Need advice on Deity-Progress

[Ninal]

@CrazyG how do you think Progress coups be buffed? Do you agree with the Notion that progress should have advantage in “peacefull wide play” as computer to the more warlike (authority) or tall (tradition) playstyles?

Id so do you agree that progress Settling too slowly is part of the problem or do you focus on other solutions?

 

[Stalker0]

@CrazyG how do you think Progress coups be buffed? Do you agree with the Notion that progress should have advantage in “peacefull wide play” as computer to the more warlike (authority) or tall (tradition) playstyles?

Id so do you agree that progress Settling too slowly is part of the problem or do you focus on other solutions?

So looking at my two recent Tradition vs Progress experiments, I don't see any issue with Progress' expansion speed. In fact, I think Progress can really pump out settlers when your in the 6+ city territory.

The actual weakness of Progress right now is early culture....that kind of expansion has a big culture cost, and Progress' culture takes a long time to scale up compared to Tradition.

The simplest thing you could do there is swap the two left side policies. So this means you could either go left early and really push culture, or if you go right you are still getting that policy 4th instead of 5th, which makes a big difference. At the same time you are not fundamentally altering Progress' culture paradigm which could have a lot of unintended consequences.

 

[CrazyG]

Here are what I find hard about going wide with progress:

• It takes a long time to get all your cities down.
• Even if you get progress to work in the early game eventually happiness problems will come and kick you in the nuts.
• In theory it has better production, but doing the math it's not by that much. You spend production on buildings that tradition would just skip anyways.
  
• Symbolism is the best belief in that category (at least if not warmongering) and it heavily favors tradition
• Most founder beliefs favor tall play

So looking at my two recent Tradition vs Progress experiments, I don't see any issue with Progress' expansion speed. In fact, I think Progress can really pump out settlers when your in the 6+ city territory.

I think that is an issue with expansion speed. While tradition's cities are building libraries or temples and generally moving to the next part of the game, progress is still building settlers.

 

[Ninal]

Aan progress you need to settle cities quickly. If I want to stay small i prefereer tradition and what I want to conquer I prefer authority.

The problem is that you need to be really gast with the land grabbing at deity. This means full-on settler production (without Any bonus to do so). This does a fee things:
- drive up the culture and science costs a lot!
- increases border tensions with neighbouring civs and thus increases the need for a strong army.
- takes population away from your capitol while building settlers.

All in all my experience has been that it’s NOT worth the “trouble” and that tradition and authority are just more effective. But it’s good to hear different oppinions here....

 

[CrazyG]

The actual weakness of Progress right now is early culture....that kind of expansion has a big culture cost, and Progress' culture takes a long time to scale up compared to Tradition.

The progress opener used to give 15 culture per tech, it was lowered to 10.

I feel a bit silly as this rather obvious change can account for a lot of the problems and it took a while for me to notice it.

However, I still find progress to struggle in the land grab phase, though not by that much. I think dropping the increasing settler costs would be a small change that helps.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

I've been playing lots of games on Deity on this patch as Progress Indonesia versus manually selected AIs (usually Ethiopia, Carthage, Russia, Mongolia, Sweden, Zulu and Arabia) and the going is tough, but it's doable because in this version the religious game is more open (easier to found due to later founding dates) and the AI is slower to settle all the lands than before, so I've been winning quite a few games.

 

[Stalker0]

In fact, I think Progress can really pump out settlers when your in the 6+ city territory.

Reading CrazyG's latest reply I think I need to clarify my statement here. I did not mean once you get to 6+ cities you can pump out settlers with Progress. I meant, if you are going to 6+ cities, than Progress has caught up or exceeded Tradition in expansion speed.

But don't take my word for it, look at the save files and see for yourselves.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Just wanted to add that the big advantage Progress has over Authority and Tradition is the ability to purchase Great Writers with faith. That can be worth 3-4 (sometimes fewer, sometimes more) social policies if you time them correctly with the World fair and one or two golden ages, which is a tremendous buff. Now if you take to the Glory of God reformation belief as a Tradition/Authority civ, you can bypass taking Progress for that, but with Progress you avoid the danger of some other founder taking that reformation belief and you can pick another reformation belief instead.

Ninal, I'd recommend you share your pics from your games here so we can help

 

[CrazyG]

Just wanted to add that the big advantage Progress has over Authority and Tradition is the ability to purchase Great Writers with faith. That can be worth 3-4 (sometimes fewer, sometimes more) social policies if you time them correctly with the World fair and one or two golden ages, which is a tremendous buff. Now if you take to the Glory of God reformation belief as a Tradition/Authority civ, you can bypass taking Progress for that, but with Progress you avoid the danger of some other founder taking that reformation belief and you can pick another reformation belief instead.

I had this opinion of the great writers until I tried it both ways and really payed attention. Tradition has a better great person rate, so they probably are a natural great writer ahead in that time period anyways.

Tradition gets a lot more from each great writer. Each great works boost them, and tradition gets more.

Also, if you are having cities use the culture process during world's fair (which I usually do), then the culture for building isn't active, thus progress is earning 0 culture per city.

Tradition earns 4 or 6 (2 culture to monuments/baths/gardens) per city. That can be more like 6 or 9 if you have golden ages and world's fair active.

Faith buying great writers is very strong, and I think they are overall the best great person to faith purchase, but when really pushing my culture output, they weren't enough to overcome the lead tradition already established by that point.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Hmm, could be true, CrazyG, I haven't sat down to crunch the numbers - how many extra great writers do you think Tradition gets naturally compared to Progress and how much is the extra boost from the extra great works by the time you get to the Industrial age? I think it's crucial to be able to "time" your great writers to sync with golden ages, culture processes and the world fair (if possible). But in any case, I'm not saying that Progress is better than Tradition, I just wanted to point out that Progress is indeed very viable even on Deity.

 

[DaniSciB]

Just wanted to add that the big advantage Progress has over Authority and Tradition is the ability to purchase Great Writers with faith. That can be worth 3-4 (sometimes fewer, sometimes more) social policies if you time them correctly with the World fair and one or two golden ages, which is a tremendous buff. Now if you take to the Glory of God reformation belief as a Tradition/Authority civ, you can bypass taking Progress for that, but with Progress you avoid the danger of some other founder taking that reformation belief and you can pick another reformation belief instead.

Ninal, I'd recommend you share your pics from your games here so we can help

Which BTW, is also something very Exploitable for humans #ExploitPolice xD. The AI just doesn't have a clue that they can do something remotely similar. But yeah, is a super powerful strategy.

Edit: Hol Up, since this is in fact doing something "Efficiently" idk if it should be labeled as Exploit, maybe yes if the AI is completely unaware about this or incapable of replicating at some extent.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

I think it's one of those tactical things that humans are just better at inventing, like for example settling your starting settler on a trapping or a mining luxury as the Netherlands and by selling it to an AI to get 3 culture and gold on turn 9 - it'd be great if the AI could be coded to do that "when the conditions are right", but the devil is in the details.

I mean I often have to figure out when to propose the world fair to time it with my upcoming golden ages (either natural or with the help of a great artist) and to make sure I will have built my factories, opera houses etc. by the time the vote will come around to maximize my potential. And then you can also time the bonus production from for example CS quests to go into your world fair project in order to win it and trigger an additional golden age, and to time so you'll get two natural great writers during the turns 5-20 of the 20-turn cultural boost period from the World fair, to ensure you have enough faith to buy 4 great writers etc. And sometimes I'll get preempted by a big war coming along and forcing me to try to get the World fair proposal rejected if it would be an inopportune time for me. Or if I've taken Way of Transcendence I try to time the building of the World fair for when the Modern era bonuses will kick in. And so on and on. So I think it'd be hard to code the AI to do that more efficiently, but if possible, it'd be great!

 

[azum4roll]

I refuse to use the World Fair exploit until the AI learns to do it, as well as buying Great Writers after working culture in all cities for 5 turns while in a golden age.

 

[CrazyG]

Hmm, could be true, CrazyG, I haven't sat down to crunch the numbers - how many extra great writers do you think Tradition gets naturally compared to Progress and how much is the extra boost from the extra great works by the time you get to the Industrial age?

I don't know the details, sorry. Maybe 2 extra? Great person math is complex.

I refuse to use the World Fair exploit until the AI learns to do it, as well as buying Great Writers after working culture in all cities for 5 turns while in a golden age.

Yeah when my spy shows the AI is farming during world's fair it does feel a bit dirty. Maybe this proposal shouldn't be a big of a deal as it is. The World's Fair as a proposal certainly affects the game more than other projects (other than UN obviously).

 

[Stalker0]

I don't know the details, sorry. Maybe 2 extra? Great person math is complex.


Yeah when my spy shows the AI is farming during world's fair it does feel a bit dirty. Maybe this proposal shouldn't be a big of a deal as it is. The World's Fair as a proposal certainly affects the game more than other projects (other than UN obviously).

Considering you can get the free policy AND the +33% culture, it definitely has a strong swing in the culture game vs a game that does not get this WC passed.

 

[Ninal]

Since there was some discussion on the Maya I decided to try a progress game with them. I had a reasonably good start where I went construction first to get some quick Kuna's. I then grabbed Pottery to grab some land after which I Bee-lined Mathematics. I succeeded in blocking off Ethiopia and America from "my" area of the map that was rather forrested as well. So far things went pretty well.
I did however fail to get goddes of renewal even though I built Ankor Wat. It went as the first pantheon :-(
I took the extra food and growth pantheon instead.

I succeeded in getting the second religion and took Council of Elders and Inspiration (the 3 culture per follower). I enhanced in turn 101 with my second great person.
My problems started when I settled all 8 of my cities. My culture generation dried up and it took ages to complete Progress even with Inspiration. I started getting happiness problems, which hampered my growth and meant I couldn't work specialists. My gold and production weren't great either. The only thing that was going really well was science.

Since I had a strong faith I have taken Fealty to get the extra cost reductions and religious buildings. Artistry is no serious contender for wide play as wide-tourism is impossible. Maybe I should have gone Statecraft. But there was so many civs going statecraft already that a Diplo victory seemed tough. I reformed with jesuit education and spent my faith on Universities and Public Schools.


It is now 1505 AD and this is what the game looks like.

I think Korea is going to win this one. She is 2 techs and 2 policies up on me and has way more culture and tourism generation. I had the lowest culture generation of all civs for a while. Lack of culture and happiness combined with the stress of grabbing land quickly, combined with the relatively low pay-off for going progress makes it by far the weakest tree in my experience. Of course I am willing to look at all the mistakes I am making and to be proven wrong

 

[CrazyG]

I think Korea is going to win this one. She is 2 techs and 2 policies up on me and has way more culture and tourism generation. I had the lowest culture generation of all civs for a while. Lack of culture and happiness combined with the stress of grabbing land quickly, combined with the relatively low pay-off for going progress makes it by far the weakest tree in my experience. Of course I am willing to look at all the mistakes I am making and to be proven wrong

I think you still have a chance, you might be able to get a spaceship out before Korea if you can hit key events (Hubble and Apollo Project) before him. The AI also isn't great at getting the parts built in a timely manner.

I think progress will be getting a culture buff (15 for techs instead of the current 10) which would fix most of your issues in this situation.

 

[Ninal]

What do you guys normally prefer as the Maya for the medieval policy trees? Do you think Fealty or Statecraft is more often the correct choice?

 

[CrazyG]

Probably Fealty if you are going for a science victory. You can benefit from extra food and religion can be a major part of your strategy.

You could probably make a diplomatic strategy work too. Strong religious early game and free great diplomat to get extra votes, pass world religion on the first round and you are good to go.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Hmm, I guess the AI also doesn't set the production to science 5 or so turns before the birth/buying of a Great scientist in the modern/atomic/information Era? That might be an exploit as well like using the culture process before getting a great writer.

I'd be in favor of a significant nerf to the World fair.