Pre Update
Welcome back to Justinian and the deities. It's been awhile and I start my 1400 AD turn with a full review of the situation. Since sharing my thoughts is kind of a trademark for the University, I decided to write them down. Well, turns out thinking is a lot faster than writing
First thing: resource check. Although often uncredited, resources are massively important for the success or failure of any economic strategy.
There are 11 health resources in CIV, 9 happy, and three mid-ground. There are also 3 more happy resources from lategame wonders.
In health, we have three out of three granary ones (corn, wheat, import rice), three out of three harbor (fish, crab, import clam), four out of four supermarket (sheep, deer, pig, import cow), and import bananas from grocer ones. We have the other three grocer resources as well, the mid-ground wine, sugar, and spices, the latter two imported.
In happy, we have three out of four marketplace (fur, ivory, silk) and our expanding culture will net us whales in 2 turns. Forge ones are not that good, gold is abundant, but silver is nowhere to be found on the planet, and there are only two gem mines, in Arabia, the extra one traded to Boudica. Finally, the odd ones: we've got incense, however dyes are Malinese monopoly and I'm not trading with world villain #1. Then again, Byzantines get only half the effect of dye, the other half is from horse and we have plenty of them.
Recap: with proper infrastructure for our tech level, we get 15 happy faces and 18 health (21 in ports). Add base for 19/20, aquaduct, colloseum, state religion, AP hindu temple, and we hit 22/22, plus more for sea, fresh water, christian/taoist temples (we have holy cities on those), state cathedrals, occasional forests and of course the Byzantine Hippodrume when we really need to combat unhappiness, and you see sticking to FE won't be problematic in the long run, if we go that road.
That is, in the perfect city. As it is, I need to run 10% culture rate to combat emancipation unhappiness in Constatinople so that the GP generation schedule is met (more on that later). Constatinople is building a marketplace and with whales that's 5 more happy faces in six tuns...but six turns are too much on normal speed deity. One of the unhappy faces in Constatinople is certainly Justinian's own!
There is our first priority: more infrastructure. Three ways to get it:
- universal suffrage buying isn't a bargain at 3 for 1, because towns don't produce commerce three times the hammer rate of workshops, and also the Byzantine empire has only three decently cottaged cities.
- slavery is alright, but will greatly interfere with GP production. And if we can't mass produce GPs we'd better trade for Democracy and adopt emancipation and not bother with big cities.
- good ole hammers. Never out of fashion. Caste is on, SP can be on, levees can be started right away, factories and coal plants can be next tech. A Caste/SP workshop is 4 hammers now, 8 with forge/powered factory. Compare to a village, 4 commerce after 15 turns of investment under emancipation. Workshops win hands down. Even for research: workshops are still better at 8 slider independent beakers v 7 when library, university, and observatory are present. It will take towns, and Free Speech towns at that, to beat this research rate, and of course towns can't beat the infrastructure rate of caste/sp workshops.
State Property has two downsides. Right now, we get a lot out of trade routes. Tomorrow it's the corporations. The game is now patched to 3.13 and corporation maintenance is manageable. Corporations are a new thing and increase the importance of resources even more. I take the time to review them. The "food based" ones (Mills, Sushi, Standard Ethanol) compete each other in a vicious circle. Assuming we'll be able to buy off extra resources from the likes of Saladin, Mills will net 6-8 food, SE will net ~14 beakers, and Sushi will net ~8 food and 30+ culture. Sushi is definitely good, and it is also researchable right away (Medicine).
So there is priority #2: a GM for Sushi. We'll get back to this in a bit.
The mining corps aren't nearly as good for us. They compete as a three-pronged star, with Mining Inc in the center fighting everyone else. As I said, we don't have many ores in our empire, despite its huge size. I'm still kind of surprised how we got about to winning deity with one Iron resource half a continent away and one bronze resource that's not even on our landmass!
Precious ores aren't much better, only four golds. We also lack stone and have a couple of marbles. Coal and Aluminium are unknown as of yet, although Coal tech can be traded for right away. We'll probably have a few. Overall, mining corps aren't that impressive under the circumstances, not to mention they require either far away techs or great engineers. We can't use Caste to guarantee a GE, and the wisdom of using one for a corp at this point of the game is doubtful. There are some great wonders to be built yet, and there are a couple of very expensive and powerful national wonders to be built yet too.
Back to trade routes. On a sidenote, the patching bugged all currently built custom houses by not updating them to 100% bonus. Oh well, there goes all the effort to build custom houses for academy/bureaucracy synergy in Constantinople and Numidian.
Back to trade routes, take three. We've got 17 cities, 68 trade routes under FM. Out of those, 33 are foreign. We only get one trade route per foreign city, and Saladin, Ceaser, Boudica, and Suleiman have 33 cities in total. The other 35 routes are internal. Unlike foreign, internal trade allows a city to feature multiple times. Consequently most of these 35 routes are to Constatinople (biggest city, therefore biggest base value) or to Greenland isle cities Angle/Laodicea (+100% for oversea routing).
Conclusion: switching to SP will kill 17 internal routes and will reroute 1 from bureaucratic capital. That's about 40 commerce less. On the other hand SP will kill city distance maintenance (currently 30ish, 40ish adjusted for inflation) and reduce civic cost by ~15 adjusted for inflation. Since we're saving gold with SP, it's fair to multiply the lost commerce by the gold modifiers, which are pitifully low, with only three banks and few market/grocer empire-wide. So we get what we lose, and we add food on workshops/watermills and 10% prod bonus. The switch to SP is greenlighted. It's so cool to be Spiritual
Next: eyeing the competition - they also get resources and trade routes
).
less when financial, while it completely fails to (ab)use farms/workshops the way a human FE player (which is us in this game) can.
