palace jump, exploit? or strat?

[Sirp]

Hygro: you don't have to sacrifice a good city to do it. Build your capital, and build a second city with just one tile between. Keep your capital pumping out settlers and make it stay small, 1/3 or 2/4. Your second city might produce some military, but fairly soon it prebuilds the forbidden palace.

Attack your nearest neighbour. Take their capital, and some cities around, perhaps setting around it too. Grow their capital to be your biggest city with the most other cities around. Then disband your capital which has done little but produce settlers and workers, when it's size 1 or 2. It has no improvements other than the palace. Your capital will jump to the capital you captured. You're losing a small town out of it, that's all.

Oh and about capitals moving in real life, when the Commonwealth of Australia (my country) was formed out of a collection of British colonies, the two biggest colonies, New South Wales and Victoria, both wanted their capital to be the capital of Australia. There was bickering and it couldn't be decided. In the end it had to be put in the Constitution that a new capital would be built exactly half way between Sydney and Melbourne Melbourne was the capital for the first twenty-something years though, before it moved to Canberra.

-Sirp.

 

[wilbill]

Originally posted by Chieftess


Actually, we had 4. Annapolis, Maryland was the US capital for 1 day. New York, Philly, Annapolis, and Washington DC.

I stand corrected. Only one day with Congress in town, huh? I guess that's why Annapolis is still such a nice place and New York, Philly, and D.C. are...well...what they are.

 

[Hurricane]

It is an exploit, sure, but not any more unbalancing than prebuilding or mass-upgrading. So I'd call it a strategy that sometimes, but not nearly always, is good.

Originally posted by Sirp
Hygro: you don't have to sacrifice a good city to do it. Build your capital, and build a second city with just one tile between. Keep your capital pumping out settlers and make it stay small, 1/3 or 2/4. Your second city might produce some military, but fairly soon it prebuilds the forbidden palace.

But you don't know the surroundings. Sometimes your starting position will be ideal for your capital, and your neighbor's territory will be lousy. I have had several games where I intentionally have kept the capital small, and eventually kept the capital there anyway. Also, you often build a granary in your capital (to get those settlers out fast), which you'll lose when jumping.

Second, jumping the palace to a far away foreign pop city requires that you merge quite a few of your own workers to the city. This also comes with a cost.

 

[Sirp]

Hurricane, your starting location still gets a palace: the forbidden palace.

It's also highly unlikely that you're not going to have at least one neighbour with some decent land, for two cores. Yeah you'll probably build a granary in your capital, but the benefit of the early granary mostly comes in being able to produce 8+ settlers nice and fast. You've already had the main benefit when it comes time to disband.

Prebuilding isn't an exploit: it was explicitly put into the game, after being removed in Civ2. They think it works better that way, and the AIs are programmed to work effectively against it: they will build wonders they have no hope of getting, and cascade onto other wonders.

Mass-offensive-upgrades (I call them this because I have no problem with mass upgrades of defensive units), are a problem only because the cost for upgrading is lower than the cost of building units with part shields/part cash. It also can't be regulated easily since there are lots of shades of grey. Palace jumping could be far more easily regulated: just say you can't do it.

-Sirp.

 

[Hurricane]

Palace jumping was in fact a bit harder in the original, unpatched, game, since you could only abandon a city by creating a worker (if size 1) or settler (size 2) out of it. The "abandon city"-command makes it so much easier.

 

[Sirp]

Yeah but it still wasn't exactly hard. If you were size 2 you could even just build a worker and pop rush it straight away...

Anyway building a worker or settler is probably still a good way to do it since you don't lose pop points.

-Sirp.

 

[Bouchehog]

Free Palace Jump
When disbanding your capitol your palace will appear in the biggest other city. Your former capitol can be rebuilt by the settler it created. This way you've moved you capitol for free.

I'm totally new to the idea of palace hopping. Previously I either rebuilt a palace elsewhere or had my capital destroyed and relocate. Now I know that it relocated to based on a simple formula (1pt citizens; +1/3pt if foreign; 1/3 for each every city owned by you within 8 squares of the candidate city.) I will certainly be using it. However, I'm a little confused: the 'cheats' section of the mainpage lists this technique as defined above but rather infers that you can use the settle to found a city and the palace will jump there. Is this just my poor interpretation of the statement?

As regards whether or not it is an 'exploit' rather depends on how you define your terms. Certainly the AI would never do it, but then the AI is bad a donig a whole variety of things - surely you wouldn't argue that upgrading troops or attacking en mass is an exploit? Yet the AI seems unable to plan for either.

Certianly the ability to relocate you capital outweighs the loss of losing your capital. This is particularly relevant when you want to relocate a good distance away because it means that you can build your FP without hinderance from corruption. However, there does still remain a degree of strategy. You (presumably - confirmation please!) lose any culture it has built up; you lose the ability to produce building there unless you are willing to take a loss on their sale; lastly and most obvious, you lose an established city.

IMHO, the best stategy for utilising this would be to retain the original capital as a settler factory without building any improvements and then building an early FP nearby. If you can then time your first military campaign so that you'll take the enemy capital as the FP complete, you can quickly jump the capital to a (usually) idea location surrounded by cities you are just about to take.

On a relevant and interesting side note, if you were to take the enemy capital and install you own then you would have a first rate base of operations (albeit a risky one if you're not sure about winning) and huge protection against culture flips. Furthermore, you could assess the enemy cities and control where his capital will flip to. This means it might be possible to send the enemy capital to a border town that happened to have a high population thus opening the possibility of suing for peace and absorbing the cities aroudn your new capital via culture.

P.S. See, you can get the formula onto two lines!
P.P.S. Apologies if anyone has mentioned getting the AI capital to move as a strategy before, but I've not seen it posted. I don't of course mean to steal anyone's idea!

 

[Spike59]

Originally posted by kryszcztov
Historically, the fall of the capital would mean the end of the empire or the beginning of the resistance, therefore in Civ3, I think you (or the AI if you attack him) should try to defend your capital at all cost, because loosing it would mean no palace anymore, unless you take the capital back or you build another palace in another city. !

In the war of 1812, those pesky red coats came in and burned the white house. We stll held together as a nation, such as it was in 1812. However, I cannot think of another example where the capital city of a nation was invaded and the nation still put up any major resistance. Also at that time, we were not really much of a centrally controlled nation.

So originally I thought I had a great point in that whole 1812 example and then realized that I had not much of anything. I must conclude that there should be a huge penalty for losing your capital; other than the whole humiliation thing.

 

[Bouchehog]

As a history graduate I'd also have to agree that losing one's capital doesn't necessitate the 'end of empire'. Quite apart from anything else, the capital isn't always the most important city - rather it's cultural importance makes it a significant prize. You only have to look at Russia's military decisions during the Second World War to justify this.

On the other hand, this is just a game and there are many extremely stupid models. Cultural flipping is great, but nonsensical vis-a-vis military garrisoning. The fact that a city of size one can revolt and destroy a twenty-tank army just makes no historical sense and yet it has been used by the game makers as a devise to make military conquest harder. Conveniently for this discussion, palace hopping to a conquored city will help prevent this.

 

[Hustapha Thool]

1812 again and Tsar Alexander I evacuates Moscow as the French army approaches, leaving very little in the city, eventuallly leading to Napoleons decision to have to leave the capitol city with the Russian cossacks snipping at his retreat resulting in the final devastation of his Grand Armee.

 

[Xion]

Just like to say that losing a capital city would be a lot worse for the nation in ancient/medievil times than in industrial modern times due to decentralisation (in the real world ).

 

[Hygro]

taking a capitol usually takes a civ to its knees anyway. Even if they have a new free capitol, they've probably lost most of their offensive military, much of their defensive, and a number of cities.

 

[lordex]

Originally posted by Spike59

In the war of 1812, those pesky red coats came in and burned the white house. We stll held together as a nation, such as it was in 1812. However, I cannot think of another example where the capital city of a nation was invaded and the nation still put up any major resistance. Also at that time, we were not really much of a centrally controlled nation.

IIRC (I would because that's where I came from ), China lost its then-capital city, Nanking, to Japan at the beginning of WWII, yet still managed to put up a great amount of resistance til the end of the war.

 

[alamo]

If there was some penalty then it wouldn't be so bad. Something like N turns of anarchy before the new capital appears, depending on how large/advanced/cultured you are when disbanding the capital.

 

[lordex]

I tend to think of it as one of the over-simplified(and hence unrealistic) things in the game, so it's not an exploit as far as I'm concerned.

It would have been a lot better if the concept of capital were more abstract, i.e., you can pick any of your cities to be the new capital but it takes a certain amount of gold to move the stuff over, and if you don't build a palace in the capital it has say only 50% of the corruption reduction effect. Of course once you move your capital the palace in the old one would be destroyed immediately. This would seem to be a good compromise - you get some extra penalty if your capital is captured, but not hard enough to kill you or have you doomed.