India is FAR stronger than i thought.

rawrkitty

Chieftain
Joined
Aug 9, 2014
Messages
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So i was playing a game with my friends the other night, and in order to handicap myself i decided to play a "wide" india playthrough. seems extremely counterproductive and a good way to handicap yourself, right? Wrong.
i had a lot of food sources and completely dominated.. the rate of civ growth and science was higher than ive ever seen and after the game i was kind of confused, was i lucky? a little, but still.

so i did some math.

each city adds 3 unhappiness (6 as ghandi) and population adds 1 (.5 as ghandi)

with 0% unhappiness reduction

3 + 1p 6p = 9 7p = 10

6 + .5p 6p = 9 7p = 9.5



with 15% unhappiness reduction.

3 + .85p 6p = 8.1 7p = 8.95 8p = 9.8

6 + .425p 6p = 8.55 7p = 8.975 8p = 9.4

So:

with 0 unhappiness reduction modifier, ghandi has equal unhappiness at 6 pop, better at 7

with 15% unhappiness reduction modifier, ghandi has near(L) equal unhappiness at 7 pop, better at 8.


Assuming there is a flat growth of unhappiness per citizen/city, wide india... is obscenely good if you manage to get all of your cities to 12-20 pop like i did.
the only time this trails off hard is when specialists start coming into play, each specialist is something like 2.2 times more costly relative to a regular citizen. but even then, if your cities are large enough, and if you go democracy the strengths far out weigh the cost. wide india is scary. and i'd put it up there with bablyon/maya/poland if you can play them properly and there's enough food to settle on.
 
Oh yes it is widely accepted that India is best played Wide
 
Not to mention that the UU is great for early war to make space to go wide.
 
The one problem with India is by the time you can afford getting expands out there are already no space left.
 
The one problem with India is by the time you can afford getting expands out there are already no space left.


Castles provide tourism too after hotels which is kind of swell. I'm thinking of play a huge game just for the achievement and think idia might be the best
 
[ ... ] and i'd put it up there with bablyon/maya/poland if you can play them properly and there's enough food to settle on.

That's a pretty extreme statement.

The real issue I have with playing as India is that there is a time in the early game where the Indian UA is a handicap: before the majority of your early cities have hit the break-even point of 6 population, the situation feels quite fragile to me.

Meanwhile, lots of other civilizations are at their prime in this time period, and nobody else is worse off than a vanilla civ. The later advantage comes at too high a cost for my taste.
 
That's a pretty extreme statement.

The real issue I have with playing as India is that there is a time in the early game where the Indian UA is a handicap: before the majority of your early cities have hit the break-even point of 6 population, the situation feels quite fragile to me.

Meanwhile, lots of other civilizations are at their prime in this time period, and nobody else is worse off than a vanilla civ. The later advantage comes at too high a cost for my taste.

With the early UU, they are not really vanilla. I think you have to modify the opening and go for a water mill to help get past size 6 in city 1 faster.
 
With the early UU, they are not really vanilla. I think you have to modify the opening and go for a water mill to help get past size 6 in city 1 faster.

Fair, the UU would help with some congestion issues, but at all the trade offs early war normally brings. The water mill is a good idea.

A cargo-ship to the newly founded city will have it up to pop 6 in no time

I hate it when people fall back on this argument. This makes several assumptions which are simply not true for most games. First off, both cities needing to be coastal is pretty limiting for some maps. Second is assuming you have a cargo ship early enough to boost your second and third cities. Finally, assuming you'd commit your ship to food instead of gold: I'm often left with a deficit early game and need trade routes to offset that.
 
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