Portugal Regent

[vorlon_mi]

Archipelago map, Portugal, Regent. I'm considering a couple of choices for the end of the game, and would appreciate some comments/advice. I have just cleaned out my main island, and have some decisions to make.

Victory Conditions:
1. Space Race -- this is my default victory condition, because I find it the most fun. I built both Copes and Newtons in my capital. I'm keeping up or slightly ahead in tech, and should be able to get Thy of Evolution with a prebuild.

2. UN -- Several of the other tribes are polite with me, and I've been keeping friends by selling them my extra luxuries. If I build the UN, Hiawatha is likely to be the other candidate. A few turns before the UN completes, I declare on Iroquois and bribe the others to join a dogpile.

And then there's the question about invasions. I try to have an objective when I go to war, rather than just going berserk. There are only 3 luxuries on my island, so invading a neighbor to get a lux would let me devote more commerce to science rather than the lux slider. And there's always the truth that "land is power, and more is better."
Invading Rome: smaller land mass, easier to conquer, only one lux (wines); they invaded me once in the past
Invading Persia: larger land mass, closest in distance to reinforce, only one lux (incense); they're currently annoyed with me
Invading Aztecs: smaller land mass, two luxes (fur and spices); they're currently polite to me

Thoughts?

 

[Lanzelot]

First: you need more workers.

Sell Medicine. I got for Medicine:

• Wines and Incense
• 55gpt
• 244g
• Democracy and Free Artistry
• Everybody's worldmap

That was enough to lower the lux slider to 0%, so no need to invade anyone yet.

Also you need many more workers... So many railways still to build.

And you need some really productive towns, if you want to build the spaceship. Irrigate and rail all grassland tiles inside the BFC of Iron Town, then it can grow and use a couple of the mountains. (Otherwise the Ironworks will take forever and will never return the invested shields...)

Before I forget: more workers would be nice.

Another tip: if you want to go for spaceship, don't keep the other nations backward. Sell/gift them Steam and Electricity at the earliest moment and hope that they will finish 1-2 techs for you. Persia will contribute at least one modern age tech to your research, so make sure you get friendly with them, otherwise they'll charge an arm and a leg...

Did I mention "more workers" already...?

 

[vorlon_mi]

OK, sell medicine. Duly noted.

I've got 11 regular workers and 25 or so slaves; they're all working on the main RR line from one end of my land mass to the other. I've stacked them into groups to complete the tiles more quickly; I finished the tech recently.

My core territory is all roaded, and the newly conquered Inca territory is up next.
Do I really need more workers, or just need to keep the ones I have busy?
I've got 40 or cities, and about eight of them are located on far-flung islands and are hopelessly corrupt. My ratio of workers to productive cities is pretty close to 1:1...
do I really need *more* workers? Or just USE the ones I have?

Because once the railroads are built, I don't have much for them to do. There won't be much pollution until I build some factories or airports.

 

[Bowsling]

Aqueducts. And more aqueducts. You have so much wasted potential from all of those size 6 cities.

And then after that, I would build granaries in your core. Then workers like a madman in. Then use all those workers to mine that useless grassland irrigation in your core. And clear the jungles near Oporto. Stop building workers once you are at around 40 native workers, at least.

And disband all those obsolete units that you have. All of them. They're doing absolutely nothing except costing you 2gpt each.

IronTown needs to be working all five grasslands in it's BFC. Irrigate them and rail them. There's no two ways about this. Working five irrigated railed grasslands will allow you to work 6 hills, the coal mountain and the iron mountain. That will get you 45 base shields, which can be quadrupled to 180 shields per turn by the Modern Times. That's an Ironworks city for ya.

This is actually an intriguing save. I'm going to play around on it a bit, if you don't mind.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Aqueducts. And more aqueducts. You have so much wasted potential from all of those size 6 cities.

And then after that, I would build granaries in your core. Then workers like a madman in. Then use all those workers to mine that useless grassland irrigation in your core. And clear the jungles near Oporto. Stop building workers once you are at around 40 native workers, at least.

And disband all those obsolete units that you have. All of them. They're doing absolutely nothing except costing you 2gpt each.

IronTown needs to be working all five grasslands in it's BFC. Irrigate them and rail them. There's no two ways about this. Working five irrigated railed grasslands will allow you to work 6 hills, the coal mountain and the iron mountain. That will get you 45 base shields, which can be quadrupled to 180 shields per turn by the Modern Times. That's an Ironworks city for ya.

This is actually an intriguing save. I'm going to play around on it a bit, if you don't mind.

Go ahead, I don't mind at all. There was quite a bit of jungle surrounding the silks, in the old America territory which has been cleared already.

Aqueducts to enable the growth to size 12, and granaries to speed up the growth.
Understood.
I've been struggling with happiness, if I don't keep importing luxuries from other tribes.
I built Bach with an SGL. If I grow my core cities to size 12, won't I need to run the lux slider up at 30% or so?

Unless I take some luxuries from Persia

 

[Bowsling]

Nope: that's the great thing about the luxury slider. As the city grows, it generates more and more entertainment gold. The only issues I usually have are with large cities on the edge of the core that aren't corrupt enough to be farms but are corrupt enough that they don't generate enough luxury money. I usually end up using specialists in those cities.

That's the other thing you can't be afraid of: if a city becomes too big, you can just make the new citizen a tax collector, and now you're up 2 gpt. But yeah, 4 luxuries are more than enough to sustain a size 12 core city. Especially on Regent.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Been playing for several years, and definitely learned something here!

I had been counting citizens -- one smiley face from a temple, one from a luxury, multiple smiley faces after building a market. A certain number of citizens are born content, or born unhappy, depending on the difficulty level. When running certain governments, a military unit can make N citizens happy (military police). So I had *assumed* that each 10% notch on the lux slider added one more smiley face per city.

No, it's not that simple. As Bowsling points out, the lux slider changes the amount of commerce that is turned into happiness, and cities that are almost metro size can generate a *lot* of commerce by working railroaded tiles.

Is there a quick reference for how to convert entertainment gold per turn into happy faces? Is the formula listed? I'll check in the War Academy ... Thanks so much!

 

[Bowsling]

It's 1:1. If a city is generating 10 commerce at 10% luxury, it will get one extra happy face.

 

[Lanzelot]

Aqueducts to enable the growth to size 12, and granaries to speed up the growth.
Understood.

Nope. This is the way to go: "Aqueducts to enable the growth to size 12, and workers to speed up the growth." After your workers are done building the railway, you just join them to all cities to bring them from size 7 to size 12 in one turn. Much faster than building a granary...
Usually I build granaries only in those towns, which build workers and settlers.

Nope: that's the great thing about the luxury slider. As the city grows, it generates more and more entertainment gold. The only issues I usually have are with large cities on the edge of the core that aren't corrupt enough to be farms but are corrupt enough that they don't generate enough luxury money. I usually end up using specialists in those cities.

Yes, that's an excellent idea. Usually, in core cities you don't want to use specialists, but in the semi-corrupt cities at the edge, it's no big loss, because the 1-2 shields and 1-2 commerce from that tile would probably lost to corruption anyway, so a scientist or two solves your happiness problem, while at the same time netting you 3-6 beakers...

 

[vorlon_mi]

I've been using specialists to round off the food production to an even number, and I've been using specialists in the farms / hopelessly corrupt towns far from the core. Both of you are suggesting that I do more careful arranging of which tiles are being worked by which cities in the core, and what improvements are made on those tiles. That way, I should not need to use specialists in the core.

Regarding tile improvements... I had thought the "mine green, irrigate brown" rule was intended primarily for the early game, to work around the despotism penalty. I switched to Republic long ago, so that's no longer a factor. Why is the grassland irrigation useless?

Is it because a railroaded grassland tile can feed the citizen working that tile, but the shields are more valuable than the food? I've been doing a lot of irrigation chaining since ancient times, since this map has almost no rivers. At what point should I consider mining those irrigated tiles?

 

[Bowsling]

The rule of thumb, I find, works in almost every situation. There are a few exceptions (like Iron City, which needs all the food it can get), but generally, grasslands are the production engines of your empire. All of those cities surrounded by irrigated grassland, like Leira, Oporto, and a few others could be as productive as Lisbon and Sagres if you had mined those grasslands.

 

[Lanzelot]

I had thought the "mine green, irrigate brown" rule was intended primarily for the early game, to work around the despotism penalty. I switched to Republic long ago, so that's no longer a factor. Why is the grassland irrigation useless?

Yes, I also use it primarily for the Despotism phase. Grassland irrigation is very useful, once you are out of Despotism. I usually irrigate a couple of grasslands for selected towns, which I want to either grow quickly or to produce a mass of settlers/workers. Once I have all the settlers/workers I want, I change the irrigation back to mines (keep only those that are needed for the city to work all possible hills/mountains with 0fpt at size 12).