Feudalism

[Sadseh]

I searched around but all the threads about feudalism are outdated.

Anyway, what good is this government after the patch when it no longer provides free improvement maintenance?

Seems to me, it is just monarchy where you pay more for your units, making it largely useless.

 

[Sadseh]

Does no one have the answer?

To all those wondering the same thing, during a game I was playing as Arab, I have noticed one positive benefit:

My original state was Monarchy, and at the time, my income per turn was 24 gold, and the research rate was 7 turns. When I switched to Feudalism, the income changed to 34, with the same research rate.

I was at peace at the time, and my army may very well have exceeded the limits set by feudal restrictions. From this, it may be concluded that feudalism suffers less corruption. If anyone could verify this, I'd be grateful.

 

[Roi du Culture]

Hummm...it could just be you had a bunch of small towns...A LOT OF THEM. Basically, fuedalism is supposed to be a good government for civilizations in their eaarly growth phase. It works well if you're stuck in the middle of a desert, for instance. The extra military units support allows for expansion into better land.

 

[nullspace]

Feudalism is pretty cool, I think it is a better warmonger government than Monarchy. Yeah, it does have low war weariness, but it can support a huge number of units for free.

Monarchy gets 2 free support for each town, and 4 for each city, Feudalism gets 5 for each town and 2 for each city. In order to take advantage of this, you do have to play a certain way: build lots of densely packed towns and keep them under 7 pop on purpose. This is a very effective way to get a citizen working every tile in your territory as fast as possible anyway. Keeping the towns small isn't a problem, you can always build a worker or pop rush. Lots of small cities are less efficient than larger cities, but I think that is offest by their faster rate of growth. You can let a few cities grow to size 12 and build your universities, banks and wonders there.

If you build enough towns you'll have way more support than you need. That'll let you build tons of native workers, and cheap units like medieval infantry, longbows, pikemen, and trebuchets instead of knights. (Lately I've been preferring stacks of slow attackers and artillery instad of cavalry) You can even afford to keep your obsolete units around. So you'll have plenty of troops for military police, resistance suppression, and filp prevention. Pop-rush is also a plus when conquering, youcan kill off people in captured towns and get something out of it.

Oh well, I like Feudalism even if other people don't. You do have to play it differently than other governments, but you can build up a very impressive army and support it for free.

 

[Sadseh]

Roi du culture, if I had a lot of small towns, and feudalism favors the smaller towns by granting them more unit support, it'd make little sense for me to exceed my unit support limit under feudalism while having LOTS of small towns. Or were you referring to something else?

And nullspace, I suppose the government isn't made for me as I'm one of those people who like to have metropolises by giving each city their maximum space allotment. Whenever I wage wars (I usually play on Regent) I only have my maxed out cities building my forces; that is, the cities that have already constructed all the city improvements that they could construct at the time are usually assigned to building an army as they have nothing else to build, and the fact that they finished first usually signifies that they have the biggest shield production.

As for the infantry/artillery instead of cavalry preference when waging war, I'd have to agree with you. While cavalry really helps when you are attacking over a broad expanse of land, as happened when my Arabian UUs conquered the Inca, I recently rediscovered the wonder that is artillery support. If you have enough artillery support, you can very soon have an army entirely composed of elite infantry due to their high victory rate.

Recently, I've adopted a strategy where I launch in my mobile forces ahead to clear out all the surrounding forces and capture whatever stray workers I may, while launching the infantry and artillery around the outskirts of the enemy's empire. The cavalry are then free to round up all the plains cities and the enemy is conquered pretty quickly, unless they were preparing to attack you themselves and have a big army.

 

[Pfeffersack]

@ Sadseh

Which language has your civ installation? The German version of Conquests had free building maintenance, which was corrected with the last patch.

 

[warpstorm]

It is useful for the play style of densely packing your cities. If you weren't planning on your cities going over 6 popualtion anyways, you can pack them in and field a huge army.

The problem comes in the later game where the nerf of this government comes into play. The work around is to use your huge armies to conquer.

Before the change, it was the strongest government (now I'd have to give that throne to Communism).

 

[warpstorm]

Of course, you can mod this back in easily.

 

[nullspace]

Originally posted by Sadseh
And nullspace, I suppose the government isn't made for me as I'm one of those people who like to have metropolises by giving each city their maximum space allotment. Whenever I wage wars (I usually play on Regent) I only have my maxed out cities building my forces; that is, the cities that have already constructed all the city improvements that they could construct at the time are usually assigned to building an army as they have nothing else to build, and the fact that they finished first usually signifies that they have the biggest shield production.

Yeah, that's why I thought many people wouldn't like it, but here's a little trick to do a dense build and be a perfectionist at the same time: build "permanent" cities at OCP spots, and fill in between them with temporary cities. Permanent cities build all the improvements you want, and temporary cities build only a barracks or granary, and then units. These temporary cities are prefectly effective throughout the middle ages, they make just as many shields as the permanent ones. Once you get factories and hospitals, that's when big, improved cities are lots better than little ones. So, once you get to the industrial age, have all the temporary cities build workers until they shrink to size 1, and then abandon them. That'll leave all the land for the optimally-placed cities which have lots of improvements, and give you tons of workers for building rails and adding to cities with new hospitals. Change government to Communism or Fascism. This takes lots of planning at the beginning to place your cities effectively. I always make a dotmap first and name the permanent cities and temporary cities differently so I can keep them straight.

So, Feudalism = large army with no support cost, and it doesn't mess up your long-term development.

 

[Sadseh]

nullspace, you're a smart guy. I'll try that out in my next game.

Only problem I see with that plan is that if I want to expand outside in (from the mutual civ borders to my core city), I'll have to either keep my capital farming more settlers, build a couple core cities at first, or make my ultimate borders closer to the capital so as to be able to properly expand and start building improvements before AD.

Also, exactly why do you think Communism is the best government, warpstorm? Did the new expansion change it around or is it because of the Secret Police thing (that, I imagine, must offer a significant reduction in corruption)?

 

[tomart109]

nullspace has said most of it - what can i add?
My strategy is lots of small towns anyway (they grow faster) and lots of early warfare, so i LOVE Feudalism.

 

[Sadseh]

Nullspace: This is probably a dumb idea, but I'll make a new game and give you a dotmap of all the areas where I should build cities at so as to maximize my feudalist advantage.

I've been reading some of the logged games and how people place priorities on building at certain tiles that I would have naturally bypassed, so I figured I'd ask for some feedback on my build layout.

I'll follow this post up with the image in a couple hours or so.

 

[kb2tvl]

I have never used Feudalism but there are some advantages to this type of gov based on tighter spacing and a higher use of tiles. The advantage increases for dry/no river land masses.

Starting out and thinking about number of cities per tiles, you could get 4 - size 5 cities per 20 tiles which is the size of an industrial era city using every tile.

Depending on your end game gov, you may want to push out where your FP will placed or build it closer to allow a higher OCN/OCP earlier. This decision may be driven by map type and starting location.

 

[Sadseh]

Ok, here's my new game from a randomly generated map that is: Large sized, random type of landmass, 4000 BC, wet, warm, Regent difficulty.

Frankly, I think it's a nice starting point as the lands around my capital are plenty fertile and guarantee a generous shields output. The desert starts above the city I labeled as '1' and I've got a feeling that's where one of my adversaries will be located, so it seems like I'll be able to contain him pretty easily, unless his starting position is as fertile as mine is.

Anyway, as you can see from the image, I can place my three core satellite cities to maximize tile consumption and only have two of them overlapping. I could scout out to the south and place a fourth city there, but that is not a priority at this point as it all seems to be tundra anyway and I should focus on expanding north-west first.

I'd like to ask all contributors to tell me where the optimal placement positions for my feudal, temporary cities are.

Also, should I, after completing the spearman (which draws out only one turn after Istanbul goes to three citizens), send my first settle up north to the expected location of another civ, send him to one of my core city locations, send him to one of my feudal city locations, or what?

Thanks for any input.

Edit: Further exploration shows the the north is filled with hills, deserts and occasional forests (along with two rivers and accompanying flood plains) while the west continues the fertile plains of my starting position with two mountains, some gold hills, two rivers, and some cows. Seems like I should just place a second ring city in the start of the desert and push most of my expansion force to the west lest another civ is eyeballing it as well.

 

[Sukenis]

When you have a good deal of tundra in your territory, you do a dense city build be defalt. A land locked tundra city can not get above a 3 so you can build as many as you want as close as you want. This will allow for a large feudalism army with big cities as well.

 

[nullspace]

Really, you can build the temporary cities just about anywhere. Since every city will be totally overlapping with other cities, and every tile will be in reach of multiple cities, the acutal placement doesn't matter much. Of course you can't build city directly next to an existing city. I put some on the coast, so they can reach water tiles that others can't, and I try to build them on poor tiles. You get the same resources from the city square whether the city is on bonus grassland, hill, desert, or tundra, so I aim my cities for the worst terrain. Avoid building on forests since those can be chopped.

One neat thing is that you don't have to build the permanenet cities first. If there's a city site that adjacent to a bunch of good terrain, but it isn't an OCP spot, build a temp city there. Early in the game, any city will be building barracks or granary and units, so a temp city isn't any different than a perm city. Just don't build the temp city next to an OCP spot.

Here's your dotmap with blue dots for temporary cities. Nothing special about the spots except they're fairly spread out and all on regular grassland and tundra. All the premanent cities pictured should be able to grow to 12 if you wish. Feel free to rearrange them for whatever reason.

I wouldn't worry about an ultra-dense build on the tundra unless you need more unit support. Building a settler just for a little city like that might not be worth it. And if the tundra cities are near your capital, useful cities will get higher rank corruption.

 

[Sadseh]

Thanks.

And one final question, would you do the build around the capital first or mark out the borders as a priority?

I just played that game and did the latter, and by the 5th century AD, not only did I not have all my temporary cities set up, but I was still struggling to build roads and mines for my cities that were still busy with temples and granaries.

Something went horribly wrong there.

 

[Sadseh]

Holy crap, I just succesfully tried out the whole Feudalism thing in another game with india...now I have an unstoppable war machine of 108 units. I feel like the Russian steamroller.

 

[nullspace]

Yeah, the weakness of this strategy is that you have to build a lot of settlers, and then a lot of troops before this build has an advantage over big cities and Monarchy or Republic. It really works best when you won't have a large amount of territory to fill in. Maximum # of civs for the map size and 80% water and a difficulty above Regent are when this is best. I like this strategy, but it is definitely a bad idea in many situations. If you do have lots of territory to cover, you'll want 3 or 4 settler factories. So, having some productive cities early on is more important than claiming a large border.

Also, I don't think the Ottomans are an ideal civ here. Agricultural (free resource in town square is great when you have many towns), militaristic (cheap barracks), and commercial (higher OCN) would be better traits. If you really like industrious and scientific, Persia is a better choice because their Immortal is a cheap Medieval Infantry. Feudalism doesn't have much point unless you have many units, and those temp. towns would take forever to build a Sipahi.

Man, I've written so much about this little strategy that I should turn it in as a strategy article.

 

[Chieftess]

The advantage is, as you conquer more cities, your troop support skyrockets. It's designed as a "come from behind" government.