Convince Me To Use Specialist Economy

[InvisibleStalke]

Also, other tips I had forgotten but this game brought to mind. Not that you probably need them, just doing a brain dump here.
-- pre-build all the theatres, temples, and colosseums you can. I had over 15 spare happiness in most cities before the big war even started. This was a huge speed boost because I didn't have to slow down in the slightest. In fact, I stopped drafting/whipping because it became overkill. I had SoDs of musketeers leapfrogging cities to go and hit the next one.
-- I made full use of the good old Globe Theatre. My GP Farm didn't churn out GP. It churned out musketeers.
-- I also remembered (thankfully early on) to click emphasize food in my drafting/whipping cities. This has a big impact in keeping my cities from going down to low pop too quickly. In addition, I was running a CE so emphasize food also meant emphasize commerce, for the most part, which was ideal.
Wodan

Good tips there.

Pre building the colloseums would have definitely helped - I stayed in slavery longer than I probably should have to whip them. Prebuilding barracks is also a good idea - better than temples when you are in Nationalism. Honestly I wasn't expecting war weariness to mount up as much as it did - I miscalculated that Cyrus would vassalize to Peter and I missed a city he had set on an island so when I took out what I thought was his last city, it wasn't and the war weariness stayed.

My Globe Theatre was my whip/draft central. Its pretty powerful on Epic when your military cities are building a unit every 4-5 turns and your Globe Theatre city drafts one EVERY turn. I like to run the population up as high as I can in advance - think of it as banked production. Then switch to nationalism and draft away. I also liked having a great general settled in this city so I got a promotion - which meant with aggressive I could draft pinch riflemen immediately.

Its also good to have a few small cities for drafting. A size six city with fast growth can be drafted maybe every five turns which is equalling your production cities. Because its so small it can afford the draft unhappiness.

 

[UncleJJ]

I think we are fairly much in agreement then - you raise some valid points about which cities to keep and controlling your expansion. Maybe I am experienced enough to do this effectively and the other factors limiting my wars stop overexpansion from being a problem (after COL).

I find the courthouses from COL only really make a difference when the empire gets larger say 8 + cities. That's when upkeep per city starts to get alarming. Currency is better at funding the first phase of expansion from say 4 cities up to 8 and beyond. The immediate + 1 trade route per city and ability to build wealth in tight situations (1 gold for 1 hammer can be good at times) are often overlooked. Then there is the more obvious benefit of building a marketplace, particularly in bigger cities when you have the research slider set a low %. Marketplaces can give you early happiness (ivory, silk, whale and I forget) and the 25% bonus and the ability to run merchants. Just what you want when it makes a big difference.

Both are important but I rate Currency before CoL for the early expansion.

I think its probably a factor of the level you are playing too. On Monarch/Emperor, the AI requires a lot of effort to subdue and war weariness goes up faster. So I need to control my expansion with rest breaks. On a lower level the AI puts up less resistance and overexpansion can be a killer.

I also put your advice on a SE with drafting into practice with Monte. I had Cyrus going ballistic in power, but researching steel, trading for rifling and drafting/whipping like crazy sent my power even more ballistic - probably the biggest army I have ever raised in the shortest space of time. It got fairly hairy when he vassalized to Peter. That was my fault - I should have vassalized him myself but I got greedy as I thought I might make domination by taking all his cities since Bismarck had volunteered to be my vassal.

I ended up with 31 unhappy from war weariness and was surviving by running merchants under caste system and 80% culture. But the troops kept marching in under a never ending cannon barrage and were whittled down by cossacks - but they kept going. Eventually hit a domination win for 95k points which was nice.

The AIs use big armies on higher levels and that means you need a big army to counter them and that means war weariness is an important issue. Drafting/ whipping is an amazing combination if you have "saved up some hammers" in the form of population. A few turns after you discover Rifling and switch civics you can be at the head of a huge army. I seldom run the Caste System while at war. Slavery is much more flexible and gives the ability to control unhappiness (WW, Emancipation, and Motherland are all size dependent) and to produce hammers. Also it is better matched to using Nationhood as both forms of unhappiness recover in parallel (i.e 10 turns recovers -3 from drafting and -1 from whipping). A small city that can grow 4 pop in 10 turns can draft a rifleman and whip a cannon on a long term basis and they underpin my military expansion leaving the big cities to research and raising gold.

Definitely a different style of warring. I had 3x the cities Cyrus did from earlier wars which I translated into a massive production lead through whipping and drafting. My CE game at the same point would have switched to Emancipation and Democracy, put my cottages to work to race first to the next level of tech - probably Assembly line, cash rushed lots of Infantry and invaded with fewer but better troops. The SE allowed me to overwhelm the AI in raw numbers. I could just see the faces of my young drafted riflemen as they were rushed to the front and a high probability of early death.

I can see why you need to work the culture slider though - I had to whip in theatres, colloseums and jails into most cities to stand the war weariness.

I like to minimise the use of culture to control unhappiness. It just seems such a waste to turn commerce to culture in my core cities, border ones do sometimes benefit a bit. So theatres, colliseums and jails are often supplimented by markets and forges (which both have their own good reasons for being built in a SE) in big cities. Sometimes I spread religions (under FR) and temples and even a cathedral will be built for happiness.

But the main measure I take to control rampant WW is to make sure wars are short and I might attack several different targets in rotation, while paying attention to diplomacy. That is until I get Fascism for Police State when war can become a long term struggle to the death. Building Mt Rushmore and jails in bigger cities means complete freedom to attack whoever I like for as long as I like ... at the loss of Representation beakers.

Anyway, definitely a fun alternative and I am much more convinced about the value of lightbulbing. I am not so convinced about secondary specialist cities in the early game - as least for GPP purposes because even with a specialist economy running, the only city that ever produced great people was my capital. Possibly I played the game a little differently since I rushed Oracle for COL and built military cities early - after COL I started a heavy whip cycle for my first war.

I am glad you had fun playing this way. I've mostly been using this approach for the last 6 months or so. Playing a high food economy is an interesting alternative to the more mundane (in my opinion) CE or the slightly stronger HE (my version tends to a SE flavoured HE anyway). The rapid responsiveness (lightbulbing, drafting and whipping) seems a little like driving a sports car compared to the more sedate cruising of the CE which is like driving a people carrier

When running specialists in secondary cities (for GPPs) you need to keep in mind how long they will take to produce a GP if ever. After you have made say 7 GPs and the next costs 800 GPPs only 2 or 3 of your best cities are likely to produce more GPs. You have to accept that some of the smaller cities will have their farms cottaged over in a HE or become primarily whipping cities in a pure SE unless you run Representation (if you don't already have it or want to run another civic say Police State).

 

[amaterasu]

Sorry, but i deleted the save after finishing the game :'[ I needed more memory room.

But the tech situation was that I was behind my rivals, by 1 or 2 techs, I was only at the philosophy branch of the tech tree, while some of my rivals were getting further ahead

I had 1 big GP farm ( in a normal SE game for me, I have 1 massive GP farm but every city is making lots of GP points themselves so I can get chains of great people appearing if I micro it right) and it was poping a GP quite reguarly, so I still got some of the light bulb boom.

Ok, so it was a normal sized map, continents ( another reason for my big war was so that I had the continent under my control) I had 2 rivals on my continent, lizzie and tokugawa. I attacked Lizzie as she had techs on me, which i wanted, which as said was where things reall dipped down.

I had a couple of production cities ( I did make an effort to specialise them) which had been churning out units every few turns, so I had a respectable army of swrods/cats/ axes( I hadn't even gotten to civil service yet ) which I attacked lizzie with. The higher unit costs as they went into her boarders obviously gave me a negative cash flow, so I lowered the slider. Then I took a couple of cities, again I had to lower the slider, as I had been runing high science so I had a small treasury, I would of had a strike going on and lizzie could of countered me. Anyways that crashed my tech rate off, I sued for peace with lizzie ( still garnered a tech!) and tried to get more cottages in my new cities to cover the costs.

I really hated being kept under wraps by the slider btw.

Also for the pilaging thing brought up by another guy, and how I wouldnt be able to do it, he would have to garrision units every few squares to stop me from taking a fast unit and pillaging them, a lone 2 move unit would pull lots of their armies away so that they didn't lose their towns.

Cities all had a lot of impovments, by 1100AD though I had printing press and liberalism ( usually get them around 750AD) so the beaker count took off.

For production I did sorely miss being able to make a slew of units in a single turn, I had to build up my armies in my producion cities, which i do think hurt my science, as in a SE I could of been running scientists instead then just whipped and drafted units in. What do you do in a CE when you want to get units/ buildings quickly before universal sufferage?

I find the SE more fun overall really I did have a city ruined by a knight in a later war, but by then I was owning anyway. For the science eventually the CE easily over shone an SE, even post biology. I was taking techs like fission in 3 turns, and an SE usually suffers from rising tech costs around that time.

But still I maintain SE is better at war and more flexible.

 

[futurehermit]

But still I maintain SE is better at war and more flexible.

This is the motto of the FE/SE. CE is better if you are going for space race, imho. But if you are looking for a renaissance-era domination victory then imho FE/SE is the way to go, whipping/drafting/lightbulbing your way to victory.