Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

I donnot dare to disagree but that is quite a surprise to me. Is the evidence for that thesis solid?
No, it's admittedly only observational; I very rarely see any assimilation taking place in my cities -- but that might well be because of the way I habitually play.
Spoiler :
Building the Spaceship (playing at Monarch/Emp) is my preferred VC, but I never deliberately optimise the map set-up to this purpose, and always play from the first starting position I roll, until the game is won (or lost). Since Republic is such a good all-round government, I'll aim to get there ASAP, and usually stay there for the rest of the game (unless I'm playing a REL-Civ). As a result, during the early-to-mid-game, happiness is often problematic, because I'm frequently both Lux-poor, and lacking MP-capability.

Wars therefore usually need to be restricted to quick resource-town grabs (if I DoW'd them), and/or defensive/punitive actions (if they DoW'd me). Assuming I can survive long enough, I'll usually try to have a healthy economy set up, a lot of happiness from overseas trade, and be rated 'AVERAGE' vs. my nearest neighbour(s), before I'll go on the final crusade to knock them off my continent for good and all. In the meantime, to minimise flip-risk (my Culture is also usually comparatively low), and/or WW-unhappiness after inevitable further DoWs (mine or theirs), I generally won't add Slaves to my cities until their parent-Civ is finally dead (or at least evicted to an overseas holdout).
I frequently won't start acquiring the majority of my final territory (and foreign nationals) until after I have MilTrad, and the process may not be complete before I reach the Modern Age. Combined with that very low assimilation probability for Republic (which suggests that it might require up to 50T to be reasonably sure of assimilating any given foreigner!), it's quite possible that I simply don't have enough turns left for any (noticeable) assimilation to occur, before I hit game-over (one way or another).

Buuut... when I complained about (apparent) non-assimilation of dead-Civs' nationals in another thread (we were originally talking about what factor(s) governs whether Settlers/Workers built out of mixed cities will have your nationality or foreign), the general response was 'Meh, they count as yours after the parent-Civ is dead, so they don't increase the flip-risk, so who cares?' rather than 'You're wrong, and here are the savegames to prove it'.

ADDENDUM
Walletta's post would seem to be more (and better) evidence that foreigners who do not have a parent-Civ, will never assimilate. Surely his mighty Mayan government would be considerably more persuasive than anything a puny Barbarian-tribe could muster...
 
Thanks tjs282 and justanick. I suspected that it would be very difficult for citizens to convert as I've seen citizens added 100 turns back sitting as it is up until the end of the game.
 
Combined with that very low assimilation probability for Republic (which suggests that it might require up to 50T to be reasonably sure of assimilating anyone!)

Reasonably sure is open for interpreation. If you have 20 nonnational citizens in a city, than after 50 turns 12.717 are expected to be converted because 20 x 0.98^50 = 7.283 are expected to remain.

how long before an enslaved barbarian becomes fully absorbed into the great Mayan biomass?

That will never happen. That is the beauty of exponential decay. As citizens are an integer it might happen, or it might not. So the proper question is when one could expect 50% or 90% to be converted. 50% takes about 34 turns at 2% per turn, about 23 turns at 3% per turn and about 17 turns at 4% per turn. 90 % takes about 114 turns at 2% per turn, about 76 turns and about 56 turns at 4% per turn
 
Reasonably sure is open for interpreation. If you have 20 nonnational citizens in a city, than after 50 turns 12.717 are expected to be converted because 20 x 0.98^50 = 7.283 are expected to remain.



That will never happen. That is the beauty of exponential decay. As citizens are an integer it might happen, or it might not. So the proper question is when one could expect 50% or 90% to be converted. 50% takes about 34 turns at 2% per turn, about 23 turns at 3% per turn and about 17 turns at 4% per turn. 90 % takes about 114 turns at 2% per turn, about 76 turns and about 56 turns at 4% per turn

:D it never ceases to amaze me the stuff you know.
 
If you're doing this after Rails, you can move-and-disband newly built land-units over your entire Continent in a single turn -- and if you have coastal cities on separate landmasses, but within 1 ship-journey of each other (or the patience for ship-chaining -- which I don't!), you can even move them between landmasses in a single turn.
In the late Industrial Age you could simply use Airfields, if you are tired of ship chains. :old:

Since Wealth is the last item on the project-list, Wealth-producing cities will initially be clumped at the end. You could scroll all the way down, but clicking the column header a second time will reverse the list order, bringing the Wealth-producing cities to the top instead.

You then don't even need to click through to the individual city-screen(s) to change the production: right-clicking on the individual project icon(s) in the F1 screen will pop-up the build-list right there.
This feature is also very useful/time-saving when pre-building for something. For example, when I pre-build universities while researching Education, I usually set those cities that need a University to work on a Collosseum (or some other project that I usually never build in my games). Then when Education comes in, I just go to F1, sort all cities by build project so that all Colloseums are grouped together and then quickly go through the list, right-click and switch to University.

That actually depends on whether the parent-Civ is still in the game. You can only :borg: foreign citizens if their parent-Civ is still alive and kicking; if the parent-Civ has already been eliminated, any foreign citizens obtained from that Civ -- whether they grew up in cities you captured, or were freed Slaves joined to your original cities -- will never visibly come over to your side.
I'm also quite curious whether this is the case?! I have never seen any evidence that would either support or refute this theory.

However, I remeber a funny story by one of our legends, tR1cKy: it was called "Save the Mongols" or something like that, and there he undertook something that can be considered the "opposite" of assimilation: tR1cKy started a game where, with the help of the editor, he gave himself a single worker (slave) of Mongolian nationality. (Besides his settler of course.) Mongolia was not part of the game. The goal of the game was then to "multiply" this single slave and to create a Mongolian population as large as possible by the end of the game.
He achieved this aim using the following mechanism:
  • Join the Mongolian slave to a size-1 town and then produce a settler. That settler will then have Mongolian nationality. (Not completely sure, but I think, if you build a settler in a town where you have 2 or more citizens of your own nationality, the settler will be of your own nationality. So the settler must be produced in a size-2 town, where one citizen has your nationality and the other one is Mongolian.)
  • Join the settler to another size-1 town. It will now have one native citizen and two Mongolian citizens.
  • In this town produce a worker. It will be native, which leaves a size 2-town with both citizens being Mongolian now. After that build a worker (will be Mongolian) and then settler-disband.
  • Now you already have 3 Mongolian citizens, one in form of a worker and two in form of a settler. Rinse and repeat.

It's been a while since I read that story and I can't remember whether he ever finished the game, but it was quite hilarious... :D
 
Reasonably sure is open for interpreation. If you have 20 nonnational citizens in a city, than after 50 turns 12.717 are expected to be converted because 20 x 0.98^50 = 7.283 are expected to remain
Edited the above text while you were writing your respeonse, hence the mismatch. Thanks for demonstrating that 'reasonably sure' = '>>50% of them' and giving me the formula I need to crunch some numbers of my own...

Let's say that my continental genocide-campaign begins when I have a decent Rail-network going up (and a stack of Cavs to roll along them), and I become tech-leader by reaching Electronics via the ToE, then tech-trading the lower-branch techs up to SciMeth/AtomTheory for the upper-branch techs as far as Refining/Steel. Even at 4T per tech, I'd still need 64T to get through the remaining 16 needed late-Industrial and SS-techs (and it usually takes longer than that, because my Civ will almost certainly not be fully-optimised -- due to incompetent leadership ;) ).

Under a Republic, an additional 64+T should then be enough time to assimilate ~75% of the foreigners from those cities which succumbed before I took the tech-lead -- but this doesn't seem to be happening in my games, where the parent-Civ gets eliminated. By the time I launch my Ship, unless I've enSlaved them, and replaced the foreigners with homegrown Settlers/Workers, many captured cities will still be very much foreign.
 
However, I remeber a funny story by one of our legends, tR1cKy: it was called "Save the Mongols" or something like that, and there he undertook something that can be considered the "opposite" of assimilation: tR1cKy started a game where, with the help of the editor, he gave himself a single worker (slave) of Mongolian nationality. (Besides his settler of course.) Mongolia was not part of the game. The goal of the game was then to "multiply" this single slave and to create a Mongolian population as large as possible by the end of the game
Coincidentally, I read that story last week -- it's here, for anyone else who's interested. I almost cited it in this context in my above post, but then I remembered that he also modded all the assimilation probabilities to zero...

As for this...
In the late Industrial Age you could simply use Airfields, if you are tired of ship chains
That's true, but doesn't airlifting a unit use up its whole move (like pressing SPACE, except the unit jumps between airports/-fields)?

So even if you airlifted it directly to its destination (or an airfield on a rail network), you still wouldn't then be able to (move-and-)disband (henceforth: 'MaD'!) it immediately, i.e. you'd have to pay at least 1T-maintenance on it, then MaD it on the next turn.

OTOH, ship-chaining between friendly ports leaves the transported unit(s) with its MP intact at the end of the chain (doesn't it?), allowing you to MaD it/them in a single turn. Which was more the point I was making there -- keeping the units-to-disband off the account-books...
 
Ah, yes, when air-lifting the units you lose the movement points. So that's the price you pay for a little "convenience"... ;) However, with enough cities, unit upkeep shouldn't be a problem. (After all, you are not leading any wars at that point, right? So the military can be small.)
 
Tr1cky´s game is still active... the Mongols are still breeding. or rather they are getting bred. ;)
t_x
 
That's the great thing about games like this, you can do all sorts of weird stuff to add entertainment to a game. It's not quite as interesting as Tr1cky's adventure, but I once did a Jungle preservation game.

Unlike Forest, Jungle can't be replaced, so my mission was to eliminate all the other Civs without then Settling anywhere and to try and save as much Jungle as possible, all available Forestable squares at least returned to Forest (I wasn't allowed to chop anything). A real eco-warrior :)

On topic, In my current game I'm trying to see how quickly I can get a 20k, trying to get into the mindset of a HoF'er.

It's only Regent, so it's not hard, and I reloaded to a fairly suitable start, but looking at the HoF I'm still miles off a good completion date. It's about 1050AD and I only have about 6500 Culture with 75 per turn, so still approximately 150 turns to go (assuming I'm able to build more Culture in the intervening time).

But I look at the HoF and dates like 1350 appear doable. So it appears my start position wasn't so hot after all. I'm only able to max-out at 20 Shields at size 12. I've also wasted one Wonder's worth of production by not disbanding units to one-turn Temples to University normal building improvements, but that's not a huge deal, it makes a difference, but it's not a huge deal.

I did, however, max-out getting to size 12 as soon as possible and I have got all the game's Ancient Age Wonders except the Great Wall and Statue of Zeus, many of them before 500BC (about 4 or 5). I've also had one, alas, just one, Scientific Leader which greatly helped by allowing me to rush The Temple of Artemis in good time pre-500BC. I feel a bit disappointed I've only had one SGL though, particularly as I'm playing a Scientific Civ and I've been the first to 25-30 Techs and am nearly in the Industrial Age (I'm taking every Tech instead of bee-lining, so as to line-up a good Wonder pile, perhaps I could have bee-lined Railroads etc, but, again, at 4/5 turns per tech for the dead-enders it doesn't seem like that much of a saving to do so? Meaningful, but not massive?).

So am I correct at concluding that 1350AD finish on Huge requires:

1. A start location which permits at least 30 natural (post-Republic, pre-Railroads) Shields, maxed to size 12 ASAP using multiple Workers to get all tiles worked ASAP and by joining Setllers from one's second town.

2. Disbanding Units to get normal Cultural buildings up ASAP.

3. Possibly bee-lining Railroads? Maybe push to Factories? All before collecting the Techs that have the nice Wonders?

4. Incredibly lucky SGLs? Do the early finishes mostly rely on the luck of getting 4 or 5 SGLs during BC?

Culture's not something you can affect that greatly, so I can't think of much else?
 
For HoF 20k games, 4 to 5 early SGLs may be expecting a lot but with 2 to 3 of those, and a decent start (30-35 Shields without railroads) can get you a nice date.
You're right on the fact that you'll need to rush all non wonder projects by disbanding units and short rushing. The ideal practice is doing that in one turn but it is not possible many times for earlier builds like the University. Anyways you need to get them done as fast as possible. Also in the industrial age, steam power and then industrialisation are a no brainer. You'll want factories and coal plants in your 20k city asap and all of its shield tiles railroaded in the turn you get steam.
 
Yeah, came in at a fairly lame 1778. I got a second SGL, but there was only about 20 turns left so it was a bit pointless in the grand scheme of things. Nice quick games those 20k'ers though, only 14 hours and most of that was pointless fiddling like clearing the black with boats, moving stuff around, perfecting outlying areas with workers etc.
 
And I have never seen an AICiv start a GWonder-build in a city that has no chance of completing it before a competitor (e.g. 1-shield towns).


Just to clarify, by "competitor" you mean another town within the same civ, yes? Because certainly multiple civs race to complete the same wonder at the same time.

I've long regarded the Temple of Artemis as a designer-built-in cheat, because it seems like all the civs waste time trying to build it, and it costs so much.
 
So am I correct at concluding that 1350AD finish on Huge requires:

1. A start location which permits at least 30 natural (post-Republic, pre-Railroads) Shields, maxed to size 12 ASAP using multiple Workers to get all tiles worked ASAP and by joining Setllers from one's second town.

2. Disbanding Units to get normal Cultural buildings up ASAP.

3. Possibly bee-lining Railroads? Maybe push to Factories? All before collecting the Techs that have the nice Wonders?

4. Incredibly lucky SGLs? Do the early finishes mostly rely on the luck of getting 4 or 5 SGLs during BC?

Culture's not something you can affect that greatly, so I can't think of much else?

Point 3. should be replaced by
3. Bee-line to Free Artistry.

It's important to get the early wonders as early as possible. The industrial age wonders don't matter that much anymore. The number of turns till end-of-game is too small for them to make a really significant contribution to the final culture score.

Shakespeare's Theater allows you to double your shield production by approx. 300AD. That will have a much bigger impact than doubling your production by 800AD (using rails and factories).
Also Shakespeare's Theater is the structure with the highest culture value at 8cpt. So getting it as early as possible also gives a nice boost to your culture score, in addition to speeding up the construction of the remaining middle age wonders... :goodjob:

(PS: just to make sure: you did ask for advice this time, didn't you? :scared:)
 
I too have been aiming for Shakespeare lately, not to win a cultural victory, but just to have an incorruptible power house at the heart of my economy.
 
Bee-line to Free Artistry.

Yes, I quite agree. I guess the pedanting might be that if one was managing 4TPT then Hospitals are only 2 out of the way whereas Shakespeare's Theatre is 3. If you're on Wetlands then Medicine/Santiation might be desirable as well?

But the 8 Culture for ST is a definite no-brainer, though by taking it early you do run the risk of losing one of either Sistine or Leonardo's to that one Civ that's doing ok. If you're aiming for a 1400 finish then the 8 wont double until 1300 anyway, even if you maxed to get it by 300AD?

In the game I just played I went Sun Tzu's -> Knight's Templar -> Copernicus' -> Shakespeare's -> Leonardo's and had to sacrifice the Sistine to another one of my cities because the Aztecs had already had both Invention and Theology for quite a few turns by that point. I might have been able to make both, but 11 turns is a long time to wait in CIV AI land, especially when your other city is just 5 turns away.

On the topic of 'doubling' your production with Shakespeare's, I guess you mean by going from size 12 to size 20. In the game I've just played, 6 of the squares were Coastal squares, so, in my case, the population boost from ST was only 2 squares which, without Railroads, is barely worth it.

Which brings me to my main question for you:

Surely a good 20k requires a coastal city? Otherwise you lose Colossus, Lighthouse and Magellan's. Colossus is going to be important for getting to Republic quicker (and all the other AA Wonder techs). Lighthouse and Magellan's might be passable, but they are cheap and the Lighthouse can be made very quickly.

So, if you're going to need a Coastal start, it's going to be very difficult to also have 20, or even 18 productive squares is it not? That one start location that includes both a small Coastal start and a 30/35 production potential from 12 squares, on a River, with bonus foods to feed the many Hills, is all going to be quite a tough one to reload for? So we're back to point 1 really aren't we? It's 90% all in the start location... ?
 
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