Handling non-despotism and/or golden age

[Chicken Pizza]

Both should be entered as soon as possible, for the exponentional benefit, right?

Just like starting at a site with extra food, or other means of early growth like the pyramids from a scientific leader, can mean that you double your power in the longer run.

But both open up a new can of worms, or possibilities actually. Too many.

In monarchy and republic, suddenly hills become the most valuable tiles. But they need 12 worker turns to develop. Am I better off using those workers to road ahead for a war, or building settlers instead of workers?

Every time I go into republic, I tend to develop my existing cities until I've forgotten to expand at all.

When I combine that with going into golden age early, I lose maybe 15-20% shields/food and some gold.

Because I don't yet have developed land, variated, I can't controll this explosion of resources, and it annoys me very much.

 

[justanick]

Both should be entered as soon as possible, for the exponentional benefit, right?

Entering non-despotism as early as possible is (usually) a no-brainer. The one relevant exception would be that you have entered the golden age. Donnot waste your golden age into anarchy.

A despotic golden age can make sense, especially if that is needed to enter non-despotism earlier. This can be the case if you ever dare to play at Sid. If need to use your golden age for mere survival, then you need to use it, obviously. Also research at Sid is so damn expensive that your golden age will be needed to cut research times down to reasonable levels to simply get the tech for the republic.

If you donnot need your golden age to enter non-despotism or for mere survival, then you have the freedom to wait a little longer. If you wait till you have 10+ cities of size 10+ and with properly improved tiles being used, then your absolute gain from the golden age will be bigger. This absolute gain seems to be a relevant consideration since the golden age is limited to 20 turns or slightly less than 20 turns if you use a wonder to trigger it.

You probably want to trigger it after you have libraries, but before universities, as the later offer a good way to use the shields from the golden age.

In monarchy and republic, suddenly hills become the most valuable tiles. But they need 12 worker turns to develop. Am I better off using those workers to road ahead for a war, or building settlers instead of workers?

In general you want to build settlers before workers. But by the time you have entered anarchy to enter non-despotism(anarchy still has the despostism penalty, thus it is not yet non-despotism) you tend to have built enough settler for all towns with less than 70% corruption prior to courthouses.

At Emperor on a standard map this means 18 towns in addition to your capital or 22 if you play a commercial tribe. Counting in the forbidden palace increases the numbers to 24 and 28 respectively, but that forbidden palace needs to be built first, so it may be wise to not count in the forbidden palace at this point in time.

If you have reached such an amount of towns you donnot want to expand at all costs. Once you hit that right amount of settlers corruption wise or once you cannot expand further without war it is often a good idea to improve your existing towns and let them grow to become cities(size7+). Often the limits of corruption and AI taking territory with its settlers do coincide, at least roughly.

Entering non-despotism is the first major goal in the game, reaching city-size is the next one. In a republic each worker past free unit support cost 2 gtp. This matters. You need to economize in a reasonable manner. Improving hills can usually wait. Improve the cheaper tiles first, also because they tend to offer more food for urgently needed growth. You may also want to road first if this unlocks the commerce bonus for that tile. Still properly mined hills are needed once you reach the population limits of size 12 or 6. You want to use properly improved hills to get shields while food only matters once you have lifted the population limit by building an aqueduct. Aqueducts are a crucial building. Once you have the needed tech "construction" you may want to lower research in favour of generating cash for rushing aqueducts. Buy a courthouse for 80 shields and switch to aqueduct for the remaining 20 shields via regular means.

The early republic is a big challange. Finding the right ballance there is something that arguably every good player struggles with. You are not alone with this.

Every time I go into republic, I tend to develop my existing cities until I've forgotten to expand at all.

This is not a big problem if you have expanded reasonably far. You donnot want to overstretch your limited resources. Improve our existing empire and aim for military tradtion to expand it once you have a reasonable amount of cavalry. They have more speed and and meaningful increase in the attack value, but only marginal higher costs. Cavalry revolutionizes warfare.

 

[Chicken Pizza]

My problem is that a 10 pop city usually will give me at least 20 shields/turn in golden age republic, and some more.

So building horsemen or swordmen wastes at least 25% of my shields. Archers is a possibilty, but who needs them.

Basically: in an early golden age, military units don't cost enough, and there's only so many city improvements to build instead, often useless at the time.

 

[justanick]

My problem is that a 10 pop city usually will give me at least 20 shields/turn in golden age republic, and some more.

So building horsemen or swordmen wastes at least 25% of my shields. Archers is a possibilty, but who needs them.

Basically: in an early golden age, military units don't cost enough, and there's only so many city improvements to build instead, often useless at the time.

This sounds to me that your research is insufficient. If you advance at 4 turns per tech you should be able to build MedInf, Musketmen or Knights. Still using the GA for a focus on military production seems unwise. If you have nothing better to build you might as well build wonders. Sun Tzu is really expensive, but saving 1 gtp on every barrack can save quite some money in the long run.

Why do you not advance faster in tech? At this point i have to use quite some guesswork, but it seems that you did not give settlers the priority they deserve before leaving despotism.

At emperor on a standard map research costs 30 beakers per base point. Gunpowder costs 48 base points and thus 1440 beakers in total which equals 360 beakers per turn at 4 turns per tech.

In a republic it is a reasonable assumption for tiles to yield 2.5 base commerce on average. If this mitigated by 20% corruption it is still 2.0 base comerce after corruption or 3 beakers with a library. 10 times 10 citizens working such tiles will give you 300 beakers per turn, at least at 100% research. Likely you need to discount about 20% for luxury rate and possibly a bit on taxing, too. So maybe you are at 210 beaker per turn from your core-cities, which would take 6.86 turns per tech.

Once you have 10 cities of size 12 in the inner core and further 8 cities of size 10 in the semicore with a presumed average of 40% corruption you would be able to yield about 10*12*2.5*0.8*1.5*0.7 + 8*10*2.5*0.6*1.5*0.7 = 378 beakers per turn. At this point i did not count in the city tiles, which tend to give more than 2.5 base commerce before corruption. They add a further about 50 beakers per turn or 75 if your tribe has the commercial trait.

A reasonable developed empire of 18 cities on a standard map can achieve 4 turns per techs reasonable soon.

 

[vorlon_mi]

"Once you have 10 cities of size 12 in the inner core and further 8 cities of size 10 in the semicore "
How do you keep all those citizens content or happy, especially at Emperor difficulty? What's your setting for the luxury slider?

So many of my maps have only 3 luxuries that I could settle on or invade easily. That's not nearly enough to keep size-12 cities happy, even with Marketplaces.

 

[justanick]

How do you keep all those citizens content or happy, especially at Emperor difficulty? What's your setting for the luxury slider?

I did assume it to be 20%, but if it goes up to 30% or 40% it is also acceptable, at least in the short run. Donnot avoid growth in fear of a bit luxury rate.

So many of my maps have only 3 luxuries that I could settle on or invade easily. That's not nearly enough to keep size-12 cities happy, even with Marketplaces.

At only 3 luxuries marketplaces donnot cut it. You should aim at 5 or 6 luxuries, out of which some will need to be imported. Imports pay off as they enable you to lower the luxury slider.

3 luxuries with market places give 4 happy faces.
4 luxuries with market places give 6 happy faces.
5 luxuries with market places give 9 happy faces.
6 luxuries with market places give 12 happy faces.

At 6 luxuries and size 12 you need zero luxury slider.
At 5 luxuries and size 12 you lack 2 happy or content faces.
At 4 luxuries and size 12 you lack 5 happy or content faces.
At 3 luxuries and size 12 you lack 7 happy or content faces.
At 2 luxuries and size 12 you lack 9 happy or content faces.
At 1 luxury and size 12 you lack 10 happy or content faces.
At zero luxuries and size 12 you lack 11 happy or content faces.

The lack of happy or content faces can be mitigated by wonders or temples, the later seems like a bad idea.

Say your size 12 city has 33 commerce before corruption and 26 after corruption. Those 26 would be the figure that the luxury rate is applied on. Rounding can differ pending the research rate.

40% luxury rate give 10 happy faces.
30% luxury rate give 8 happy faces.
20% luxury rate give 5 happy faces.
10% luxury rate give 3 happy faces.

40% are needed for 1 or 2 luxuries, 30% for 3 luxuries, 20% for 4 luxuries and 10% for 5 luxuries.

 

[vorlon_mi]

OK, thanks, that helps a lot. I play a lot of continents maps, which have 3-4 luxuries on my land mass and the rest on the other land mass.

Assume 4 luxuries available before I can trade across oceans.
- with Marketplaces, I can get 6 happy faces (as you write above)
- At 4 luxuries and size 12 you lack 5 happy or content faces
- 20% luxury rate give 5 happy faces

The math works out; yes, I should grow my cities faster and run 20% slider. I've been leaving the slider at 10% in Republic, just out of habit, and limiting my city population growth.

If I am playing a Pangaea map, then I could import more luxuries in the middle ages, without ocean trade. I might get lucky with an Archipelago map, if enough islands are separated by Sea tiles.

 

[tjs282]

At only 3 luxuries marketplaces donnot cut it. You should aim at 5 or 6 luxuries, out of which some will need to be imported.

I usually play on Archipelago/Continents maps, so generally find the most difficult period for Happiness is the time between going to Republic (which usually heralds the end of the Ancient Age, one way or another), and someone reaching (and trading) Astro (Sea trade) and Navigation (Ocean trade). Because until then, importing Luxuries (from overseas) may not be possible.

Map size isn't even really the issue, since even a 5-tile channel on a Small/Standard map can be blocked to resource-trading by one measly Ocean tile in the middle. But of course inaccessible resources are increasingly likely to be found on larger maps.

The math works out; yes, I should grow my cities faster and run 20% slider. I've been leaving the slider at 10% in Republic, just out of habit, and limiting my city population growth.

My general rule of thumb is that if I'm finding that I need to run at least one Specialist in, say, >half of my core towns to maintain order (and/or getting riot-warnings from CAII for those towns without Specialists) — and especially if I've already got Libs/Markets up in those towns — then it's almost certainly (past) time to raise the Lux-slider another notch.

Of course, being pre-emptive with moving the slider would likely be even better than reacting to the problem, but I'm still not very good at predicting whether the next citizen born in any given town will be content or unhappy at my current LUX%...

 

[need my speed]

40% luxury rate give 10 happy faces.
30% luxury rate give 8 happy faces.
20% luxury rate give 5 happy faces.
10% luxury rate give 3 happy faces.

Could you explain this a bit more? Surely putting my luxury slider at 10% doesn't give all of my cities three happy faces (or two, if their base happiness is one)? I never quite figured out the precise mathematics behind the luxury slider - how does it work? Does my total commerce matter (e.g. for science, an X% of my total commerce is converted to breakers, but commerce isn't so directly converted to happy faces, obviously)? Does the city size matter? What does the luxury slider do, in detail, beyond 'a higher percentage equals more happy faces'?

 

[justanick]

Could you explain this a bit more? Surely putting my luxury slider at 10% doesn't give all of my cities three happy faces (or two, if their base happiness is one)? I never quite figured out the precise mathematics behind the luxury slider - how does it work?

First all commerce yields from tiles worked by the citizens of a city and the commerce yield of the city tile are added together. This happens for every city seperately, obviously. Say you have the city tile with 3 commerce, 6 regular tiles with 3 commerce and further 6 regular tiles with 2 commerce. That totals to a base commerce of 33.

Second corruption is calculated. This figure will vary a lot. A limited amount of cities closest to the capital will have low corruption, but the further away you go the higher the corruption will become. 20% corruption would mean a base commerce after corruption of 26, 40% corruption would mean a base commerce after corruption of 20 and 60% corruption would mean a base commerce after corruption of 13. At this point some rounding had occured and indeed it is only the rounded figures that are used in the next step.

Third base commerce after corruption is divided upon 1. research slider, 2. luxury slider and 3. taxes. If two sliders compete over the rounding of 0.5 base commerce, than research will win over luxury slider and luxury slider will win over taxes. Say you have 70% research slider and 20% luxury slider and 10% remaining as taxes. Then a base commerce after corruption of 26 will give 18 on research, 5 on luxury and 3 on taxes. For a base commerce after corruption of 20 it is 14 on research, 4 on luxury and 2 on taxes. For a base commerce after corruption of 13 it is 9 on research, 3 on luxury and 1 on taxes.

Fourth building multipliers apply. Say you have +100% research by library and university and +50% taxes by market place and +0% on luxury slider because an unmodded C3C has no such building. Each base commerce after corruption spent on the luxury slider gives you one happy face.

This means that 18 base commerce on research is 36 beakers, 3 base commerce on taxes is 4 gold and 5 base commerce on luxury slider is 5 happy faces.
14 base commerce on research is 28 beakers, 2 base commerce on taxes is 3 gold and 4 base commerce on luxury slider is 4 happy faces.
9 base commerce on research is 18 beakers, 1 base commerce on taxes is 1 gold and 2 base commerce on luxury slider is 2 happy faces.

Corruption implies that cities outside the inner core could require an unreasonable high luxus rate, much higher than the inner core needs.

The conclusion is that your inner core should grow and develop first and that further outside letting cities grow is less important, at some point using scientist experts with 3 beakers per turn is the way to go.

 

[need my speed]

Huh, okay, so it is actually literally the net amount of commerce that a city makes, that influences how effective the luxury slider will be for this city, on a 1:1 basis? So if my city makes 12 net commerce, and I put my luxury slider at 100%, I get +12 happy faces? That is more powerful than I had imagined.

Thank you for your extensive explanation!

 

[justanick]

Huh, okay, so it is actually literally the net amount of commerce that a city makes, that influences how effective the luxury slider will be for this city, on a 1:1 basis? So if my city makes 12 net commerce, and I put my luxury slider at 100%, I get +12 happy faces?

Yes.

Buildings can increase it to higher numbers and some mods have such buildings.

 

[tjs282]

So if my city makes 12 net commerce, and I put my luxury slider at 100%, I get +12 happy faces? That is more powerful than I had imagined.

Bear in mind, though, that 'happy faces' in this context does not refer to the number of 'Happy' citizens in the city view.

Rather 'Happyfaces' is a third type of currency generated by a town (the other 2 types being 'Gold' and 'Beakers'), which is "spent" to make (first) Unhappy citizens into Content citizens, and (then, when no more citizens are Unhappy) Content citizens into Happy citizens in that town only.

So in a city with 6 Unhappy citizens, all 12 of the Happyfaces in your hypothetical would be needed to make those 6 citizens Happy. Conversely, 6 Happyfaces (50% LUX) would make those 6 citizens Content, which might be all that would be 'needed' to prevent a riot; the Happy citizens just need to equal or outnumber the Unhappy citizens (unless you want to trigger a WLTKD, in which case all Unhappiness must be alleviated) .

i.e. 100% LUX-slider would rarely if ever be necessary (and if it is, then something else has likely gone badly wrong!)

 

[justanick]

the Happy citizens just need to equal or outnumber the Unhappy citizens (unless you want to trigger a WLTKD, in which case all Unhappiness must be alleviated) .

That is correct.

Rather 'Happyfaces' is a third type of currency generated by a town (the other 2 types being 'Gold' and 'Beakers'), which is "spent" to make (first) Unhappy citizens into Content citizens, and (then, when no more citizens are Unhappy) Content citizens into Happy citizens in that town only.

That is not quite correct.

Content faces(orange) are created by military police and buildings such as temples. Content faces make unhappy citizens content, but they cannot make content citizens happy.

Happy faces(yellow) are created by entertainers, luxuries, luxus slider and war happyness (if war had been declared upon you). Happy faces make content citizen happy. If no content citizen is left over, but happy faces are still available, then happy faces are used to make unhappy citizens content.

In most circumstances city size is high enough for all content faces to be used. An ideal situation is at size 10 your 5 luxuries give you 9 happy faces out of which 1 is used to make a content citizen happy and 8 are used to make 4 unhappy citizens happy. This leaves you with 5 happy and 5 unhappy citizens, a perfect balance.

 

[need my speed]

Thank you all very much. And yep, I actually added something like a Newspaper Office (I don't remember) with Printing Press that increases the effect of the luxury slider by 50%, a month or so ago, just to see what it would do.

 

[Chicken Pizza]

"Once you have 10 cities of size 12 in the inner core and further 8 cities of size 10 in the semicore "
How do you keep all those citizens content or happy, especially at Emperor difficulty? What's your setting for the luxury slider?

So many of my maps have only 3 luxuries that I could settle on or invade easily. That's not nearly enough to keep size-12 cities happy, even with Marketplaces.

War

You neighbours are going to land a horseman somewhere someday anyway, so you may as well protect yourself. Four or five more units and constant war, is worth it as long as you don't have to trade technologies.

Civilizations over ocean can't even reach you. No war weariness, just happiness, your people know you're at war with bananistan because you are doing good for the world.

I don't know if someone making war on you makes more happiness than the opposite though?

 

[justanick]

I don't know if someone making war on you makes more happiness than the opposite though?

If war is declared upon you, then you get war happyness. War happyness gives you one (invisible) happy face for every 4 population points.

Size 1 to 3: 0
Size 4 to 7: 1
Size 8 to 11: 2
Size 12 to 15: 3
Size 16 to 19: 4
Size 20 to 23: 5
Size 24 to 27: 6
Size 28 to 31: 7

If you declare war, then you donnot get war happyness. However, there is a chance that war happyness from an earlier war may reawaken. So while declaring war does cause war happyness, it may undo undoing it.

War weariness needs to be considered:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-does-war-weariness-work.61628/

 

[Chicken Pizza]

Entering non-despotism as early as possible is (usually) a no-brainer.

But let's say that I've just made the Republic slingshot and have six towns with 1 or 2 citizens each.

Republic grants the possibility to irrigate grassland and speed up growth, double it if you want, but faster growth means more workers to keep up with it.

More workers mean more upkeep, so I can't keep researching during this phase, I barely make enough gold with 0% science.

Should I just be pumping out workers at this republic stage, or could it sometimes be worth it to delay switching from Despotism?

I'm far away from Construction with their aqueducts, so not being able to research for quite a while (although it gets better and better when my towns grow) means that I'll have to build stuff that I don't want...

...when abundant food becomes shields, if I planned my land correctly with mined plains to match the irrigated grasslands, at town size 6.

 

[justanick]

or could it sometimes be worth it to delay switching from Despotism?

No. The only exception would be war. What good is switching into republic, when during anarchy you lose half your empire or more?

But let's say that I've just made the Republic slingshot and have six towns with 1 or 2 citizens each.

Republic grants the possibility to irrigate grassland and speed up growth, double it if you want, but faster growth means more workers to keep up with it.

The key is building settlers. Before you have completed settling all free territory you need to concentrate on settlers.

At this point you may have around 1 worker per town. You donnot need more because building settlers reduces population by 2. Settling increases population by 1 but you also get the city tile which does not need any improvining and the new settlement also increases free unit support.

You may even choose to found settlements, that you will abandon at some point during the middle ages.

On balance this will help a great deal with unit support for workers. Irrigation helps with building settlers. If you run into a problem of growing too fast you may choose to employ scientists that give you 3 beakers per turn. You do want to have construction soon for higher free units support and also for simply not wasting you net output of food.

You may end up having settled all free territory before you have construction. Then it is fine to increase workers to about 2 per town. It will put some stress on your finances, but it is acceptable. It will not reduce you research output too much.

When settling keep in mind that coastal towns have the advantage of fewer tiles needing to be improved. Still you need harbours to properly utilize coast and sea tiles.

There is some chance that you run out of useful uses for your shields. You donnot want to build more workers than you can utilize and you donnot want more workers than you can pay for. You also donnot want to have more military than you can pay for. At this point wealth is an option to bridge a few turns. Wealth gives only 1 gold per 4 shields, but 1 shield still gives 1 gold. So this rounding is something to keep in mind in the ancient age.