Marathon/Huge Immortal/Diety, Early Commerce = King

[MarigoldRan]

Agree? Disagree? Your thoughts?

My argument:

More commerce = Earlier BW and Pottery and granaries = More Production.
More commerce = Faster Currency = Ability to REX and/or Rush.

The thing that restricts you early-game is the lack of money to expand and/or rush heavily. The more money you have, the more you can do military-wise and expansion-wise. The best way to utilize the "extra shields" at Marathon is to get more commerce.

 

[cbucks]

Water is wet

 

[MarigoldRan]

Yeah, but the point is that it's different from standard/normal maps. For example, at Marathon/Huge, BW is useless without commerce. The reason is because if you chop and whip too much, you can easily crash your economy. The only way to take advantage of the extra shields is to have more commerce.

Pottery for example is probably consistently more important than BW.

Like, for example, if you have 10 extra commerce, it means you can get all the important techs 20-30 turns earlier than usual.

 

[obsolete]

First of all, this game doesn't use shields....

Second of all, I don't care how much commerce you can start out with, without food and hammers you're not going to get very far.

Not sure how by this date & age commerce can be considered king since every deity player will tell you food & hammers = king. On the other hand, every noble/settler rookie who does cart-wheels when looking at a food-deficit gold tile in their BFC will probably agree with you. But I wouldn't pay 1 cent for any of their advice to be honest...

Doesn't stop them from constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong in my deity games though.

 

[r_rolo1]

First of all, this game doesn't use shields....

Second of all, I don't care how much commerce you can start out with, without food and hammers you're not going to get very far.

Not sure how by this date & age commerce can be considered king since every deity player will tell you food & hammers = king. On the other hand, every noble/settler rookie who does cart-wheels when looking at a food-deficit gold tile in their BFC will probably agree with you. But I wouldn't pay 1 cent for any of their advice to be honest...

Doesn't stop them from constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong in my deity games though.

Even the AI gets that , obsolete ...

Just FYI, the AI values yields by default as:

F: 10
H: 6
C: 4

So, not too far off what you guys had above. In at least some sections of the code, it considers a tile to be "good" if it has a value > 20 and will try to get to a population level where it is working all the > 20 tiles. With this it will work those initial 2F 1C cottages and also 1F 2H forested plains while waiting for lumber mills and such.

When it's working 2F 0H 0C tiles, then it has probably gone above the target population it set for the city ... so yes, if it's working poor tiles then burning off some population on drafting is reasonable.

For the AI 1 = 2,5 and 1 = 1,5 ...

 

[MarigoldRan]

First of all, this game doesn't use shields....

Second of all, I don't care how much commerce you can start out with, without food and hammers you're not going to get very far.

Not sure how by this date & age commerce can be considered king since every deity player will tell you food & hammers = king. On the other hand, every noble/settler rookie who does cart-wheels when looking at a food-deficit gold tile in their BFC will probably agree with you. But I wouldn't pay 1 cent for any of their advice to be honest...

Doesn't stop them from constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong in my deity games though.

It's Marathon/Huge. Commerce unlocks the techs necessary to make productive jumps. Like BW. Emphasize food, cities, and production early-game and your econ crashes. Yes, you need a balance but Marathon/Huge tilts it towards commerce.

In order for production to be useful, you need something to produce. Like libraries for example. Or axemen. Or granaries. All of which requires hard-to-get techs like writing, wheel, pottery, and BW.

By Diety players, you mean Diety players who play standard maps. Right? How much experience have you had with Marathon/Huge?

 

[Abegweit]

Bull It is no more difficult to get techs at marathon than any other setting. And huge means that you can get more cities before your economy crashes.

 

[LeftAdjoint]

The majority opinion certainly seems to hold that marathon/huge is far, far easier than normal settings. As someone who fails regularly on immortal, I think I might try out marathon/huge/deity. I am curious about the result...

OK, as far as the topic. OP's arguments obviously make no sense whatsoever, but at the same time, wouldn't the (relatively) accelerated unit production of marathon mean that an extended pre-alphabet/currency phase would suffer, commerce-wise? Units are cheaper, leaving more hammers for buildings, so you either have higher civic/unit maintenance than normal, or more buildings than normal. Of course, you can easily run out of useful buildings to make very quickly...

Being devil's advocate here just a little bit. Of course, I'm not so much arguing for "early commerce is king" so much as I'm arguing for "early commerce may situationally be slightly raised in priority on marathon".

 

[obsolete]

When playing huge maps, the maintenance scales down for your cities to compensate. So I'm not sure claiming more commerce is needed is valid.

 

[Mylene]

The same is probably true as for all maps, go food and hammers to build wealth directly in some cities if needed.
A crappy cottage city is the same on all maps, a waste of time.

 

[Kid R]

I accept the first 10 or so techs are a real bottleneck on these settings, but I don't think commerce is necessarily the answer. Why not try beelining writing to decouple your research from the slider. If you happen to get there via pottery as well you then have two great buildings to put hammers into instead of units. The slew of early great scientists you get will be a nice surprise too

The OP seems to be assuming =

 

[LeftAdjoint]

When playing huge maps, the maintenance scales down for your cities to compensate. So I'm not sure claiming more commerce is needed is valid.

Ah, I didn't know that. You are quite right.

 

[MarigoldRan]

When playing huge maps, the maintenance scales down for your cities to compensate. So I'm not sure claiming more commerce is needed is valid.

Unit maintenance costs do not scale. Really. Try it.

 

[MarigoldRan]

The same is probably true as for all maps, go food and hammers to build wealth directly in some cities if needed.
A crappy cottage city is the same on all maps, a waste of time.

You need currency to build wealth. Once you have currency, then you're fine. Do whatever you want.

 

[MarigoldRan]

The majority opinion certainly seems to hold that marathon/huge is far, far easier than normal settings. As someone who fails regularly on immortal, I think I might try out marathon/huge/deity. I am curious about the result...

OK, as far as the topic. OP's arguments obviously make no sense whatsoever, but at the same time, wouldn't the (relatively) accelerated unit production of marathon mean that an extended pre-alphabet/currency phase would suffer, commerce-wise? Units are cheaper, leaving more hammers for buildings, so you either have higher civic/unit maintenance than normal, or more buildings than normal. Of course, you can easily run out of useful buildings to make very quickly...

Being devil's advocate here just a little bit. Of course, I'm not so much arguing for "early commerce is king" so much as I'm arguing for "early commerce may situationally be slightly raised in priority on marathon".

Yes. And unit maintenance costs do no scale. To take advantage of the extra units, you need more commerce. Granted that you still need production to build the units, but that's NOT the bottleneck.

So when are you going to play?

 

[MarigoldRan]

I accept the first 10 or so techs are a real bottleneck on these settings, but I don't think commerce is necessarily the answer. Why not try beelining writing to decouple your research from the slider. If you happen to get there via pottery as well you then have two great buildings to put hammers into instead of units. The slew of early great scientists you get will be a nice surprise too

The OP seems to be assuming =

Essentially, you're right. But then you're seriously crimping your expansion unless you also have the Pyramids.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Unit maintenance is based off of population though, isn't it? More cities = higher population = more units for the same price.

Edit: I think the only really true point here, is that since worker turns are cheaper (due to the lower cost of worker movement) this means your workers work faster compared to the speed of teching and building. This means you might need a bit extra commerce early on to keep the guy going without down time. But that is a fairly transient thing, and likely would mean you'd just spend less time building workers instead of more time working commerce.

 

[kossin]

Find the right balance, it's the secret to playing civ ultimately. Once you've got the early economic techs, food and hammers are king until Democracy for towns+US... and even then it's highly debatable as the time it takes to set up 1 cottage city compared to 1 hammer/food city isn't favorable.

 

[MarigoldRan]

Yes. But how do you get more population? Building settlers increase the number of cities. They do not increase pop.

 

[MarigoldRan]

Unit maintenance is based off of population though, isn't it? More cities = higher population = more units for the same price.

Edit: I think the only really true point here, is that since worker turns are cheaper (due to the lower cost of worker movement) this means your workers work faster compared to the speed of teching and building. This means you might need a bit extra commerce early on to keep the guy going without down time. But that is a fairly transient thing, and likely would mean you'd just spend less time building workers instead of more time working commerce.

It's more than that. On Marathon/Huge you need more troops early for barbs in the majority of situations. This becomes a big deal in the early stages of the game when you have a really low pop.

You can get a lot of cities to lower unit maintenance costs (happy cap keeps your city sizes low). Bu then you're paying lots of upkeep of a different sort.