King Younk's Questions thread

I don't think of worker or settler builds in terms of surplus hammers. As soon as slavery is available and city regrowth is possible I try and whip these units - it's more efficient.

In terms of new cities building workers, I avoid this beyond my first 1-2 cities as I'd rather they started growing and contributing ASAP. Try to have a worker go to improve a new city at the same time as settling it or the new city is just a drain on your empire.

 

When you don't have a granary, you should often slow build settlers/workers (unless you have a huge -surplus). Once you have a granary, whipping becomes very good (thus slow building becomes very bad) and you should whip most of your settlers/workers. Maybe sometimes it's OK to cool off whip anger by slow building.

 

Any rules on when to whip/not whip?

 

That's difficult to answer. It's a very broad question but generally it's good to whip when:

1) You have lots of food + Granary for fast regrowth.

2) Your happiness cap is high.

2) You're not whipping away citizens working power tiles. For example you don't want to whip a citizen working a gold mine 50 turns into the game.

3) You have hammer multipliers like Forges, Police State, Kremlin etc. These are only a factor later in the game. Note that once you have Levees and Factories and put up Workshops everywhere you can simply build most things very fast and Slavery is not very beneficial.

When you don't have much food, or you have power tiles or you don't have multipliers you may well still whip but you should think if it's worth it. If you really micro your whips you can do it more optimally like whip when your food bar is almost full. You 2-pop whip but immediately the next turn the city grows so you only lost 1 pop.

 

No rule on "when", that is situational and based on what you are trying to do and what you are whipping. But a good guideline is "don't whip off strong tiles". What I mean by that is don't whip off food specials or tiles like copper or horses. Whipping off cottages, mines and farms is fine. Overlapping cities is actually a good thing, so cities and tile share and keep cottages working, or even share those strong specials while whipping.

Generally early, you are going to 2 pop settlers at size 4 or 5, or 3 pop settlers at size 6+. Workers can be whipped at size 4+. Chops help speed up settler whips. Note the overflow (OF) from whipping.

Granary is the key to whipping, but a starting cap with good food is probably at least going to whip the first couple of settlers. If EXP though, I might try to work in a fast granary in cap earlier than later. If food is more of a premium in the cap, then I'd rely more on chops.

Once new cities get their granary, then whip away.

 

Maybe this is an obvious point, but you can also whip with impunity if going for a conquest victory. You simply don't need a happy population-or even a population at all-once you are going after conquest. Domination is different since you need to hit the population threshold though. But I've had games where I was down to 1 or 2 pop in many cities because I just whipped everything and started chaining capitulations until I won the game. I've done the same with drafting as well.

 

I'm in an interesting position - I am currently the only one with Optics on a Huge map, and therefore the only one able to trade with everyone. How do I capitalize on this advantage to the fullest?

 

Also - when catapults, when trebuchets?

 

Trebuchets are better than catapults when attacking cities; catapults are better than trebuchets when defending and when attacking outside of cities. If you have some catapults around when you first get trebuchets, you can use the catapults for bombarding and the trebuchets for attacking. Later, you can upgrade all of them to cannons.

 

I assume tech brokering is on.

Calendar to Wash for Literature+100g
Calendar to Willy for 290g
Code of Law to Pacal for 250g
Anything to Wang for 430g

Optics+money to Liz or Joao (whichever is less annoying) for Civil Service or whatever of the other 2 you can get.

 

The problem is you're (as usual) massively behind in tech, compared to the leaders. You can catch up a bit by trading what you can with the laggers, which might only give you money. But Pacal, Liz, Justinian, and Huayna are all up at least 5 techs on you, and you don't have much they want. The problem starts much earlier, with bad micro early in the game.

Might help to drop out of your religion so they'll hate you less, that might open up some trades.

 

Thanks for the advice, new question -

How many different specializations of cities are there? For example,

Cottage city
HE/Mil city
Globe Theatre/Draft city
Cultural cities
GP city

What are the different types and what should the ratio look like? Deity players preferred, lol

 

Well Globe city is special, if you go for it (I rarely do). Otherwise... I'd say city specialization does not exist for me at least in the way it seems to exist for you. Maybe in a way of "strong city" which mostly means growing to full potential and "helper city" which means that the city is better than not having a city. Former tends to work cottages and latter tends to stay rather small and whip (workers/settlers/units) or help working cottages for a stronger city. I think a single GP-city is in general ineffective. should mostly be produced during a golden age due to the huge +100% boost (plus another +100% for pacifism obviously).

It's much more effective to specialize your whole empire to do one thing at a time. If we want to be poetic, think about an ocean. The wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. You need to fluctuate your whole empire from peaceful (usually means max ) to war-time (usually means max ). Specializing single cities to do one thing for the whole game does not accomplish this, and thus is inefficient.

 

I agree with Sampsa here, for the most part. I'm still guilty of saying "hey, this capital is cottage heaven, it will make a great Bureau capital." And maybe that may sway me towards trying to get to bureau a little sooner. Other than that, though? I place my cities to get the food in the inner ring, share key tiles, and call it a day. IF I later decide to build, say, heroic epic, I'll make that decision based on the best candidate city at the time. I never really place a city "for" ironworks, or "for" the heroic epic, though.

This is how we all learned to play when the game first came out, but it has since proven to be sub-optimal. The idea at the time was "there are so many buildings to build, so you need to pick certain city types so you'll only be building a handful of buildings in each city, based on the type." The, we all realized that building wealth or units was usually better than ANY building, and city specialization went the way of the Dodo for the most part.

 

Wow, ok. What level are you guys playing on?

 

Deity, immortal if feeling very rusty. Normal speed obviously, which is way harder than marathon.

 

Immortal, Emperor if feeling rusty/lazy. I should probably put "I'm not a deity player" in my signature. I like to spout off a lot but I'm far from the best player around!

 

Immortal/Normal/NHNE is what I play these days.

 

Emperor Marathon Large NTT/No barbs/no vassals this year. Building many wonders. Bunch of buildings. And delaying victory many times. Exactly what I'm looking for in this game after dozen of years

 

Interesting that 2 of the specialist city types you mentioned are just NW cities (HE, GT). You can only have one each of those. I like to pair NE with GLib, so that's a third single-city type.

Cultural cities can be any city with a lot of commerce or production to build I've never intentionally won a culture victory, but those are more about getting multiple religions into any three cities with the production to build lots of Cathedrals, I think.

At this point I'm still predisposed to cottage the crap out of a city with lots of river in the early game, but most of the time, whipping/chopping is more flexible. And after, say, Guilds, almost every new city is a production city (units or wealth).

I don't really play on a level these days.