An alternative to the SE

[bassist2119]

Having never felt totally comfortable with the SE, even after milking it to quite a few victories, I always feel better running a CE. The only problem that consistently resurfaces with the CE is maintainance/civic cost, and the CE doesn't provide many outlets for avoiding the eventual economic collapse. Only shrine income, the Spiral Minaret, and the occasional GP can help keep the CE's head above water, and having conditions that favor away from great people doesn't help. Courthouses, Forbidden Palace, and Versailles only reduce the minus, they don't add a plus.

This being the case, I've recently been experimenting with an alternative form of the SE. Cities that are science-specialized (cottage cities) do their usual routines. Non-cottage cities, along with cottage cities that have food resources, use their food surplus to support merchant specialists. Building a market and grocer provide 4 merchant slots, and the happy/health bonus to support them. In a recent game, I purposely skipped the Spiral Minaret, normally a CE life-preserver, to see how well this helps and found that by 1600 AD, the science slider was at 100% and income per turn was in the green by 125 GPT. It's noteworthy that I had 4 shrines by this point, but I'd like to add that no two were in the same city and I wasn't actively spreading religions (as the CE normally does rather frantically).
I think the implementation of this method is also something to note. If you start by using the food resource/farm plots which will eventually support specialists, you first add a great deal of fuel to the whip to create the necessary buildings. Once these builidngs are up, you then have a food overflow that creates rapid gorwth, and access to more plots for cottages to begin growing. Finally, the merchants are worked, creating a city that supports itself financially and contributes a great deal towards research.


Questions/Comments/Criticism?

 

[DaveMcW]

There's nothing wrong with running science below 100%.

Would you rather have 500 commerce at 100%, or 1000 commerce at 80%?

 

[drkodos]

There's nothing wrong with running science below 100%.

Would you rather have 500 commerce at 100%, or 1000 commerce at 80%?

No doubt that beaker per turn is the better number to be obsessed with, but if the goal is to maximize science then 100 percent is always yielding better results than any other setting.

As per the numbers you offer, I would choose to run science at 100% and grab 1250b/turn, since you made no mention of $$$$.....hehe.



Word of the decade: HYBRID. It's taking over everywhere and it seems to make the most sense in Civ to have a hybridized economy that is molded more by each individual game setting and prevalent conditions than it is to pick either polemic end, force it to work as well as it can, and then rationalize that therefore one must be "better" than the other.

 

[Paeanblack]

-Having the slider breaking even at 100% is a clear sign you need to expand, no matter what kind of economy you are running. Most of my really good games usually run at ~20% break-even, supplemented with military income to sustain about 50% real research rate.

-Build less infrastructure and more troops. Every library rougly equals the amount of axemen you would lose conquering a typical enemy city. Every university equals the catapults you would lose conquering another enemy city. Every wonder is worth an enemy capital, and it might even contain the one you wanted.

 

[cabert]

-Having the slider breaking even at 100% is a clear sign you need to expand, no matter what kind of economy you are running. Most of my really good games usually run at ~20% break-even, supplemented with military income to sustain about 50% real research rate.

-Build less infrastructure and more troops. Every library rougly equals the amount of axemen you would lose conquering a typical enemy city. Every university equals the catapults you would lose conquering another enemy city. Every wonder is worth an enemy capital, and it might even contain the one you wanted.

I'm with you about the slider.
I'm not about infrastructure. Having more troops doesn't always mean conquering faster.
Often but not always.
And I like the early great persons you can have from a library, a forge or a market.

I often go 50% unit building, 30% infrastructure building, 20% missionary/wonder/specific (wealth/science) building.
Seeing that the HE will build faster than anything else, it may well be the only city building units for half of the game.

Early game is different. Less cities, more cities to conquer.
Late game is also different : one victory goal to pursue, everything else is pointless.

 

[Landmonitor]

Word of the decade: HYBRID. It's taking over everywhere and it seems to make the most sense in Civ to have a hybridized economy that is molded more by each individual game setting and prevalent conditions than it is to pick either polemic end, force it to work as well as it can, and then rationalize that therefore one must be "better" than the other.

Totally. Sometimes, particularly early in the game, a couple of non-representation scientists can provide a much needed boost, but a situation where it would not be wise to build early cottages is probably going to be very rare.

Maximizing each Civ game will almost always involve cobbling different strategies together. The idea in the first post of having farms and cottages together, with heavier emphasis on farms to get things built, is a good one that I often use. Apart from a GP city, a few cottages will always be needed in most cities... even if you are running a "specialist-heavy" economy. I think all of my games have been hybrid economies after I first read about the specialist economy.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Non-cottage cities, along with cottage cities that have food resources, use their food surplus to support merchant specialists.

I'm not sure I buy into this.

Merchants

I'm not convinced that Merchants are the right answer. There's effectively no difference between running a Merchant and running a Scientist from the "raw commerce" point of view, unless your commerce sliders are at one or the other extreme end. (Example: building a library allows you to run two scientists with a 25% boost. building a market allows you to run two merchants with a 25% boost. Wash.)

It doens't sound as though you are intending to spawn Great People this way, so Merchant vs Scientist doesn't appear to matter on that score either.

The only reason I can see to prefer Merchants is that, in your production cities you might build markets and grocers for the happiness/health benifits, and so the merchant slots are "free", where the scientist buildings (which don't have a lot of commerce to chew on) don't have vigorish. Of course, in your production cities, you will normally gear the extra food towards production (shocker) and so...?

Farms and Commerce

For commerce cities (at least, for most of my commerce cities) I don't buy it. Suppose I have three happy pop available. I can farm two grassland tiles and run a specialist (net: 3 commerce + GPP points), or I can cottage three grassland tiles (net: 3 commerce + maturing cottages). That's essentially a wash, until 10 turns later when the hamlets appear up.

Post Biology you are looking at a farm and a specialist (net: 3 commerce + GPP points) versus two grassland cottages (net: 2 commerce + maturing cottages) which is a win for all of 10 turns at normal speed? And breaks even after 20, and loses ground after that? Give or take, depending on where the multipliers kick in, and how much depreciation there is in ten turns. Different math, but I get the same answer in the end.

Yes, it is reasonable to have farms available: there are advantages to being able to grow quickly when the cap lifts. But as a rule I don't want to be working farms, unless they are improving a food resource.

Surplus Food

Assuming you buy that, consider what to do with your surplus food from a food resource; call it +2 food for the sake of argument. Now you are essentially looking at running a grassland cottage and a specialist vs two plains cottages. The specialist is a short term win (assuming the hammers from the plains tiles have no value - if you needed production you'd be growing to use the whip), and is break even until the village matures into a town. If you've discovered the Printing Press, then the break even point is crossed when the hamlet matures to a village.

If Emancipation is available, I doubt that I would bother. If Emancipation is soon, I'd be tempted to run the specialists until the civic were available, then go to town (as it were) at half price.


It would be really great if there were deep strategic and tactical choices to be made between working cottages and hiring specialists, but I don't think the game is really balanced that way. From what I've seen, specialists are only viable (a) if the terrain won't support cottage driven commerce or (b) when run in a city that will spawn great people. Edit: (c) when the specialists are augmented (ex: Representation, Sistine Chapel), that changes the math quite a bit.

 

[Wodan]

For commerce cities (at least, for most of my commerce cities) I don't buy it.

I agree with most of what you said. Good points.

You've forgotten one case, though: a city at max pop or which is working all tiles which can support cottages already. If it has extra food and you desire more "effective commerce" (research and/or gold), then a specialist would be the obvious choice.

It would be really great if there were deep strategic and tactical choices to be made between working cottages and hiring specialists, but I don't think the game is really balanced that way. From what I've seen, specialists are only viable (a) if the terrain won't support cottage driven commerce or (b) when run in a city that will spawn great people.

I'm not going to get into the whole SE thing again except to say I disagree. On a city-by-city basis in a CE economy, your statement might have some applicability. In a designed SE, I don't think it does.

Wodan

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

You've forgotten one case, though: a city at max pop or which is working all tiles which can support cottages already. If it has extra food and you desire more "effective commerce" (research and/or gold), then a specialist would be the obvious choice.

I thought I had covered that under Surplus Food, but perhaps not.

I'm not going to get into the whole SE thing again except to say I disagree. On a city-by-city basis in a CE economy, your statement might have some applicability. In a designed SE, I don't think it does.

Right - we'll leave that in the usual threads. I haven't gotten a full blown SE to work effectively, but that doesn't mean it's not perfectly straight forward. I was remiss in failing to note the third condition initially.

 

[Wodan]

Well, this whole thread is about running specialists inside of a CE, so I certainly wasn't trying to say you did anything wrong, VOU. Actually I found your comments well taken. Made me sit and think for a good long while. Was going to add more along the lines you were talking but decided no there really wasn't anything more to add, you had covered it all.

Wodan

 

[Paeanblack]

There's effectively no difference between running a Merchant and running a Scientist from the "raw commerce" point of view, unless your commerce sliders are at one or the other extreme end.

Actually, there can be a huge difference, and it typically swings in the Merchants' favor.

The civ-wide commerce->beakers and commerce->gold conversion ratios must be accounted for and are generally never the same. In a typical early SE game, a capital can convert 1 commerce to 2.625 beakers (Academy+Library), but can only convert 1 commerce to 1.500-1.875 gold (maybe a Market). Assuming the capital accounts for the majority of the civ-wide commerce, that will create a big gap.

This means that by replacing Scientists with Merchants and raising the slider, you will achieve more total science. Since your capital can generate more beakers than gold from a fixed amount of commerce, every gold you produce elsewhere frees up the capital to steer that commerce towards the more efficient beaker production.

 

[Wodan]

A good point. I think it's probably relevant to any city with an Academy, not just the capitol. Clearly you should run scientists in that city, not merchants. In addition, if running merchants elsewhere allows the civ to run higher on the slider, then this city will produce more research that way too.

In addition, I think Bureaucracy will have a similar effect. If you can run higher on the slider, then running scientists in the capitol will give you a better return in beakers. You could, likewise, run merchants in the capitol and reap the same thing. (The presence of an Academy aside.)

For that matter, one should take into account Oxford, Bank, etc.

Wodan

 

[UncleJJ]

Actually, there can be a huge difference, and it typically swings in the Merchants' favor.

Agreed, merchants (in chosen cities) and other sources of gold such as Holy Shrines can allow a SE to run its research slider at 100% for most of the game making very efficient use of commerce.

The civ-wide commerce->beakers and commerce->gold conversion ratios must be accounted for and are generally never the same. In a typical early SE game, a capital can convert 1 commerce to 2.625 beakers (Academy+Library), but can only convert 1 commerce to 1.500-1.875 gold (maybe a Market). Assuming the capital accounts for the majority of the civ-wide commerce, that will create a big gap.

Your figures are somewhat confusing but you are obviously including the effects of Bureaucracy on commerce. I find it easier to consider the parts of the calculation separately so Beakers from Capital = Commerce x 150% (Bureaucracy) x % research slider x Science modifiers. I often arrange for several monastries to be added to the capital so the science modifiers can be +95% (academy, library and 2 monastries). You are right that it is more efficent to keep the research slider at 100% for as long as possible while raising gold elsewhere.

But I find that just as important as the capital good modifiers is the fact that science modifiers are usually better in most cities in the empire than gold modifiers. In a newly captured city, I usually build a library as the first economic building (after granary, forge and courthouse). A libaray provides 2 scientist slots (for specialists) and often just as important 2 culture to expand the fat cross. I often add a monastry to that for more culture and another 10% science. Markets are usually built a good deal later and maybe not at all if units or missionaries or whatever are needed.

This means that by replacing Scientists with Merchants and raising the slider, you will achieve more total science. Since your capital can generate more beakers than gold from a fixed amount of commerce, every gold you produce elsewhere frees up the capital to steer that commerce towards the more efficient beaker production.

Agreed, but it applies to the whole of my civ, not just the capital. If I run merchants in a city I try to build market, grocer and bank so they get 100% gold modifier and that allows other cities to run scientists where there are only science modifiers plus the background commerce and beakers from Representation also goes through the science modifiers. That arrangement allows a SE to have a more efficient use of modifiers than a CE which needs to build all science and gold modifiers in all cities to get the same degree of commerce efficiency and hence needs more buildings.

 

[Paeanblack]

The other thing that works in favor of using Merchants instead of Scientists is that Great Merchants generate more research than Great Scientists when settled in the capital and the slider is below 100%.

Assuming Bureaucracy, Library, Academy, Oxford, Market in capital (no Representation, slider < 100%)
Great Merchant = 5g + 2.5c (raw) => (5*3.00)/1.25 + 2.5*1.5*3.00 = 23.25 beakers
Great Scientist = 6b + 1h (raw) => 6*3.00 = 18 beakers + 1 raw hammer

It basically works like this: if your empire has a better science multiplier than a gold multiplier, you want to run Merchants somewhere. Doing so will let your other cities concentrate more on science by raising the slider, and you will be taking more advantage of the better multiplier.

A good point. I think it's probably relevant to any city with an Academy, not just the capitol. Clearly you should run scientists in that city, not merchants. In addition, if running merchants elsewhere allows the civ to run higher on the slider, then this city will produce more research that way too.

Even if the city has an Academy, (and Library/Uni/Oxford, with no gold multipliers), you'll still get more total beakers by running a merchant in that city than a scientist. It's counterintuitive, but the better your science multiplier, the better off you are with merchants. Once you hit 100% science on the slider, then you start switching to scientists, starting with your highest science-multiplier cities.