates would be so useful during war.

 

[Athenaeum]

Military CS's dont gift units nearly often enough to make too depend on them for a standing defense. Furthermore you can get allies without Consulates.

Also, you may not have a military CS on your continent if you're not doing Pangaea, and we're talking about opening policies before Rationalism/Renaissance, so that means you don't have astronomy yet and can't meet CS on the other continent(s).

 

[joncnunn]

Why is this? If you're friends or allies with a CS, you won't notice a change. If you're not, then it won't get you there. I don't see the benefit at all, but would like help seeing what I'm missing.

The prereq to Consulate (the Patronage) opener indeed is giving the benefit to your current friends and above.

What Consulate has done though is (combined with using pledge to protect on non-friends) is raise the resting point to 25. There are frequent cheap city state quests providing 20 points (such as get X resource and the only reason you don't have it is you sold it all), if you are at 25 from consulates, you will now be at 45 and thus friends for several turns while if you didn't have consulates, you wouldn't have become friends at all as your starting point was too low.

Consulates did get a nerf in the BNW patch that decreased pledge to protect, but given the frequent no-cost city state quests, it's still powerful.

 

[Acken]

By the way, if u go solid tradition (fast 3-4 cities without early wonders), you should consider open honor after opening tradition if you spawn +/- in the center of land. Some barb killed will refund culture spent at least in early game and you may have extra general when you need.

No don't do that, you will slow down your policy acquisition for no reason. Take something useful instead and invest in units if you somehow have trouble with barbs unless you really plan to go further into Honor.

 

[FrostK]

No don't do that, you will slow down your policy acquisition for no reason. Take something useful instead and invest in units if you somehow have trouble with barbs unless you really plan to go further into Honor.

Several thoughts for quick speed:
-you always has bad start and have no time to walk around finding better
-barbs count is increased, sometimes you may need 2 archers just to clean barbs on your land
- Investing in units simply means that you delay expand a lot and will loose perfect locations for cities (like natural wonders etc.) and you often missing production. (my usual BO is scout-scout-shrine-settler and this is faster then liberty settler, add here archer and it can be slower than liberty settler)
-first politics in tradition is useless at start, if u build monument in cap - second is fairly useless as well. And with honor you wont delay 3-5th politics.
-you will be slowed in politics later, but I think compensation is great. Again on quick speed you do have much less time to transfer units, so u basically clean barb camp with what you have here and now. And again clearing camps are harder on quick.
-And again 1 general is often enougph to cancel attack on u or to take one enemy city.

 

[claudiupb]

I've seen this done countless times.

Setting aside the fact that you completely ignored my claim that you would get more great generals than you need, it really depends on what those "countless times" is. Have you realistically seen a player do it more than 4-5 times in a single game? You can easily get 4-5 Great Generals naturally if you have 2-3 armies fighting all game. Sure having more great generals is nice, and if you have spare ones you can grab land or use them to quickly access some strategic resource, but wasting 2 SPs just for that? I don't think it's worth it and as people have debated there are a lot of better options for choosing 2 SPs between finishing the starter and renaissance. If you had 3 SPs to spare I would see also getting into Military Tradition, and make more use of those policies since the extra XP is a pretty good boost (and it also increases the spawn rate of the Great Generals indirectly), but deliberately stopping at Warrior Code is just not worth it.

Which is why you should bring workers with you. You should already be doing this.

Nobody said anything about having/not having workers with you in the battle front. It would be pretty stupid to plant an offensive citadel to grab the land and build roads, while not having the workers around. It will just give the defender even more time to put up a defense. But even if you have the workers it will still take you at least 3 turns to build the roads.

I have my mind set up that Generals are awesome. My question is whether it's more beneficial to use extra policies on Warrior Code or Wagon Trains.

Having to much of one thing and losing on other stuff is bad. If you end up with 2-3 generals and can't find a good use for them just means you lost a lot of other bonuses. Taking Commerce with Wagon Trains will give you gold and will save you gold, meaning that you end up having a lot more gold. Just 20 tiles of road saves you 10GPT, having 1-2 caravans to city states will give you an extra 2-4 GPT and with the opener it really adds up. You can easily have an extra 30GPT (more as the game progresses) just from these two policies.

 

[Dushku]

Several thoughts for quick speed:
-you always has bad start and have no time to walk around finding better
-barbs count is increased, sometimes you may need 2 archers just to clean barbs on your land
- Investing in units simply means that you delay expand a lot and will loose perfect locations for cities (like natural wonders etc.) and you often missing production. (my usual BO is scout-scout-shrine-settler and this is faster then liberty settler, add here archer and it can be slower than liberty settler)
-first politics in tradition is useless at start, if u build monument in cap - second is fairly useless as well. And with honor you wont delay 3-5th politics.
-you will be slowed in politics later, but I think compensation is great. Again on quick speed you do have much less time to transfer units, so u basically clean barb camp with what you have here and now. And again clearing camps are harder on quick.
-And again 1 general is often enougph to cancel attack on u or to take one enemy city.

He qualified his input with "unless you really plan to go further into Honor." Outside of that qualifier, his claim was that taking the Honor opener will slow down policy acquisition, which is true. Finally, you kept mentioning quick speed. Most game advice given assumes Standard speed. Saying it works differently on a different speed wouldn't necessarily invalidate the advice.

 

[Athenaeum]

Setting aside the fact that you completely ignored my claim that you would get more great generals than you need, it really depends on what those "countless times" is. Have you realistically seen a player do it more than 4-5 times in a single game? You can easily get 4-5 Great Generals naturally if you have 2-3 armies fighting all game. Sure having more great generals is nice, and if you have spare ones you can grab land or use them to quickly access some strategic resource, but wasting 2 SPs just for that? I don't think it's worth it and as people have debated there are a lot of better options for choosing 2 SPs between finishing the starter and renaissance. If you had 3 SPs to spare I would see also getting into Military Tradition, and make more use of those policies since the extra XP is a pretty good boost (and it also increases the spawn rate of the Great Generals indirectly), but deliberately stopping at Warrior Code is just not worth it.

Setting aside the fact that you have a hard time having respectful discussions without taking passive aggressive jabs in attempts to provoke arguments, you're not always going to have 2-3 armies that have been fighting all game and happened to rack up 4-5 great generals on their own.

I don't know if I have ever had 4-5 great generals at one time. And again, this is talking about what to do with social policies between Tradition and Rationalism, so we're talking Pre-Renaissance. I challenge you to have 4-5 Generals naturally Pre-Renaissance without being Maya or China (and even with them I challenge you to do this) and without adopting Warrior Code. You would need 1700 military EXP to acquire 4 generals. Do you think you can acquire that much EXP before Rationalism?

Furthermore we're not talking about filling an entire tree. We're talking about 2 measley policies that are just filler policies. Adopting Consulates is great, but what effect is that going to have in war? It may pay off later on down the road, but again, what I'm asking is how this will help WAR.

 

[Acken]

-first politics in tradition is useless at start, if u build monument in cap - second is fairly useless as well. And with honor you wont delay 3-5th politics.

It will delay everything. 3rd 5th etc.

 

[Phukit]

-first politics in tradition is useless at start, if u build monument in cap - second is fairly useless as well. And with honor you wont delay 3-5th politics.
-you will be slowed in politics later,.

Are we even playing the same game?

 

[reddishrecue]

I have seen units rank up to the good promotions without military tradition from honor but it required killing many units. However, the point is that units can rank up without military tradition in honor but a lot later than without military tradition.
Another point, missing out on Professional armies will cost you a lot more if you like to upgrade your units. Professional armies in honor is a good offer that one can choose to take or not take, besides, you can eventually upgrade the rest of your units when you save up enough gold. However, xb- > ggun upgrade could be an exception if targetting cities.

 

[beetle]

My apologies for my tardiness with circling back to this...

I don't see the benefit at all, but would like help seeing what I'm missing.

One useful thought exercise is to try and ballpark a gold value on SP. That is not easy in many cases, but Consulates is about 4000 gold (250 gold for 15 influence x 16 CS). For GP, how do you feel about 1000 per? So late Warrior Code is maybe 2000 gold. This rough approximating shows they are not even close.

Military CS's dont gift units nearly often enough to make too depend on them for a standing defense. Furthermore you can get allies without Consulates.

I think perhaps you and Dushku are not paying close enough attention to the benefits you casually get from CS. Just giving CS a little more focus can double the boons. The unit gifts are quite nice -- but they are the least of it.

I have my mind set up that Generals are awesome.

Yes, they really are.

My question is whether it's more beneficial to use extra policies on Warrior Code or Wagon Trains.

Wagon Trains, by a wide margin, not the least of which is because even without WC you have more GG than you can really make use of.

But Wagon Trains is not as good as Consulates. But filling out Commerce is better than filling out Patronage. So it is all a very compelling mix of interesting choices, and great fun to play different ways.

 

[Dushku]

One useful thought exercise is to try and ballpark a gold value on SP. That is not easy in many cases, but Consulates is about 4000 gold (250 gold for 15 influence x 16 CS). For GP, how do you feel about 1000 per?

I'm going to try it out. However, I don't think this argument is convincing. First of all, 20 isn't enough to establish a different bracket of the relationship. Secondly, it effects resting point. Meaning it will take time before it's useful. And it cannot be useful in and of itself. These were the sources of what seems to be a blind spot for me.

I usually gift in 1,000 gold chunks anyways since it's more efficient.