Nationhood vs Slavery ?

[Soirana]

Half of expenses were city upkeeep. Maybe you should razed more?

 

[Kesshi]

Soirana,

Why would I do that? I had plenty of money! I had 3 holy shrines, so each city was producing me about 4 gold just by existing...after I got the missionairies there, that is. Also, I was targeting a pre 1000AD Domination win. I could have stayed Rep + Vassalage + OR and 1/2 wonderspammed, 1/2 military spammed. But I decided to screw research, and go all out military. PS + Vass + Theo, and every city was producing Military units except for my 3 dedicated Missionairy cities. I did it on purpose.

 

[Soirana]

Exuce me, but it is strange to say that poor 63 maces were bankrupting you. Correct me, but does not free unit limit goes up with number of cities you have.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

With population I think, but your point is valid... I bet Kesshi didn't whip enough courts...

Cheers,

Raskolnikov

edit@uncleJJ: cool post!

 

[mirthadir]

He was playing at noble and split his stacks many ways. On marathon. This is hardly something you'd encounter in a normal game.

I find nationhood much stronger in a large empire where you can cycle the drafting so that you don't staff anger, but can still draft away every turn. Globe helps with that obviously...although I find globe costs a stifling amount of hammers to put in a city that used to be a GP farm honestly...but it still helps if I remember to get it.

What kind of bothers me when comparing whipping and drafting cycles to pure hammers is that you cannot continually whip cities forever, especially larger ones...the anger will stack and ruin you. Going past that, if you're playing faster than epic cities specialized for hammers are making a unit every single turn or very close in many cases (hell, the heroic epic example earlier in a strong hammer city would put out a unit/turn on epic even...) - why would you whip in these cities? How much whip anger are you willing to stack? And for using rifles? Are you seriously going to wait for communism and biology to wage war with rifles, or are you talking about whipping infantry or even tanks? The latter makes more sense, if you've taken the time to just set up tons of food cities everywhere, of course with the assumption that you can do so.

Drafting does have the benefit of just getting a massive army REALLY FAST, and there's something to be said for that...however just rifles on their own don't cut it. I never saw a HUGE hike in success between doing this vs say, spamming maces and using a GM to upgrade rifles to CR, just building rifles (or cavalry or cannon for that matter), etc etc.

A truly fast war requires spies or siege to lower D...or the losses are too heavy, even against longbows.

Ahh, low difficulty marathon, that would explain things. I tend to only play emp/immort/deity on normal which greatly skews my perception of the number of troops you can hoard and the costs for so doing. Normally I need a massive SE or cottages, cottages, and more cottages to keep up with the AI. In the former case I want nationalism over vassalage just to get good production out of my non-production cities. In the latter, I have never found vassalage to be a better return than FS.

Rifles on their own depends; Toko or Churchill can manage it passingly bad (cover does pretty well at taking down LBs for a decent trade while pinch redcoats are ownage across the board, lots of promos soon make even draftees deadly). More often I'm going with Janus, Oromos, or Musketeers if I'm going to power draft (though normally I want spies). But, given the espionage bonus draft and spy is a pretty good combo at the riflemen era.

Kremlin whipping depends. If you nab Sci Method with lib via power bulbing or GLH; Communism (with SP and the Kremlin with a free GA to boot) can be had before rifling. However more often, yeah this is infantry/tanks/arty whipping, and the trick is to have lots of crappy little high food cities so you can keep the suckers at size 6 or 8. Whip stacking is generally a non issue at this point as you have so much happy kicking around (HR and garrison chariots make it laughable to circumvent). With Monty or the Greeks (SE/RE/GLHE/EE/CorpE) you can whip whenever your pop hits 6, 8, or 10 and forget about it. Also do recall that this spirals upward as you take territory. All those cities yearning for the motherland? Yeah you know how to deal with them.

My stacks weren't always individually huge, but my army sure was. I would take over a city, and stick the injured in the city to rest while I moved my other units forward. I lost more units that way, but with how quickly I was producing more Macemen I didn't care because I was going for a pre 1000AD Domination win.

You were playing on epic, which screws up the unit numbers with which I am accustomed; you also are in an atypical situation wherein you have dominant tech position which will last for many, many turns. It may be more economical to go vassalage under a specific constrained set of circumstances like that, but I doubt it. You have what, 25 cities? Assuming an average of 2 towns per city, the bonus from FS should pay better than free upkeep on what 1/3rd of your maces?

 

[UncleJJ]

What kind of bothers me when comparing whipping and drafting cycles to pure hammers is that you cannot continually whip cities forever, especially larger ones...the anger will stack and ruin you. Going past that, if you're playing faster than epic cities specialized for hammers are making a unit every single turn or very close in many cases (hell, the heroic epic example earlier in a strong hammer city would put out a unit/turn on epic even...) - why would you whip in these cities? How much whip anger are you willing to stack? And for using rifles? Are you seriously going to wait for communism and biology to wage war with rifles, or are you talking about whipping infantry or even tanks? The latter makes more sense, if you've taken the time to just set up tons of food cities everywhere, of course with the assumption that you can do so.

I'm not sure if this was addressed to my comments but it seems it might be. Let me explain my example comparing the hammers for drafting a rifleman against the hammers from whipping with the many things that can affect the whipping efficiency. Firstly, I would not be whipping riflemen in an actual game as they can be drafted and whipping (plus normal production) would be producing the other troops of that era, like cavalry, cannons, galleons, machine guns etc. In my games I almost never build / whip rifles but either draft them or upgrade earlier troops (e.g. CR3 macemen). I occasionally build a woodsman3 or guerilla2 rifleman, which have a tactical use, and can't be drafted when I don't have a troop to upgrade.

I only used the rifleman example to show that on a typical marathon game (with the Kremlin and the Pyramids) it is possible to whip riflemen with the same food efficiency as it is to draft them. The rifleman is the most food efficient troop that can be drafted. This was imporant to refute the assertion made by xarthaz that Slavery is made redundant by Nationhood. That is completely wrong.

On some maps I most certainly do wait for Communism and Biology to wage a decisive war (which might happen to use draft rifles among many other troops). This is particualrly true when launching an intercontinental invasion where I will have concentrated on the bottom half of the tech tree to establish naval superiority (privateers, frigates, drydocks etc) as that leads to researching cannons and grenadiers before rifles and cavalry (as we've disussed in the past). Also recently I've come to rate the Kremlin as the most important late game wonder for a SE. Furthermore, with jails already built in most cities, a 3 or 4 pop whip installs intelligence agencies for a huge increase in EP production and the ability to run lots of spy specialists. If I'm not way ahead in espionage already this the moment in the game when I shoot past any AI pretensions in that area.

Incidentally the HE example was inspired by my recent game where for the first time in a long while I built it late in the Globe city which had many grassland farms and sushi allowing a whip every 2 or 3 turns (on marathon). Otherwise I'd agree that happiness issues can become a problem for both Slavery and Nationhood particularly if there are several civs running Emancipation. Obviously large cities are not normally whipped or drafted as that is generally inefficient in terms of food to hammer conversion as well as making them more vulnerable to happiness problems. But with the many small drafting / whipping cities I like to run these civics are possible and very powerful even if limited to an average of 1 use every 30 turns.

 

[Tephros]

For perspective, I play exclusively marathon games on emperor (I should just put that in my sig but I'm not sure if I'm going to post much ):

I’m not a big fan of nationhood, but that’s probably because I play mostly domination games. When playing for domination I normally want to pop-rush things in the starving cities I just took over, not in my home cities. I also usually whip courts and theaters, not units, and I put off emancipation as long as possible.

I usually employ a professional army to minimize the costs of wars. My military cities either work on increasing the size of that army so they can constantly attack or divide into two+ forces, or building competent defenders. Pop rushing horsehockey units is just too expensive, IMO.

In terms of your economy, for a small nation (or when building a critical wonder in your capital) Bureaucracy is going to be better with 50% hammers and 50% commerce than the +25% espionage and +2 happiness from barracks, unless that happiness is really going to make the difference between having an extra couple population. Given that the techs you will soon discover will obsolete whales, ivory, and fur, this may occasionally be the case.

Offensively vassalage is better than nationhood, though ensuring a tech lead through bureaucracy or free speech seems better to me most of the time. For large economies with an average or above average number of towns, free speech is better.

The extra 25% espionage may be useful if a neighbor has a tech lead on you, but with the bonuses from jails and intelligence agencies, it becomes pretty small-time like the pathetic +10% research from free religion.

The best context I can think of is the synergy between pacifism and nationhood. There's the benefit of employing spies that are now better in output of espionage and gp points. You also want to minimize your military with pacifism, but you don’t want to be too vulnerable to invasion – hence nationhood. When you unexpectedly have visitors you can use the units from nationhood immediately as opposed to the next turn.

For a cultural or space race victory you may want to maximize your great artists/scientists with nationhood/pacifism, but for cultural victories you have to give up free speech for nationhood. This is probably not worth it.

Nationhood can be useful but not in most games I play.

 

[Agent327]

Hello,

I'm playing CIV4 for a year now and i'm still discovering new things, like nationhood. I don't understand the difference however between nationhood and slavery.

A very basic difference: Slavery can get you City revolts; I never use it.

Nationhood I use when my Castles go obsolete (Espionagewise).

BTW, I don't play militaristic - I want a civilized civ. (But I make sure I can defend if attacked - si vis pacem, para bellum.)

PS: A 10% Free Religion bonus can make all the difference if you go for a science lead, IMO.

 

[Gliese 581]

It is not surprising that marathon players are generally less enamored with Nationhood than normal speed players.
The relative difference in window of opportunity for attacks on faster speeds can make Nationhood a fantastic civic there.

 

[vicawoo]

Shouldn't that be the other way around?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Shouldn't that be the other way around?

No, I don't think so. There's a couple things about marathon that weaken nationhood relative to just building things.

One is that when building units with hammers (whipping or just production), units essentially have +50% production (-33% cost) on marathon. Drafting, however, converts food to hammers at the standard rate of other speeds (except quick, which it still does, but quick sucks and makes war at high levels really stupid). So, relative to other options drafting is weaker at marathon.

The other thing that goes against drafting on marathon is that wars can lost a LOT longer turnwise. A 20 turn war on normal is OK if it gets you returns, and pretty typical of a renaissance capture of the majority or all of one AI's cities if things go well. What about marathon? Well, techwise it's identical if the war lasts SIXTY turns...and you've had that hammer bonus since long before nationhood! Medieval war is viable at levels where it would otherwise be impossible. If the AI suicides its stack against your wall/defensive border city, you have an eternity to put it down before it can amass such a force again. Basically, while you get a production bonus for troops on marathon, you actually need LESS troops to succeed, and you need them less quickly !

My favorite speed is epic, since I enjoy war a lot but don't like the horrendous imbalance and slow speed associated with marathon. It also scales the most closely with normal, which is the only other speed I'll play typically.

Marathon makes wars ridiculously easy relative to other speeds, and quick makes them stupid...really flagrantly stupid...even as your troops march slower relative to time, the enemy will present you with at least double the troops in their territory that you'd see on marathon, and will tech new military techs quickly. Quick does have the benefit of improper culture scaling though, so winning culture on that speed is far easier than other speeds (although turn scaling usually makes it a later finish date...that's true for all things on quick).

Edit, now that I read it again, Gliese's sentence isn't very clear...this entire post might be agreeing with you, or what you intended.

 

[Artichoker]

Nationhood is great as a Golden Age civic...8 turns of continuous drafting will give you not only plenty of Riflemen, but also plenty of drafting anger and population loss, something you don't want in the long run.

Outside of Golden Ages, Nationhood does a fair job at both military and economic development. Its main strength is that it can do both without sacrificing either one. However, if you want to concentrate on either economy or military, you're often better off with Free Speech for economy or Vassalage for military. Especially when you get access to Tanks and Marines, which cannot be drafted, having the +2 XP from Vassalage (instead of Theocracy because you also want Free Religion) can give those units the extra edge they need in tight battles.

I use drafting primarily for improving garrison forces. Instead of spending precious gold to upgrade an Archer to a Rifleman, I can simply spend 1 pop to create a Rifleman immediately. The very low XP of the unit is not as big a drawback when the unit is used for garrison duty only; that is, assuming that the unit never sees battle.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

the enemy will present you with at least double the troops in their territory that you'd see on marathon

Agreed with most of your post except this... Now that I play normal speeds on a more regular basis, I have the opposite feeling (and that would be logical as the bonus prod on units for AIs is bigger on marathon)... i 've seen giant stacks on marathon...

Once, I counted more than 135 units in a Shaka's SOD in MONARCH (approximately 40 knights, 30 cannons, rest muskets and grens)... I almost cryed the day I reinstall my game (saves were deleted)... I swear this is true! Obviously, it was game over for me...

Cheers,

Raskolnikov

@Artichoker: drafting during a GA is rather counter intuitive I must say...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Agreed with most of your post except this... Now that I play normal speeds on a more regular basis, I have the opposite feeling (and that would be logical as the bonus prod on units for AIs is bigger on marathon)... i 've seen giant stacks on marathon...

Once, I counted more than 135 units in a Shaka's SOD in MONARCH (approximately 40 knights, 30 cannons, rest muskets and grens)... I almost cryed the day I reinstall my game (saves were deleted)... I swear this is true! Obviously, it was game over for me...

Cheers,

Raskolnikov

@Artichoker: drafting during a GA is rather counter intuitive I must say...

Well, 2 things about this:

1. By saying "In their territory" I meant that you'd deal with such a stack in YOUR OWN territory with siege to duck WW typically...exception being an intercontinental foray. Basically what I MEANT was that the AI will produce AT LEAST twice as many troops once the war begins on QUICK than they would on marathon.

2. In saying you'd see DOUBLE, I was specifically referring to quick. If you don't believe me, try it. You can march at a city with 3-4 garrison troops, and in 2 turns there will be 10 units defending that came running from all over the defender's empire. On normal or slower, this is usually only true for the first city or so. On quick, it's every city. Most AI cities, with bonuses, make a unit/turn of medieval garbage crap, and that really bogs down a renaissance rifle push. WW and damage to say rifles is off the charts, and then the AI techs gunpowder. Then replaceable parts. Then rifling. In one war...that on marathon would never have even seen gunpowder.

 

[cabert]

on quick you face so many troops nationhood isn't even a factor.
What are 3 riflemen per turn going to do against 12 or so lbs per turn?

Yes the AIs can build Lb in 1 turn in most cities at quick speed... and it does when you're at war.

 

[Bleys]

@Artichoker: drafting during a GA is rather counter intuitive I must say...

There is some truth to this statement, however, lets remember what happens around the point in the game where you get Nationhood. For non-SPI leaders, you go from 1-turn Anarchys to 2-turn Anarchys. This makes jump civics brutal.

Popping a Golden Age, you can move into the Military civics, draft for a bunch of turns, and move back into your Economic civics without a single turn of Anarchy, and by the time your GA ends, you should have a solid army of Draftees.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Until it gets to rifles. And believe me, it has no trouble teching PP, replaceable parts, and rifling in one war on quick if it has at least 8 cities. Taking cities fast enough to prevent a bogging down is extremely difficult.

Edit @ above: I might stay in nationhood for the as drafting can put a hurting on that, but theocracy vs FR would depend on the situation.

In a mid-large empire on a reasonable speed, drafting is king in terms of hammers put forth in a very short time (during the time where drafting is truly viable vs alternatives). Later on if you're one of those kremlin whipping people though you can probably do both for even faster production also.

If you empire is too small to support sustained drafting, you can always produce your rifles with a great merchant . Mass up some CR II maces, run a trade mission, and enjoy the 13-15 CR II rifles from that alone! Any tech selling or begging can net over 20 rifles very quickly (considering maces are cheaper hammer-wise, and you can start on them earlier, that is). With something to drop defenses these don't lose very often.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

@TMIT: yeah... I didn't factor in the overflow thingy... LBs in one turn in every city is something not fun IMO.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The reason he suggests whipping in "production" cities is that with the kremlin and biology, farms become extremely competitive with any alternative in terms of hammer conversion. In fact, if emancipation and whip anger weren't factored in, that would probably have the highest yield in the game barring things like ironworks super cities at pop 20 working all hammer tiles...but those much harder to set up than farm filler cities.

Loud demands for emancipation usually stifle that, but if they don't it's plenty realistic. Forgets and etc add to whip hammers, too, after all.

I've yet to find a game where I wanted slavery at that point though...mostly because I don't do dedicated "pure" SEs with tons of little whipping cities everywhere. You CAN though, if you like excessive micro.

 

[Kesshi]

TheMeInTeam,

There have been a few games where I've done just that. Stayed PURE SE and used the whip all the way to endgame. I even defied every UN resolution I didn't agree with. Unhappiness wasn't a factor, because I was running a pure SE. When I wanted to "fix" my unhappiness, I just pushed the culture slider up another knotch. Between Resources, Theatres and Colosseums, I could have up to 50+ happiness in a city fairly early on.