How optimum is optimum?

[ese-aSH]

atreas you speak of higher difficulties... you should know that then worken are to be stolen to an ennmy civ =] no need to build them
I usually run on a warrior-warrior built, let my city grow to its happyness limit (default in emperor : 4 - 1 du to whip = 3). By the time my city reaches 3 I have stolen 2 workers most of the time, the settler is constructed fast using whip overflow, but i rarely chop. lossing forest to chop a settler (you need 4 forest ^^) dont seems optimum to me : health problems (unless youre expansive), inefficient (youd better use your forest for military units - or wait construction).. And having an early 2nd city not improved is not a good thing (unless organized + 2nd city site near your capital so it wont cost anything to you) : I always build the road first (using one of my 2 settlers) and start ilmproving adjacent tiles the turn when the city is founded.

 

[alatari]

For the experts, yes. For the rest of us, I believe it's 'cross your fingers and pray!'

You neglected to mention the thread for diety advice...

 

[alatari]

At diety levels the health limit with no fresh water is 1 with fresh water it's 3 so growing to happiness limit is impossible without two loaves of bread.
I always include a warrior in the first 20 turns because his 10 experience points and the intel of the surrounding area are as important as a minor wonder. If he finds some villages and collects 80 coins or another scout/warrior then that saved some resources.

1 food .=. 2 hammers .=. 8 coins

So his finding 80 coins from 2 villages is about another 20 hammers to consider and if he finds 40 coins and 1 warrior then thats about 40 hammers. Even if he finds a hostile village thats about 3 to 5 experience points.

How many coins is 1 point of experience worth?
Anyone have an idea how to figure that?

 

[Eqqman]

You neglected to mention the thread for diety advice...

As we are unfamiliar with sarcasm, I will now close the register and inform you that 99 cents refers to the rental price.

 

[malekithe]

2 hammers .=. 8 coins

This may not be the place to debate it, but I believe you're seriously under-valuing commerce. 2H = 4C is more common, and typically what I use.

 

[alatari]

Bah.

Thanks for the 2 cents Eggman which I will promptly invest in a single sunflower seed

 

[alatari]

malekithe, how do your figure out your exchange?

I approximated mine from several places:

silver 1H = 5C
gems 1H = 6C
gold 1H = 7C
early workshop instead of village (by the time workshops can be built)
-> 1H = 3C
later workshops and printing press town => 2H = 5C
mines vs town -> 2H = 4C
mine vs town (printing press) -> 2H=5C
mine vs town (democracy/printing press) -> 2H = 1H 5C or 1H = 5C

All of those values are greater than the exchange you mention except for mine to town. Maybe with railroads +1 on mines but by then the democracy gives +1 hammer per town so its 3H = 1H 5C -> 2H=5C

 

[malekithe]

I base my valuations, more or less, on equating the value of a mine and a hamlet, both on grassland (mine on a hill, of course). The mine would be 1F 3H, hamlet is 2F 2C. So, 3H needs to be equal to 1F 2C. If 1F = 2H, then 1H = 2C. I don't include special resource in the calculation because those are random and offer a special case where you can trade hammers for commerce (or vice versa) at very efficient rates. I don't care about workshops, because they are a remarkably inefficient improvement until chemistry. You can't simply look at improvement to get your tradeoff, you have to look at improvements as they are used in the game. I also don't care as much about what the trade-off is later in the game. By that point you've adapted your empire such that you're valueing either hammers or commerce more than normal (running Free Speech, for instance, means you intend to focus on commerce, thus making hammers more rare).

Also, with Universal Suffrage you can cash-rush for 3 gold per hammer. A mere 50% gold bonus gives you an effective rate of 2C per hammer. Throw another 50% bonus into the mix and you're looking at 1.5C per hammer. This is a very special case where you've taken pains to maximize the value of commerce.

Basically, what I'm saying is that, at the beginning of the game, you choose between hammers and commerce at about a 1:2 ratio. As the game progresses, you tailor that rate to what you desire more in the game. If you construct buildings and research techs that increase your hammer output, you're guaranteed to make commerce more rare, thus increasing its value.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

How many coins is 1 point of experience worth?
Anyone have an idea how to figure that?

First, figure out the sorts of battles that you expect him to fight. You can probably make some guess at this by looking at the XML to figure out barbarian and animal spawning rates. For example (I'm making up these numbers; they aren't from the XML), maybe you expect him to fight a lion 35% of the time, a wolf 25% of the time, a bear 10% of the time, a warrior 20% of the time, and an archer 10% of the time.

Second, figure out the combat odds for each of those battles with no promotions and with one promotion (whatever promotion you would give to him). You need to calculate this several times for different terrains to get a weighted average based on terrain frequency. For example, let's say you expect 20% of tiles to be hills and 10% to be forest. You would have a huge set of combat odds and weights:

• no promotion, vs. lion, flatland
• no promotion, vs. lion, flatland forest
• no promotion, vs. lion, hill
• no promotion, vs. lion, hill forest
• no promotion, vs. wolf, flatland
• ...
• promotion, vs. lion, flatland
• ...

Using that, you can figure out the value of the promotion. Lets say the promotion increases his survival odds by 10% on average. Then the promotion saves you .1 * 15 hammers. One experience point is half a promotion, so the experience point saved you .75 hammers using these example numbers.

Note that this means the value of the first two experience points (half a promotion each) is different than the value of the next 3 (one third of a promotion) which is different from the 5 after that ...

Having said all that, I can't imagine that it's worth actually calculating this.

 

[Eqqman]

Bah

Guess we're unfamiliar with the Simpsons too... 0 for 2 in the joke department.

 

[alatari]

Having said all that, I can't imagine that it's worth actually calculating this.

Dang, is everyone woken up on the wrong side of the bed?


When losing a single warrior who was scouting out the next city site causes the city that is building the pyramids to delay 4 turns to replace him and ends up costing you the pyramids then that cost is extreme. You must count losses into your calculation of the value of that experience gained by that woodsman which made him invulnerable to death from the basic barbarians.

Not to mention the lost time in your life by restarting the game.

Woodsman II is 5 points and effectively keeps the warrior alive against any single early danger. That 5 points keeps your from spending 30 more hammers so 6H per experience. Losing the pyramids to having to respawn a warrior is 1330 H per 5 experience or 266H or 532C++ depending on your value of hammers.

 

[alatari]

I don't include special resource in the calculation because those are random and offer a special case where you can trade hammers for commerce (or vice versa) at very efficient rates.

Every city must be built near one of those money bag resources or it's not worth to build so that value can't be eliminated from the average value of coins to hammers taken across the entire city resource 'plus'.

Every city must have a village or town in the 'plus' to pay off the maintenance costs. So those are 1H=3C or 4C

So maybe an average size 12 city with:

center = 2F 1H 1C
2 loafs = 10F 0H 0C
1 money bag = 1F 2H 7C
1 town = 2F 0H 4C
3 mines = 3F 9H 0C
3 grassland hamlet = 6F 0H 6C
2 coast or lake = 4F 0H 4C

28F 12H 22C -> 1H = 1.8C

So I can live with your assessment for pre-rail, pre-printing press, non-financial leaders.

Thanks for your insights.

 

[alatari]

Just wanted to post this. I respect Godonut a lot so her's what he says:

3 Gold = 1 Hammer

Good Luck!

 

[ohioastronomy]

Interesting discussion here. I'm just returning to Civ4 after a long break (real life, other games!) The items on the second page are really not relevant to my original thread, which was restricted to the question of what you do in the very opening game (up to the founding of the second city). In answer to the first post:

An early worker is powerful because improved tiles are much more valuable than unimproved ones, chopping or no. So you'll benefit from building a worker as soon as they can do something useful (improve a wheat, build a mine, etc.) For slow/hard games, this may not be at the beginning - so time a worker so they arrive when they are useful.

By the same logic, the sooner you get out a settler (and a worker for city 2 - for exactly the same reason as stated above) the better off you'll be in total production. Chopping is definitely less important post-patch. I'm rerunning the numbers, but building a +3 improvement looks to be the best initial worker action, followed by chopping (the acceleration in worker/settler output is still really worth it). For the later game, a "settler/worker farm" becomes more attractive than chopping for cities 3 and beyond. This is the same idea as a great person city - pick a site where you can get a huge food surplus (three food specials is ideal), improve all three, and switch to churning out workers and settlers from that city alone until you have what you can stand to maintain at your difficulty level. Let all of the other cities grow.

Valuing worker turns is also interesting. With chopping reduced, a better value is from getting to use improvements earlier. If I have a city with a big food surplus (so I can grow into improvements as fast as I can build them) worker turns are very valuable - I get the improved yield from the tiles as soon as I build them, and this occurs for every improvement. (I also get a head start on growth into the next tile). If you have a +3, 3 +2, and a +1 (not at all unreasonable) this would be 10 production per worker turn. But if the city is growing more slowly, you don't gain by building things before they're used - so the added value from a worker turn is reduced depending on city growth.

 

[alatari]

So that means to value fishing, agriculture and animal husbandry over any other first technology?

 

[malekithe]

3 Gold = 1 Hammer

Good Luck!

Just wanted to post this. I respect Godonut a lot so her's what he says:

Just found which post you were talking about with that. Godotnut was specifically refering to the exchange rate achieved through Universal Suffrage, not the general going rate of hammers vs. commerce. Moreover, that quote is about the exchange rate between gold and hammers, not commerce and hammers. There is a subtle yet important difference.

 

[ohioastronomy]

So that means to value fishing, agriculture and animal husbandry over any other first technology?

I'd add mining to the list - you can research agriculture or fishing if you need it in your start. But the reduction in the power of chopping means that a fast start depends more on the position. Before, all you needed was 4 forests and bronzeworking and you could do about the same regardless of anything else in the city. Now you take a definite start-time hit if you can't improve a +2 or +3 tile first, unless you're willing to burn 6 forests.

 

[Alraun]

"Epic BW=21, W=19 turns" (in epic you discover BW in 21 turns and produce a worker in 19 turns). This is false for the majority of civs in higher levels - the truth is that without an organised civ you need 28 turns (due to 80% science) or, with a binary tech search, 27 turns (if I didn't miscount - I get bored with this up-down thing).

Uhm, why would you only have an 80% science rate?

 

[malekithe]

Uhm, why would you only have an 80% science rate?

That post was from before the 1.61 patch. Then, the civic maintenence at the beginning of the game on higher difficulties was higher. On Emperor and above, you started out with 2 civic upkeep. This meant, until you discovered some gold in a hut, you were forced to run 80% science.

 

[alatari]

There is no difference between coins and gold in this instance. The game manufacturers placed in the 3 coins to 1 hammer exchange rate for universal sufferage and since all the previous discussion had 1:1.5 up to 1:8 exchanges depending on the worked tile I'll stick with the 1H : 3C as a general rule of thumb.
Malekithe, we will have to agree to disagree on this.