AI spreads like disease

[VCrakeV]

Um... Yeah. By the time I have two cities (including capital), I have to rush my third one just so I can make sure I have enough land to expand. If I don't rush cities, the AI takes all the land surrounding mine. What am I suppose to do? I can't afford to sacrifice production, health, and energy just to put dibs on a decent amount of land. I used to play one continent per player in previous games in the series, but you can expand across seas quickly in Beyond Earth.



By the way, I play on the difficulty just above normal. Any and all help would be appreciated. ^_^

 

[Ryika]

What's wrong with sacrificing health and energy? Going down to just above -20 health is perfectly fine, and energy... you shouldn't have problems with dropping into negative energy early on and other than that expansions are > energy. Production... well, you should have enough thanks to internal trade routes. The go-to strategy in BE is expand first - then follow up with infrastructure.

 

[VCrakeV]

What's wrong with sacrificing health and energy? Going down to just above -20 health is perfectly fine, and energy... you shouldn't have problems with dropping into negative energy early on and other than that expansions are > energy. Production... well, you should have enough thanks to internal trade routes. The go-to strategy in BE is expand first - then follow up with infrastructure.

Can you elaborate on why it's best to expand first? I figure it'd be best to focus on city upgrades to make expansion faster (with production), and with less repercussions (health and energy upgrades). Is early expansion just better in the long run?



And if it is, how would I go about it? Is there a particular algorithm? Should I expand right away with each city, or make a few upgrades per city? Just upgrade one or two cities, expand with the rest? The logistics seem hard to tackle.

 

[Ryika]

Well, one of the reasons is the one that you described... the AI will surely expand if you don't.

Other than that, the quicker a city is founded, the quicker it can begin working on infrastructure and the quicker it can start growing. Trade Routes are also part of why early horizontal growth is important, as every city will, after a short setup-time (aka building the depot) generate a good sum of Food and Production for the capital.

In the midgame you'll want to work as many of the better tile improvements as possible (Academies in most cases), so you need to have produced a lot of population until that point - which is only possible by going wide early on, as cities don't grow fast after a certain point.

 

[VCrakeV]

Well, one of the reasons is the one that you described... the AI will surely expand if you don't.

Other than that, the quicker a city is founded, the quicker it can begin working on infrastructure and the quicker it can start growing. Trade Routes are also part of why early horizontal growth is important, as every city will, after a short setup-time (aka building the depot) generate a good sum of Food and Production for the capital.

In the midgame you'll want to work as many of the better tile improvements as possible (Academies in most cases), so you need to have produced a lot of population until that point - which is only possible by going wide early on, as cities don't grow fast after a certain point.

So, is my best option to focus on the following (in order):

Trade depots and convoys/vessels

Expansion

Population

Culture (for land)



Regardless, thanks for the help. Sometimes, quantity is better than quality, I guess. I was looking at the geometric growth from upgrading cities to build (colonists) faster, but I was not thinking about the exponential growth of early expansion.

 

[Ryika]

Well, ideally it's probably more like:
Trade > Expansion > Health (to stay above -20) > Energy (if you need it to avoid getting bankrupt) > Production > Food > Science > Culture > Health (if you've got a buffer to -20) > Energy
...when it comes to yields. But that assumes that you took Artists or started as African Union (or both)

 

[Disgustipated]

Well, one of the reasons is the one that you described... the AI will surely expand if you don't.

Other than that, the quicker a city is founded, the quicker it can begin working on infrastructure and the quicker it can start growing. Trade Routes are also part of why early horizontal growth is important, as every city will, after a short setup-time (aka building the depot) generate a good sum of Food and Production for the capital.

In the midgame you'll want to work as many of the better tile improvements as possible (Academies in most cases), so you need to have produced a lot of population until that point - which is only possible by going wide early on, as cities don't grow fast after a certain point.

Still new to this game, got it for my B/D. Your mention of trade routes has me thinking you are prioritizing internal trade routes? Which should I go for? Internal or external trade routes? Should I prioritize the outposts (not sure if this is the correct name- the city state wannabes) over rival civs?

And it's okay to keep health so low? Doesn't it hurt growth or troop morale?

 

[Ryika]

Always internal, mainly for the production. External Trade Routes don't really help much long-term - the flat science is very low and the energy is just "a worse kind of production" at that point.

I find that prioritizing outposts is dependent on a lot of different factors, mainly if you need that instant-production to get another city up to speed, or if you can "afford" to wait for that outpost to finish. Sometimes it can even be problematic to boost cities, mainly if you're scratching the -20, which basically means -1 production in every city (because of rounding).

My basic rule of thumb is to prioritize outposts as long as it doesn't bring me to -20 Health or if I'm not in a hurry to pump out some military (which can be important for both, starts with close neighbors as well as starts with alien-infested expansion locations). Not entirely sure how other players handle their internal trade routes though, haven't really seen any in-depth discussion about that, so take it as my opinion and not as "the best way of doing things". ^^

And yes, going low in health staggers your growth quite a bit, but there isn't really much that you can do against that. The alternative is to not expand, but that just leaves you with even less population and slows you down a lot more. So the only thing you can really do is to accept the penalty for a while and make sure the cities grow asap (because each pop yields +1 health, but only costs 0.75 health, so 1 pop = 0.25 global health as long as you have the health-buildings to support it), until you can go back to positive health with virtues.

And I'm not 100% certain about that, but I think there is no combat penalty for low health in BE.

 

[GeoModder]

And I'm not 100% certain about that, but I think there is no combat penalty for low health in BE.

I thought I had that once. A penalty for combatting when my health is too low.
Usually I don't go that low in health, so must've been pretty deep.

 

[Aldor]

You can mouse over the health number at the top of the screen, it will show you the effects of your current health level.

In general, your health will fall below 0 during the expansion phase. If you build the early +health buildings in every new city asap (clinic, cytonursery, pharmalab, but only if they have enough population) you can usually stay above -20 easily. Usually you get back into the positive numbers through virtues, but if you choose the purity affinity, you can also go for early gene gardens.

Definitely don't delay expansion for health reasons.

 

[Gritf]

And I'm not 100% certain about that, but I think there is no combat penalty for low health in BE.

In CivBE, health doesn't reduce the power of your military.

If you have the time you might want to check Bob Morane's guide, or maybe you did already. I keep forgetting how it works.

Here is the link: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=539954

Also, I have a question, when you say the game can be won on turn =<220, are you playing on quick or standard speed?

 

[Ryika]

Yeah, was quite sure about that but in the end too lazy to look it up. Thanks.

And yes, that's standard Speed.

 

[Gritf]

The thing is I use a different strategy, althought I use different settings from what I usually read here in the forums when people talk about the academy spam strategy. For example I just beat a game with an emancipation victory in 171 turns on quick speed and soyuz difficulty.

I use a mod wich enables and fixes the quests back, so I get affinity throught them and not just leaf techs and expeditions. So I research whatever gets me to complete those quest. And instead of academies I usually go with lasercom/deep space satellites and with a good amount of health so I don't get my science punished, usually around 0 health (+/-5).

Also there are two factors that reward you for being healthy, the African Union +food and the first virtue from the knowledge tree wich gives you +10% science when healthy, so for me AU is supposed to be a tall civ instead of a wide one.

When I dare get into apollo difficulty I'll talk back about it. Also, I suppose that when CivBERT comes up the quests will be back and the meta will change, but maybe that is obvious.

 

[Ryika]

Well, purely scaled up mathematically, a 171 win on Quick is a ~256 win on Standard Speed, which I assume is where most people end up with non-streamlined strategies. Some points you might be missing are the free tech from the Institute - that one can easily cut 10 turns overall or so if used on a very expensive tech, the free Affinity from Might that allows you to completely skip the second ring-3-affinity-tech and the fact that you can end the game quicker by spamming a ton of manufactories right before you start constructing the victory wonder (the +15% Wonder Construction from Industry also contributes). And of course, some extra-turns may just come from things that scale differently on quick.

But yeah, there are factors that reward you for being healthy, but you should manage to stay healthy starting in the midgame anyway, even when going super-wide, as all of the virtue bonuses have some indirect "per City"-stuff built in and the rest comes from the 0.25 health you get per pop (as 1 pop costs 0.75 health but can support 1 health). Playing tall (as in 4-5 cities) does, in general, not really work for very fast strategies, because of how the food-requirements stack up. A tall empire will usually not manage to get more than 4-6 extra pop in their cities, while a somewhat-wide empire gets the extra-bonuses from 2-5 additional cities.

 

[Gritf]

Well, didn't know that quick was around 2/3 of standard time. What you said about growth makes sense to me, I've never managed to get that 3rd trade route in a single city in difficulties above normal, nevermind the fourth. Sucks to me as it breaks some combos I had tought with the knowledge virtues.

Also, yeah, I've missed some of your points. And it seems to me that harmony lacks some strong science multipliers. The best it has as tier 2 is the Xenonursery building without invading other techs.

 

[joncnunn]

Um... Yeah. By the time I have two cities (including capital), I have to rush my third one just so I can make sure I have enough land to expand. If I don't rush cities, the AI takes all the land surrounding mine. What am I suppose to do? I can't afford to sacrifice production, health, and energy just to put dibs on a decent amount of land. I used to play one continent per player in previous games in the series, but you can expand across seas quickly in Beyond Earth.



By the way, I play on the difficulty just above normal. Any and all help would be appreciated. ^_^

If you are used to playing on Civ V, you must first unlearn Civ V's keeping global happiness / health positive at all costs for BE.

But the basic developers intent is for similar bursts of expanding by building cities, then development them before a new round of cities that was seen in Civ IV.
The difference is that instead of figuring out how much costs would increase for another city at this point / how much the income slider would have to be lowered to avoid going bankrupt that in BE you figure out how much unhealth would be added by your new city, and figure in your existing cities future growth and city builds to avoid hitting -20 health.

I think for the first round, they have succeeded. However, I think internal trade routes are so powerful that eventually you'd want to found cities that would be otherwise be totally junk just to get more internal trade routes. (Similar to BTS corporations)

 

[Zenstrive]

for expansionists, you really need to have Gene Vault and Promethean. Gene Vault for the free workers, Promethean for reduction in unhealth. Of course, get Chemistry and Pioneering first,expand like crazy for the first four additional cities, and prepare your ranged and melee soldiers, at this point the neighbours would declare war and half-heartedly attack you (probably forever sending useless waves of soldiers at you). Keep on expanding to other directions, keep on asking for peace. After they agreed to peace and you got good number of cities (six or seven), start building your army and gobble up the neighbours.

For trade routes, get your first route on each city to nearby stations (for nice bonuses) or the capital(for wonders building)

 

[michaeljhuman]

On quick, I try to build 5 cities (roughly) before turn 100. Any cities after turn 100 are mostly useless, but I suppose they can always focus first on trading with capital, or another city And occasionally, leaving a large gap between your cities can result in the AI grabbing the location, so perhaps it's worth filling such a gap.

 

[michaeljhuman]

...

I think for the first round, they have succeeded. However, I think internal trade routes are so powerful that eventually you'd want to found cities that would be otherwise be totally junk just to get more internal trade routes. (Similar to BTS corporations)

I found your post very interesting, thanks.

Trade routes amazed me, after I went after a dom victory. I had 330 food income in my capital from all those cities I was taking over. I wonder if they will weaken trade routes in the expansion a bit?