6otM106 AAR

[DanQuayle]

I have a couple of questions for you wrt the quoted section above, re Vertical Integration vs Space Initiative. I had to make a similar kind of choice I guess in a recent game as Maya, where I was building the main spaceport with Magnus, but then had to decide whether to keep him as governor or switch to Pingala. In such a situation, as per above, it would seem the right choice is to switch to Pingala, but I'm curious as to whether your calculations also factored in the 5 turns in which two cities would be effectively without governor benefits? (I'm thinking it wouldn't matter very much, although it might over the long term if the spaceport city isn't also a major driver of beakers per turn, since I usually still have a lot of techs to research while the early projects are going on).

The best time to switch governors is right after you have built your spaceport and you are starting to build the earth satellite.
If you are hard building the spaceport, the higher base production from Magnus will speed up the completion of the spaceport. The 5-turn downtime matters less for earth satellite, because royal society builders provide a percentage of the total project cost and the earth satellite project has the lowest cost of all science victory end-game projects. If you don't already have the royal society, the more reason to get the downtime before you do.
If you are purchasing the spaceport with Reyna or Moksha, you obviously want her/him out of there asap and install Pingala/Magnus.
The choice of Magnus vs Pingala also depends on how many builders you can afford to speed up the science project. If you can afford to sacrifice one 7-charge builder per turn (the max), then it favors Pingala. If you can't afford to sacrifice any builder then Magnus can the better choice depending on how many IZs you have in range. (If you are as "maniac" as I am, I suggest modeling the production in a spreadsheet.)

Also, would the presence of Sergei Korolev or Carl Sagan impact on this differently? In that Maya game I managed to snag both (and Korolev with Mausoleum, for two charges), which meant a lot less need for production over the total span of the projects. In such a case it seems it wouldn't matter much whether the main spaceport functioned under Pingala or Magnus. In fact it seems to me that the other Great Persons (Goddard, von Braun, Kwolek) that reduce the overall need for production also mitigate any difference between Magnus and Pingala. And how exactly do their bonuses stack with Space Initiative versus Vertical Integration? Is there any difference?

As a rule of thumb,
any great person that provides a percentage toward space race projects (Goddard, von Braun, Kwolek) will favor the higher base production (ie Magnus) and
any great person that provides raw production toward space race projects (Korolev, Sagan) will favor the higher percentage bonus production (ie Pingala).

In your choice of governor, you will need to evaluate if science or production will become the main bottleneck. If you are getting so much free raw production from great people that production becomes no limiting factor, then science most likely becomes your bottleneck and you just need to place Pingala wherever he will provide you the most science.

However, these questions should only be of interest to you if you are an extreme min-maxer. And if it were the case, you wouldn't see any of these great people in your game, because they come too late.

I'm curious: what is your target base production (no governor benefits, no turn-by-turn chop benefits, no internal trade route production bonuses) for the main spaceport city? The best I've managed to do is somewhere around 100 - 110 hammers per turn (granted I'm not as proficient as many here). So it seems to me that Space Initiative would in such a case offer me around 30 hammers per turn, which maybe isn't that much different from Vertical Integration? Am I looking at this wrong?

First, really high production in your main spaceport city only really matters if you are researching all the late game techs at the pace of one per turn (and sometimes more if you are pillaging or using great persons such as Darwin). If you think you can get to Offworld mission in 15 turns, then you ideally need to produce all the required parts before then. You then need a lot of production. If you think you will only get to Offworld mission in 30 turns, then you only need half as much production. You need to evaluate if you are facing either a production or a science bottleneck.

Second, you need to keep in mind that the UI is misleading: it doesn't show the production you get from Space Initiative, ICS and Synthetic Technocracy.

Third, you also need to factor the production you will get from royal society builders.

Now, in an ideal scenario (such as the one in this game where Offworld mission is right after Smart Materials and where production becomes the main bottleneck) you would need about 330 total base production with Pingala to get 1050 hammers with a 7-charge royal society builder to build the Exoplanet in 2 turns and churn out 1 laser project per turn (without Hong Kong).

 

[DanQuayle]

For anyone interested...
I just ran some test in-game and it appears there is a persistent "ghost penalty" of around -2.5% for all endgame science projects.
It applies to both city production and royal society builders.
It seems to apply to all combinations of ISC, SI and ST (and persistently even when none of them are activated).

 

[Mazrak]

SV Turn 265 - I went out and bought the Pass once it went 20% off on Steam even though I'd bought a couple of the individual modules previously as I wanted to take part in some of these games

Playing these games always highlights to me just how much I still have to learn, especially when I see folks like Dan, BrokenCar and Chrumo coming in 50+ turns ahead of me. It would be super helpful to players like me if one of them could write down their first 100 turns or video it and share it with the rest of us - I know it would be onerous for them but I think I and others would learn so much from it. I wasn't unhappy with a win after 264 turns until I saw some of the other scores

- What did you prioritize for research and policies?: I saw builders as key so Feudalism was a beeline priority - I built the Government Plaza in my Capital - noticed not all the others did that, is it better to build it outside of your capital as a rule or is there no hard rule for this? Noticed that some of my other cities were late getting the Magnus inspired chops as he was sitting in my capital preventing population loss as Settlers were built. I wonder if this was the right thing - what do others do?

- Did you bother with Religion ? Not really - always seemed to have enough money for Builders - got a golden age every time and took the builder option.

- How did you pump your Science ? Tried to maximise the mountains/mines bonuses as much as possible - all my Campuses are at least +6 - although my science total per turn looks nothing like Dan's!

- Were City-States helpful? Yes the +5% science Suzeran card is super nice and the bonuses to production from the Industrial city states are great

- Any surprises you ran into, how did you deal with it? America and Egypt both were super early into Science to the extent I was 3rd I think to get a Campus in place and missed out on a couple of the early scientists. Egypt declared war on me mid game, nothing unusual there but then declared a state of emergency on me 20 turns later when they had no troops - joined by Canada who I had been entirely peaceful with all game who also had no troops - all very odd

- How was the new game mode? Its ok - the millions of city states certainly help in the late game, didn't really manage to utilise the bribe options as it was a largely peaceful game

- Did you enjoy the game? Yes - first time playing the Gauls and really enjoyed them - obviously, very suited to the Highlands map and love the optionality they bring, would have been just as easy to win a Culture game. Thanks as always for the effort you put in.

 

[leif erikson]

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