Discussion: Beating deity without lump sum trading?

[Jigokuro]

(I'm surprised there isn't already a thread on this; unless there is and I'm blind, in which case link me there and ignore this.)

So, I have Brave New World and I love it- highly recommended. However, for all the new stuff in the expansion the biggest change isn't trade routes, or tourism, or any new civ, but the fact you can trade lump sum gold unless you have declaration of friendship with the civ.
This means:
no 25 gold to accept an embassy,
no 45 gold per strategic,
no 50 gold every 30 to open boarders,
and most importantly no 240 per lux!
which then translates to no early rush bought workers or settlers or libraries or anything. Later, perhaps even worse, you can't easily buy wars between threats to slow them down.
Furthermore, the GPT exchange rates are worse for most things. AFAICT it is the same ratio to lump as before, but the cpu only accepts 1gpt per strategic and only 5gpt for a lux- an absolute rip off!

Of course I can see later in the game trade routes can provide enormous amounts of gold, but when the cpus start as far ahead as they do on deity, that gold comes far to late. That 1000+ gold in sales by turn 70 was critical in G&K, and I don't readily see an alternative here. The 4 city tradition start as it was is dead...

So, fanatics far better than I, what are your thoughts and experiences thus far? Surely Deity is still possible somehow. This calls for collaborative brainstorming.

 

[Falconiano]

If DoF is req for trading it's pretty stupid and TOTALLY unrealistic, just think of Napoleon's attempt at blockading England and the fact everyone, enemies and friends kept on trading.

But even there I wouldn't see this as a big issue honestly, it just makes it a little bit harder.
Befriend the 2-3 richest civs and get cash from them... or play no-trade quite hard but can be managed.

I mean just play as if you were playing archipelago/mini continents where you usually have 1-2 civs discovered in the early game, unless you're Poly.

 

[EEE_BOY]

it may be luck dependent, if the neighbour civs are needy, two or three dof early is possible. plus staying small and tall initially gives them more reasons to be friendly. Tabarnak is developing a modified 3-city tradition opening plus food trade strategy, so it is still alive.

This means early scouting is crucial to determine which social policy branch to open. if you see Shaka, Attila, Alexander as your neighbour, Tradition may not be the good option to go.

 

[pkf]

essentially the benefits of (over-) aggressive play have been reduced.

whether you would have usually stolen a worker early or DoWed after lump sum deals, diplomatic penalties hurt much more. if you buy a worker it will not pay for itself anymore - at least not in the short term.

what this means is probably:

connect strategic before luxes (unless happiness is an issue) to sell for 4gpt asap. most AIs dont have enough gpt to support gpt/lux early on and its also kind of a rip-off

AH is great. techs that grant additional trade routes are almost not ignorable early on - so AH-sailing might be viable.

internal trade routes - food trades seem a bit op. they make up for what you lost in growth by settling later than in G&K.

delaying writing/NC for AH and trade routes seems viable too as you will get a considerable amount of early science from trade routes with deity AIs.



BNW feels like there could be quite distinguishable approaches to the victory types for once, mostly because techs are much more evenly distributed between upper and lower half of the tech tree. hopefully this will impression will last

 

[Loucypher]

If DoF is req for trading it's pretty stupid and TOTALLY unrealistic, just think of Napoleon's attempt at blockading England and the fact everyone, enemies and friends kept on trading.

But even there I wouldn't see this as a big issue honestly, it just makes it a little bit harder.
Befriend the 2-3 richest civs and get cash from them... or play no-trade quite hard but can be managed.

I mean just play as if you were playing archipelago/mini continents where you usually have 1-2 civs discovered in the early game, unless you're Poly.

DoF is not required for trading, just for Lump Sum Gold trading, which IMO is a good move as it prevents certain exploits or at least punishes them more. Trade for GPT which means that while things won't go as fast, you'll still end up with cash.

 

[Bas1c]

If DoF is req for trading it's pretty stupid and TOTALLY unrealistic, just think of Napoleon's attempt at blockading England and the fact everyone, enemies and friends kept on trading.

The Nazi war machine in WWII was largely built by General Motors subsidiary Opel, Ford Motor Company and ran on Standard Oil, all companies of the USA and allowed the blitzkrieg of France. Henry Ford even received the grand cross german eagle Medal

Quite shocking really that American troops were fighting against vehicles built and funded by US companies and wall street.

 

[DaveMcW]

Sell resources/embassies/open borders to neutral civs for GPT.
Sell GPT to friendly civs for lump sum.

Problem solved!

 

[Securion]

Play as if diplomacy matters. Problem solved.

 

[_megafone_]

If you don't plan to go to war, selling lux for GPT is fine (I used to do it even before BNW when all the AIs were out of gold and I had spare lux - it's better than "missing turns" IMO). The only issue I've been having is that the AIs are actually paying a lot less than the ~8GPT they used to pay.

 

[Buccaneer]

There are more ways to get gold now but perhaps not as sustainable. The lump sum exploit has thankfully been removed but in it's place, you can sell luxuries, strategics, embassies, open borders, etc. all for GPT, not to mention land routes, sea routes and what ever GPT you can get from tiles, religion, buildings and wonders.

 

[hr_oskar]

I love this change as the lump sum trading was too easy to exploit before. Funding your early expansion through resource sales has been a required strategy on deity until now. Also it was easy to tell if someone was going to DoW you early and then sell them whatever resources and gpt you had to get all their gold to then buy units/walls.

This way DoF really means something and is worth caring about. I think the OP is being too pessimistic because my impression from what I've seen of BNW (don't have it yet) is that many of the AI will offer DoF early on; so you can still get lump sum trades - they just require you to be nice and care about the diplomacy.

 

[Tabarnak]

The only issue I've been having is that the AIs are actually paying a lot less than the ~8GPT they used to pay.

True, and it's where horses and iron ressources come in action. You can sell groups of 3 or 4 of them for 4 or 5 gpt respectively, numbers where the AI(emperor, at least) are hangering around for a long time.

If i'm lucky i will be able to DoF a civ or 2 and hit a 240 gold deal soon enough.

 

[Tabarnak]

The 4 city tradition start as it was is dead...

Not completely. 4 cities pre NC is something hard to achieve now but after the NC and a food based strategy you just have to combine a food caravan, the Trad. finisher(aqueduct) and a rush bought granary to see this city litterally explode in growth and reach 7-8 in less than 20 turns. And finally end with 4 juicy cities for the turn 100.

 

[RedRover57]

I like the changes (I don't usually play Deity though); however, I can't understand why a friendly civ (DoF partner) will give you 240 lump sum gold (if they have it) but will only give you something like 5 gpt plus 25 gold (total over 30 turns = 175 gold)? That seems odd since they take less risk giving you the gpt. It would make more sense for them to give you the full amount using gpt but only a portion of the full amount if a lump sum.

Regardless, it is making the early play a lot slower and I have had situations where lack of early gold is a huge factor when there aren't any decent (or safe) early trade routes to set up (the "Plus" maps have become more difficult due to lack of early CS trade routes).

 

[Catan_Settler]

This is awesome news, IMO. If you'd played every (or even ANY) other version of Civ you'd probably have realized that cheating the AI out of so much gold you're buying settlers in the first 20 turns was never an intended way to play the game. Sure it became "required" cause everyone was doing it. But yeah, the point of civ's early game has always been trying to juggle your priorities, not just exploit the AI and REX while using the non-REX tree. I mean, come on. It never seemed the way Civ was supposed to be played.

 

[IAmOzymandias]

I think this is a hard counter (and a very blunt one) to people trading 30 turns of 100 GPT for 3000 ai gold, then declaring war next turn to void the agreement. Instead why don't they simply add a tick box for "auto-renewal" that would automatically propose all deals with that civ on the turn it ends, (or simply renew if both civs have an auto-renewal checked) shorten the time to 10-15 turns and add a peace treaty?

 

[Justice1337]

Well the good news and bad news is that it's not a complete fix.

First, this was only ever a problem on Deity, and it continues to only be a feature of Deity. Even on Immortal, AI's just never had enough for you to buy more than one Settler this way. As it is now, it's harder to get the AI's gold, but still the AI only has gold to trade on Deity, and you will get it one way or another eventually. So the problem continues to be that players migrating to Deity are served just as well by learning these gimmicks as they are developing good strategy skills and wise prioritization of resources. If that's what Firaxis wanted to avoid, they failed.

Second, you only need one or two trade partners in order to get the Gold flowing to pre-BNW levels. AI's will sign DoF's more liberally now, then you just trade for their lump sums in exchange for the GPT coming in from your non-friends. Every turn you will make a GPT for lump sum deal with your friend for whatever income he/they were able to make in the previous turn. So, more micromanagement, more unintuitive exploits, equal benefit. If Firaxis wanted to reduce the impact of Gold trading in the early game, they didn't entirely succeed.

Third, the superiority of purchasing Settlers over building them stayed in place. True, other Civ games had you hard building every Settler and in theory Civ V would work more this way with this change, but at the same time, Civ V is the first title to halt your growth in a city where you're building a Settler. And any Food above 2 continues to translate very poorly into Hammers on Settler builds. So the methods of the ploy may have been changed, but the overarching incentive to avoid hard-building Settlers is still there, and it remains at stark odds with the prod boost in the Collective Rule SP. So basically any strategy that avoids hard-building Settlers will be the new standard to replace the old. If Firaxis wanted to emphasize hard building Settlers, they failed.


Behind all of this, the benefits of expanding in the first place have been drastically changed because tech costs now increase per each city founded. In deciding between expanding and an early NC build, you only had to judge, say, the benefits of the NC in a size 6 cap, roughly 10 beakers. Little known secret apparently, you could get those same 10 beakers with 2 size 3-4 cities with Libraries. Now, adding those cities increases your tech costs. Adding puppets doesn't. So in the trifecta of staying small, expanding peacefully, and expanding through conquest, only expanding peacefully is nerfed, which is the one that needed it the least as evidenced by so much Tradtion over Liberty. Maybe this is even a deep enough cut to go against the old 4-cities trad, changing it to 2 or so cities, who knows. But at the same time, it's redundant and overlaps with the above changes such that you'll have an even harder time trying to play the old way, even if you have the Gold somehow. At a time where everyone in G&K was wondering whether ICS could be resuscitated, the xpac is here and now it's just dead on arrival, taking with it basically every kind of game other than OCC.

 

[Catan_Settler]

Actually, stopping growth during settler production has been a thing for many iterations of the game. I believe it was changed to that in Civ 3, whereas in Civ 2, building a settler actually cost you 1 pop out of the city that built it. My memory may be fuzzy about those old games, but for sure by Civ 4 growth stopped during settler building, and I believe it's been around longer than that. Hence, the All New to Civ5 strategy of buying settlers came about because... it was the first Civ game where you could actually do that. Buy a settler, I mean.

As for your comments indicating 'wide is dead' I am going to have to agree to disagree with you. In the older Civs, wide was simply how you win. What we've seen with Civ5 is a dedicated effort by the devs to give smaller empires (which are now called Tall empires) a chance to compete. So now it affects tech too, but really, 5% more beakers can't be covered by adding cities? That is quite the laugh. The math is nearly always in favor of a wide empire, but they have thrown all sorts of things into the mix to limit just all out ICSing-- happiness, culture, now tech. From where I'm sitting I can see they are motivated by a good idea (let small empires win the game) and are still working on fine tuning all the systems to balance them.

 

[Justice1337]

Well, the problem with ICS was never catching up in Beakers mid to late game. It was being able to get good Science early on so that you could hit techs like Education on time. The 5% increased tech costs per city hits wide empires exactly in that spot. That size 1-2 city on T20 now not only earns less Science than a Library would have in Cap, it now increses your costs by 5% as well. And forget about letting your empire go unhappy while you're expanding. You'd better have plans to get that city up to at least size 4 with a Library, or you've shot yourself in the foot. I mean, I'm not saying that expansion should be the only way to play, tall shouldn't be viable, or even that expansion didn't need to be toned down a bit from previous versions. It did. It's just that expanding before turn 50 shouldn't be dead, and that there should be some cognizable benefit to expanding that doesn't take 70+ turns to kick in.

I mean, it's not as if expanding needed to be hurt this badly. All the record Science victories played tall, and nearly every Deity game played tall in the first place. The challenge was getting expansion and conquest to actually work.

And again besides, this concerns tall empires just as much. Tradition's core SP's still affect 4 cities, which seems to be more than the game wants you to be able to effectively settle before T60. Due to the way they've thrown together changes, there is going to be a lot of dead weight in the game. If OCC National College builds are the new standard, then the current maps have way too much space, early game wars don't happen the way they do now, or the way they should from a historical perspective. The game wasn't designed for that kind of play in the first place, and so forcing it as the optimal strategy is going to leave big holes. One of them is that players still want Gold, can't get it, are punished for not having it, and then find themselves retroactively curtailed in case they did get it.

 

[decebalus77]

This way DoF really means something and is worth caring about. I think the OP is being too pessimistic because my impression from what I've seen of BNW (don't have it yet) is that many of the AI will offer DoF early on; so you can still get lump sum trades - they just require you to be nice and care about the diplomacy.

These "honest" DoF from your neighbours were in G&K on a daily basis. Almost everytime you get them early on, and then 50 turns later you get stabed in the back by your so-called-friend.
So unless this has changed in BNW, I'm counting on using the same strategy(more or less):

Get the DoF immediately with everyone who offers, trade some lux/strat resources / settle agressively somwhere near my so-called-friend neighbour to piss him off, build some archers/walls and wait for him to DoW me.

Not sure if that works though, I havent played it yet.