RBtS1a - The Thief Economy

[Archaelicos]

Newbie/Lurker comment:

Somebody said, at some point:

"This really seems out of proportion to me. Obviously you do waste hammers, but still the hammers lost on spies seems miniscule compared to the conversion rate that is possible in terms of Spy points to beakers and vice versa."

A question - is any significant amount of the lost hammers from slain spies compensated for by not having to build as much +Tech infrastructure?

 

[darrelljs]

A question - is any significant amount of the lost hammers from slain spies compensated for by not having to build as much +Tech infrastructure?

Yes, that's true and a good point. Of course you will be building more EP infrastructure but then those buildings are more effective.

Darrell

 

[Swiss Pauli]

I finally got around to reading this on Sunday. Obviously, the strategies we employed were broadly the same (Great Wall, rush a neighbour, become the Big Dog) but there were sill some interesting differences. Aggressive AI seemed unit spam seemed to pay off for Brennus here, but with the non-aggressive setting in our game he kept getting hammered by Justinian's superior units.

 

[ruff_hi]

hey guys - is there a nice summary thread somewhere about what you found about the thief economy? When to turn it on / off, what you can and cannot do with it, tactics, etc?

 

[darrelljs]

Ruff,

I did post some of my thoughts in another thread. Quoted here:

Here is an SG where all techs came from theft. In general if you look at the math a thief economy is more efficient. First off, lets analyze the cost of a tech in EPs vs. beakers. There is a 50% premium you pay, so a tech that would cost 100 beakers to research costs 150 EPs to steal. To combat that, your spy gets several discounts (in particular a 50% discount for being stationary for five turns) and in practice the EP cost of a tech is less than the beaker cost.

Now lets look at the generation of beakers vs. EPs. Converting commerce to beakers or EPs via the slider is probably slightly in favor of beakers in the early game due to the Library. Once you get access to Jails, Security Bureau and Intelligence Agencies that will change. Not only do you get +150% per turn, you actually get +20 EPs native. Imagine a University giving +8 EPs! Specialist based generation is even more heavily weighted to EPs. EPs are treated the same as culture, with +4 per Spy and a whopping +12 for a Great Spy. The Great Scientist lightbulb is worth far less than the Great Spy infiltration. Finally, Scotland Yard is worth +100% vs. +50% for the Academy.

The negatives are hammer costs of building the spies (many of which will get caught) and negative diplomatic modifiers. I think the negative of not being able to take a tech lead is a chimera; you can use EPs for the bulk of your research and run deep beelines when you have techs you want.

I'll add that in 3.13 the AI is much better at building Security Bureau's which means post Democracy you will have more problems (although I believe it is still more efficient). All that said if I don't build the Great Wall early (or run some variation of uberfish's Sumerian Spy Scam) I rarely steal more than a few techs. All the logistics of stealing techs with spies suck the joy out of the game for me.

Darrell

 

[darrelljs]

I finally got around to reading this on Sunday. Obviously, the strategies we employed were broadly the same (Great Wall, rush a neighbour, become the Big Dog) but there were sill some interesting differences. Aggressive AI seemed unit spam seemed to pay off for Brennus here, but with the non-aggressive setting in our game he kept getting hammered by Justinian's superior units.

Swiss, hadn't noticed this until Ruff's post caught my eye. I think both games were a failure in my overall vision for the same reason: we just got too big. The game became a boring wait for the AIs to suck less. If we had not killed off Shaka things could have been exciting down the stretch but it just didn't play out that way.

Darrell

 

[darrelljs]

A question - is any significant amount of the lost hammers from slain spies compensated for by not having to build as much +Tech infrastructure?

The odds of you reading this reply are close to zero since it has been so long, but I'll give it a shot anyway, sorry for the delay . In a real game you are going to want to have the ability to do deep tech runs to get monopoly techs (e.g. a Liberalism push to Democracy for Security Bureau's and Emancipation) so you'll end up building at least Libraries and enough Universities for Oxford. After that point you'll be sinking hammers in Jails, Security Bureau's and Intelligence Agencies, which cost more than Observatories and Laboratories. So my take is that net you will need more hammers for "economic" buildings, although you get a much bigger bang for your buck.

Darrell