[BTS] Deity Marathon Corps Question(s) - 4th Golden Age or Academy + 3 GM Missions?

[Fish Man]

Hi everyone,

I'm at it again with the sub-1400AD deity marathon space attempts. This most recent save looks promising: using an OP old Nobles' Club terra start for Willem, I managed to conquer my way into undisputed dominance with HAs and later elepults. This is my position at 260AD, when I've already libbed railroad.

Spoiler :

Aachen is a really killer GP farm, especially with pacifism (the best non-FR religious civic, IMO). Sushi will come in 30-50 turns which will mean I can run probably 10 or more specialists in that city eventually.

Spoiler :

Now the question is: I'll probably get a lot of GP from that city, no doubt. BUT I need a merchant next for Sushi (already have a GE for Mining). So that means that, including that GM but minus the free GP from communism/fusion/physics, I'll need at least 7 extra great people for founding the corps I need and to chain a 72-turn golden age. This is especially tricky because I need to generate the right GP to actually start those golden ages. The other option is to forgo the 4-people golden age and, after getting out 2 GM and 1 GS, afterwards aiming to maximize GM production for max trade mission revenue. To make things more complicated, I just popped a GS - should I build an academy in Amsterdam (pictured below) or save the GS for bulbing/golden age afterwards? An academy straight-up gives me 80 extra bpt, which translates to at least 16,000 more beakers by the end of the game (soon with Sushi I may be able to run many more scientists). But I might not get the 4th GA I want by doing this, and in the short term my Sushi beeline might be delayed 3-4 turns.

Spoiler :

What's the fastest way to space here?

While we're at it, tech order - after corporation, I'm headed to AL and then to medicine for sushi, and after that ind -> plastics, etc. Right way to do it or no? Should I go electricity first for the sizeable commerce boost? And civics - now I'm in caste to get as many merchant specialists as I need in Aachen to take advantage of pacifism. I don't think I'll whip anymore, nor would I need to with Mining coming up soon. Is that the correct assessment?

 

[Fish Man]

Also, while we're at it...how long does it take for shared faith/civic bonuses to build up (as in, how long to get every +1)? And is the rate different on marathon?

 

[Fish Man]

One last thing I noticed...when I liberate colonies (if I choose to), it's always America that becomes the vassal. DIssapointing. I kinda wanted to be able to create a supercharged Mansa who teched a bunch of stuff for me by liberating and then gifting a bunch of settlers + workers.

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: Moved to S&T. Have fun!!

 

[krikav]

I did try to liberate some colonies, and also got Lincoln/Washington, however I did get Mansa as my second colony.
Do some wb-testing of this, see if the order is always the same.

You could settle two (three?) crappy cities in the ice and get washington, and then liberate other better cities and get mansa in another place?

 

[krikav]

Shared religion is one every 10 turns iirc, perhaps thats 30turns in mara?

Can't advise that good on your game as I seldom get to go to space and when I do it's in a very haphazard way...

But generating alot of great people is something that you generally want to have multiple cities to do. Sure you have national epic in your best city which will generate the bulk of your great people, but one city can only do so much, and it's effort is not diminished in any way just because other cities help out too.

 

[krikav]

No idea if it can be of any help at all, but here is one of my few space wins, and in that I did do a 72T GA:
http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4replay/ select civ4 bts / BOTM164 player krikav.

Borealis map so food is very scarse, GPeople from a myriad of different cities.

 

[Anysense]

There is one very useful thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ace-strategies-from-a-10-year-veteran.574724/
Lib Railroad in 260AD sounds good and your bpt is impressive. In my 1260AD space game I was only maing 800bpt at this point and Lib Assembly Line in 490AD. And that was Epic speed, on Marathon in such a strong position you should be able to do much better. Perhaps you need to reconsider your benchmarks, because sub-1400 seems rather pessimistic. There is no reason why it should not be sub-1200.

 

[Anysense]

Assuming that you get Mining first, AL beeline is automatic - you need those multipliers to make Mining really powerful.
I never use 4GP-GA. Not sure what the balance is on Mara but on Epic and Normal its not worth it; its boost is about the same as 3 GS bulbs and its just too much of a trouble to get those 4 different GP, anyway.
You don't need that GA to build space ship parts either - there better ways. There is a guide on this part of the game too in the thread linked above.

 

[Fish Man]

Assuming that you get Mining first, AL beeline is automatic - you need those multipliers to make Mining really powerful.
I never use 4GP-GA. Not sure what the balance is on Mara but on Epic and Normal its not worth it; its boost is about the same as 3 GS bulbs and its just too much of a trouble to get those 4 different GP, anyway.
You don't need that GA to build space ship parts either - there better ways. There is a guide on this part of the game too in the thread linked above.

What do you mean by "there are better ways"?

I got electricity first, didn't see your post until after I finished. The reason I went electricity is to take advantage of boosted lategame financial windmills/watermills. The results were somewhat disappointing, with only about a 4-5% increase in raw commerce generation. Still, for a large empire, that's a lot. Got a t549 space win, which was 1245AD. So not sub-1200, but better than what I had expected! Was dangerously close to the dom limit at the end, but gave away a city to prevent that from being a problem. Sushi culture is super fun for getting rid of revolts/motherland anger and then in turn revolting/flipping AI cities (but I had to be careful since cre + sushi guarantees 3 border pops in short order, meaning I couldn't oversettle and had to keep a close eye on the land%). I was raking in about 10k bpt at the end of the game with as many cities as possible building research.

I feel like I could've managed sub-1200AD, but I have no idea how. I'll be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised I even made sub-1400, much less sub-1300AD (the Augustus game about a year ago I tried the same thing, except crashed my economy with praets and never really recovered). So I'm quite happy with my performance already, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth.

That being said...the thing that I do differently from most people is this: instead of building coal plants, I wait until TGD to power any of my cities. This saves me a LOT of health (think of it as 2 extra food/turn in most cities, for almost 100 food/turn total!) AND a hammer saving of 12000-15000h on marathon (TGD is certainly less expensive than 40-50 plants!). But the downside is, of course, you have to wait until the very late plastics. This game I was fortunate enough to pop 2 GE which were enough to fully rush the dam. So I feel like the net gain was really worth it especially in this case. Am I correct or am I better off ignoring health and just relying on coal power?

The above also ties in with why I tend to go electricity first. When my factories are only powered some time after plastics (or immediately after in this case), it really doesn't pay to sink 750h into what is basically another forge. Since the factories won't be that useful until plastics, might as well get the beaker boosting tech first, electricity, and THEN just casually build the factories. The other thing is that, when spreading mining, initially my economy takes a pretty big hit. I can't afford to build factories instead of wealth at the same time that half my gpt is going into corps. So since the marginal benefit of a factory before plastics is low while the opportunity cost is high, I tend to delay them. In fact if I rushed factories instead of electricity it takes quite a bit LONGER to reach plastics (which requires indust which requires electricity), making that strangely the choice which LOSES me more production. My timing is very good though - by plastics, I have factories in most of my cities.

Does any of this click, or am I just spouting nonsense?

Also: lategame tech order. After electricity->AL: medicine (sushi)->plastics->rocketry->superconductors->genetics->fusion->communism->composites->ecology. Yay or nay?

Anyways, here are some saves at key benchmarks for reference. Critique at your leisure, if you so desire.

PS - "final" question. Never really wrapped my head around how hammer overflow worked or what the rules for max overflow were. How does that work? Been mostly eyeballing it for the most part, though I HAVE used rudimentary forms of overflow (etc. getting as close to completing a building on the second to last turn to bank hammers and maybe shave a turn or two off the SS part) to get slightly better times (especially with those darn casings!). Oh, and the new world did have a lot of forests which I used to 1-turn the life support - first time I've had enough unchopped trees to do that, I must say.

 

[Anysense]

What do you mean by "there are better ways"?

There is a comprehensive guide on how to build really fast even on marathon.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-10-year-veteran.574724/page-49#post-15016528

The rule for overflow is very simple: overflow cannot exceed either base production or base hammer cost of a building/unit. It means that if a city has 120 base hammer output it can get up to 120 overflow even from a spy. To exceed that value you need a building whose base hammer cost will be greater than 120. For example, you have +100% hammer boost (forge, factory, power), the base cost of a lab will be 750/2=375, so you can get up 375 overflow from a lab.

 

[Anysense]

I think the thing that held you back most is delayed power. Dozens of cities were missing 20-40 hammers per turn until you built TBD, that's a hell of a lot of production. And you could use 2 GS bulbs instead of rushing TBD.
Of course, factories a expensive and that quite a problem. You want to consider using organized or Kremlin.

Just looked at the launch turn save... You wasted 12 turns of GA That probably cost 2 or 3 turns, may be more. Twelve turns earlier GA could help to get a couple more great scientists for bulbing. I suppose it happend because you did not expect such an early launch.

BTW you had only 4 GS in this game and 4 GE, which is a bit odd. Normally I have 8-10 GS in a space game. Perhaps, you need to plan GP generation more carefully.

 

[Fish Man]

I think the thing that held you back most is delayed power. Dozens of cities were missing 20-40 hammers per turn until you built TBD, that's a hell of a lot of production. And you could use 2 GS bulbs instead of rushing TBD.
Of course, factories a expensive and that quite a problem. You want to consider using organized or Kremlin.

Just looked at the launch turn save... You wasted 12 turns of GA That probably cost 2 or 3 turns, may be more. Twelve turns earlier GA could help to get a couple more great scientists for bulbing. I suppose it happend because you did not expect such an early launch.

BTW you had only 4 GS in this game and 4 GE, which is a bit odd. Normally I have 8-10 GS in a space game. Perhaps, you need to plan GP generation more carefully.

Thanks a lot for the advice! The part about OF hammers made things a lot more clear. One thing, though - if total hammers = base hammers * multiplier, doesn't that mean the effective maximum overflow is base hammers * whatever multipliers apply for the next build?

I did waste a lot of GA turns because I didn't expect to literally 9-turn the last parts, yes, and that probably cost me up to 5 turns. The other real kicker was being forced to switch to emancipation because all the other civs got democracy from Zara, which then proceeded to give me the choice of either 5-6 unhappy/city, or -25% workshop yield and not being able to run as many merchants/scientists as I wanted (besides constantly bribing civics, which doesn't even work sometimes for emancipation, is there any way to get rivals to AVOID democracy?). That costed me maybe 3-4 turns as well. I do agree that my GP generation was somewhat...disappointing this game. Golden ages were run late and at any rate I didn't convert everyone into a merchant or something to squeeze as many GP as I could've from them, instead electing to work towns and food (a total waste of pacifism). That set me back 2-3 turns, or about a turn per GP I didn't get. Finally, I've been chewing on the power issue for a while. TGD is clearly the right play on (Pangaea) communism standard speed space, but with the increased hammers from mining it does seem now that it might've been better to swallow the bitter pill of building plants in all cities instead of one of the latest/most expensive wonders in the game. Altogether, your analysis of shortcomings seems to imply that I can shave about 15-20 turns off the win if I played things a bit better, putting me sub-1200AD. If I have time I might play from railroad onward again to make different choices and see if I can make the cut.

 

[Anysense]

I prefer calculating everything in base hammers because multipliers remain fixed, while production fluctuates. That is you just calculate base hammer cost for a building/unit once and then production/overflow as they appear in the city screen can be used without any preprocessing. It really makes difference when you are planning something and need to know how many hammers you'll need, particularly when buildings with different multipliers are involved.

Yeah, Emancipation can be a bit of a hindrance. Usually, I solve that problem by having a large number of vassals (each providing +1). I see you wiped out two civs completely, that probably wasn't a very good decision. There are also a couple of islands large enough to create colonies in the north. That is a no brainer on faster speeds where one does not have time to conquer everything, thus vassalizing everybody at 1-3 cities (only taking the best ones) is sensible. Not exactly the case on marathon. Still, one city left to a vassal is a reasonable price for 1, especially when you are done with conquering and many of your core cities have some 10 from whipping units.

There is another traditional approach - beat everyone down and keep them in the dark so they don't even get an idea of democracy. Large and strong Zara is such a troublemaker and he had several mining resources, which he would not trade.

There is "influence civics" espionage mission, though I never used it, so can't tell you much about it.

 

[AcaMetis]

There is "influence civics" espionage mission, though I never used it, so can't tell you much about it.

In terms of dealing with AIs adopting Emancipation, that mission is completely useless. Even if you were to use spies to flip Wang Kong into Caste System, his favorite civic, he'll just flip back into Emancipation in five turns. AIs will also never agree to flip into something other than Emancipation when they're running it as part of a trade, because "we don't want to deal with the unhappiness". The only real way to stop Emancipation from taking over all the AIs is by clearing the playing field of everyone who knows Democracy.

Oh, and never build UN unless you're sure you can maintain control of it, too. AIs love forcing Emancipation on everyone, and UN doesn't care whether you've got Democracy or not.

 

[Anysense]

I can't seem to understand this thing about trade missions to fund corps, isn't better to just turn slider down to 0% for a couple of turns? The best trade mission I ever made was 1950 worth, thats enough to fund some 3000 worth of research. On the other hand, last bulbs are typically at least 5000 each. Thus you lose about 2000 with every trade mission compared to bulbing. And there is no problem with halting research for a while either. I mean there isn't anything of importance to research after Railroad, AL and Medicine, unless you want Communism for Kremlin.
May be I'm missing something? May be there is a way to make trade missions more powerful? I remeber reading something about it but can't find it.

 

[AcaMetis]

The short version (IIRC) is that a trade mission generates money based on the amount of a (theoretical) trade route between your capitol and the city you're performing the trade mission in would generate. I've never seen a trade mission yield more than 1950, though.

 

[Anysense]

I found it
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-10-year-veteran.574724/page-42#post-14975715
It explains why TM will normally cap at 1950 on Epic. With ToA in the target city it would go up to 2250, even 2550 if you grow you cap to size 16.