An Anti-Cottage Economy? (ACE) a.k.a. My culture slider is bigger than yours...

[Jet]

It hasn't been to difficult to cover expenses with merchants once I reach cs.

Caste System or Civil Service?

Do you really mean merchants alone or, say, a few merchants but mostly commerce with only 40% culture?

Anyway if you have a save of this I'd be interested to see.

 

[fed1943]

IMO, the point OP noticed is the difference between % and real amount.

Just think 2 cities, one with 100 commerce, other with 10 commerce. The real quantities
of science, gold, culture and espionage are different. But not the happy faces generated
by the culture, just the % counts, not the real numbers ( of the commerce).

And that point is an advantage of SE over CE. But far from being the whole story.

Best regards,

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Passive commerce from non-cottage tiles and trade routes (especially with bigger cities) is not insignificant. Regardless of what you're doing, you want to use the culture slider as little as possible unless you're going for a culture victory. Resources, civics, and buildings will usually cover requisite happiness, allowing you other options than culture with passive commerce.

That is all.

 

[budweiser]

Fact - the culture slider is available at Drama.

Fact - The culture slider raises the happy cap which allows verticle growth.

 

[Crusher1]

Agreed Bud, but only if I'm running a FE with Rep scientist where I can get big raw beakers.

 

[scyt4l3]

Fact - Cottages are overrated and weaks!


Though I do like your lateral thinking tangent.

Attacko references FTW!

 

[Earthling]

Reagano disapproves.

The culture slider provides no health, can waste a significant amount of money, and requires heavy investment in tech and buildings. Specialists provide much lower yeilds until the late-game, without Pyramids, which are broken anyway. Tear down this article.

 

[budweiser]

Fact - the path to Drama goes through Aesthetics which is trade bait. No messy religious techs wasted without an actual religion.

The extra pop allowed by the slider do not have to live in cottages they could instead work in a mine or get whipped into soldiers or live on a farm. If you have alphabet, the hammers can become research. Specialists are not required or advised.

 

[Crusher1]

=D. Too funny bud, lol. But yes, very true! Rep scientist with mass farms, mines, and whipping provides superior production to cottages for an extremely long time - and even then elites can make them quite equal. People like Iranon from what I understand are quite successful on Deity with rediculously tight city placement which do very well with the above. Throw in a leader like Monte and his UB to the scenario and unit production verges on cheating.

 

[Kulbara]

Exactly Budweiser! Most peoples here keep mistaking this post as a pro-SE rant, when in reality it's more questioning the worth of cottages and the culture slider. Specialists have synergy with building farms of course, but aren't required.

Even +15 happiness in each city with nothing but farm improvements is some truly insane whipping/drafting potential imo.

Who cares if you're unhealthy, if you're too happy to notice! (Culture sure is a funny word for getting stoned...) Also, theatres require heavy investment?

 

[Crusher1]

Also, theatres require heavy investment?

Of course they are. 25 with a CRE leader is the most expensive building there is. Besides, although cottages are viable and probably the "noob" improvement of choice because it's the only way a lot of people can win, they are certainly not the only way. I've played too many games where I have never built a single cottage and been at zero slider the entire game and easily owned the AI. Sure research isn't spectacular, but hell, 500 beakers at 1000 AD is good enough. 2000 beakers at 1500 AD is good enough.

Edit:

Ok, I just looked at a game I played with Early Mids with Hatty on a standard map and I had 17 cities at 970 AD (12 @ 1AD) with 769 beakers per turn - I had less than 6 cottages combined empire wide. Mids can work just fine.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Exactly Budweiser! Most peoples here keep mistaking this post as a pro-SE rant, when in reality it's more questioning the worth of cottages and the culture slider. Specialists have synergy with building farms of course, but aren't required.

Even +15 happiness in each city with nothing but farm improvements is some truly insane whipping/drafting potential imo.

Who cares if you're unhealthy, if you're too happy to notice! (Culture sure is a funny word for getting stoned...) Also, theatres require heavy investment?

The major investment loss is losing around 20-30 commerce/major city that could be going into research or gold. That's commerce without cottage improvements, by the way. If you're running the culture slider you need a very good reason to do it even if you don't touch cottages. If you're already @ pop 15 with representation and basic resource trading, is it worth 20% on your slider to get pop 20? Only if the city has enough food to support more specialists or those 5 tiles are more productive than more science %. By the way, if you go past 1 city then the output has to be on AVERAGE big enough to justify the culture slider.

I have seen and fielded some pretty big early-game cities. The slider is usually not the answer for doing that, unless you have no alternative and really need the GPP.

By the way, building wealth/research is also slider-independent and without representation, can be superior to using specialists in the majority of your cities.

Unless a player is screwing around, he/she should probably not be intentionally avoiding any tile improvements unless the situation calls for it.

Pratrape on monarch (regardless of speed, but slower = easier) is not impressive and can be done using virtually anything, including ignoring slavery entirely and just working some mines and as the city gets bigger plains forests/caste workshops.

There is no magic economy, and no magic way to gain oppressive amounts of hammers, short of fielding more cities of course.

 

[Iranon]

How much commerce is our average city likely to have if we deliberately neglect it (farms, mines, possibly workshops, possibly Mercantilism...)? 40 seems generous.

With the right infrastructure, two ticks of the commerce slider would sacrifice 8 for 5 *assuming commerce channeled into culture is useless*. This seems more than fair if happiness is an issue on an empire-wide scale (and if we like to whip or draft, we have plenty of opportunity to cheese off our population for fun and profit).

I see no reason to overdo it and run the culture slider at 100% unless we have immediate culture-related goals; turning it up until most cities have no happiness issues will usually be stronger than having them unhappy or leaving perfectly good land idle.
One could eliminate food-yielding improvements in favour of something else... but maybe we simply don't want to do that (maybe we want high population for score or voting).

 

[Crusher1]

There is no magic economy, and no magic way to gain oppressive amounts of hammers

LIES, lol ! Nah, lot's of good stuff i there. I agree with building research/wealth, unless the comparison is vs Representation scientist. Besides, if you got the Mids early then you will most likely not be running Monarchy so you are going to need some happiness, and if you are unable to get decent land or trade for it, the culture slider with some cheap buildings are your friend. Besides, the earlier you get GT set up the quicker you can create your army. I see no problems with a permanent 20% culture slider - as long as you have REPRESENTATION.

 

[budweiser]

It's really about the pop, not the land. The other thing is, you can't count on what resources you will draw, happy or health, but you can count on Drama always being in the tech tree.

 

[Earthling]

50 from trades, regular tiles, etc... by the mid-game is easily a good estimate, remember that putting it all into culture is also a large opportunity cost, since with multipliers it could be 100+ beakers/wealth. So a 100% slider is easily a loss of hundreds of gpt nation-wide, just take whatever percent you want of that, and extra culture in inner cities really is pretty useless. Keep in mind that apparently we're not considering an early game scenario, bio/drafting/civics etc... are all in place.

Another thing, which I know has been said and proven before, but whipping is horrendously useless past the early game, in the majority of cities. It costs significant production/commerce unless you're at tiny city sizes, which you shouldn't have much of by that point anyway. It also goes against running over civics, Caste being a very useful one instead for instance. Drafting seems rather independent of any need for consideration here but I do agree it's one of the best benefits from high culture slider - however just turning the slider up and drafting anyway when you really need it isn't much of a loss, in return for a much better peacetime economy.

Also, you can also always count on Monarchy being in the tech tree. The only way this works, as most already seems to recognize anyway, is early mids to Representation, a gambit which everyone already knows.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

LIES, lol ! Nah, lot's of good stuff i there. I agree with building research/wealth, unless the comparison is vs Representation scientist. Besides, if you got the Mids early then you will most likely not be running Monarchy so you are going to need some happiness, and if you are unable to get decent land or trade for it, the culture slider with some cheap buildings are your friend. Besides, the earlier you get GT set up the quicker you can create your army. I see no problems with a permanent 20% culture slider - as long as you have REPRESENTATION.

I don't disagree fundamentally, I just felt the need to point out that even for a 0 cottage game, shifts on the slider have a cost (and when trade routes start getting to be 8+ commerce each, pretty material).

So raising culture slider then becomes another simple cost/benefit idea: do you get more from the higher cap than you do from the higher science slider? If you have pyramids/rep and some good tiles, that is quite possibly the case. However, the higher that culture slider goes, the less likely that the next 10% is as useful as the last.

I also feel it pretty important to point out the impact of resource trades, ESPECIALLY at high levels. Immortal and especially deity the AIs are going to have even the calendar resources in the BCs very very often. If you have representation, went drama, you have at least 1 from buildings. You might also have 1 from religion, and usually 3 from civic in the cities that need it most. If you got a forge, each mining resource is +2 (you can usually get or trade for one of them, sometimes 2-3). Similarly with markets and fur/ivory/silk/whale for another +2 each (though unlikely for whales, the others are often doable). If you're getting something like +8 from resources and 3 from civics, your cap is around 16. If you have a lot of cities that can still run more specialists after that (given they eat food and running more than what you can get @ pop 16 early game is quite rare), great, mail the game in as a win. Otherwise, the culture would be better spent elsewhere.

On anything but deity, +6 to +9 from resources alone is pretty common (on deity you need enough of your own resources to trade so it MIGHT be harder, maybe), so this isn't out of the question. Resource trades are obviously preferable to the slider or even HR garrison warriors if you have the resources. In some of my war crazy games I've been able to keep high enough with these alone...no mids, no HR, pop 12+ cities off mass resources, religion(s), and buildings.

 

[budweiser]

Also, you can also always count on Monarchy being in the tech tree.

Sure you can, but who wants to waste a dozen turns researching religious techs if you dont have a religion. It's better to get Aestethics. At least that's what I read around here.

 

[Earthling]

Try out the next LHC and beeline Aesthetics. Emperor or Immortal would be fine. I'll make time to play it my way too, we'll see who does better.

If you don't have Monarchy before Drama, ahem, you're doing it wrong. I didn't say you couldn't trade for Monarchy - after all, Aesthetics is only good because of it's trade value.

 

[Crusher1]

50 from trades, regular tiles, etc

Now take 8 cities who have the Mids and therefore are running representation. Now give them theaters and a 20% slider. Every city is now able to work 4 additional tiles which can easily add up to 10 beakers/10 gold per city. That gives us 80 raw beakers or 80 raw gpt compared to potentially losing 50C which goes through the slider.

Another thing, which I know has been said and proven before, but whipping is horrendously useless past the early game, in the majority of cities

We have a huge disagreement here. Imo slavery is one of the most powerful civics in the game and I try to stay in it whenever possible. Exceptions being when running a pure Hammer economy and when going for GPP for necessary bulbs. Keep on whipping and keep on pushing the culture slider.

Also, you can also always count on Monarchy being in the tech tree. The only way this works, as most already seems to recognize anyway, is early mids to Representation, a gambit which everyone already knows.

With stone or Industrious it's never a gambit but a simple matter of precise timing. Not everyone has enough skill to play w/out cottages.