Gazing at the stars from the thick jungle

[Seraiel]

Now, where is the update in which you get the corporations?

 

[Seraiel]

Come 'on Pangaea, 3d without an update. Don't forget, that I got no PC currently, so you must entertain me ^^ . I'm sure you'll be rewarded with exceptional luck for doing this. Remember, good things come to good people .

 

[Pangaea]

I've taken more pictures and looked through a lot of saves today, but not sure I'll get together a new post today as I'm feeling a bit tired after little sleep last night.

 

[Seraiel]

I can wait 'til tomorrow, np . Just don't let us hang here forever, because you're waiting for more feedback .

 

[Pangaea]

Heh, in that case I'll just have to continue that game anyway without feedback, as writing new posts will take a lot of time. Right now I'm too tired for both that and gaming though. Am thinking about doing some stats stuff too.

 

[Seraiel]

Where is the promised update for today Pangaea?

 

[Pangaea]

The Final Stretch

Think it's about high time I continued this Writeup

When we left off, I had waged war on Russia and captured their core cities, before the stupid AP broke off the war. This is what it looks like in former Russia.

Clearly I need to deal with the culture in the south, otherwise it will be a pain with high revolt chances, and I'd need to park a load of troops there. It's a former barb city, and with it being on the edge of the map, I want to raze it.

As you can see, I've also founded the Stone city, so now we finally have access to stone, speeding up the Kremlin a little bit.

Land ownership is already up to over 56%, and will further increase when the cities come out of revolt and the southern culture is dealt with. Need to keep a watchful eye over that, so I don't trigger domination by accident.


Having researched Assembly Line, it was time to queue up a few Factories.

Most are pretty fast to build, but I still Kremlin-whipped some of them, plus some Coal Plants, to get higher production a bit sooner.



Corporations

The idea in this game was to found both Mining Inc and Cereal Mills, after running State Property for a while. It's now time.

First up is Mining Inc, and I already have the GE ready in the Shrine city. Shrine(s) + Corporations HQs + Wall Street makes for one hell of a pump.


Naturally, some civic changes were needed first, as I was in State Property, which means you can't even found corporations even if you have the techs and GPs to do it.

Of course I didn't spend 3 turns of anarchy on it, like the screenshot hints at. Instead I launched a Golden Age to make the triple switch: Caste System + Free Market + Pacifism. More GPs should come out soon-ish as a result.

Here is the tech path in the early 1200s, as the next goal is to found Cereal Mills for massive food in all cities. This will allow many more specialists, which boosted by Representation will help us tech a little faster.

Research is plugging along quite fast now, so 7 turns later we are ready to found Cereal Mills. In the meantime we also finally completed the Taj Mahal, and extended the GA with another 12 turns.

When founding Cereal Mills, Mining hasn't spread to all cities yet, but we're getting there. Executives are exclusively produced in one turn, so spreading is pretty fast. Ironically, the biggest hurdle for faster spread was the lack of roads. Because of all the rivers I didn't build all that many roads, and that meant getting to some of the cities was slow for the executives, which meant I couldn't produce them as fast as I wanted due to the limitation of 5 executives alive or in queue.

However, 10 turns later, in 1390AD, and both corporations have been fully spread to all cities.



More AP problems

Lets rewind back to the early 1200s again.

The AP has been riding me pretty hard in this game, and now it hit me with a tough proposition.

It stole Novgorod from right under our noses, and gave it back to that heinous crook Peter! Naturally we weren't going to stand for that, so we instantly declared war on Peter and took it back. Good excuse for war anyway, and we needed to deal with his southern culture sooner or later.

After some unnecessary losses because I just wanted to get it over with, we raze the south. In the process Peter captured Stone city (top left in the screenshot above).

A few turns later and we have enough troops in the jungle outside the city to take it back.

At this point Peter is willing to capitulate, but that will almost certainly trigger domination, so that is out of the question to accept. Instead we simply make peace.



Towards Apollo and Space

In 1370AD we are reading to start building the Apollo Program.

The Ironworks city had spared up some overflow, possibly from whipping a Coal Plant (don't recall), so it finished Apollo in 3 turns.

Health is a tiny issue there....

Apollo is finished in turn 200, a nice round number, and it's time for spaceship production. Think I was slow here, but not sure how, so feedback would be welcome

Most cities are running Research and a handful of specialists. The National Park city currently supports 24 specialists, mainly merchants. Spaceships are produced in high production cities, that have got Laboratories (didn't build them everywhere btw). Yeha is the Ironworks city, and it's building the Docking Bay in 4 turns. Later on it builds an Engine.

The long Taj-extended golden age is coming to an end, so it's time to extend it again. This time it requires 4 different Great People. With so many cities, naturally golden ages are very, very powerful, with hundreds of tiles getting boosted hammers and commerce.

Land ownership is now dangerously close to trigger domination, so I decide to do something about it.

St Petersburg is gifted away to Hannibal. Earlier I gave away Stone city to Peter, but I didn't want him to get St Petersburg too, as his culture would flood into our cities and steal many tiles. Therefore Hannibal got it. I learned later that this probably wouldn't be possible if he didn't have 3 cities. With only 3 cities (or less), the AI will apparently take any city you gift him.

Here is the National Park city at the height of its power, running 26 specialists without working a single city tile, yet not starving due to the power of Cereal Mills.



LAUNCH!

1510AD, and the spaceship parts are produced. Time to send off this little gadget of ours.

Just moments before victory, Shaka was up to no good it looked like, so I got out a few units to deal with him in case he declared.

Rather close to Domination in the end, but thankfully no accidents on the final turn.

^^ That is picture #30, the most one can have in one post =)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -​

I'll come back with screenshots of all cities, and perhaps a little bit of stats too. If you need more info to offer feedback, I'll gladly provide more screenshots. Haven't saved every turn, but pretty frequently towards the end.

 

[Seraiel]

I unfortunately couldn't see on the screens how much research you conducted in the end, would have been interesting to compare against my Huge / Epic / Space Race I played with Cathy. I also didn't get which path of research you talk, so I can't comment on that too. Next time link the game in HoF if you don't want to write everything, then we can go through the logs.

What I also didn't understand is, why you built research in the end and ran Merchants. Wealth + Scientists would have gotten better modifiers unless you built Banks, Markets and Grocers everywhere. Also: Did you construct the Christo Redentor or used a GA to switch to Universal Suffrage to fasten uo the 2nd Engine in your capital? Did you work normal citizen soecialists to even get a few more hammers? Did the IW-city finish the Life Support in time with the 2nd engine?

In addition, some sentences on Corporations would have been nice. I still am not sure, if going for corps is really the right way of if SP would be better. Ofc., it's less hammers, but it's also less techs and less maintenance. I find especially the food-corps too expensive. Mining is great, but do those things really pay back 200y before the finish? Would be very interesting if you compared that somehow. I know this is difficult, but I think nobody has done so before. Were you able to keep 100% science even with Corps?

That's all thoughts I have right now. Thx for the update .

 

[Pangaea]

I unfortunately couldn't see on the screens how much research you conducted in the end, would have been interesting to compare against my Huge / Epic / Space Race I played with Cathy. I also didn't get which path of research you talk, so I can't comment on that too. Next time link the game in HoF if you don't want to write everything, then we can go through the logs.

Had intended to write that somewhere, but in any case here is the link to it in the Hall of Fame: http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ4/game_info.php?dsply=&entryID=28166

On the final turn I was doing 8,889 btw. I would think that is much less than whatever you had, as you would have had a great deal more cities than on this Small map.

I intend to put up some info about the research path towards the end btw, just not sure what is the best way. Possibly just loading a game from around Apollo, and then Shift-selecting all techs in the sequence in which I teched them.

What I also didn't understand is, why you built research in the end and ran Merchants. Wealth + Scientists would have gotten better modifiers unless you built Banks, Markets and Grocers everywhere. Also: Did you construct the Christo Redentor or used a GA to switch to Universal Suffrage to fasten uo the 2nd Engine in your capital? Did you work normal citizen soecialists to even get a few more hammers? Did the IW-city finish the Life Support in time with the 2nd engine?

I mostly ran scientists, but ran merchants in the NP city because I already had got too many GS, and wanted something else if I were to launch another GA. Ran at 100% for the vast majority of the game btw, including every turn since founding the corporations. This is also why I was building Research. I already had the gold, so building Wealth didn't make any sense. Better to build Research then.

Did not build Cristo Redentor nor change to US, so perhaps this is one cause for the somewhat late building of spaceship parts. Comparing with other games, I spent more turns here.

In addition, some sentences on Corporations would have been nice. I still am not sure, if going for corps is really the right way of if SP would be better. Ofc., it's less hammers, but it's also less techs and less maintenance. I find especially the food-corps too expensive. Mining is great, but do those things really pay back 200y before the finish? Would be very interesting if you compared that somehow. I know this is difficult, but I think nobody has done so before. Were you able to keep 100% science even with Corps?

That's all thoughts I have right now. Thx for the update .

Haven't tried to compare SP vs Corps like that. But with all that extra and I would think it was worth it. Also, on this mapscript there is basically no bad tiles, almost everything is grasslands or better, so the extra food from SP isn't really as needed as on maps where you have heaps of plains tiles.

 

[Seraiel]

Regarding the comparison of Corps vs State Property, I took the IW city from Replay #5, and switched to State Property. Result was city starving with -26 , creating a lot less because of no Mining Inc. and the lower maintenance imho was no argument, because the extra-pop through Sushi + the from Mining outweighted that by far, so my conclusion is, if the game is long enough, Corporations are better than SP.

It's a little hard to comment on this game, with only seeing the screens. I saw that you still had a lot of Cottages and Farms on the screens, what was the problem there?

Also, did you reach the speed of 1T / tech?

And did you really research Refrigeration for the earlier Laboratories? Doshin and I found out, that doing so makes the game take longer, on normal speed 1T because it's 1T, but on Marathon, it can be a few turns.

The I ask myself, did you micro all your cities building the SS parts, to work max Engineers and normal citizen specialists? Sometimes this shortens the build again by a turn. US is only needed, if you still got Towns in your capital, normally they should be built over with Workshops.

I'll look at the savegames once I find the time.

 

[Pangaea]

Thanks, more comments would be brilliant as it's a good way to learn more. I'm also supposed to update with pictures of all cities at the end, but haven't got to it yet. Certain other things are stealing my time now

From what I recall, I did get some techs per turn, but not all of them at the end.

On this mapscript, you kind of need Refrigeration if going with Corporations, because Sushi is practically useless. So I got to Refrigeration fairly early so I could found Cereal Mills, which is really good due to all the rice (and it gets more per resource than Sushi). I did build some Labs, but not everywhere. I looked at the payback and built them where it made most sense.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Actually, it's not random. The order of priority should be S-W-N-E, according to Izuul: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=12982663#post12982663

Watermills:
The priority order mentioned was for the way that the graphics get displayed, but it turns out from later testing that the graphics of where a Watermill gets placed is not relevant at all as to "on which River segment" the Watermill actually "counts" as being placed.

In fact, the graphics will change as more Watermills get placed, sometimes with 2 Watermills apparently overlapping each other, according to the graphics.

So, my original information is wrong, as you should ignore Watermill graphics completely.


Instead, the rule to use for Watermill placement is to place a Watermill on the square with the LEAST amount of unused Rivers FIRST.

Note that a River gets "used" if a cardinally adjacent square (i.e. to the N, E, S, or W, but not a diagonally adjacent square) has a Watermill on it, regardless of how many Rivers are cardinally adjacent to the square on which you placed the Watermill. Ignore the graphics completely, as they are totally misleading (the graphics misled me, initially).

An Example may help.

So, let's say that you have the following layout, where we have 3 flatland Grassland squares (represented by the letter G), one Grassland Hills square (represented by the letter H), the existence of a River (represented by the letter R), or the lack of a River (represented by either a dash - or a pipe |):
-----
|GRG|
|-RR|
|HRG|
-----

So, that's 4 Grassland squares (one is a Grassland Hills square) where the NW G square has 1 River segment adjacent to it, the NE G square has 2 River segments adjacent to it, the SE G square has 2 River segments adjacent to it, and the SW GH square has 1 River segment adjacent to it. Hills squares cannot get a Watermill built on them.

With 3 Rivers segments existing along the sides of squares, you should ideally be able to place 3 Watermills.

How to correctly get 3 Watermills:
Approach A] NW G first (since it has 1 available River segment, which is the least amount that can be available to a square) -> NE G (since it has 2 River segments but actually only has 1 River segment available to it, as an adjacent square has a Watermill on it--this point is the key point to note) -> SE G (since it has 2 River segments but actually only has 1 River segment available to it, as an adjacent square has a Watermill on it)

How to mess up and only get 2 Watermills:
Approach B] NE G first -> NW G can no longer get a Watermill because it only has 1 River segment and that River segment gets "used up" by the fact that an adjacent square has a Watermill on it

Approach C] SE G first -> NE G second (since it has 2 adjacent River segments but only the southern one of them got "used up") -> NW G can no longer get a Watermill due to the same reason as Approach B]

Approach D] SE G first -> NW G second -> NE G cannot get a Watermill since it has 2 River segments but there are 2 adjacent squares with Watermills on them already


So, as you can see, there are a lot of ways to "mess up" if you have a situation with "just enough" Rivers. But, once you understand how the approach works, it becomes very easy to plan out the order of laying down your Watermills.

Very interesting read!

I agree whole-hardheartedly!

 

[Pangaea]

Thanks for this very thorough clarification Dhoomstriker. Then the method that I think was mentioned in a micro management thread is correct, and you should first build watermills at tiles with the fewest rivers.