Deity Modern Age Soured Me On 7; Too Many Bloated Options For Unfinished/Poorly Balanced Game

[Taefin]

But you literally don't get an advantage. Everyone knows where the sites are. The bonus artifact for researching is the only benefit for trying to rush hegemony, and you still have to trade off for researching on four continents - letting all other players know where all the artifacts are - or researching one continent with explorers ready so you can get that continent's artifacts.

Ah, I see what you are saying, assuming you can dig one continent before revealing on the next continent, it would be helpful to keep yours together. I’m usually playing against AI with 1-2k culture up to hegemony, and so even my strongest culture game I am not going to have time to dig one continent and move to the next before the AI get hegemony themselves and researches all the others.

Given you only really need 6-8 artifacts after hegemony, if I was going to be first to hegemony, I’d rather just get 3-4 artifacts for free when researching, and then dig one artifact per explorer. No need to worry about hiding artifacts from the AI once you have 15.

To clarify, I’m thinking of that “advantage” of knowing 1 turn earlier where the artifact is as being very small, and the only real benefit as getting the free artifact.

 

[aelf]

So it's 4 artifacts if you are the first to research, that's what you meant. But then you have to spread your explorers all over the globe potentially, making it harder to rush the revealed sites.

Yeah, this isn't how it typically works out. If you look at the probabilities, 3-4 guaranteed artifacts from researching on different continents is better than a chance of getting 3-4 artifacts from digging. So you should always favour getting artifacts from researching first. And there's still a good chance your explorer can get to a dig site after researching.

So all in all, I think getting Hegemony first and 3-4 free artifacts from researching makes for a stronger play in a minigame that is very dependent on chance.

 

[Taefin]

Since this all hasn’t put the issue to rest, from a purely mathematically it’s also more likely that you will win the race to 4 antiquity artifacts (the most you would need if you are first to research after hegemony) by having one explorer on each continent (vs all 4 explorers on one continent).

This is best proven/illustrated by counterexample:

Suppose you have your four explorers evenly distributed on one continent before revealing antiquity artifacts, consider the continent as having four quadrants, one explorer in the middle of each. It’s not guaranteed that the four artifacts will also be evenly distributed, and likely that one quadrant will have 2 or 3 of the four artifacts, possibly near the coast.

Now one or more of your 4 explorers in an empty quadrant will need to cross up to 2/3 the continent to go to a quadrant with multiple artifacts.

Alternatively you could put all four explorers in nearer to the middle of one continent, and now you ensure at worst one or more explorers will have to cross up to half of the continent (maybe 40% of it).

Moreover one of these artifacts could appear on an island, in which case it would take extensive time to get there.

In contrast, with one explorer, perhaps roughly in the middle of each continent (researching at the university closes to it), each explorer only needs one artifact to be closer that 40% of a continent away to beat the scenario above.

Or more briefly stated, with one explorer per continent, each explorer gets 4 chances for an artifact to be close, and you can ignore poorly positioned artifacts. With all 4 on one continent, one explorer will need to travel to each artifact, and any any poorly positioned artifact will need to be travelled by. One explorer gets 4 choices, one gets 3, one gets 2, and one has to take whatever is left.

 

[tman2000]

Since this all hasn’t put the issue to rest, from a purely mathematically it’s also more likely that you will win the race to 4 antiquity artifacts (the most you would need if you are first to research after hegemony) by having one explorer on each continent (vs all 4 explorers on one continent).

It does seem like the optimal strategy would be to put four explorers well distributed in the 4 continents, then beeline hegemony, research for all four continents, then try to get at least one artifact per continent.

However, if you are aggressive with building explorers and rushing for the first set of artifacts, especially if you get 6 explorers, you don't necessarily need to research hegemony.

 

[Taefin]

Oh certainly, and I never have gotten hegemony first. I won my culture victories just by having the modest gold/turn needed to do just that, but I also had relatively weak AI competition that game. Just speculating on how best to do it with a culture-focused strategy.

 

[chazzycat]

I really think it’s more effective to do it continent by continent, if you are truly well ahead of the AI in culture. I only pulled that off once on deity but got 4/4 on the first two continents, before an AI got hegemony and the other continents were more contested. Just don’t do the research until your fleet of explorers is strategically positioned throughout the continent. It helps a lot