Point of Information: Organized Trait doesn't cut City Maintenance Upkeep by 50%

[wc3promet]

Point of Information: Organized Trait doesn't cut City Maintenance Upkeep by 50%

Here's an example of a slightly misleading post quoted:

Tokugawa is a much better civ to war with, I think, because not only to you have Agg, you have Org which makes it easier to take on cities you capture instead of razing them (because it costs less to have more cities).

For the above quote, having many cities which are far away from your Capital is going to incur a City Maintenance Upkeep of at least 3 gold per turn per city.

Organized Trait doesn't help if you have 15 cities and you're running Civics with Zero Upkeep cost.

Being a warmonger is going to get the player killed in the later Eras unless the warmonger is able to get rid of all the other Civs within 200 turns of Gameplay.

Organized Trait does cut production cost of Courthouses by 50% but that is assuming that you have enough gold left to research Code of Laws.

 

[petey]

Organized does cut the cost of civics in half, so although it doesn't reduce city maintenance as a whole, it does reduce one part of it, which can turn into a significant savings, especially if you're using expensive civics like Hereditary Rule or Organized Religion.

Of course it doesn't do anything if you're not using high cost civics, but doing so would be as pointless as having the Financial trait and not building any cottages.

 

[Oggums]

Organized Trait doesn't help if you have 15 cities and you're running Civics with Zero Upkeep cost.

Why would anyone do that? Can you even run zero civic upkeep across the board if you wanted to?

What you quoted was dead on. He didn't say city maintenance was cut 50%, he just said it costs less to have more cities. From my experience, mostly from monarch/emperor games, warmongering with Organized is easier than with other traits, and Tokugawa is king.

At the very least, I'd be running caste system, so I can expand borders of new cities with artists, then help with the maintenance costs with merchants. Vassalage comes next, which is expensive.

 

[wc3promet]

Why would anyone do that? Can you even run zero civic upkeep across the board if you wanted to?

What you quoted was dead on. He didn't say city maintenance was cut 50%, he just said it costs less to have more cities. From my experience, mostly from monarch/emperor games, warmongering with Organized is easier than with other traits, and Tokugawa is king.

My posts deals with Multiplayer settings unless otherwise stated. Meaning that my interest is not in acquiring strategies dealing with Computer AI players. I'm afraid to say that your experiences in Monarch/Emperor Games are meaningless to me.

 

[Oggums]

Don't quote someone who was discussing single player, if you don't want to discuss it.

Perhaps we should set up a multiplayer game and I'll show you just how meaningless Tokugawa is?

 

[SmartMuffin]

Of course it doesn't do anything if you're not using high cost civics, but doing so would be as pointless as having the Financial trait and not building any cottages.

Actually it does.

It reduces civic cost by 50%. That will save you more gold overall if you're running high cost civics, but 50% is still 50%, whether it changes 40 to 20 or 2 to 1. So unless you are literally running no cost civics across the board, organized is a nice way to get some extra gold. No, not nearly as nice as Financial, but it's not as bad as everyone thinks.

 

[Crimso]

wc3promet: First of all, 90% of us already knew this. We read the manual. Second, most of the people on these forums who have sigs don't put anything interesting in them, and so it's quite easy to skip yours (I've done it several times myself). Might I suggest an avatar? In fact, I would suggest a unique avatar to everyone here, especially if your name is as unpronouncable, and thus forgettable, as wc3promet. Finally, I think it's only you and one other (avater-less!) person who bring multiplayer discussion to this sub-forum. Perhaps the mulitplayer forum is better place for your topics?

I've been trying to come around to the Organized trait, but I really can't. When the people who defend it the strongest usually admit Financial is better...

 

[fornost]

I dont know, i wouldnt say that financial and organized are much more comparable than any other 2 traits. I use civ's with the organized trait if I want to capture cities and almost immediately use them for military unit production, since they are closest to the battle. The financial trait does not reap instant rewards unless you spam cottages at the beginning of the game, something that just doesnt seem to work our for me in my games.

In my most recent game with mao on monarch, i conquered the english and after the 4 or so turns of anarchy, built a barracks, in some cases, within 6 turns, and started pumping units out of those cities to conquer elizabeth's neighbor...a lot more efficient than wasting the production of your best cities on units and having to wait 10 turns for them to get where they need to go.

Pre-state property, the costs of running vassalage and/or theocracy can be huge with an ever-expanding empire, and thus, i can say that the organized trait works much better for me. I think it comes down to picking the traits that work best with you rather than trying to work with the "best" traits, and i'm thoroughly enjoying the fact that there is an organized trait. And yeah, Tokugawa rules.

 

[Oggums]

Financial takes a while to pick up. For early warmongering, I much prefer Organized.

Relative to multiplayer, I'd wager that Organized is better all the way through a game, just because it still works even if your towns are pillaged.

 

[Doctor Love]

Financial takes a while to pick up. For early warmongering, I much prefer Organized.

Relative to multiplayer, I'd wager that Organized is better all the way through a game, just because it still works even if your towns are pillaged.

I agree. Financial is great against the AI because you need some way to keep up the tech pace, and the AI is too dumb to realize all your towns are your soft white underbelly. Meanwhile a human multiplayer knows how bad they can hurt you by pillaging, so they can make some calculated unit sacrifices to really screw you.

 

[fornost]

Plus pillaging towns helps the aggressor stay even tech-wise, and if you're playing duel or tiny maps, thats 2 things in their favour.

 

[Smirk]

I fail to see how pillaged cottages reduces the power of finacial, all you need to do is build a cottage on any river square and you've got an instant 3 gold tile. Its hard to do an exact comparison but +3 gold per city is going to be superior to the organized innate benefit for a long time.
And not until the cheap courthouses get built will the organized start to save money but thats just a temporary relative gain as everyone can build courthouses.

Anyway, acting like pillaging is some king of all strategies is silly. For one you've got little to no defense bonuses (nor promotions) unless your foolish opponent cottages hills and then doesn't defend them. So your pillaging units are easily destroyed. Then you only drop one level per pillage so your opponent doesn't need to stand around in pointless defense if they can accept some reasonable loses and then react to your assults. Assuming its not warriors doing the pillaging and the unit is lost, thats a gain of 50 hammers or more per unit, so all but the largest earning spaces will be a fair tradeoff.

Of course this all is situational, but in general its not useful to raid unless you are going to just disband those units anyway, even losing a warrior for 30 or so gold is a waste.

 

[Oggums]

Well, nobody said it was "king of all strategies" but it sounds to me like you just haven't been victim to a proper pillaging stack. If all you've seen or used is warriors, no wonder you don't think much of it.

It's definitely not silly.

 

[Seven05]

The organized trait is also the one trait that is most influenced by the difficulty and map size of the game you're playing. On higher difficulty levels your civic upkeep is increased (100% at emporer) and on small maps your civic upkeep is generally lower because you have a smaller population (the determining factor in civic upkeep costs).

So multiplayer/singleplayer arguments aside, if you're playing small/duel maps on Noble like most MP players do the organized trait is effectively useless when compared to other traits. In fact, those specific settings are chosen by most players for the very reason that it reduces upkeep (and civic) costs so it's really no wonder it feels underpowered. Try increasing the difficulty level up to Deity (yes, even for your MP game) or playing on a larger map and you might be suprised at just how effective it can be.

Of course if you play Civ4 like it's a Rubic's Cube and the game is over while you still have 4 cities because everybody did the same warrior rush and one of them had more luck than the others than don't even bother trying a civ with the organized trait.

(For those that miss the connection with the Rubic's Cube: It's a small square puzzle game with 9 colored "blocks" on each of the six sides with the goal being to match up all of the blocks on each side with others of the same color. The puzzle was easily solved following a simply step of repetive moves regardless of how the colored blocks were alligned. I see a lot of "strategy" topics that remond me of that; build worker, build warrior, research this, research that... always the same pattern)

 

[obsolete]

I've noticed on monarch level, organized is pretty useless still.

 

[Draetor24]

I find Financial better for fast tech/peace games, and Organized better for warmonger games. Why?

Financial needs cottages to benefit from. Hence, less farms, hence less population to work mines and produce hammers.

Organized is instant -50% to civics across all cities, which means you can use more farms/mines and produce more military.

 

[fornost]

I fail to see how pillaged cottages reduces the power of finacial, all you need to do is build a cottage on any river square and you've got an instant 3 gold tile.

Firstly, its 3 commerce, not 3 gold. Very different. I think this is why i thought financial looked so good on paper, but wasnt that hot early on in any of my games. The tiles have to be worked to get that commerce, and theres usually a better tile out there than one with a cottage. They don't start growing for a while unless adjacent to a river, and even then, you're cheating yourself out of early city growth by using it. And if you're beside a river, a higher population city is going to at least break even in commerce with a financial civ with a few cottages, while bringing in more food and hammers.

This only applies to riverside tiles. Otherwise, you're going to have to build cottages early and wait until they at least turn into hamlets. All it takes is one pillage and your +1 commerce bonus is gone, and by that time, you better be prepared for more than a warrior choke.

Besides, in my experience at least, a few extra commerce per hamlet doesnt start to effect your science rate early on at all. Plus that means that you have to go for pottery pretty darn early, which i really doubt the importance of unless you get cheap graneries also.

Cheap lighthouses are also really really nice. You can take over a coastal city and turn it into a money making city very fast with lighthouses...or just build one for that matter. And you'd be surprised what organized can do on even a size small map...if you're going for domination that is, but I would agree that it's not incredibly useful on tiny/duel maps.

 

[fornost]

That being said, financial can be a very powerful trait...mid-late game. Before then, its not that nifty. Then again, it all depends on how you play. Organized just really seems to fit better with my way of playing than financial does.

 

[fornost]

And not until the cheap courthouses get built will the organized start to save money but thats just a temporary relative gain as everyone can build courthouses.

Cheap courthouses are quite a big deal actually. The further away your cities get, the less productive they generally are (half of which are probably recently captured). The courthouse is a fairly expensive building, and half of the cost gone is a huge deal for low production cities. Time is power.

 

[Shillen]

This is from a prince game, standard map:

I'm not playing an organized civ, but I'm running all low upkeep civics except bureaucracy is medium upkeep. If I was organized and running these civics I'd be saving 180 gold per turn. But if I was organized I'd probably be more willing to take more expensive civics and benefit even more from it. I don't think organized is useless at all for a heavy expansion game, especially when you factor in the cheap courthouses.