building city improvements faster

[TruePurple]

to make up for tech, you trade for it. they usually do science slider at 0 and a one scientist run for specific techs.

You tried buying tech from AI? They want ALOT. To generate enough funds to buy a unique tech for trading from AI.. by the time you get enough money it wouldn't be a unique tech. In fact you'll be so far behind in tech no tech AI has will be unique.

But if you can research a unique tech,(got to learn what the AI doesn't research as much) then trade it,(for other unique techs for more trading) that can be very powerful.

if you have a library university temple cathedral and colosseum thats 5 gold a turn for what?

Lux slider down to zero(which easily pays upkeep), no clowns, fast research. Hmm, sounds dreadful [/sarcasm]

Plus a bunch of scientist/tax collectors working for you during anarchy.

to make up for tech, you trade for it.

Trade what, cash?
You think its tough keeping up by researching and trading? Try keeping up tech by buying and trading. Or waring for it. On deity level. Especially with a bunch of clown specialist or lux slider on 50+(if no temple or bonanza of lux resources)


I play deity level, I don't do that well but ive often held my own (least for awhile) I play deity level with max AI opponents. You play a game like that and win and I'll listen to you.

to prevent flip, you raze every city you cap.

Huh?

Also, there is a culture flip formula, as long as you garrison enough units (or there are no tiles in your city radius overlapping enemy cities), it will NEVER flip.

Use civassist, it will tell you how many troops you need in the town to prevent a flip. 30+ troops isn't too unusual(in a single city!) Sometimes the numbers are really high. And they will be really high with your cities producing no culture.

you garrison/trade for luxuries, manage the population.

If your not republic or democracy you can garrison 2 or 3 troops in a town for 2 or 3 happy faces. Except you can't always afford to have your troops sitting at home far from any front lines. Especially if you got 30+ troops in each of your towns on the edge of enemy domain

Trading lux is a option. But you have to have enough extra lux/money. The AI is not going to give you anything remotely resembling a fair deal at deity.

in addition to razing cities to prevent culture flip, you can also starve them down to a single citizen.

You never know when a city might flip, you gonna raze every single city at the edge of enemy domain? Then what? Wait for AI to take more land?

Cities with a single citizen won't flip? Where did you read this?

 

[Aceman101]

Lux slider down to zero(which easily pays upkeep), no clowns, fast research. Hmm, sounds dreadful [/sarcasm]

But that's 5 gold per turn for ONE city. If you did that for every city you'd be broke.

Cities with a single citizen won't flip? Where did you read this?

You should know by now that cities with one citizen HARDLY ever flip. That's why you starve cities down. It's better than waiting for the cities to grow and increasing the chances of the city flipping. A city with, say, 6 resistors has about a maximum of 7-14% chance of flipping each turn. Now if you stave it down to 1 citizen you got about a maximum of 0.7% chance of flipping. I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like a big difference.

Edit: Of course, this is between you and fishjie. But I'm just pointing out the obvious.

 

[fishjie]

I play deity level, I don't do that well but ive often held my own (least for awhile) I play deity level with max AI opponents. You play a game like that and win and I'll listen to you.

so listen to the top players who do beat it at deity consistently. they're bound to post in here or elsewhere eventually. or read the legendary games where they give detailed play by play descriptions of what they do and even provide the saves.

You never know when a city might flip, you gonna raze every single city at the edge of enemy domain? Then what? Wait for AI to take more land?

are you serious? you capture the city, raze it, and move a settler over and replace it. not terribly complicated. there, now you've just expanded into enemy territory with drastically less chance of a flip.

as for city starving, if you look at the culture flip formula, which is somewhere, the fewer citizens that are of foreign descent, the less the chance of a flip. you won't need 30+ troops if you only have 1 foreign citizen in the city. and of course, with bombards from artillery, another strat the top players use, starving the city often wont be necessary.

finally, you can always just garrison your troops OUTSIDE the enemy city. it flips, you don't lose anyone and you just recap.

but I think the raze and replace strat is best.

 

[TruePurple]

Civassist2 shows high troop requirement to prevent flip even when every single civ in your cities are of your nationality. So your saying civassist2 is wrong?

Oh you mean war with other civ, getting into war at deity with so many other nations is dangerious and getting out of it without long battle or serious payment can be difficult. Even capturing cities for razing can be difficult. Of course sometimes you simply need to fight, but if you try to fight every nation that puts a bit of cultural pressure on your cities, you'll be at war alot(and suffering for it at the bottom of a mean dog pile of diety bonus troops)

Also the odds are the city you replace the razed city with will be experiencing lots of culture pressure itself being even further in enemy territory. I suppose if you don't mind if it flips and just dont develop it any.. or not place a city at all.

you can always just garrison your troops OUTSIDE the enemy city. it flips, you don't lose anyone and you just recap.

Once again, that would mean war. If you can afford it. Not something to casually get into at deity level with many nations.

library university temple cathedral and colosseum

Well first of all you wouldn't necessarily build all that, all over or even in just one city. It depends on the situation. Depends on the city.

You can argue that there are better investments of shield time and so forth. But when you try to say such stuctures can't easily pay for their upkeep in the right cities... Its really hard to take you serious. BTW all 5 would cost 8 upkeep each turn. University colosseum and cathedral all cost 2 upkeep. So much for being knowledgable about the game fish. Notice cathedrals give you more happiness for your upkeep and are more efficient. Not that there isn't occassional situation to build colosseums but not often.

A few more problems with buying tech, saving up gold means the AI demands more and more money from you. Which at deity level you have to give into a few demands to survive.

Also research progress counts as discount towards tech you would buy. The more research you've put into a tech the cheaper the AI will make it for you. (try buying a tech when you have one turn left to research it and even with research at say 10% you'll still get it next turn-AI will likely let you have it for a song) But 50 turn tech does NOT give this benefit. Since the AI only gives you credit for research you've put into a tech, and having only 1 scientist or 10% slider for science means you haven't been investing tech.

And once again AI wants ALOT of gold for its tech. Especially the unique tech that gets you the really useful trades with everyone. But the only way to get the tech that no other nation has(VERY valuable to AI) is to research it yourself. Anyways AI trades with AI at warp speed. Its tough to find tech that AI hasn't traded with everyone else.

 

[TruePurple]

This is early in the game. Notice the nearly 140 troop to prevent flip chance requirement for the bottom city. All are my citizens only. No I can't afford to go to war with germany right now (the nation exerting the pressure). Im still expanding and that would be suicidal. I put a city there to claim the resource for trading.



If you still think troops are a feasible flip preventer then take it up with civassist2. That or your just crazy.

 

[fishjie]

ive never used civ assist before but is the 139 troops to get the flip chance to 0%? how much would the chance decrease after a few troops were garrisoned there? sure 3 - 7% is a high flip chance. so do you think trying to keep up with culture by holding temples in all your cities is the right answer?

again i will provide anecdotal evidence. reading this sid game right now, it seems they *do* build temples. HOWEVER the only time they build temples are to expand borders to work squares, and occasionally build and hold a temple in a border town (not multiple border towns) that has high flip risk. but it sounds like thats the only place they hold a temple.

this post taken from that shared game is indicative of the prevalent attitude of not building research buildings. at first they traded, but because it was so expensive like you said, it became cheaper to just steal techs.


http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1431825&postcount=142

 

[TruePurple]

Ive seen high numbers like that in towns loaded with 10-20 units. Units effects on flip seem to be exceedingly slight according to civassist2.

As it is, we're spending 80 shields and 2 gpt for each library

Libraries cost 1 gpt a turn. This is your source? Anyways in their game they were stealing rather then researching. But that doesn't mean thats the only way of playing.

Stealing tech is also insanely expensive with high risk of failer and war at the high levels. Espionage helps but thats much latter.

If you can stay at tech pair through trading resources and such, then you stand a chance to research a tech AI isn't. If you research such a tech, its worth ALOT to AI if your the only one who has it (but that doesnt effect its reseach cost) You can can gain alot trading techs around like that. The only way you stand a chance of doing that is with things like libraries.

 

[Abegweit]

This is early in the game. Notice the nearly 140 troop to prevent flip chance requirement for the bottom city. All are my citizens only. No I can't afford to go to war with germany right now (the nation exerting the pressure). Im still expanding and that would be suicidal. I put a city there to claim the resource for trading.

Surely Corinth should be placed one tile to the east? Not only is there less flip risk, it's just a better a location. And if you are still expanding, why would you settle Thermopylae, which is almost certain to flip. Actually, you're lucky that it hasn't done so already.

Perhaps if you trained military instead of building useless temples, attacking Germany might be less suicidal?

 

[TruePurple]

I already mentioned why its there which you would know if you read my post. Its there to claim the silk for trading. If it were one square east it probably couldn't do that. And that silk has been very valuable.

Germany is huge, so is its neighbor (and mine) spain. If I were to attack it and stand a chance of making progress against it I'd have to set all my cities to producing units(metals not even hooked up yet) instead of expanding with settlers. Attacking germany means its less likely to get into fight with other nations(no inter AI wars yet) And more likely to pay for them to allie against me.

Better I keep good relations with everyone with trade and wait for them to pick fights with one another.

Then when they have worn each other down a bit (and ive finished expanding) I can gear up for and fight wars. Considering germany is prime candidate for trading the silk in question (being the only nation with road connections for starters) Its not likely to be germany for awhile.

In the mean time I don't want cities to flip and troops according to civassist are not the answer. Culture is the way to go.

 

[Aabraxan]

You can argue that there are better investments of shield time and so forth. But when you try to say such stuctures can't easily pay for their upkeep in the right cities... Its really hard to take you serious.

You are, of course, free to not take me seriously, but there are (usually) better investments of shields and time than temples and cathedrals. There's also one more factor that I'll mention. You may have already considered this, but I can't tell from your posts, so I'll press on. Treasury flexibility. One of the reasons for using the lux slider rather than happiness buildings is flexibility. Maybe I'll save a few gold for a little while by using a temple to make someone happy, but if I can capture or buy an extra luxury, I can turn the slider back down and quit spending that extra gold. If I've built a temple and the same occurs, my options are to either keep paying, or sell the temple.

As far as culture flips, the numbers given by CA2 for preventing flips is usually a much higher number than I can afford. So I rarely try to prevent flips by garrison. I frequently raze and replace captured towns, starve the ones I keep down to size 1, and worry about recapturing cities that do flip.

 

[induktio]

edit: oh and i forgot to mention, in addition to razing cities to prevent culture flip, you can also starve them down to a single citizen.

Starving them is quite slow imho... and after starvation the annoying auto-governor seems to allocate some citizens back to collecting food. My favourite way to deal with future dissidents is to stack 30+ artillery near the city and let 'the negotiations' begin.

If you have a mega-city or two that are causing you to raise the lux slider to keep the peace, building a temple might be the way to go. Of course, luxes are more efficient, but not always an option.

I'll give you one more example: in my recent COTM at DG, I was making a fast Diplo run. I needed max gpt for research, and I had a number of core cities with extra shield potential. Moreover, I had been denied access to some luxes by a strong neighbor, and going to war would have been more costly than it was worth, IMO. So, I proceeded to build temples and cathedrals in my core and as such could lower the lux slider by 10% or more. It saved me hundreds of gpt that I could then pour into research.

What about building the JS Bach's Cathedral wonder? Doesn't it act like 2 extra luxuries (marketplace effects excluded)?

 

[Lord Templar]

In wartime you cant make improvments. or thats what i thought. What version of the game do you have?

 

[Othniel]

What about building the JS Bach's Cathedral wonder? Doesn't it act like 2 extra luxuries (marketplace effects excluded)?

In the COTM game I referenced, I would have certainly considered it but it had long since been built. I didn't start on happiness improvements until somewhere in the middle of the Industrial Age, IIRC.

Overall, Bach's is a nice wonder albeit rather expensive. Most non-culture games I wouldn't even consider building it because of the shield cost.

 

[RFHolloway]

In wartime you cant make improvments. or thats what i thought. What version of the game do you have?

Thats mobilisation - simply being at war doesn't affect your ability to build anything, but yes if you mobilise then you can only build military builds.

 

[Lord Templar]

Totaly. i am more interested in the panzers in the Industrial Age than the Bachs wonder. ill milk it off other civs if I get the chance though.