News: BOTM 238 - Pericles, Monarch - Starts July 1, 2022

MarleysGh0st

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BOTM 238: Pericles of Greece.



Hello, I'm MarleysGh0st. You may know me from the mediocre middle of the GOTM game rankings, going back for the last 14 years or so. When I was invited to join the GOTM staff, I jumped at the chance. After being taught the secret handshake, I toured the clubhouse. Oh, the wonderful Trophy Room--where else can you see a full-sized Humbaba mounted above the fireplace? And then there's the Security Center, with its big, red button--but I was told never to touch that!

After sitting down to work on a game, though, a question occurred to me. How does this work? Luckily, the veteran staffers, particularly DynamicSpirit and Noble Zarkon, have been very generous with their help. Now I think I have everything ready to host my first game, so let's see what happens. If all else fails, I could always try pushing the red button.


You are Pericles of Greece and you've just had a wonderful idea: Democracy!* You share this idea with your advisors, but they have some questions.

Domestic Advisor: What if the people don't want to vote for us?
Financial Advisor: What about the wealthy?
Military Advisor: What about our noble war leaders?
Corporation Advisor: Aren't corporations people, too?
Foreign Advisor: Our neighbors will not like this!
Religion Advisor: Shouldn't the people get guidance from the temples?
Civics Advisor: You know where the people do get guidance? Twitter.
Technology Advisor: How does this work?

So, maybe you need to mull this idea over for a millennium or two. Perhaps you'll decide that the old ways are best, after all. Let the campaigning begin!

*To be clear, yes, you are starting the game with the Democracy tech, in addition to your regular starting techs. Whether you wish to change your civics is up to you.


Game settings:
Playing as: Pericles of Greece
Rivals: 6 AIs
Difficulty: Monarch
Starting Era:
Ancient
Speed: Normal
Options: No goody huts, no random events
Victory Conditions:
All enabled. Espionage Cultural Victories count as Cultural Victories.

Map settings:
Map: Custom Continents (lightly edited)
World Wrap: Cylindrical
Mapsize: Standard
Climate: Temperate
Sea level: Medium
Map latitudes: -90°S to 90°N


Pericles is Philosophical and Creative, and you start with Fishing and Hunting.
The Philosophical trait gives +100% great people birth rate and double production speed of University

The Creative trait gives +2 culture/city each turn and double production speed of Colosseum, Library and Theatre

Unique unit: Phalanx (replaces Axeman)
Compared to the axeman, the phalanx is much less vulnerable to chariot attacks, having +100% defence against them.

Unique Building: Odeon (replaces Colosseum)
The odeon gives an amazing +2 happiness and +3 culture in its city. It can also turn 2 citizens into artists, and gives an extra +1 happy from hit singles.

Starting screenshot

This is the start of the game (click for a bigger image):




Adventurer Class bonuses:
You play on noble level. But watch out, because the AI have monarch level starting units.

Challenger Class Equalizers:
You play on deity level, because nothing less is a challenge for you! The AI still only have monarch level starting units.

To Enter the Competition:

This competition will open at 00:01 am on 1 Jul 2022, server local time (UTC-6:00). From that date and time, you'll be able to get your chosen starting save >>>here<<<.

Submit the save after your victory (or defeat) here, by 1 Aug 2022.

Here is a link to a list of the differences between Vanilla, Warlords and BtS.

Software Versions

Windows: This game MUST be played in Beyond the Sword (NOT Civ4 Vanilla or Warlords), patched to version 3.19, and with the BUFFY mod version 3.19.005 installed. You can download the BUFFY mod here. Players using Windows Vista or Windows 7 are encouraged to read the notes on Vista fixes here.


Macintosh: This game MUST be played in Beyond the Sword (NOT Civ4 Vanilla or Warlords), patched to version 3.19, and with the Mac BUFFY mod version 3.19.003 installed. You can download the Mac BUFFY mod here.
While playing...

Remember - for your entry to be accepted, it MUST be your first attempt to play this game, and you MUST NOT replay any turns. If you make a mistake while playing, you have to live with it, learn from it, and carry on the game without replaying.

We will open 'spoiler' threads during the month for players to discuss what happens in their games. Do not discuss any details of your game outside those threads.
 
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It seems like a reasonably generous start, perhaps with little reason to move the Settler.

+1 for the idea of giving us Democracy as a starting tech, which would certainly add a lot of interesting dimensions to the game. Consider the setting up of the initial saved games your practice run, and take the time to throw together updated saves; maybe you'll have to push that red button, after all, to make the change. Either way, it will be good practice to have you run through some of the paces again, so that you'll be better prepared for the next time around.

Throwing Democracy on the table from Turn 0 would certain spice up the need for pre-game discussions, too.

Given Pericles' Unique Building, some people might go for a Cultural Victory. The 2 Artist Specialist slots help a lot. Combined with the Philosophical Trait, you can have many Mini-Great-Person Farms for creating Great Artists. How will Espionage Cultural Victories be scored? As their own category or as a Cultural Victory?
 
Military Advisor: Keep your hands off my Phalanx!

Great intro, MarleysGh0st! Starting position looks excellent for some fast work boats.

Challenger save: AIs start with Democracy! :mischief: :lol:

Reminds me of the good old days when WT named our test game Testicles… :grouphug:
 
+1 for the idea of giving us Democracy as a starting tech, which would certainly add a lot of interesting dimensions to the game. Consider the setting up of the initial saved games your practice run, and take the time to throw together updated saves; maybe you'll have to push that red button, after all, to make the change. Either way, it will be good practice to have you run through some of the paces again, so that you'll be better prepared for the next time around.

Throwing Democracy on the table from Turn 0 would certain spice up the need for pre-game discussions, too.

Given Pericles' Unique Building, some people might go for a Cultural Victory. The 2 Artist Specialist slots help a lot. Combined with the Philosophical Trait, you can have many Mini-Great-Person Farms for creating Great Artists. How will Espionage Cultural Victories be scored? As their own category or as a Cultural Victory?

OK.

I am an inexperienced and impressionable mapmaker, like a puppy so very eager to please. And it does seem like a shame to waste an interesting concept by saying, "it was just an idea". So I will be changing the starting saves to give Pericles the Democracy tech. Please carry on with your pre-game discussion with that in mind.

I am even resisting the idea of preserving game balance by giving the AI their own "wonderful ideas". :mischief:

Espionage Cultural Victories will count as Cultural Victories.
 
Hmm, one key question will be worker first or Statue of Liberty first :)
Going by memory here, I believe that The Statue of Liberty requires a Forge to first be built in a City. Thus, Metal Casting may be a worthwhile early beeline. Meanwhile, the Worker can start Pre-Chopping. ;)

An early Forge also means possibly getting an early Great Engineer. Early Wonders can be said to "waste" potential Hammers, since their cost is greater than the total amount of Hammers that a Great Engineer could provide for a build item which requires more Hammers. But, The Statue of Liberty takes around 1.8 Great Engineers (less if your City's population is higher) and thus you could use the full value of the Great Engineer and still have a way to go before completing the Wonder.

But, having Copper will be vital before starting to build that Wonder, so, Bronze Working early may make sense to ensure that we'll be able to settle near Copper. There's also unlocking our Axeman Unique Unit to think about.

Another is library beeline or iron beeline?
To help to decide: Do you want an Academy first or a Great Engineer first to help with completing The Statue of Liberty? Also, why Iron Working? Is the expectation that Copper will not be nearby and thus we might need Iron to build our Phalanx?

Yet, Bronze Working for unlocking Slavery competes with having unlocked Emancipation.

Also, it will be important to get in some early Work-Boat exploration, to determine whether it might make sense to build The Statue of Liberty on another continent, with conquest of that other continent in mind, if it is reachable by Work Boat/Galley.

Starting the game with 35t to towns w/ +1 hammer???
It's a well-made point. Of course, you still need to at least research The Wheel and Pottery before you can build Cottages, and have enough happy citizens to work the Cottages. It might mean wanting to found some helper Cities for the capital, especially given all of the nearby Food sources. It looks like we have room for 10 Cottages in the capital.

Challenger save: AIs start with Democracy! :mischief: :lol:
A very devilish idea, and yet a great idea! Putting the AIs on equal footing would make for quite a fun challenge! Turn 2: 6 AIs adopt Emancipation. No Slavery for me! Doing an Axeman rush without Slavery... quite the challenge, indeed!
 
@Dhoomstriker

I was mixing up the Statue of Liberty with the Eiffel tower, which needs iron of course.

I haven’t played much with emancipation but as I understand it if 6 AIs have it and we don’t, we get -6 unhappiness, right? Do we have to know them?

For the purposes of this game, when we adopt emancipation that means all the AI‘s will get minus one happiness, but before or after we meet them? That’s a nontrivial factor on custom continents which tend to not have a lot of happiness resources on each continent by my observation.
 
Emancipation doesn't give flat -1 happiness. AFAIK the unhappiness is supposed to be proportional to the size of the city. So a size 1 doesn't get -1 happiness and a size 20 city gets more than -1. The more people in a city the more those who demand emancipation instead of emaciation. I would guess it works only with civs who know of the emancipated civ. Might be interesting to check with a game that has some AI civ with emancipation from the start.
 
OK, pretty sure I got this figured out now. I searched high and low for the answer but couldn’t find the exact equation. The one thing I did find was the variable (I forget it’s exact name), iCivicAngerPercent = 400. Using that and this post from klarius:


There is only one unhappiness percentage in a city (in fact it's calculated in 1/1000s). All sources of unhappiness are summed up first, then multiplied by population and then divided by 1000.
So there not really whole numbers of unhappies if there are several sources of unhappiness.
There is a fixed 334/1000 unhappiness for safety. So lacking other sources this gives the 3, 6 ... breakpoints for another unhappy.
WW is 5/1000 per WW point.
We will have to deal with another source of unhappiness when gifting and retaking cities. That's the foreign plot culture part (motherland). That's 400/1000 times the fraction of foreign culture.
That's no big problem for EK as MW will help the plot culture. Other gifted cities will have 50% foreign population (plot culture) after retaking meaning another 200/1000 unhappiness. After building an obelisk this will go down quickly (the 50% means we have 1 plot culture each).
All these minor 1/1000s don't show up in the game interface at small population.
So 2 WW red faces shown @ pop 2, can mean e.g. 1.005 really from WW, .668 from undefended and the rest from foreign culture.

I extrapolated the emancipation factor is:

RUNDOWN{ROUNDUP[400*(#rivalswithemancipation/#rivals)]*citypopulation/1000}

Note the rivals need not be known!

Tested!

For the purposes of our game, in garrisoned AI cities, emancipation anger will start at pop 15. 400/6*15/1000=1.005. In other words, emancipation contributes 67*pop to klarius formula for unhappiness.

Example1: ungarrisoned pop5 AI city
pop5: 334*5 + 67*5 = 1670 + 335 = 2005

+1:mad: “We fear for our safety.”
+1:mad: “We demand Emancipation.”


Example2: ungarrisoned pop6 AI city

pop6: 334*6 + 67*6 = 2004 + 402 = 2406

+2:mad: “We fear for our safety.”
 
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Not entirely sure if this is based on memory or assumption, but I seem to recall that emancipation anger isn't just based on amount of AIs with it, or the size of the city, but also the amount of cities the civs with Emancipation have. So let's say you have taken over the lion's share of the world, and the last AI has Emancipation, it's probably not a big deal. But if you control 4 cities and the rest of the world has 200 and are all under Emancipation, you will probably have a tough time of it.

Anyway, AIs being AIs, they'll probably just laugh at it under HR anyway.
 
Not entirely sure if this is based on memory or assumption, but I seem to recall that emancipation anger isn't just based on amount of AIs with it, or the size of the city, but also the amount of cities the civs with Emancipation have. So let's say you have taken over the lion's share of the world, and the last AI has Emancipation, it's probably not a big deal. But if you control 4 cities and the rest of the world has 200 and are all under Emancipation, you will probably have a tough time of it.

Anyway, AIs being AIs, they'll probably just laugh at it under HR anyway.
I tested your theory with 31 heavily populated cities versus Pacal’s one city. Exact same results as I reported above. As I searched for the mechanics of emancipation unhappiness I ran into all sorts of ideas about what caused the unhappiness. Most of them were obviously wrong. One example is that the unhappiness is capped at half the citiy’s population. False. It’s 40%, as in 400 out of 1000. Hard cap. (iCivicAngerPercent = 400)

Edit: I also saw a post by Rusten asserting that HR Can be used to counteract emancipation unhappiness. Thanks for reminding me. I was curious about that too. I just tested that also. Nada. I gave Pacal Monarchy and he immediately revolted to heredity rule. The massive emancipation unhappiness continued unabated. (Mutal had 40, 39, 38 population for three turns and 15 unhappy citizens wanting emancipation.) Of course he could have a stack of 15 units in there to counteract it… Maybe that’s exactly what Rusten meant. 2 units for every five pop if everyone else has emancipation.
 
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Regarding Emancipation Unhappiness, yes, it stacks together with some other types of Unhappiness. Yet, I wonder exactly how the stacking works for Unhappiness sources which appear to be "fixed," with a value that is consistently observeable regardless of the Size of a City. For example, Whipping and Drafting seem to have "fixed" values.

Perhaps there is one "stackable" Unhappiness component that stacks with various stackable sources. Meanwhile, there could be other fixed sources of Unhappiness which can co-exist, where fixed sources could be from items such as from Whipping, Drafting, and Vetoing an Apostolic Palace decision result?


LowtherCastle's research seems to indicate that an AI will only see 1 Unhappiness from Emancipation at a City Size of 15, assuming that no other stackable Unhappiness factors are involved. Note that there appears to be a minor typo, as, for me:
400 * 1 / 6 * 15 / 1000 = 1, not 1.005.

AIs are going to be very unlikely to have unguarrisoned Cities for long, probably at most only if the City was founded using a "gambit Settler," and by City Size 3, the City should have a guarrison, meaning that we're not likely going to see an AI stacking Emancipation Unhappiness with Unguarrisoned Unhappiness.

War Weariness or Foreign Culture could play some roles, though. That said, my experience with XOTM Custom Continents games is that the AIs on the other continent or continents play buddy-buddy with each other and tend to get farther ahead in tech than on our home continent, possibly due to a limited number of Religions on the other continent or continents.

Still, even with some other sources of stackable Unhappiness, Military Police Units under Herditary Rule or the extra Happiness from the AI who will build The Pyramids and which runs Representation (except if it's an AI with a differing Favourite Government Civic) will allow said AIs to completely shrug off the Emancipation Unhappiness from 1 rival player.


Using LowtherCastle's formula, if 6 AIs ran Emancipation, and we did not, we could see:
400 * 6 / 6 * {Population} / 1000
= 400 / 1000 * {Population}
= 0.4 * {Population}, where each whole number represents 1 Unhappiness

City Size 3 = 1.2 -> 1 Unhappiness
City Size 5 = 2 -> 2 Unhappiness
City Size 8 = 3.2 -> 3 Unhappiness
City Size 10 = 4 -> 4 Unhappiness
City Size 13 = 5.2 -> 5 Unhappiness
City Size 15 = 6 -> 6 Unhappiness
City Size 18 = 7.2 -> 7 Unhappiness
City Size 20 = 8 -> 8 Unhappiness

But, it sounds like the AIs won't be receiving the free tech and thus we do not need to consider this factor.


As for confusion with the Eiffel Tower, it's understandable.

https://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info-center/#Wonders

Both of The Eiffel Tower and The Statue of Liberty require a Forge to build them.

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of The Statue of Liberty, requested the help of Eiffel's company to build an Iron spine for the statue, which sits inside of the Copper plates that make up the surface of the statue.

Indeed, the pedestal upon which the statue sits was originally supposed to built with granite, but the US builders cheaped out and used concrete, which they covered with a granite facade.

The face of the statue was modelled on that of a French woman, Augusta-Charlotte Bartholdi, the sculptor's mother.

The statue is still the largest statue in the US.

For the game, while you do get a Citizen "Specialist" if you do not have a Specialist slot available, you'll want to prioritise trying to build at least one Specialist-Enabling Building in each City on the same continent, be it a Temple, a (cheap) Library, a Forge, a (cheap) Theatre, a (cheap) Odeon, etc, so that your free Specialist will produce more raw output and will produce Great People Points (Citizen Specialists do not produce Great People Points).

The Statue of Liberty will generate Great Merchant Great People Points, which is the same type of GPP as has The Eiffel Tower.
 
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Dhoom: “Yet, I wonder exactly how the stacking works for Unhappiness sources which appear to be "fixed," with a value that is consistently observeable regardless of the Size of a City. For example, Whipping and Drafting seem to have "fixed" values.”


Klarius seems to answer that: “There is only one unhappiness percentage in a city (in fact it's calculated in 1/1000s). All sources of unhappiness are summed up first, then multiplied by population and then divided by 1000.”

Evidently the anger from population, whip, and drafting each carry a value of 1000 points.

Dhoom: “Note that there appears to be a minor typo, as, for me:
400 * 1 / 6 * 15 / 1000 = 1, not 1.005.”

No typo. I used 67 for the 400/6 because I think that’s rounded up in the formula. Didn’t want to complicate the simplified example here. (if you’re nerdy enough to check my math, then you’re nerdy enough to pay attention to the round up round down aspect also. ;) )
 
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