GOTM #8 *Spoilers* Thread

[Cartouche Bee]

Hi Bamspeedy,

I'm pretty sure we are going down a pretty similar road. I've changed my view of this process now from "worker harvesting" to "specialist relocation". This is a more accurate way to milk more from the process. At my current pace now that longevity has set in I may get my internal score upto the 66000 range by the end of this game.

CB

 

[Bamspeedy]

Yep, we have the same idea! I might get my internal per-turn score up in the 90,000 pt range, maybe over 100,000. Aeson had an internal per-turn score of 103,000 on Deity (which should be twice as much as Regent), and it was on a bigger map!

 

[Creepster]

Cartouche Bee, & Bamspeedy,

If you get a chance would you mind explaining a bit on how you are getting the score so high? I am very curious and I would love to see some of the saved games along the way (After the GOTM is over of course). This is my first time trying to milk a game and I am learning a lot but I want to know more about how the score is generated for future games.
Also I am curious as to how much of an impact workers have on the score? I am builing a whole bunch of them to pop into the citys population at the end of the game, but I am unsure as to how much that will change my score. For example does the fact that they are starving take away from my score?

 

[ainwood]

Can I take from this that you are finding cities that are expanding with WLTKD and Longevity, building workers with them and adding these workers to cities as "specialists"???

 

[Fossil]

Hmmm...I think the light's coming on for me. My calculations above were based on a sustainable population in a city.

So, are you guys building workers before population dies of starvation, then stuffing them in somewhere else, and rotating specialists around?

Slick.

With Longevity, city populations quickly grow to unsustainable levels. Then the food level drops, and the population starves down to size.

I can clearly see that population juggling gives a short-term boost. But ultimately the food boxes drain anyway, correct?

It seems to me, but I'm not sure, that a long-term boost using this method would require that on the turn a city builds a worker, that the worker is first counted as a population point for scoring purposes, then built. Is this the case? If so, all of a sudden it starts to make sense (I was completely baffled yesterday).

I'd love to see a write-up of the management process you guys use.

I've just been letting excess population die. If they can't find a restaurant, then they don't deserve to eat.

One more question: As my total culture was leading me to a premature cultural victory, I was forced to sell off most of my cultural improvements. Once the temples and cathedrals were gone from the totally corrupt cities, I could no longer maintain 100% happy citizens in most of them.

How does your strategic planning take this into account? Do you sell off cultural improvements in core cities early to preserve the happiness-builders in the corrupt areas late? Do you only build max-size cities on premo-land in corrupt areas? Do you relocate the palace late in the game? Or... do you use some other techniques?

That's five questions. I guess I lied.

Thanks to all for contributions to the thread. Collectively, I find your writings entertaining and informative. It is much appreciated.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

By building workers in cities that have specialists and then moving those workers to one city and adding all those workers to that city you create a specialist capitol. The cities that you move the specialist from now has a reduced food consumption so they produce another specialist. Rinse and repeat to the end of the game. I recommend 1 specialist capitol per continent, it will save you alot of ferry traffic.

Now the specialist capitol is starving for food but you only lose one population per turn so as long as you add more than one worker per turn to the specialist capitol then you have a net gain. I'm adding about 50 new specialists per turn in this game.

Since I have 8 luxuries and most wonders, happiness is not a problem. Almost all my cities are a size 12 or less to save on happiness and pollution. If a city does have a happiness problem and you can't add a cultural building to help then build workers until the city is small enough to have only happy people. Also on the cultural subject, cities around the edge of the continent need there borders expanded to gain workable area so build culture improvements but once they expand I sell the cultural building. Indeed you must manage culture so as to not trigger a premature cultural victory. I have absolutely no temples or cathedrals. Culture is reserved for science and wonders only.

This might have answered some questions indirectly, if I missed something of interest let me know.

CB

 

[Fossil]

Totally answers the question. Thanks!!

 

[BobFargo]

Wow... I'm continuously amazed at what some people can come up with. Truely "outside-the-box" thinking. Good job. It seems to require a bit of work moving workers now, but just think of how well this would work with the "rally points" feature in PTW. Yikes!

However, this definitely smacks of exploit to me, and I think it should be outlawed for future GOTM's. IMHO, Firaxis should probably do something to prevent this as well.

 

[Grey Fox]

Originally posted by BobFargo

However, this definitely smacks of exploit to me, and I think it should be outlawed for future GOTM's. IMHO, Firaxis should probably do something to prevent this as well.

Like a rule ingame; "If city is starving, the worker don't feel like being a citizen of the city".

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Well this is not really new, and Firaxis should probably do something about it. Sometimes you just have to expose problems and expose problems and expose problems and then they get fixed. Now, you can't just ban this problem from GOTM cause you can easily hide it, especially with 1.21 where you can abandon cities.

CB

 

[Creepster]

Cartouche Bee,

That is absolutely brilliant!!!

I missed the boat completly on my GOTM with your idea here, but I will try it next month. I never thought of the "specialist capitol". I was saving all of my workers for the last turn to add in to the game, and thus missing out on most of the points. I also failed to realize my mistake on larger cities. I am set up with most of my cities with max production area so they tend to be a size 22 or more.

Just a thought you should write something up and have it submitted to the academy. It is a brilliant startegy!!

 

[Creepster]

Originally posted from BobFargo

However, this definitely smacks of exploit to me, and I think it should be outlawed for future GOTM's. IMHO, Firaxis should probably do something to prevent this as well.

It is part of the game, and should be allowed. There are all kinds of ways to win and exploit traits of the game. If Fireaxis wants to change it; then that is fine, but until then IMHO it is legitimate and any one who goes through the pains of using this strategy should reap the rewards.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

I sincerely hope they make a change, it will save me the pain of "mouser's shoulder".

CB

 

[BobFargo]

Now, you can't just ban this problem from GOTM cause you can easily hide it, especially with 1.21 where you can abandon cities.

You can easily hide reloading too, but it's still banned.

Actually I would think this would be pretty easy to spot. Anyone who used it heavily would be at the top of scoring, and using a tool to show the internal score of the final save should show that something is fishy.

Someone may be able to use this to boost their score a little bit and get away with it, but GOTM is, after all, "on your honor" so I don't think it's worth worrying about.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a cool strategy, and I'm really impressed with it. If I had the time and patience to try to milk a game I would be tempted to try it myself. I just think that it has the potential to really upset the balance of the GOTM, especially now that it's public knowledge.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Hi Bob,

Your right about the banning, but what do you ban. Late in the game you may have many cities that are starving cause they have grown a bit too much, especially with Longevity. Should we just ban milking? Do we limit the scoring to be achieved to a certain figure each game? Anyway, Firaxis has set the city size limit at over 2 billion yet you rarely have enough food for 60. I just think that the rules should be left to Firaxis and they seem to pretty much address issues in a timely manner.

Everyone plays the game with a different angle and different objectives. I can pretty much end a game as quickly as most, this milking thing is just another little avenue to travel. I think it's the choice of roads that make the journey interesting, and allow for us all to learn new things about how this game model works. If we all play the same it would really get boring fast.

CB

 

[cracker]

SO is there a maximum population that you can attain or is this number technically infinite and only limited by the number of turns in the game?

Add 50 starve 1; rinse repeat for 150 turns looks like a city with population of 7000+ people to me. This is in inspite of the theoretical maximum population of somewhere around 56 citizens who can be fed in the most perfect metropolis with 21 fully productive irrigated railroad tiles and lots of cows and wheat.

I had never thought of the exploit possibilities of this programming error. Since only one citizen can starve per turn, you could technically get some amazing city pop numbers.

What does the bottom line of the city display screen look like with all those itty bitty heads crammed in there? I would think that somewhere near a couple hundred people this graphic routine would just give up.

This is truly the most amazing exploit I have every seen. I am impressed.

I definately think this is deserving of some sort of Grand Golden Award and permanent recognition from Firaxis for whoever fully discovered this exploit.

And this will be disabled fairly quickly by a patch. I don't think that city populations in the 100s or 1000s were ever part of the game design. Really cool snafu, but eeee gads what an exploit.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

Originally posted by cracker
What does the bottom line of the city display screen look like with all those itty bitty heads crammed in there? I would think that somewhere near a couple hundred people this graphic routine would just give up.

Nope, it just does the best job it can, by cramming them in on the line and then running off the side of the display dialog. Don't try and change the specialist types around though.

Thought you would like this one, cracker.

I think that the idea of the 2 billion city limit was a good one, it was set to allow more diveresed scenario's, when they become more practical.

CB

 

[cracker]

I have a comic and visionary ability to imagine all the ants in the hive frantically running around to code a quick addition to the patch that will be released next week.

To disable this exploit they will have to add a code piece that disables the "join city" command whenever a city is producing less food than is required to support the population (or something like that). This fix is probably what we will see since it would seem to be simpler from a programming standpoint.

A hard coded population limit would create future problems with scenarios with extra luxuries and greater food production values.

Hard coding a limit to the number of pop points that can be joined to a city in one turn would also create conflicts with other legitimate strategies that do not use the 1 starving person per turn exploit.

I am still so impressed. Beers are on me. A round for all the discoverers and a whack on the peepee for anyone who knew about this moons ago but said nothing while merrily milking away in the insanity zone.

I'm going to have to go do this in a game real quick before the exploit is closed just so I can see what it does.

Somebody post a screen shot of big mondo city?? When does the pop display part of the city label get shortcircuited??

 

[Bamspeedy]

This concept originally started in GOTM6 when I had 275 or so extra workers that I added all to one city. Didn't think of continually adding workers until I was about half way through my game when I had 900 workers!

After this revelation, Sir Pleb may have to entirely re-write his 'maximizing score' article. Most of his ideas still hold true (grab all grassland, go for quick conquest but stop just short of domination, etc.). I could have scored thousands of more points had I more planned for this style. Right now it is 1680 A.D. My capital has over 3200 population points and I am adding over 100 pop points to it per turn! So right now my capital is worth almost 10,000 points for the internal per-turn score (regent level). I only have 1 hospital, but with no mass transit, that city has 3200 pollution icons!! I've had several turns where I had 12-13 tiles change to global warming. The sun finally turned red, never had seen that before except when nukes were launched.

Normally, awhile after you reach max territory and population/happiness your increase of points per turn actually decreases. I've been continually gaining 95 points/turn for the last 250+years. Now that I am rush buying workers (only cities that have specialists), I'm starting to increase that. When I get longevity, I should start making well over 100 points/turn.

In the capital, about 2/3 are entertainers (still considered specialists), with the other 1/3 either scientists or taxmen. With so many scientists I can have science set to 10% and still get any tech in 4 turns! Once I get longevity and mass transit I will set science to 0, so the governors turn all specialists to taxmen and I should be making over 6000 per turn profit.

I thought this would take forever, but if you turn the governor off in the capital, there isn't the long delay of when your adding each worker, the governor has to recalculate how to assign the specialists. I just turn the governor off before adding the 100+ workers, then back on before I end my turn.

I should end up with a score of 35-40,000 on this huge map I'm playing, but I bet I could have beat Aeson's 60,000 pts he got on deity, if I played this map again, or if I played on Monarch level.

The demographics screen is a mess. Notice I have a negative population and productivity. The capital had several billion people ages ago, now it should be in the trillions, but when I look at the city screen the population numbers overlap with the date.

 

[Creepster]

Bamspeedy,

That is impressive!!

I am sure that the other civs are not capable of this, but wouldn't it just suck if they nuked Washington. Talk about a major population loss.

I can't wait to try this. I am going to have to give it a try this weekend.