pigswill
fly (one day)
It occurs to me that the deciding factor in a game's outcome is the skill and experience of the player rather than a particular economic approach which may render the entire debate somewhat meaningless.
CE past Prince
- Thread starter royal62184
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popejubal
Emperor
If cottages grow into towns on appropriate terrain enough before the end of the game to give those towns time to actually have a significant effect on the game, empires with the same buildings, city populations and land should reasonably be expected to beat an economy that avoids cottages.
Of course, that's a completely empty and worthless statement since an empire that focuses on food and specialists rather than on cottages will grow in an entirely different manner than an economy that focuses on working cottage tiles rather than on food and production tiles.
It's all about opportunity costs. Do I grab a quick boost now or do I delay my gain in the hopes of a greater gain in the future? Cottage Economies do certainly give great gains when that future comes and you have a vast sprawling empire loaded with cottages. A Specialist Economy can also do quite well by grabbing early gains and then leveraging those gains into a larger and more powerful early empire which can then use its large land and population to greater dominance than the smaller Cottage Empire would have had.
Which is better? It depends on the land. It depends on the leader. It depends on the player.
...and for those people who dislike such wishy-washy bet hedging, I'll just point out that success doesn't come to societies that pathologically drive themselves to one extreme. It comes to societies that have access to extremes, but which can also reign in the excesses when needed. Cottage Economies will not always beat Specialist Economies. Specialist Economies will not always beat Cottage Economies. Either path to power is more useful and useable if a player puts in a little bit of time and effort on micromanagement and diplomacy with the AI.
Then perhaps the same player should play the two different economies. Obviously, it would have to be the same map to get an accurate bearing. For the purposes of fairness, the player would have to enter the worldbuilder and grant entire map knowledge (including late-game resources) from the start. For the purposes of non-advantageous traits, perhaps Imperialistic/Protective would be a good combo that benefits neither a CE nor SE. Obviously, the player would have to be both honest, and competent in both economies. It would also be possible to have multiple players do this (the double thing), but again, the only issue would be honesty (you can never check save for extensive review) and competence.
This is not to say that I'd advocate any type of showdown. I haven't decided if that's at all necessary, useful, or possible.
obsolete
Deity
Dave, the master of the one line smack-down post.
He's right on the Slider, though. A CE can crank out EP late game, if it really wants to.
Wodan
And as we know, when the CE uses any other slider than the sci, his SCI output takes a terrible hit. Which sort of starts defeating the whole purpose now of this Sci debate.
Also, if we want to further press this... the SE pro will be pumping out G-Spys here. That's another 100% boost (S. Yard) which the CE can't get.
That is because not only does SE slowly become inferior to a CE, but it also becomes impossible almost always (impossible for a true SE, that is). SE is meant for an early game boost and should be orchestrated such that the game is decided before the point where CE becomes better than SE (otherwise it would have been better to go with CE). An SE planned out into the late game has 3 options:
1. Circumstances dictate that a true SE can be maintained through Caste System (for a myriad of reasons: extreme abundance of happiness through whatever means, scarcity of opponents*, commerce comprises extremely little of your economy such that the culture slider can be maxed out with little effect on your research, etc.). In that case, a biology beeline will allow the SE to give the CE a run for its money, or at least be not that worse off such that by the endgame, the CE's late-game superiority is smaller than the SE's superiority and lead from the early game.
* - I'm not sure if 5 opponents for a small map is less emancipation unhappiness as 7 opponents for a standard map, if 5 opponents for a standard map is less EU as 7 opponents for a standard map, and if 5 opponents for a standard map with the other 2 having been eliminated while they had emancipation is less EU as 7 opponents for a standard map (opponents = opponents with emancipation)
Advantages: keep pace with CE with a lead (presumably)
Disadvantages: extremely situational (read: unlikely)
Victories favoured: Space, Culture, (Diplomatic), (Time*)
* - time is always dependent on the difficulty level and settings... many times it just isn't possible (and activating technology trading makes it much more unlikely)
2. Circumstances dictate that the game will proceed long enough and #1 isn't available (thus SE is pretty much impossible), such that it's a good idea to cottage over all the farms. In this case, you're taking a bit of a toll in the middle-late game in order to eventually level off with everyone else's CEs. This works out nicely if the early-game boost is greater than the switch loss. Alternative methods include cottaging over some farms such that you run as many scientists/merchants (and artists in the appropriate cities if pursuing a cultural victory) as you can.
Advantages: eventually receive CE's late-game awesomeness
Disadvantages: big drawback until the cottages become towns since everyone (CE) else will have many towns
Victories favoured: Space, Culture, Time, (Diplomatic)
3. You optimize your lead (as in where the lead is the greatest) and choose a good place to "stop" research, military technology oriented. You have many farms and good population, so now you can use workers to maximize production in all cities by building mines, workshops, and watermills (Communism would be a good tech to have at this point). You churn out a good military force since you've diverted "all" your empire's resources to production, and you should have a reasonable technological superiority at least for the first couple of wars, after which sheer numbers and experience can keep you going. A good idea would be to switch to an espionage economy, since that is more commerce-effective towards gaining techs (for the drawback of never having a lead).
Advantages: if done right, you achieve a military victory
Disadvantages: if the difficulty setting is high enough, your lead may not be much (and your enemies may catch up to your technological point and enjoy their greatly AI reduced upgrade costs), such that technological superiority will not be enjoyed as much; if you're not fast enough, the last AIs could be so far more advanced than you, that it could pose a bit of a problem
Victories favoured: Conquest, Domination, "Diplomatic", Time (if you don't manage to wipe everyone out by the designated time)
Cookie Crumbs
Emperor
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2006
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If you're in a tight spot or plan to get better troops later you can always go rush-buy crazy with the gold from your CE.
InvisibleStalke
Emperor
That is the whole point of a CE - you can devote 100% to gold or near 100% to espionage. If you want to run an espionage strategy then surely you want as many espionage points as possible - stealing techs is cheaper than researching them after all. If you want to run half and half science and espionage you can - but its a lot less efficient. What you can do instead is run the espionage slider at max to build up the EPs you want and then switch entirely to research the instant you no longer need more.
When I've done this with a late game cottage economy I am stealing a modern era tech every 3-5 turns. Fast enough? I think so.
Wodan
Deity
The problem then becomes what map to use. We all would agree that different economies require different terrains, let alone do better on different terrains.
Agreed. Regardless, as an ad hoc solution when you run up against an Espionage Economy neighbor, it's pretty much your only solution. And, regardless of the effect on the CE user's research, it will be effective in slowing or even stopping the EE. The EE will surely simply pick another empire as his target (if one is available).
I don't quite understand why you make a plain statement such as the above and then go on to list options where it isn't true? Anyway, there are other options than you list, here are some off the top of my head.
What is the reference point? Are you taking "a bit of a toll" vs where you would be if you continued to run SE, or vs where you could have been if you ran CE the whole time?
We're agreeing that the SE is slowing down, thus, a gradual conversion to CE is not necessarily causing "a bit of a toll" vs where you would be if you stayed in pure SE. In fact, I would be surprised if this were the case. It's not like the specialists will disappear instantaneously. They will slowly draw off as your food diminishes. Meanwhile, your cottages will ramp up VERY quickly with Emancipation.
The thing with a cottage maturation is that the biggest lag by far is from villages to towns. So, a SE->CE will get to villages pretty darn fast, and that's the majority of the commerce income right there.
Back to the question, if we're looking at "a bit of a toll" vs where you would be if you ran CE the whole time. Well, that's entirely dependent upon how fast your SE was in the early game, isn't it? We agree that a SE is faster early game, period. So, when we do the SE->CE switch, we are already ahead of where we would be if we had run CE the whole time.
I wouldn't be surprised if doing the switch kept you ahead of where you would have been. Certainly, I don't think there's any foregone conclusion that it causes "a bit of a toll" when all is said and done. Is there any way to definitively say either way? I doubt it.
Anyway it seems like you agree as you work through your thought processes:
4. You mention this in #3, but it is really #4. That is, you transition to an Espionage Economy, which after all is simply a specialized SE. An EE is a SE on late game steroids.
5. Switch to a culture victory. Civilized Jewelers plus Sushi plus max Artists.
6. Switch to a hybrid SE / Trade Economy. SE means you have huge cities (as big as you can support). This is after Astronomy, so you have world trade routes. Big cities + lots of trade routes = lots of trade commerce. This is a peacenik solution of course and depends on being friendly to lots of people. Switching to Free Religion early would be a good idea.
There are probably more but I need more coffee to kick start my brain.
Wodan
r_rolo1
King of myself
Wodan already responded much of this ( I agree with his opinion ) , but I just want to ask you a question: why not defy the UN vote on Emancipation?
Surely it has a cost in terms of
( 5 from defying ( that wears down with time ) + the Emacipation anger, that can be quite high if everyone else is running Emancipation ( can easily get to 10 in big pop cities) ), but a SE can make a much more effective use of the 
slider for 
issues ( because for a SE money is not the main issue ) than a CE and there are the late "hits" and broadcast towers. In last resort you can drop Pacifism ( if you're still in it... in late game GP are not as crucial as in early game , and anyway you should already had produced most of the game's GP by now ) and adopt FR .... I already won a a SS win with a pure SE after a Emancipation defying using those methods ( of course that was in Monarch and with Pericles... his UB really helps in that regard )P.S I'm a cottage lover.... but Rent Ceasaris quod est Ceasaris
royal62184
Prince
I can see there are tons of opinions, but they all say pretty much the same thing. Either strategy can work up to the higher difficulty levels. There are certain factors that may make one strategy slightly better than the others at times but both are doable. Right now I have a bigger problem that my economy. At prince, everybody hates me so I need to work on my diplomacy 
. I guess warmongering doesn't help that. I need to figure out how to keep people happy before I move up from prince I think. Thanks for all the input, you guys definitely answered my question.
. I guess warmongering doesn't help that. I need to figure out how to keep people happy before I move up from prince I think. Thanks for all the input, you guys definitely answered my question.shyuhe
Deity
@rolo - the emancipation issue isn't so much the UN as how the penalty scales with time and the number of civs adopting emancipation.
If you guys are going to run another CE vs. SE game, I'd recommend HRE as the leader. His traits suck for both economies and don't favor one over the other. Somebody mentioned spiritual as favoring neither economy but that's not exactly true. Spiritual is a great trait for SE addicts (frequent civic swapping) and is part of the reason why Gandhi is such a great SE leader.
If you guys are going to run another CE vs. SE game, I'd recommend HRE as the leader. His traits suck for both economies and don't favor one over the other. Somebody mentioned spiritual as favoring neither economy but that's not exactly true. Spiritual is a great trait for SE addicts (frequent civic swapping) and is part of the reason why Gandhi is such a great SE leader.
Indeed...
The statement is independent from the later options. I said that usually an SE is supposed to win you the game before you get to the late game. However, if you actually plan to not win the game before you get to the late game and thus predict you'll go into the late game, you only have the following options...
A bit of a toll as in your research will go down while your cottages improve. If you continued to run SE, you slowly start to have no specialists or tiles being worked. A bit of a toll means that while you're switching to a CE and your cottages are being developed, your opponents (should) have towns.
In fact, it is. You're switching from a tile (grassland farm) bringing you 3 beakers (+GPP) from the half a specialist you can run, all the way to a tile (grassland cottage) bringing you 1 beaker, then after a short while 2...
On the contrary! They will disappear instantaneously as you switch to Emancipation and now have 2 to at most 4 scientist slots (and 2 to 4 merchant slots). Of course, you could run other specialists, but compared to cottages or scientists/merchants, their research yields will be small.
The cottages will grow doubly as fast with Emancipation, but they'll still take a while to grow! That while will put you to a much slower research pace while your CE companions continue to tech at the same rate they were enjoying just a moment ago.
Yes, they will get to villages pretty fast, but they still won't be towns. A town is worth 3 extra commerce compared to a village (1 from growth, 2 from free speech... and yes, I know you could be running Bureaucracy instead, but if we're talking a decent sized empire, then the boost of free speech towns vs. bureaucracy villages is pretty big)... let's say 2 to 2.5 considering that you'd be running Bureaucracy. That means that for a "short" while your CE friends enjoy a large boost in research, and then for another short while (as your villages grow into towns) they'll enjoy a 2 to 2.5 beakers per research tile advantage (less than that if you're keeping your maximum specialists; research tile means basically a tile that you'd be either farming for specialist support or cottaging for commerce - tile for acquiring research*). This can sometime offset the early boost you'd be enjoying, depending on the situation, but then again, it might not be enough to catch up to you.
* - Or whatever are your economic goals: espionage, gold, research, culture, etc.
Yes, that's the point. The issue is that if you don't plan to capitalize on that lead somehow and plan to go into the late-game, then you have to take into account that while we switch to SE, our CE friends might catch up to us.
Scenario SE
Turn 1: Specialist Economy
Turn 200: Switch to Cottage Economy
Turn 300: Switch complete
Scenario CE
Turn 1: Cottage Economy
...
If the plan isn't to win before turn 200 (or somewhere around there), and if leading the pack from turn 1 to turn 200ish isn't giving us some nice boost (i.e. allows us to invade one or two civilizations, which we wouldn't be able to so easily or at all without this lead), THEN:
If at turn 300, scenario CE gave us more beakers or whatever (as in, the lead enjoyed turns 1 through 200 is less than the loss suffered turns 200 through 300), then we should have used a CE.
It would keep you ahead if your inferior research would be for a short enough time such that your CE friends don't catch up to you yet before you're equal to them.
If you plan to maintain an economy (such as an espionage economy), then you need some backing: cottages or specialists. The issue is that you won't be able to run as many specialists. However, I guess that if you switch to a hybrid SE(beakers/gold)/SE(espionage), then you will probably have enough specialist slots to not need Caste System anymore. I guess it's another way to approach it, but in my opinion, any hybrid research/espionage economy wouldn't be that strong. It could still be a viable strategy, and I guess it does deserve a #4 (I never did say that I knew everything
).One doesn't "switch to a culture victory". Usually, you're supposed to know pretty early that you'll be doing a culture victory. In that case, you'd be running max artists in your three cities from pretty early on. When you'd get at the dilemma point, what would you do with all those cities that would not need any artists?
This might be viable strategy. You keep going until you reach the point of these corporations and then the rest is irrelevant as you keep culturing. The issue is that these corporation are quite far away, and it'll be pretty close about whether or not you can keep your SE going (without having to transition in any way, or if you do, be close enough) to these technologies after which all else is irrelevant with your new culture objectives. Sure, I'll grant this #5
Your cities would already be enjoying these trade routes, as would your opponents' cities. Since you can both run specialists and build the necessary trade-enhancing structures in most cities (especially the big ones where the largest impact is), then this wouldn't be so much a switch as a life-raft to keep you going a bit. But then again, since your opponents would enjoy the same trade benefits, then this isn't much of an option to keep your lead.
And I originally thought that mine were the only solutions... silly me
Wodan
Deity
It might have nothing to do with a "plan". If playing on a competitive skill level, the AI might have something to say about any "plan" the player comes up with.
Anyway sounds like we're in agreement.
In my experience it doesn't work that way. I'm ready to do the SE->CE way before they have Towns even in their capitol.
Which brings another point... cottages aren't "planted" in the early game all at the same time, let alone worked at the same time. Thus, they mature over a huge interval.
Anyway I disagree that your research will necessarily go down. To come to that conclusion we would have to do a detailed analysis of different ways of doing the switch (one city at a time all at once vs the whole empire at once one cottage per city at a time), and compare the progression of decrease in food and how fast that removes a specialist, what benefits are lost and the progression of that, and compare to the functional increase of cottage benefits, computing in the speed of advancement of the cottage (one assumption I think it's safe to make is that we would have Emancipation running).
Isn't not even nearly that simple.
Plus, it's also a very good option to do the switch immediately after you get Biology. This would grant a huge amount of surplus food that would easily accommodate the switch with ZERO loss.
That's not a fair assumption let alone a fair comparison.
It's not just research we have to compare from one to the other. It's the whole economy. If the player chooses to run engineers instead of scientists (to get 2H3B instead of 6B, under Rep of course), that's his call. Or maybe he's running merchants, priests, or even artists (maybe he's going for a cultural victory).
In addition, we can't assume the player is running Caste. That is true in only a portion of SE strategies. Many SE strategies do not utilize Caste.
Plus, I'm not sure we can assume there aren't other things going on. In the most simplistic or "pure" case yes perhaps the city is simply working all food plus all specialists, until it reaches the health or happy cap. But cities are never this clear cut. There's always something else going on. Working a mine or something to sneak in that grocer. Something.
But let's look even at that "pure simplistic" situation. Which cap did the city hit? The health cap is extremely fluid. Especially when running a SE. It comes in "half" increments of 1 food, so it's not like it simply says you have to stop now... you slowly get -1 food to your mix (while each citizen/specialist eats 2). And, there are bonuses you could get. For example, maybe you just got refrigeration or built a grocer, or got another resource. So doing the switch right when that happened would not impact anything.
And what about the happy cap? Keeping in mind that many (though not all) SEs run the happy slider. So, in addition to all the same situations for the health situation, we should keep in mind that as the population of your cities decreases, you can knock off a notch on the happy slider. This will actually increase your research even if it's only going off the inherent commerce coming in from rivers, water, and resources.
On what basis do you say "much" slower? We're discussing whether one is better than the other, which would indicate the situation is at least close... jumping to "much" says you think there's a huge disparity.
That assumes the CE has free speech to start with. If the SE gets to Emancipation (and Free Speech) before the CE player, this is not the case. And, as you point out, switching to Free Speech means a loss of commerce/research from Bureaucracy (keeping in mind that many SEs run cottages in the capitol purely to take better advantage of Free Speech -- this is the opposite of a GP Farm in a CE).
And if we stay in SE and don't switch at all, our CE friends might catch up that way too.
On the other hand, the SE is more able to conduct a war, so we could be expanding at this time, which means we have more cities bringing in commerce.
There are literally too many things to calculate here. I'm not sure we can come to any valid conclusions on this subpoint.
Agreed. If, that is, it's inferior in the first place (see above), then this conclusion seems accurate.
That's true only if you plan on running a single-specialist strategy. Many SEs run a mixed bag of specialists. And even if you're doing a single specialist, we should point out that you can run a LOT of spies with the appropriate buildings.
An EE using cottages is very powerful. Think how much commerce you are taking in and how much EP that will generate.
I guess it's another way to approach it, but in my opinion, any hybrid research/espionage economy wouldn't be that strong. It could still be a viable strategy, and I guess it does deserve a #4 (I never did say that I knew everything
Well, try it before you knock it, is all I can say. If nothing else, it's a fun different way to play the game.Disagree. Sounds like you're not familiar with the strategy. I could probably dig up links to the threads if you like.
Not true, not in the sense you're implying. # of trade routes depends upon each player's buildings, techs, and civics. Quality of trade routes you do have depends on open borders, distance, and city size. Commerce income depends on your # of routes and your quality, not those of your trading partner. (The only thing your trading partner impacts is that it "opens up" the possibility of having routes to his cities.)
I could be wrong but I believe that's how it works.
And I originally thought that mine were the only solutions... silly me
One thing I like about this game and enjoy the threads. I learn new things all the time. Certainly, you yourself have dropped a couple of comments that have made me think, too. So please don't think I'm coming to this discussion with an all knowing attitude... far from it. It's been a good collaboration.Wodan
