Challenge #8: Super Size Me!

[cabert]

First attempt. I got nowhere near Biology.

Berlin 28
York 26
London 24
Timbuktu 21
Djenne 17

Total 116

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/87280/King_Size_AD-1200.Civ4SavedGame

that's an average 23 pop/city! quite impressive.
Do you have the feeling you're in a winning game, or just a "screwed for the challenge" game?

 

[ShannonCT]

that's an average 23 pop/city! quite impressive.
Do you have the feeling you're in a winning game, or just a "screwed for the challenge" game?

Thanks. But I fully expect that score to be beaten many times.

I think it would be an easy game to win at this point. I am way ahead in score, land, population, techs, productivity, and GNP. I could whip an army of macemen and cats and roll over the remaining AIs (I took out three AIs fairly early).

Spoiler :

I begun running Representation as soon as I captured the Pyramids in Kyoto, and I never switched to anything else. All that extra population is going into specialists, so it is hardly being wasted. The only way I screwed myself for the challenge was not teching faster. I built no cottages, which are usually preferable with a financial civ, and I only used a few specialists in my top 5 cities, until they ran out of food tiles to work. So it might have been possible to get to Biology, but not enough to make up for the lost food.

 

[carl corey]

Well, I just finished my first full run. In retrospect I think I built too many wonders. Getting the cities earlier would have been more important for their growth...

Largest cities:
- Timbuktu - 21
- Osaka - 18
- London - 16
- Djenne - 13
- York - 13

Total size: 81.

I see Shannon has already passed the 100 mark, I wonder if we'll brake the 150 one. That would be something. This is pretty much how I feel when I'm playing on Warlords/Monarch with the new patch: just watching helplessly how the AI has really huge & improved cities. Time for payback.

Oh, and cabert: it totally feels like a won game. I'm in front of everybody, teching like mad. Only my strength is a little low, but since I'm getting Chemistry soon it won't really matter.

 

[lilnev]

Ah, another warmonger challenge. Gentlemen, sharpen your axes!

In my first (blind) attempt, I botched the war with Toku. Second try I think I found my strategy, at least for now:

Spoiler :

Settle WNW, on the spot that will pop Copper. Warrior circles counter-clockwise, hopefully stealing a German worker at the end of his loop. In my game, though, my warrior got eaten by a lion. Ag-BW-AH-Myst-Med/Poly-Priesthood. The Oracle will grab either MC or Alphabet, I'm not sure yet. Meanwhile, build worker-barracks-axe-axe-axe-axe-axe-warrior-settler. Send them axes west to take Berlin, and the settler NW to a spot on or by the marble. Longer term, the plan is to claim the rest of my city sites from the Japanese.

Unfortunately, the RNG hated on me pretty savagely. I had five axes (3 CR1, 2 CR2) against his 2 archers + 1 warrior in a flatland city. The first three axes, collectively, reduced one of his archers to 1.9/3.0 and failed to even touch the other. Combat log says I lost 15/17 rounds (statistically, I should have lost about 10). Oh well, next try, eh?

peace,
lilnev

 

[patagonia]

With a bit more refinement, I think we might be in business:

Spoiler :

Just grabbed Biology in 1270AD as the free tech from Liberalism (first time I've EVER done a biology slingshot - might be an interesting gambit for an SE game perhaps). However the game was far from optimal so there's a lot of scope for improvement. The GPP got messed up as I wasn't paying any attention to my cities and didn't realise the governors had assigned loads of random specialists as they were over the happy cap, which landed me an artist and two prophets I didn't want or need. Had one of them been a GS, Biology would have arrived just before 1200 - it's just a question of whether another 15-20 turns can be shaved off the total. As expected, the AI were little help apart from backfilling redundant techs like currency and construction. Everything on the beeline had to be researched independently.

Interestingly, this challenge works well with bulbing GS to beeline your way up the tech-tree since the number of beakers you get depends on your total population.

 

[oyzar]

Finished my first try.
Timbuktu 23
Berlin 21
Kumbi Saleh 19
London 18
Walata 18

Spoiler :

None of the cities had reached maxpop. I guess i was waaay slow on the farmage. You have to mircomanage the cities every freaking turn :/. I think i was way slow on taking the english(which was only done with 3 catapults and 2 macemen anyways. I either teched too far or too short. Both london and berlin are toaly amazing sites. I think i should have not bothered getting berlin and just focused on taking the german territory as Berlin never got its full fatcross(the culture around it was totaly wierd. At one point i had a title in the middle of the german culture. I got pantheon and Pyramids in berlin. I have found out that if you dont walk much out of your islnad you can get hinduism by teching hunting -> agriculture -> animal husbandry -> mysticsism -> polyethism followed by BW priesthood(start oracle) pottery writing code of laws. Getting COL and CS on the same turn as spiritual is so fun. I think you could easily feed the AI more techs without them getting threathening. They might be viable trading partners if you give them pretty much all techs... Then again maybe not.

 

[carl corey]

For those who have posted results, please also include the saves with them.

I'll post a first scoreboard in post 2 of this thread when there are a little more saves posted. Of course I think over the weekend we'll see a lot of tries.

I'm starting to like the 1200AD limit. It's pretty close so it will allow replays, and it also makes developing a viable Biology slingshot very interesting. Keep it up guys! Show us what would have happened had their been no dark ages!

 

[cabert]

a biology slingshot isn't going to bring anything here.
I mean that even if you manage to get it in in 1100 AD (which would be huge!), you still have only a few turns of higher food output. Does it really matter?

 

[patagonia]

a biology slingshot isn't going to bring anything here.
I mean that even if you manage to get it in in 1100 AD (which would be huge!), you still have only a few turns of higher food output. Does it really matter?

I'm not convinced it would improve on ShannonCT's total by any means, but I am intrigued by how early it's possible to get such an advanced/powerful tech.

 

[cabert]

I'm not convinced it would improve on ShannonCT's total by any means, but I am intrigued by how early it's possible to get such an advanced/powerful tech.

If it's a scientific experiment, then

 

[carl corey]

Yeah, I'm starting to think the same thing: it'd be interesting but not game breaking. Of course, as soon as we agree on this someone will come and post a 900AD date for Biology.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

a biology slingshot isn't going to bring anything here.
I mean that even if you manage to get it in in 1100 AD (which would be huge!), you still have only a few turns of higher food output. Does it really matter?

You would need to get it early enough (obviously), but I do think that 10 to 20 turns of Biology would be huge. Consider this ...

You're already focusing on population growth via farms, so worst case scenario, your weakest city probably has 15 population of which 10 are working farms. That means that as soon as Biology is researched, you've got an additional 10 food per turn in that city (and even more in the others). If you get Biology within 10 to 20 turns of the end, you don't think 100 to 200 more food would make much of a difference?

The food required for growth is 20 + 2P where P is the current population. An extra 100 food (which is our worst case, most conservative estimate from biology) would be enough to grow one more population point in each city as long as the city's population is below 40 (yeah, right!) to begin with. You would grow an additional two points as long as you started out below 15 (or if you were getting more than 100 extra food).

I think you would probably need to get Biology with a minimum of 10 turns to go in order for it to matter, but if there's some way to do it, I really don't see how that can be a trivial factor.

 

[ShannonCT]

The problem with going for Biology is that there are tradeoffs:

1) The best way to tech fast in this game is using scientists under Representation and Caste System. But if you start assigning specialists in any of your top five population cities before they're working every food-generating tile, you'll be stunting their growth. You could probably get Biology before 1200AD if you sacraficed some population growth for more specialists, but I dont know if getting Biology with 10-20 turns before 1200AD would be enough to make up for the food lost by running specialists early.

2) You could try to get a big empire through conquest. (In my game, I ended up with 11 cities.) If you have a lot of big cities, you can run a lot of scientists in the cities that haven't been earmarked for the top 5. But improving all of those tiles (with farms or cottages) takes a lot of worker-turns. For your top 5 cities to reach their max growth rate, they need to always have a farm ready to work when they grow, and they need a lot of health and luxury resources hooked up. The civic that would make your workers more productive (Serfdom) would mean losing scientists (no Caste System).

3) When your citis start getting big, it becomes necessary to start using the culture slider to keep the cities happy. With a big empire with lots of resources, most of your commerce will be going to maintenance and culture, and not to science. If you lower the culture slider for more science and accept some unhappy citizens, you'll be sacraficing population growth and/or specialists.

4) It has been suggested that gifting techs to the AI to increase global research might help speed the path to Biology. But the biggest cities you can get are going to be ones you capture from the nearby AIs. And conquering the AIs is the only way to guarantee getting a lot of health and luxury resources. If you attack/destroy 2-3 AIs, there will only be 3-4 left to trade techs with. And even if you can persuade the AI to research a tech along the Biology path, it's far from certain that they'll be willing to trade it to you. Even Friendly civs will deny you a tech that they have a monopoly on.


So I suspect that focusing on getting Biology will result in a lower top-5 total population.

 

[lilnev]

I started again, but my Warrior got eaten by a Lion. So I reloaded and walked a different path. He beat the Lion, then got eaten by a Bear. Grrr. The next game he got eaten by a Panther. The game after that he made it all the way around the lake without getting eaten by anything at all. Hurray!

I hit 110. I didn't burn it to a disk, 'cuz I'm sure I can do better, so I won't post it today. A couple of my cities were not ideally placed, and none of them was truly maxed out -- I ran the game forward 10 more turns and grew to 121. I think I waited too long after my first war (the Germans were extinct by ~1600 BC) to seize the rest of the territory I needed. When things eventually went slowly against the Japanese, I realized I needed to work with the best cities I had, I couldn't wait for the best possible sites.

I wasn't really trying to optimize, more just getting a feel for the overall game. In particular, I didn't push science (ended up ~5 techs short of Biology), I didn't try to do much with the non-five cities, and I made a lot of sloppy little mistakes. One interesting point: my capital did not end up as one of the five. When I got to comparing max potential food yields, it had more bad tiles than some of my captured cities. I'm not at all sure that this is a bad thing. In particular, it could allow me to use the capital as the engine to drive the growth of the rest of the empire rather than wasting Bureaucracy on a city that just wants to work farms.

1) The best way to tech fast in this game is using scientists under Representation and Caste System.

Not necessarily. We are Financial, remember. How about a traditional Oracle->CS slingshot, then work a bunch of cottages under Bureaucracy? Or build a lot of mid-sized commerce cities. The part I have a hard time estimating is the lightbulb effect of a specialist economy. If you can capture the Parthenon and/or get into Pacifism quickly, the GSs could have a big effect.

2) You could try to get a big empire through conquest. (In my game, I ended up with 11 cities.) If you have a lot of big cities, you can run a lot of scientists in the cities that haven't been earmarked for the top 5. But improving all of those tiles (with farms or cottages) takes a lot of worker-turns.

So build a lot of workers. They're cheap. I didn't count, but I'd estimate I ended the game with 15 or so for my ten cities, and could have had a lot more if I'd wanted them.

3) When your citis start getting big, it becomes necessary to start using the culture slider to keep the cities happy.

Or use HR and a stack of units. I did turn up culture for the last 10 or 15 turns, but more as a matter of convenience than necessity -- I wasn't going to reach any more relevant techs, and I didn't want to worry about pushing around lots of units.

4) It has been suggested that gifting techs to the AI to increase global research might help speed the path to Biology.

I gifted a fair number of techs, and didn't find it to be all that useful. Their research is so poor that they just don't come up with much on their own. I did manage to backfill a few holes -- Monotheism and Calendar come to mind -- but I bet I got less than 10% of my total research through trades. I did get good relations with everyone I wasn't killing, however.

Anyway, my next attempt will keep the same initial sequence, but try to Oracle into CS (I took Alphabet this game, and found that most of the AIs didn't even have Writing yet), and definitely keep the war momentum rolling longer early. Good luck, y'all.

peace,
lilnev

 

[patagonia]

Not necessarily. We are Financial, remember. How about a traditional Oracle->CS slingshot, then work a bunch of cottages under Bureaucracy? Or build a lot of mid-sized commerce cities. The part I have a hard time estimating is the lightbulb effect of a specialist economy. If you can capture the Parthenon and/or get into Pacifism quickly, the GSs could have a big effect.

That's the approach I've been following. You can comfortably complete a CS slingshot by 1200BC, with time to churn out enough axes for your first war in the meantime, since research is the limiting factor here. Bureaucracy, Caste System/Slavery alternating and Pacifism are then the critical techs, since the optimal way to slingshot Biology is to have a commerce-heavy bureaucratic capital provide the bulk of the raw beakers, whilst trying to time GS to arrive exactly when you want them for Education, Printing Press and Scientific Method (if you use one GS for each, that gives you an optimal 5-10 turn window for the scientist to appear). If you get a couple more, you can also use them to bulb Philosophy and Chemistry, which would save another 15 turns or so, and is perfectly possible if you're willing to have 5 or 6 cities take it in turns to produce each one.

Stick HE in the capital and with the hammer bonus from bureaucracy it can provide all your military/HR happiness needs until teching's finished and you can start using the slider.

Edited to add that spreading techs around the AIs is utterly pointless for this approach. You'll have more than enough trade-bait to pick up useful stuff like Calendar and Currency, whilst even with all the prerequisites they'll never reach anything actually useful (metal casting springs to mind) early enough to help you out. There's something fundamentally wrong with a game in which you've got Gunpowder and the AI doesn't even have a backward tech like that.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Edited to add that spreading techs around the AIs is utterly pointless for this approach.

Spreading the technologies is only worthwhile if one or more of the following conditions is satisfied.

1. The AI's have a substantial research advantage due to the difficulty level. In that situation, it's much more efficient to let the AI's research most technologies. Therefore, you want to make sure they aren't wasting their time on something you already know.
   
2. You want a very broad set of technologies. In that situation, you hope that the AI's will take one path while you take another. Giving them your technology makes it more likely that at least somebody will be researching something that you aren't.
   

Like you said, in this game these don't apply. On Prince, you can overcome the AI's advantage with a reasonable amount of effort. The technology path for this game is extremely focused. Really only about 2 or 3 technologies (Guilds, Biology, maybe a couple others) are important after the basic worker techs.

 

[oyzar]

Maxing out your cities at 1200 ad seems realy hard. Some of my cities didnt even have aquaduct and alot were REALY close to poping. That said i did get biology.
Berlin 24
Timbuktu 23
Djenne 20
Kumbi Saleh 18
Gao 16
for a total of 101.

Spoiler :

I feel like i am sooo far from otimizing this it is not funny. I need more workers damnit!
I botched waring The english cause i wanted to trade construction and metalcasting from toku(who had both) But even if i got +6 with him he wouldnt trade ARGFH! Getting hinduism AND taking germanys setler + berlin for your own should def be doable at the same time you dont forgo any worker techs cept agriculture. It is possible to trade maths about the same time as you can research it normaly so i think going for that then getting construction and rushing the english should def be doable. I poped 2 GPs that should have been GS which made me lost 5-10 turns on biology and as it was i got it too late to amtter anyways. I think it would be possible to get biology before 1000 AD easily if you stop waring after taking like york + london or something. Ofc i didnt even have the pyramids in this game either which detered me even more. I also bet i didnt follow optimal build orders. 150 should certanly be doable.

 

[scherbchen]

i kinda feel like this is a conquest challenge first and foremost (something i really stink at) and a "growing" challenge after the groundwork has been done.

i probably would have preferred a 1 city size challenge after all, but you know what they say about hindsight. it appears that a military approach for this challenge is inevitable, which for me makes it less interesting and much more one-dimensional.

my early game stinks so i will not be able to post any significant scores (there isn´t even room enough to found 5 cities oneself (sp) so it basically comes down to how fast you can dominate your corner of the world, which basically is a regular civ game imho, with the added option of going for supersizing after you did that).

so i´d say it´s rather a challenge of early game warmongering and city placement than of growing cities. the latter is only possible if you managed the former.

not trying to say anything bad about the challenge, it´s just not something i can access and relate to.

 

[patagonia]

Any chance we could make this a 6 city challenge?

York - 25
Kyoto - 25
Djenne - 24
Timbuktu - 23
Osaka - 21
(London - 21)

Total = 118

Spoiler :

Settled in place, went for a CS slingshot with the Oracle and while that was happening captured York from the English. Captured London and then turned my attention onto the fertile Japanese lands. Ended up keeping Kyoto and Osaka even though larger cities could have been fitted into the same space with slightly better positioning, since there wouldn't have been time to grow them sufficiently.

Forsaking the Great Library, I ran Bureaucracy and cottages in the capital, with Caste system scientists in York, Djenne and London to get the GS I needed to bulb Education, Philosophy, Printing Press, Chemistry and Scientific Method (hence no need to worry about prophet contamination from the Oracle). Then researched Liberalism to claim Biology as the free tech in 1050AD. After that, it was a case of researching Drama for theatres, since the AI still hadn't gone there and then farming everywhere possible to try and max out growth in the run up to 1200AD. The finish actually came a turn too early, since five of those six cities were due to grow the next time I pressed "enter" but that's probably true for most games.

At 1050, Biology definitely came early enough to make a difference to my game (Timbuktu grew 11 pop in the 15 turns I had it), although teching for so long meant that I hadn't grown some of my cities as much as I could have done before it came in.

Earlier biology and a higher total population are definitely possible in this game, especially as my city placements were by no means optimal for maximum growth, but now that I've got a reasonably early time for biology, that's probably the last stab I'll have at this.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Total = 118

This seems to support ShannonCT's claim that the choices you need to make in order to get Biology hold back growth enough that the overall net gain is minimal. Although I think you're the current leader, ShannonCT got 116 earlier with the note, "I got nowhere near Biology." Biology clearly helped your late growth, but running all those specialists must have hurt during the time leading up to its discovery.