Automated workers and road building....

[tedeviatings]

institutes gets you 3 science slots without having to use up a tile to get them.

Working a scientist slot is exactly the same as working a tile. A tile that gives 3 and nothing else, though it can get better with virtues.

 

[legalizefreedom]

You still get yields while that trade route returns home (that amount of turns is just added to the total duration), so by default you have not lost anything.

Good to know.

Thanks!

 

[ProphetMaster]

Working a scientist slot is exactly the same as working a tile. A tile that gives 3 and nothing else, though it can get better with virtues.

True, but that is not my point. The tile that is used up by the academy to get 3 science could be used for something else. Whereas, with the institute, you do not have to dedicate a tile to get the 3 science slots.

 

[Ryika]

Well, the bottleneck is usually how much population you can generate, not the area you have as cities just don't grow as large in Beyond Earth. Academies use population more efficient than scientists because they also give the base tile yield - and on top of that you don't need to spend production to get them - usually you can just completely skip the buildings with scientist slots by going for academies (and build 1-2 institutes once you've unlocked one of the most expensive techs you want so you can use the free tech from the building quest to get that one), thus generating even more science with science focus.

And of course, while you could use the tiles for "something else" there just isn't anything worthwhile to get. The only somewhat viable alternative to academy spam are biowells (and even they are followed up with delayed academy spam), but if you use biowells and at the same time use specialist slots, then you haven't won anything (as you still need to feed the pop that runs these slots and thus stagger your growth just as much).

So overall many small drawbacks lead to the situation where science specialists just aren't effective enough to keep up with academies.

 

[ProphetMaster]

Well, the bottleneck is usually how much population you can generate, not the area you have as cities just don't grow as large in Beyond Earth. Academies use population more efficient than scientists because they also give the base tile yield - and on top of that you don't need to spend production to get them - usually you can just completely skip the buildings with scientist slots by going for academies (and build 1-2 institutes once you've unlocked one of the most expensive techs you want so you can use the free tech from the building quest to get that one), thus generating even more science with science focus.

And of course, while you could use the tiles for "something else" there just isn't anything worthwhile to get. The only somewhat viable alternative to academy spam are biowells (and even they are followed up with delayed academy spam), but if you use biowells and at the same time use specialist slots, then you haven't won anything (as you still need to feed the pop that runs these slots and thus stagger your growth just as much).

So overall many small drawbacks lead to the situation where science specialists just aren't effective enough to keep up with academies.

The reason population is your bottleneck is that you are building academies instead of biowells. I get cities with 19-20 population to feed my scientists. There is more than one way to win in CIV, which is why I like playing it. In my last game, I had 547 science per turn after 200 turns and no academies. The colony in second place in science had 380 science per turn. This was at Apollo level. I won the game. I am not knocking your strategy. Just saying there's more than one approach.

 

[Ryika]

Yes, there are different ways to play. Some are efficient, others are not. Strategies that include scientist slots are usually in the second group. Institutes are not a good replacement for Academies if you want to win fast.

 

[tedeviatings]

True, but that is not my point. The tile that is used up by the academy to get 3 science could be used for something else. Whereas, with the institute, you do not have to dedicate a tile to get the 3 science slots.

Alright, I was automatically assuming population would be your bottleneck more than anything else. That's probably not true with biowell spam so I ended up completely missing the point.
I have a question for you, though. On Apollo one usually has very limited land to play around with (well, on my settings that is) and if you're going for tall you probably don't want to place your cities too close to another. So how many do you usually end up going for (and what settings do you use)?

Another thing. There may or may not be a best strategy. Now, can we agree that any strategy that consistently beats apollo is "good"? Even if it may not be the very best one? Cause I feel that could save us a lot of basically pointless arguing.

 

[ProphetMaster]

Alright, I was automatically assuming population would be your bottleneck more than anything else. That's probably not true with biowell spam so I ended up completely missing the point.
I have a question for you, though. On Apollo one usually has very limited land to play around with (well, on my settings that is) and if you're going for tall you probably don't want to place your cities too close to another. So how many do you usually end up going for (and what settings do you use)?

Another thing. There may or may not be a best strategy. Now, can we agree that any strategy that consistently beats apollo is "good"? Even if it may not be the very best one? Cause I feel that could save us a lot of basically pointless arguing.

You are going to have limited land if you do not use war as part of your strategy. By the end of the game, I had 16 cities and maintained health with the biowells. My top 3 cities all had population 19-20, and I had Lasercomm Sats in my top 3 science cities. I play at Apollo on standard settings.

They say the Academies spam approach wins in about 250 turns. You can do it other ways in that number or less. I came to this game about 3 months ago after playing CIV4 for years, so I am still learning a lot. But it is still true that there are many different "efficient" paths to victory. Maybe most of us can agree on that.

 

[Ryika]

I don't know who "they" are, but with Academies you could win sub turn 200 on Apollo (not consistently below, but consistently around turn 200 (Which is a HUGE difference from 250 as every turn you try to shave of is a lot harder than the last one)) - Biowells just couldn't reach that kind of victory (or at least we don't know of anybody who did and thus have to assume that they couldn't). Especially not if you used the Institute for the scientist slots instead of delaying it and then using it to unlock one of the most expensive techs.

I actually missed that you edited your last post after I had already commented, but I think it perfectly shows our "disconnect":

In my last game, I had 547 science per turn after 200 turns and no academies. The colony in second place in science had 380 science per turn. This was at Apollo level. I won the game. I am not knocking your strategy. Just saying there's more than one approach.

First of all you leave out the part where you tell us on which turn you won. Then: A turn 200 benchmark doesn't really mean anything, at that point science should have been useless for around ~30 turns or so (because you already have the tech that leads to victory and are now only waiting for the victory condition to trigger). So this once again tells me that you're not winning very fast - which is okay on its own, but you can't then use that experience to effectively defend a truth-claim about the efficiency of Biowells..

So overall I think it really comes down to the definition. If you define turn 250 as "efficient", then sure, biowells are "efficient". But if you want to go down that route, then Generator-only strategies can be efficient too, as they probably still find their way to victory on turn <whatever>. So I think when we talk about efficient strategies, then we should look at the known "record victories", not at our own victories. Because otherwise the word just doesn't mean anything. Although I have to say that my comment: "Some are efficient, others are not." was of course nonsense. It's not "either, or", but rather a scale. When it comes to pre-patch victories however, academy-only spam was certainly higher up on that scale than biowells-only spam - for any affinity. Biowells were certainly further to the top end of that scale, but they couldn't compete with Academies.

 

[ProphetMaster]

I don't know who "they" are, but with Academies you could win sub turn 200 on Apollo (not consistently below, but consistently around turn 200 (Which is a HUGE difference from 250 as every turn you try to shave of is a lot harder than the last one)) - Biowells just couldn't reach that kind of victory (or at least we don't know of anybody who did and thus have to assume that they couldn't). Especially not if you used the Institute for the scientist slots instead of delaying it and then using it to unlock one of the most expensive techs.

I actually missed that you edited your last post after I had already commented, but I think it perfectly shows our "disconnect":



First of all you leave out the part where you tell us on which turn you won. Then: A turn 200 benchmark doesn't really mean anything, at that point science should have been useless for around ~30 turns or so (because you already have the tech that leads to victory and are now only waiting for the victory condition to trigger). So this once again tells me that you're not winning very fast - which is okay on its own, but you can't then use that experience to effectively defend a truth-claim about the efficiency of Biowells..

So overall I think it really comes down to the definition. If you define turn 250 as "efficient", then sure, biowells are "efficient". But if you want to go down that route, then Generator-only strategies can be efficient too, as they probably still find their way to victory on turn <whatever>. So I think when we talk about efficient strategies, then we should look at the known "record victories", not at our own victories. Because otherwise the word just doesn't mean anything. Although I have to say that my comment: "Some are efficient, others are not." was of course nonsense. It's not "either, or", but rather a scale. When it comes to pre-patch victories however, academy-only spam was certainly higher up on that scale than biowells-only spam - for any affinity. Biowells were certainly further to the top end of that scale, but they couldn't compete with Academies.

I am going to try the academies spam system with Supremacy in my next game to see how it works. I won my game on turn 212 with no academies, so that compares fairly well with your strategy, if around turn 200 is the goal.

With academies spamming at Apollo level, what do you expect your science per turn should be after 100 turns? 150 turns? Just curious.

 

[Ryika]

Pre-Patch science per turn on turn 100 would look something like 90-110, depending on how many cities you build (less with more cities at that point, but that will turn around later) and whether you've got a good starting area to both, grow and produce the buildings you need. In the rare case that you get a ruin that shaves some turns off of cognition early enough to adjust your build order you can even have around 130 although that's so rare that I still don't know if it's a good thing to start producing academies that early. The few times I did ended with my stagnating in the later part of the game. (Obviously, those are just my personal benchmarks, I'm certain someone who's better than me can reach better numbers).

I'm not sure about turn 150 benchmarks, I never bothered with them and think those are actually rather useless. If your benchmark is good on turn 100 then most of the rest of the game is spamming academies, beelining the important techs, using science focus when there's nothing important to build and building a ton of Manufactories once you're close to reaching the victory wonder. If your victory comes late although your turn 100 benchmark was good (and nothing went horribly wrong between these points), then the most common reasons for that are (or at least were for me) that you either didn't cut enough of the optional stuff, didn't have enough workers, didn't do a good job at micromanaging your population.

 

[tedeviatings]

To clarify, when you say consistent wins around turn 200, do you assume AU + Artist + Harmony VC? If yes would you assume comparable times with another sponsor / vc?
Another thing is that when talking about efficient strategies I'd rather talk about "average finishing times" rather than "record times". They are harder to track and measure but even a rough (+-5 turns) estimate of the average win time of a strategy is more meaningful than any record game - in my opinion anyways.

 

[Ryika]

AU + Artists, yes. Other combinations are a bit slower - or if you completely ignore Culture in your setup, a lot slower. Not necessarily Victory-specific though, they all seemed to work quite well. But right, I personally mostly focused on Harmony.

And yeah, by "record times" I pretty much meant the finishing times they manage to reach consistently when played by the most experienced players. That one outlier every now of then is of course not very meaningful (at least not if the strategies we compare against each other are somewhat equal in strength) and more the result of having an insane starting location.

 

[ProphetMaster]

Pre-Patch science per turn on turn 100 would look something like 90-110, depending on how many cities you build (less with more cities at that point, but that will turn around later) and whether you've got a good starting area to both, grow and produce the buildings you need. In the rare case that you get a ruin that shaves some turns off of cognition early enough to adjust your build order you can even have around 130 although that's so rare that I still don't know if it's a good thing to start producing academies that early. The few times I did ended with my stagnating in the later part of the game. (Obviously, those are just my personal benchmarks, I'm certain someone who's better than me can reach better numbers).

I'm not sure about turn 150 benchmarks, I never bothered with them and think those are actually rather useless. If your benchmark is good on turn 100 then most of the rest of the game is spamming academies, beelining the important techs, using science focus when there's nothing important to build and building a ton of Manufactories once you're close to reaching the victory wonder. If your victory comes late although your turn 100 benchmark was good (and nothing went horribly wrong between these points), then the most common reasons for that are (or at least were for me) that you either didn't cut enough of the optional stuff, didn't have enough workers, didn't do a good job at micromanaging your population.

Thanks. But I am playing online with Steam, which supposedly has the latest update. So what should be the "post-patch" science per turn at turn 100?

 

[Ryika]

I don't know about that yet, haven't really had the time to figure out the "optimal" path after the patch. With the addition of the new pioneer-loadout it seems to go back to a very expansion-heavy early game though (I've written about that strategy here), so that will delay early tech in favor of a stronger midgame by quite a bit. The exact pin-point for when to stop expanding seems to be rather hard to find though. And the fact that early trade routes are now halved does of course slow down the early game for any strategy.

But anyway, I was assuming you wanted to test that strategy in an pre-patch environment. (You can always go back to the previous version of the game by right-clicking the game in your library, then properties -> beta -> enter legacyplease). It seems like Academies are still the way to go in 1.2 - possibly mixed with academies first, though that still seemed to be too slow with the limited amount of testing I did.

 

[ProphetMaster]

I don't know about that yet, haven't really had the time to figure out the "optimal" path after the patch. With the addition of the new pioneer-loadout it seems to go back to a very expansion-heavy early game though (I've written about that strategy here), so that will delay early tech in favor of a stronger midgame by quite a bit. The exact pin-point for when to stop expanding seems to be rather hard to find though. And the fact that early trade routes are now halved does of course slow down the early game for any strategy.

But anyway, I was assuming you wanted to test that strategy in an pre-patch environment. (You can always go back to the previous version of the game by right-clicking the game in your library, then properties -> beta -> enter legacyplease). It seems like Academies are still the way to go in 1.2 - possibly mixed with academies first, though that still seemed to be too slow with the limited amount of testing I did.

I paused the game to give you an update. Playing post-patch and using your strategy for the first time, I am at 106 science per turn at turn 88 with 4 academies on rivers still under construction. I just finished research on Biotics, so should be at positive health soon.

Question: If you are playing Africa and get the 10% science bonus for positive health, do you get an ADDITIONAL 10% cummulative bonus from the first virtue on the knowledge tree?

 

[Ryika]

I paused the game to give you an update. Playing post-patch and using your strategy for the first time, I am at 106 science per turn at turn 88 with 4 academies on rivers still under construction. I just finished research on Biotics, so should be at positive health soon.

I guess you're playing on quick? (If you play on Standard Speed, provide a savegame.)

Question: If you are playing Africa and get the 10% science bonus for positive health, do you get an ADDITIONAL 10% cummulative bonus from the first virtue on the knowledge tree?

You don't get science from Africa, you get additional food. But in general, yes, if you can get the "same" bonuses from different sources, then they will stack.

 

[ProphetMaster]

I guess you're playing on quick? (If you play on Standard Speed, provide a savegame.)


You don't get science from Africa, you get additional food. But in general, yes, if you can get the "same" bonuses from different sources, then they will stack.

True, I don't know what I was thinking about Africa. I don't have the patience to play other than Quick. I take all day to play a "quick" game.

 

[Ryika]

^^

So roughly projected for Standard Speed that would be 106 Science on turn 117 - sounds about right. How many cities did you have?

I'm not sure why you're getting biowells though, to keep health constant is what the bottom virtue in industry is for - it will not bring you into positive numbers (at least not in the beginning), but the additional academies easily make up for the science you lose from not having the modifier. I'd say if you want to use both, biowells and academies, then begin with biowells to grow your cities and add academies as soon as you've got them unlocked.

 

[ProphetMaster]

^^

So roughly projected for Standard Speed that would be 106 Science on turn 117 - sounds about right. How many cities did you have?

I'm not sure why you're getting biowells though, to keep health constant is what the bottom virtue in industry is for - it will not bring you into positive numbers (at least not in the beginning), but the additional academies easily make up for the science you lose from not having the modifier. I'd say if you want to use both, biowells and academies, then begin with biowells to grow your cities and add academies as soon as you've got them unlocked.

I did get to the bottom of the industry virtues, but that is only a temporary fix. I think you need biowells more than ever with this newest patch to get your cities up to population 10 ASAP to get your second trade route in cities.

Anyway, I got to level 13 with this approach on turn 145. That is pretty decent, isn't it?