External TRs are game's biggest flaw, and Hutama is by far best civ

[Aethervapor]

What if you needed a cooperation agreement to get beakers from external trade routes?

 

[Becephalus]

Try that without beelining late game virtues/buildings.

??? I don't think I really did. I mean what is your criticism here? That you cannot both play normally and maximize your growth at the same time? Yeah that is the idea. If you want to grow real big you need to prioritize health. You are just bad at understanding the game.

 

[omniclast]

On the other hand, PAC can go with a worker seeding bonus, +2 production per city bonus, and go chemistry to get a lab up. Once you do that, bee-line to the two early food wonders (blanking on names, but one gives +1 food to farms and the other is really just the old ToA and gives +10% growth bonus).

Forget labs. They give +2 base bpt (+3 with quest) compared to +5-7 bpt from every coastal TR to another capital (and that's early game). Hutama gets 4 times that, and with pioneering start, you don't even have to research a tech to get it. So you can start beelining for Gene Vault and Ectogensis Pod immediately. (The +2 prod in loadout is still good for wondering though, and it will help you get TRs up faster.)

I should point out that growing your cities tall doesn't really help you much in BE, at least as long as more cities = more TRs. With TRs so overpowered it is definitely more worth it to spam lots of cities than grow a few tall ones; the 0.25/pop science bonus from Knowledge AND the +3 from that academy you now have the pop to work will never be worth the +10-30 bpt from founding a new city with 2 TRs. (Honestly I think TRs are the main reason tall is not viable in this game -- I enjoy going tall and the resource bonuses/knowledge tree/purity bonuses would make it viable, EXCEPT that extra TRs are way better.)

Again, with continental surveyor, miasma and sight are not barriers to trading. There is no miasma on sea tiles so you can immediately send TVs to any other cap on your continent that is on coast. Even on the off chance not a single cap is on the coast, you can see where coastal cities are being built, and send an explorer to scout them.

And I would argue that the Slavic Federation is the best civ, for the early free tech - it's hard to overstate the power of a free tech in a web-based game that relies on high research costs to keep you from hitting outer ring techs quickly.

It's actually very easy to overstate the importance of a single early game tech in BE. BE does not snowball the way Civ 5 does, because you need techs on different sides of the web to build synergy. So a single early game tech just isn't that strong on its own, and if you set yourself up to get a late game tech super early you won't have the production or affinity to build anything from it.

I'd say the best start for Slavs is to go Ecology for the repulsor and set up to get robotics, terraforming (gah! so expensive) or genetic design (for ecto pod) early -- those will all give you a decent leg up, which is pretty good.

...but really has nothing on Hutama + CS with his 10-30 bpt advantage over everyone else for the entire game. With a little luck on cap placement, that's a free mid-tier tech every 15 turns. He will have all four of those techs plus leafs by t150, while you are sitting on your free one and still chugging away at the second.

You're better off revealing resources or using Retrograde Thrusters than gambling on being coastal, and having a clear path to another coastal civ.

Nope. CS is by far best for loadout, even without Hutama. Even if you don't get your TRs up early, in the mid-to-late game (once you already have the fence) you can trade with most capitals, even if you never bothered exploring or lost all your explorers. Those BPT outputs get seriously high, and if you can't see and trade with Mandira or Central on turn 200 you will get completely screwed, no matter how much prod you have from the fancy strat improvements (that you would be able to see anyway since the techs to get them are super cheap). And note that even if you don't have your cap on coast, you just have to plant all your future cities there, which is easy once you know where the coast is.

Further, addressing the OP's statement of just spamming trade vessals until you get the Ultrasonic Fence up, that's hammers you're wasting on dead vessals when you could be putting them to work getting out explorers to find more routes, expeditions, and goody huts; workers to get tiles up and running; or other buildings - which depending on the speed of creating the trade depot, you may already have a sizeable chunk of other things to build. I honestly hate taking the TR gamble on anything further than about 10 tiles away before the fence upgrade, or a decent amount of route protection with military.

The TVs are not dead hammers, because you can use the very large ept income from your TVs to buy more and replace them as they die. (I'm assuming you don't have three sea monsters around your capital -- in that case, yes, this strat would be dumb.) And getting the depot and TVs (plus first outpost) is substantially faster with +2 prod per city. That seems like the bast add-on. In any case TVs are super cheap to buy or build and they're not a big loss.

No matter whether you're uncomfortable gambling, if you ever play MP someone will do it and crush you.

If you want super early science, you're better off with the guaranteed +3 from scientists and clinic start (cuts dev time of first ring techs by half) pushing out the fence, then the depot, and getting TRs going after that (~30-40 turns total for research and build time). It's more consistent in only roughly 5-10 more turns.

You can get +2 from scientists plus Hutama, CS and pioneering to do the TR rush.

And clinic seems like by far the worst starting choice -- what's the point of that extra health, exactly? you get like 5 extra turns of health before your first outpost grows 1 pop? Pioneering or worker seem like the only real choices. Maybe soldier if you want to go might and kill aliens.

Have you actually tried it? I had a station spawn about 5 tiles away in the sea (in fog of war), I'm coastal. After building a trade vessel, the station didn't show up in the list.

I have tried it, it certainly works. With continental surveyor and a coastal city you can trade with any other cap on coast. Not other cities though, since you don't start off seeing them; have to actually find them. Stations on coast are also accessible since you can see them... but why the hell would you trade with them when external trade route income is so much higher. The only station that comes close to producing as much science as a TV with Mandira is banu musa at tier 3.

The cap or station does have to actually be connected to the coast your city is on -- other continents and islands are not accessible since there's still fog between you. I expect that the station you saw was on another island so probably isolated. In that case get planetary survey quick (it's cheap!) and send an explorer to the nearest point on that island/continent and you'll be good -- as soon as there's a path from your coast to theirs you can reach everything on the opposite coast as well.

EDIT: I should add that the way I discovered Hutama was too powerful was by playing a lot of MP with a good buddy of mine; we took turns Hutama-ing and crushing one another on science (regardless of other player's strat).

 

[Question]

??? I don't think I really did. I mean what is your criticism here? That you cannot both play normally and maximize your growth at the same time? Yeah that is the idea. If you want to grow real big you need to prioritize health. You are just bad at understanding the game.

Its not even a matter of growing big, growing to medium sizes (around 10 pop) per city is going to give you lots of problems without end game virtues or buildings.

Assuming you pick all the +health options for quests, a clinic, cytonursery, gene garden and pharma lab only give 9 health and those are the relatively early game options. Gene garden also needs level 2 purity.

A 7 pop city is going to reduce health by 9.25 if i have the maths right. Its pretty easy to hit level 10 pop even if you dont spam farms everywhere (which given the boosts they get, is the best allround choice for tile yields).

A gene smelter is going to let you grow another 5 pop without issues but thats late game tech.

Virtues wise the problem with going prosperity -> mind over matter to let you grow another 9 pop is that the pre-reqs are crap. +2 pop for newly founded cities is largely pointless when the game heavily penalizes city spamming with health and +3 energy for foreign trade routes is pointless when you will mostly be running internal trade routes anyway.

The next best choices are community medicine in knowledge but that doesnt do much, its only 1-2 health per city realistically.

So you need to pick up both that and profiteering in industry (1.5 health per city) which are both tier 2 virtues and will take quite a while to get. So to actually start getting into positive health with your second city you need to rush either optical surgeries (which requires firaxite) or gene smelters, both of which are end game buildings.

Once you get gene smelters though, you can easily hit health cap per city, combined with virtues hitting 20 health overall isnt a problem. And thats the problem, health is too late game heavy. You should be able to run 3 or 4 mid sized cities and have positive health in the mid game.

 

[Manannan]

And I would argue that the Slavic Federation is the best civ, for the early free tech - it's hard to overstate the power of a free tech in a web-based game that relies on high research costs to keep you from hitting outer ring techs quickly.

This. Two extra trade routes isn't a big deal when one extra city makes up that difference immediately. I'd say Franco-Iberia are about equal with SF though, as they both can make some ultra silly slingshots happen. Also:

The Slavic Federation is the new Spain (from Civ V):

They are a huge gambler. Because you can sometimes get a free Orbital unit (Solar Collector) from a goody hut, you could potentially get that free tech almost at the first turn, and beyond that you'd keep that free Orbital unit up and useful for 20% longer.

But if you don't get the Orbital unit from a ruin, the boost is not as fast.

All of that said, perhaps they made it so the Slavic Federation cannot get a free Orbital unit from a ruin? Might make sense, and I've yet to play as that sponsor, so I don't know.

Miasmic repulsors come early enough and are useful enough that missing out on the free solar collector isn't a big deal to say the least. It's not like it's a big detour on the tech tree. This is all moot anyway; I get two solar collectors in more games than I get zero.

+3 energy for foreign trade routes is pointless when you will mostly be running internal trade routes anyway.

Uh, what? The extra energy and beakers vastly outweigh sending extra internal trade routes most of the time, +3 energy per trade route can be quite nice (ex: 8 cities running 1 internal and 2 external trade routes a piece for a nifty 48 ept)

 

[fjaoaoaoao]

I have been playing with the balance mod right now, and it feels weird not to have more than 1 TR per city.

In the non-mod game, slightly nerfing external TRs and nerfing internal TRs should be looked at, but they shouldn't nerf the number.

In today's globalized day and age, it makes sense to have a lot of TRs and for them to be powerful, but it would be nice to trade more unique things that civs need rather than just some random number crunching, and/or have it related to other things (like spread of religion/culture, etc.). This would involve more choice.

The additional issue is that the AI doesn't really use TRs.

 

[bhavv]

The two extra trade routes with Hutama bring more food and production into the capital.

But even after playing him a lot, I much prefer PACs worker speed bonus.

 

[ahawk]

One thing I will admit about TRs is, there's a quest that allows you an extra TR per Trade Depot, and that's huge. That's a 50% boost in TR numbers across the entire colony.

So, if you have 7 cities with Trade Depots, you have 14 TRs, which is already sort of high, but not incredibly out of whack given that expanding out that far meant doing a lot of work and slowing down science and culture. But then take the quest option for an extra TR per depot, and you have 21 TRs possible prior to if you are Hutama.

So, again, while I may not see Hutama as hands-down the best option, and there are certainly other combinations of sponsor/seeding bonuses that are powerful, I have to admit that if you go Hutama, go wide, and take the extra TR per depot, you end up basically being Enrico Dandolo (i.e., Venice) from Civ V without Venice's penalty of not having the ability to build in non-capitol cities. Which is crazy.

But on the other hand, Hutama only really adds 2 TR's... if you do everything I said above without being Hutama, you still end up having a ton of TR's, and you also have other boosts in exchange for losing just 2 TRs.

 

[Soffacet]

Stations on coast are also accessible since you can see them... but why the hell would you trade with them when external trade route income is so much higher. The only station that comes close to producing as much science as a TV with Mandira is banu musa at tier 3.

The only station that seems to be worth trading with is Palatine. It's a huge %-increase to CPT. But even then it would concede early priority to other TRs. For example as Hutama with currently two cities, you should 6 total TR slots. So you should have one ITR between those cities, four ETRs, and then one TR for Palatine if it exists.

Uh, what? The extra energy and beakers vastly outweigh sending extra internal trade routes most of the time, +3 energy per trade route can be quite nice (ex: 8 cities running 1 internal and 2 external trade routes a piece for a nifty 48 ept)

It's a lot more situational than that. Early on, ETRs are strong because they represent a huge %-increase in total beakers. And the early beakers are the crux of what makes Hutama strong. But as you start spamming new cities, each city will need at least one and preferably two incoming ITRs to grow and plow through an enormous queue of important buildings in a reasonable period of time. You can use the TR slots in the new cities for ETRs to keep the ETR BPT roughly constant, or just spam more ITRs and acquire BPT from the ICS/TR/flat-yield-building feedback loop.

When people are discussing TRs being OP they are generally referring to the ITR positive feedback loop. Early ETRs, and Hutama's access to two more of them, are a slightly different topic.

 

[subanark]

I'm taking tectonic scanners a lot. Knowing what techs to go for, where to place your cities, and even what affenity to focus on is nice.

 

[InfinityV]

Trade routes aren't as OP in multiplayer -> free 100 energy plunder per trade route can really snowball an aggressor.