Early tips and Theorycrafting

[Acken]

This is a thread to share early ideas and overall analysis that people have made in this version of the game. I like to take my time in these games to understand how the maths behind it work and see where the imbalances are. As a result I spent already quite a lot of time in Antiquity to look at the mechanics of food and draw up a few conclusions.

Growth bonuses:

Growth bonus decreases the food needed not increasing the food yield. This means the 50% growth in towns is equivalent to a +100% food.
Growth bonuses are additive (!) this means that +25% growth and +10% growth will be +35% growth meaning the decrease will be to 65% of the base growth cost. This is a bit crazy because here is how it compares to bonus food:

A 25% bonus growth will be equivalent to a +33% bonus yield. If you add a 10% bonus growth on top of it is equivalent to a 54% bonus yield in total. This is why a leader like Confucius can get a bit crazy: +25% base +10% pantheon +10% hanging gardens +10% expansionist when acquired in this order will make the food production equivalently increase by: 33%, 54%, 81%, 122% (totals).
The food bonus yields are in a separate category. Therefore you can consider the food production benefit to be as follow:
(Base yield) * (1 + food bonuses) * (1 + growth bonuses converted)
Where growth_bonus_converted is 1/(sum of all growth bonuses)

Worth noting that the base requirements are as follow (in antiquity)
30 34 45 76 139 247 417 665 1009
As you can see it grows a lot, fast. Meaning that to grow tall you quickly need ways to increase your food most likely through growth bonuses or base yields. The easiest way to increase base yields after a few turns is with farm towns.

As a side note I am suspecting gold bonuses to purchases work in a similar way, probably making them super good.

Towns:

Two things to note for towns. The prod -> gold conversion is just bad considering you typically have to pay for things at a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio of prod to gold. This gets better when the ratios decrease or when you get gold bonuses and gold purchase reductions (similar to growth). But unless you have such purchasing power I would suggest to transform your towns that have good production into full cities.
Towns grow super fast thanks to their bonus growth of 50%, in effect doubling the value of food in them.
They are by far the cheapest way to increase the base yield in the equation of a city. For example, if you are debating between a settler or a granary for growing a city, then there is no contest that the town is a much better investment as it is easy to bring a farm town to 30 food at pop 7 giving it all to your city and potentially boosting the base yield in the equation above by a ton.

Additionally, you cannot easily reconvert all your city food rural districts to production/gold/etc district. This is why you should be very careful imo in trying to produce a lot of food in a city that you would like to be a production powerhouse. It is much better to make towns that feed the city and have the city focus on other yields. At least in Antiquity, production is a more difficult resource to acquire in large quantity so you should try to avoid scrapping too many forest and mines with districts (if at all).

 

[Lazy sweeper]

I just saw a couple of new videos, and I got struck from the quote "you need negative relationship now to declare war"
How can you get an AI to declare war to another civ if it is in"good" relationship then?? SpyOps???

Your post makes sense but it's like reading a spreadsheet for the most part.

 

[pmarc]

As a side note I am suspecting gold bonuses to purchases work in a similar way, probably making them super good.

I haven't tested, but from the descriptions, I don't think that can be the case for all yields. For example Harriet Tubman's +100% influence towards espionage must mean that the actual cost of espionage is cut by half, not that it's free.

 

[pmarc]

They are by far the cheapest way to increase the base yield in the equation of a city. For example, if you are debating between a settler or a granary for growing a city, then there is no contest that the town is a much better investment as it is easy to bring a farm town to 30 food at pop 7 giving it all to your city and potentially boosting the base yield in the equation above by a ton.

Additionally, you cannot easily reconvert all your city food rural districts to production/gold/etc district. This is why you should be very careful imo in trying to produce a lot of food in a city that you would like to be a production powerhouse. It is much better to make towns that feed the city and have the city focus on other yields. At least in Antiquity, production is a more difficult resource to acquire in large quantity so you should try to avoid scrapping too many forest and mines with districts (if at all).

Thinking about those points together... Say the goal is to get to pop 5 fast and then produce that first settler. After the first free growth event in capital, you only need 2 more growth events + one building for pop 5, which seems faster than waiting for the 3rd growth event, especially if you want a capital that focuses on production anyway. Ben Franklin's ability is very strong under that strategy if you get a early brickyard or saw pit.

 

[Acken]

Thinking about those points together... Say the goal is to get to pop 5 fast and then produce that first settler. After the first free growth event in capital, you only need 2 more growth events + one building for pop 5, which seems faster than waiting for the 3rd growth event, especially if you want a capital that focuses on production anyway. Ben Franklin's ability is very strong under that strategy if you get a early brickyard or saw pit.

If the goal is growth Confucius is king with his 25% growth bonus but Franklin can indeed be a good choice for other plans involving a fast settler. It's just that without growth bonuses I think there's a point where trying to stack food is not worth it. I am trying to see what would be the best plan if you don't plan to go much beyond 10 to 12 growth in the antiquity. A fast town is probably still the best but you need a plan to convert it or maybe pop a second city fed by the same ?

 

[pmarc]

I might be worth specifying that for your equation above, the initial 2-pop growth event for the Han counts as x=2 (so it's 2 growth events). Interestingly, because of Confucius' ability the food requirement to grow 3->4 is closer to other leaders' 2->3 growth requirement, and similarly for the next few levels until exponential growth takes over.

Also another thing I noticed regarding towns and food... in-game text says a town sends "all" its food to connected cities when you switch it to something other than growth focus, but in fact the town still grows. It's like instead of getting a double food bonus under the growth focus, it gets its food (with no bonus) and sends an equivalent amount to the connected city.

 

[Acken]

On antiquity techs:
According to the XML files for the tech trees there are some techs where the visual display does not match its actual requirements.
For example:
<Row Node="NODE_TECH_AQ_SAILING" PrereqNode="NODE_TECH_AQ_AGRICULTURE"/>
<Row Node="NODE_TECH_AQ_WRITING" PrereqNode="NODE_TECH_AQ_POTTERY"/>
<Row Node="NODE_TECH_AQ_IRRIGATION" PrereqNode="NODE_TECH_AQ_POTTERY"/>
writing only requires pottery. But visually it looks like as if it needs both sailing and pottery:

Also here the cost growth of each "column" in the tech tree:
Agriculture 1
Sailing 85 Pottery AH 70
Writing Irrigation Masonry 125
Currency Wheel 245 BW 255
Navigation Engineering Military training 430
Mathematics IW 738
FT 1255
Masteries cost the same amount as the tech they are associated with.

This growth is much larger than in the past game like civ5. For example the ancient to classical techs in civ5 will go from 35 to 195 at max. +5% increased cost per city but that game was also giving 1 science per pop !
In my first game it felt that I barely got to the last column of the tech tree and the age was over. It seems unless you hard focus on science it feels unlikely you would get deep in the tree AND be able to really benefit from the tier 3 techs. This is not surprising considering the tech cost get multiplied by 10 between early antiquity and late antiquity. The game gives you a free +10 meaning the tier 0 techs will be done in 7-8 turns. You will need +70 science to be able to learn the tier 3 techs at the same pace.

I would need to play a new game focusing harder on science to see how it feels but there isn't a lot of sources of science in antiquity if your leader/civ isn't providing a science bonus. You have science endeavors (+6), libraries in cities (+3-4), codices (+2), some terrain yields, specialists (at currency or Angkor). I'm curious to hear some feedback by players playing a more science heavy antiquity game ?

On the other hand it feels right that Mathematics would reward someone focusing on science, it gives a science building and codices with the mastery. But the tier 3 units will probably be barely used by most players (and AI).
I also have to try out espionage.

 

[Acken]

I might be worth specifying that for your equation above, the initial 2-pop growth event for the Han counts as x=2 (so it's 2 growth events). Interestingly, because of Confucius' ability the food requirement to grow 3->4 is closer to other leaders' 2->3 growth requirement, and similarly for the next few levels until exponential growth takes over.

Also another thing I noticed regarding towns and food... in-game text says a town sends "all" its food to connected cities when you switch it to something other than growth focus, but in fact the town still grows. It's like instead of getting a double food bonus under the growth focus, it gets its food (with no bonus) and sends an equivalent amount to the connected city.

Hmmm that doesn't match my experience. In my game the towns were no longer growing after the switch to farming town.
Example:

As you can see it says new citizen in 37 turn (1009 / 27) but that is a UI issue, the town is producing 0 and the counter for a new citizen never decreases.

 

[pmarc]

Oh I was confused by that and also by the empire yields UI (clicking the top bar) that shows +food for the town. How do you get the screen you captured with the food balance?

 

[Acken]

Oh I was confused by that and also by the empire yields UI (clicking the top bar) that shows +food for the town. How do you get the screen you captured with the food balance?

There is like a scroll on the top left of the city UI next to the yields. It will open on the right.
I wish it would open automatically without having to click it.

 

[playshogi]

The streamer "One more turn" has a video that uses Confucius, Khmer, and the memento Brush & Scroll to get 100% growth. This means one turn pop. when all 3 are active.

 

[Acken]

The streamer "One more turn" has a video that uses Confucius, Khmer, and the memento Brush & Scroll to get 100% growth. This means one turn pop. when all 3 are active.

Growth bonuses are just busted and should be toned down. I don't even think they are necessary, Firaxis should replace them by food bonuses instead.

 

[pmarc]

Yep. Additive resource bonuses have diminishing returns (e.g. a 50% food bonus on top of a 25% is only a 17% relative increase since 1.75 / 1.50), but the way they coded growth bonuses it's the opposite of that, absolutely busted.

 

[Acken]

Exactly. This bonus is better the more you have.
The whole food/pop metagame seems weird at the moment. The curve increase is super steep making the value of food questionable in the long run UNLESS you stack growth bonuses like these.

 

[Gehennas]

Two things to note for towns. The prod -> gold conversion is just bad considering you typically have to pay for things at a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio of prod to gold. This gets better when the ratios decrease or when you get gold bonuses and gold purchase reductions (similar to growth). But unless you have such purchasing power I would suggest to transform your towns that have good production into full cities.

If you stack the gold purchase bonuses, gold becomes quite efficient. I was mostly trying to play "tall" with 3-5 cities and many towns and I was probably buying more than building in my cities. Of course, I am not sure that I was playing that effectively, but most of my gold income was coming from towns, where mining towns were obvious leaders.
I would also assume that playing "tall" as the game suggests (with only 3 cities to get bonuses from the attribute trees) will result in growth barely having any effect in the modern era due to ridiculous costs. However accumulating gold to quickly replace your old citizen spots with the new ones may be the proper solution

Growth bonus decreases the food needed not increasing the food yield. This means the 50% growth in towns is equivalent to a +100% food.
Growth bonuses are additive (!) this means that +25% growth and +10% growth will be +35% growth meaning the decrease will be to 65% of the base growth cost. This is a bit crazy because here is how it compares to bonus food

I'd say while this is huge for the new towns, it becomes quite balanced if you consider the steep growth cost curve.

Towns grow super fast thanks to their bonus growth of 50%, in effect doubling the value of food in them.

I still wonder how to calculate the "sweet spot" for stop growing the town and start sharing its food. I have a feeling that in antiquity it might be not beneficial to share food at all until you unlock the specialist slots. For the later eras it needs to be postponed until the era buildings are unlocked (and specialists can be assigned to them).

 

[Acken]

The part that is problematic also is that you cannot choose where to send the food.
In my game my capital grew so large in the antiquity that I couldn't make it grow in exploration after loosing the Khmer 50% while having multiple towns sending their food to it while some other cities would have better benefitted.
Also is it me or you lose specialists when transitioning ?

 

[Gehennas]

If I understand correctly, you don't lose them, but you can' assign the new specialists to these districts. When I am overbuilding, I can see the "from specialists" bonus visible, but I need to double-check that.

 

[Acken]

If I understand correctly, you don't lose them, but you can' assign the new specialists to these districts. When I am overbuilding, I can see the "from specialists" bonus visible, but I need to double-check that.

Could be a bug:

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1ij63im/civ7_where_did_my_specialists_go

https://support.civilization.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/38268742155539-Specialists-Removed-from-Settlements-During-Age-Transition

 

[Gehennas]

Oh my, this sucks. I hope that there will be patch soon. Meanwhile looks like I will try to play wide mostly.

 

[playshogi]

Growth bonuses are just busted and should be toned down. I don't even think they are necessary, Firaxis should replace them by food bonuses instead.

I hope they do not. I like having some combos that have an overpowered strategy. It's not like the AI will use these bonuses against you. As one of the devs said "a balanced game is a boring game".