ALC Game #22 Take 2: Arabs/Saladin

[huerfanista]

I'm really glad you did the walls->gold trick, if only to see it in action.

A couple of other points about it:
- if you had researched math, you would have gotten more (around 320) because of the 100% bonus for chops that math gives you.
- in addition to the gold from the excess overflow hammers, you also get some overflow applied to the next item in the queue. It's equal to 1/2 the cost of the walls in this case (not sure what it is on epic). To calculate the overflow applied to the queue for this trick, you divide the "list price" on the walls (let's assume it's 90) divided by the production multiplier that you get for that build (in this case, 100% for having stone plus 100% for protective walls, which gives 200% for a multiplier of 2 -- if you had researched math, which give you another 100% bonus for forest chops, your multiplier would be 3). So in this example you got 260 and 45. If you try it again after math, you'll get over 300 but fewer .

 

[DanF5771]

how come there is a barbarian city on one of the pictures which subsequently disappeared?

terraforming barb nomads
they camped, split the river , and moved on ...

 

[Jon Speelman]

Trading 105 base hammers (on epic) for 264 gold is imo not a trick but a blatant exploit.

Yes it does seem a bit rich if a fine idea.

Snce we intend to have the Pyramids I wondered if you could refine this further by going into Universal Suffrage rushing it with gold and then whipping but sadly the game won't let you whip after you've bought.

 

[Jon Speelman]

Trading 105 base hammers (on epic) for 264 gold is imo not a trick but a blatant exploit.

Yes it does seem a bit rich if a fine idea.

Snce we intend to have the Pyramids I wondered if you could refine this further by going into Universal Suffrage rushing it with gold and then whipping but sadly the game won't let you whip after you've bought.

I also tried chopping then buying rather than whipping but this simply lost gold.

 

[DanF5771]

You can also build workboats in your 70+ base hammers Ironworks-HeroicEpic-Drydock-MilitaryAcademy-Capital under police state/bureaucracy/state property and disband them ...
or earn money like an honest civ veteran

 

[vale]

I'm really glad you did the walls->gold trick, if only to see it in action.

A couple of other points about it:
- if you had researched math, you would have gotten more (around 320) because of the 100% bonus for chops that math gives you.
- in addition to the gold from the excess overflow hammers, you also get some overflow applied to the next item in the queue. It's equal to 1/2 the cost of the walls in this case (not sure what it is on epic). To calculate the overflow applied to the queue for this trick, you divide the "list price" on the walls (let's assume it's 90) divided by the production multiplier that you get for that build (in this case, 100% for having stone plus 100% for protective walls, which gives 200% for a multiplier of 2 -- if you had researched math, which give you another 100% bonus for forest chops, your multiplier would be 3). So in this example you got 260 and 45. If you try it again after math, you'll get over 300 but fewer .

Almost but not quite.

The mathematics bonus to forest chops comes as a bonus to the base hammers and isn't applied as a production bonus per se. So while it is true that mathematics would have increased the gold output simply because the hammer input was greater, the hammer overflow would remain the same.

The other thing is the 200% production bonus (stone + protective) translates to a 3 times production multiplier directly. After all, you are still getting the hammers you produced in addition to the production bonus.

Thanks Sisiutil for trying this out. I've been needing to check if this exploit/trick was still present in BTS 3.13 but now I don't need to.

 

[Fetch]

Round 4: 1750 BC to 775 BC (39 turns)

Which meant it was time to expand again:

I'll have to farm every tile I can in order to make that city viable since it has no food source. I guess I should have moved it 1W to get the corn, but I was following Validator's dotmap and trusting his wisdom. Fortunately there's a lot of river tiles and I'm planning on running a SE, so farms aren't a problem.

Meanwhile I decided to try out that walls-chop-whip-to-gold trick. I built Walls in Mecca to within one turn of completion. Then I got two forest tiles to chop on the same turn...

See the differenece in these two screenies?

The barb city is gone. And where it sat the single river has been broken into two. No ruins of the city either. What happened here, Sisiutil?

 

[slobberinbear]

The other thing is the 200% production bonus (stone + protective) translates to a 3 times production multiplier directly. After all, you are still getting the hammers you produced in addition to the production bonus.

So ... since the chopping and whipping are both at 3x efficiency for a protective civ with stone producing a wall, the overflow is at 3x as well ... even though a normal chop would only be at 2x for the Pyramids with stone, and there's the whip penalty for wonders.

In which case, our esteemed hero got more hammers from this than he would have from straight chopping, and he got a tidy a pile of gold, yes?

If that's the case, then yes, it's an exploit, even when you consider the wall production time, worker turns, 1 pop loss, and 1 unhappy face. Still, an educational exercise, which is one of the points of the ALC series, I suppose.

 

[quill18]

See the differenece in these two screenies?

The barb city is gone. And where it sat the single river has been broken into two. No ruins of the city either. What happened here, Sisiutil?

Woah...freaky!

 

[JackRules]

What happened here, Sisiutil?

And no grassy knoll anywhere to be seen. Maybe Roosey used Worldbuilder.

 

[Froggie818]

See the differenece in these two screenies?

The barb city is gone. And where it sat the single river has been broken into two. No ruins of the city either. What happened here, Sisiutil?

Weird...
Could it have something to do with the fact that the tile to the west of the river (where, presumably, the barb city was) was not in the visible, highlighted area (it had previously been explored, since it wasn't in fact, but was not actually visible on the turn the screenshot was taken)? Maybe Sisiutil wiped out the barbs (and didn't mention it) and, once that tile was highlighted in the second shot, it showed that the river had been split in two by...um...hmmm. I don't know. Maybe he cleaned up the ruins and, somehow, that affected the flow of the river...???????


What the heck do I know...I play on warlord level.

 

[OTAKUjbski]

You might want to get that new computer looked at, S man ... ur BtS bugged out something fierce.

I've seen some wierd stuff like that happen before in my games ... I feel better now seeing it happen to somebody else's game ... I thought I was losing my mind!

 

[DanF5771]

Random Event 666: Quicksands-EarthGod's Revenge

Your city + all terrain features are swallowed by the desert!

 

[GeneralGab]

See the differenece in these two screenies?

The barb city is gone. And where it sat the single river has been broken into two. No ruins of the city either. What happened here, Sisiutil?

The barbs built a dam! They built themselves a lake, so they could do some jetski. Instead of attacking Sisiutil, they decided fun was in order.

 

[Mesousa]

Just to state the obvious, it looks like the worldbuilder's erase tool was used on the tile that had the barbarian city. That will disrupt the river like that.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Sorry for sounding stupid but, I still have no clue what he just did to gain all the gold. He built a wall, almost to completion, whipped, and generated a ton of overflow production. That part I get. What I do not get is how he then turned this production to gold, without the "build wealth" from currency. I thought only failed wonders do that?

 

[OTAKUjbski]

Sorry for sounding stupid but, I still have no clue what he just did to gain all the gold. He built a wall, almost to completion, whipped, and generated a ton of overflow production. That part I get. What I do not get is how he then turned this production to gold, without the "build wealth" from currency. I thought only failed wonders do that?

Basically, overflow is capped at the production cost of whatever you're building (so for Walls, the most overflow you can generate is 50 ) ... all 'excess' hammers are converted into Gold.

Check out the Hammer Overflow article from the War Academy for all the nitty gritty.

 

[EEE_BOY]

See the differenece in these two screenies?

The barb city is gone. And where it sat the single river has been broken into two. No ruins of the city either. What happened here, Sisiutil?

It doesn't make sense, if he wants to settle that copper city, he doesn't need to remove the barb city (by god's hand) , it's three tiles away...

next time, better tick the ' Lock Modified Assets ' box on.

 

[huerfanista]

Almost but not quite.

The mathematics bonus to forest chops comes as a bonus to the base hammers and isn't applied as a production bonus per se. So while it is true that mathematics would have increased the gold output simply because the hammer input was greater, the hammer overflow would remain the same.

The other thing is the 200% production bonus (stone + protective) translates to a 3 times production multiplier directly. After all, you are still getting the hammers you produced in addition to the production bonus.

Thanks Sisiutil for trying this out. I've been needing to check if this exploit/trick was still present in BTS 3.13 but now I don't need to.

Thanks for straightening this out, Vale. While I really like your article on whipping, the math tends to make me go after a while.

 

[Fetch]

Just to state the obvious, it looks like the worldbuilder's erase tool was used on the tile that had the barbarian city. That will disrupt the river like that.

Yes, that would be the obvious conclusion, but that would imply that Sisiutil used the WB. I'm not prepared to make that jump, as he has never given me any indication that he uses the WB in the ALC games. He also had really little motive. A size 1 barb city is pretty easy to take care of. I havn't checked the save-- don't have BtS-- but I think he plays with Lock Modified Assets unchecked.