a4phantom said:
1. Bump: How about an analysis of Free Religion vs. another civic + University of Sangore? Obviously it's situational, but assuming diplomacy is a wash (staying Jewish helps me with the Jewish bloc but hurts my relations with the Buddist bloc) but assuming I have a fairly large empire with at least a Jewish temple in every city, what's generally the most advantageous path when you discover Liberalism and have the U of S?
2. Assuming a cottage rather than specialist economy, would it be bad to have your super research city (Oxford, Academy, Super Scientist Specialists) and your chief financial city (Wall Street, Super Merchants, maybe super Priests) be the same city, the one with the most commerce?
1) At the time that freedom of religion comes along, I would assume that cities in general have something like a 50% research bonus. So the temples actually give 3 extra research per city.
Freedom of religion gives you 10% extra research. So this will be more if the average basic research production (before modifiers from libraries and such things are applied) is greater than 30 per city.
So it depends on how well developed your cities are and how well developed the cottages are to know which strategy gives you more research. But also realize that if you use freedom of religion, then you'll lose the bonus that you got from the previous civic (like organized religion for which I made a comparison earlier). After the university of Sankore becomes obsolete, you should reevalute the situation.
2) That could be the best thing. But at the time that Wall Street becomes available, usually my tax rate has dropped somewhat. And even with sporadic increases of the tax rate to 100% in order to upgrade a few units or cash rush something, on average the tax rate is still fairly low. This means that the percentage of commerce that goes to gold is so small that Wall Streets effect is limited. If you have a well developed holy city that produces more gold on average, then that would be the most logical spot to build Wall Street.
Note that the Holy City should in general be a well developed cottage city (and thus might be your main commerce city as well) in order to help create the maximum bonus from Wall Street. However, often my holy city is not in an ideal spot and it won't be my main commerce city and thus not the target for Oxford University.
Lord Parkin said:
This is actually a very, very good tactic for wartime, providing that the odds are significantly in your favour. For instance, I usually theorise that (for instance) for a Maceman with 99.2% odds when attacking a unit unpromoted, making the extra promotion to bring the odds up to (say) 99.5% is simply not worth it. For the 0.3% of wins you'll be gaining (that's 3 in 1000), you'll be losing a much bigger opportunity.
This is because (as you will notice by playing through a few games as a warmonger) even at very high odds such as 99+%, you can still sustain significant damage... half hit points or even worse. In this case, the ability to use the promotion after the attack, and to gain back half of those lost hit points, is a much bigger advantage - it means that on the counterattack, your opponent will have a significantly lower chance of being able to destroy the unit in question, since rather than being at (say) 4/8 strength it will be at 6/8. Personally I think this makes the tactic of not promoting your high-win-percentage units before they attack a very good strategy indeed. I'd rather have 99.2% of my units survive at 6 strength than 99.5% of my units survive at 4 strength.
In understand the strategy, but I don't think this is all that can be said about it and it's not as easy as in the above theoretical case. The problem is that you can't fully predict the next combat for your unit as you can also be attacked. And I really don't want to lose my highly promoted unit because I didn't promote it further.
A Maceman with +20% strength and + 25% vs melee will have a 99.9% chance when attacking a pikeman, so using the available promotion seems useless. But when it is attacked by a +10% strength crossbowman, then the maceman will win with only 34.6% chance. If I had promoted the maceman with a 25% bonus vs archer units, it would have had a chance of 81.7%. Even the combat 3 promotion would have increased the maceman's chances to 63.0%.
So while a unit can win with overwhelming odds against one type of unit, it will not do so against every type of unit and you just can't fully predict the next battles.
Also, the units that tend to have very high win chances are typically very highly promoted units and I don't want to lose them too quickly. The chance that it wins a combat becomes extremely important. I want to use it many times in the future. And healing times can be shortened by medics to such an extend that it is not too bad.
I might save the promotion, when I want to use it for a promotion that will not be usefull in the predictable upcoming battle. For instance, an unpromoted archer moving to a city that it will defend for the next 2000 years (through many upgrades) and finds a barbarian warrior on its path to the city. I might let it ignore the warrior on its way to the city and refuse to promote it as I want to give it the city defence promotion in the future and that won't help it now. And since I'm moving the archer through forests, the unpromoted archer will rarely be beaten by the unpromoted barbarian warrior. So if the warrior chooses to attack, I will probably win and can heal-promote the archer afterwards.
It can be a useful tactic, but I don't think that I'll use it very often. But to each his own, I would say.
Isn't this tactic one of the tips in the Hints section of the civilopedia or am I mistaken? I have to check it out when I play the game again.
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