Rexercise: an expansion challenge

[Siran]

9 cities, with one more settler only a few turns from settling, population of 26, 8 totem poles

 

[Wreck]

I went unsustainable & silly. I settled sixteen cities on the last turn. My income went from +8 to -147.

23 cities total. And I had two settlers left on the last turn -- one because I was an idiot and didn't plan my city-packing right, and the other because a barb archer wandered onto a road I was going to use.

Buildings were minimal. 6 totem poles, 3 granaries.

Total pop at the end was 37. Of course, 16 of that was in brand-new defenseless cities. On strike.

 

[cabert]

with 23 cities, you can be pretty close to domination, no?

 

[Wreck]

with 23 cities, you can be pretty close to domination, no?

No. It's apparently a pretty large landmass. I'm not sure what the map parameters were, but I was still meeting AIs near the end... I think I met one in 25bc. Also, I packed the 16 end-game cities as dense as I could. So I had perhaps filled in my share of the initial land. Of course having all my cities unrecoverably on strike would tend to put a damper in any plans for further expansion.

 

[Mutineer]

well, rules probably should include some speculation on how to win

Seriously, I found 9 cities to be optimum amount at 1 AD, I probably can expand to 20 at 500AD sustainably.

 

[Wreck]

If I were to try again... and maybe I will...

Spoiler :

I'd do two main things different. One is to build Stonehenge. I did not go into the game thinking that border-pops would be needed, and mostly they are not. You want cities densely packed, and you can only use 4 pop in any city anyway, and you want to settle next to resources/hills you will use. Still, when you are setting up for the end-game land rush, it is nice to be able to keep as many settlers as possible within your cultural borders. Border pops are thus quite helpful.

Stonehenge should also be useful in getting GPPs. (I got zero GPPs in my game -- for a Philosophical leader. ¡Qué lata!) You'd get at least one Great Prophet. At the very least he could be used as a superspecialist. 25 for say 60 turns should amply repay the early investment of 120.

Using the GP to found a religion would be nice, allowing you to run at least some cities at one more pop. I doubt that spreading religion yourself would be worthwhile, but so long as you hook up your cities, you'd have a good chance of the religion spreading on its own. (I did not hook up some of my cities, but it would be doable with one more worker.) However, I am not sure about spending what would be needed on the little religious techs you'd have to do to be able to bulb Monotheism or Theology.

Second, I'd more carefully plan my 6-8 "core" cities with the idea of getting each of their borders popped, as per the above, and with the idea of dense-packing in another 20+ cities at the end. In my game I didn't do that because I didn't really know what I was working toward.

Some minor changes I would make:

Deemphasize Pottery, and don't build any granaries. Or maybe one granary in Chakotia. The other two were wasted. I whipped a few times in Chakotia and not anywhere else, except right towards the end of the game when regrowth did not matter. As for cottages, you don't need them that much, and certainly not until you are getting near to your 6-8 core city goal.

Stop tech after Mathematics. As it was, I got partway into... whatever was next, Calendar I think, and had to shut down tech anyway. So that was 100 commerce wasted. Heck, I could have ended the game not on strike! (It would have happened the next turn. )

Chop more ruthlessly for workers in the early game.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

well, rules probably should include some speculation on how to win

How about Time?

I think it's clear that for this sort of challenge, there needs to be a qualification point well beyond the scoring point: score comes from turn 115, but you have to survive until turn 150, or whatever.

What I don't like about this answer is that it lengthens the interval quite a bit, when what I wanted was to make it easy for players to try multiple attempts so that they can refine their ideas. Which means that I need a way to evaluate "winning position" at turn 115.

One answer might have been to require a positive income at the scoring point. That doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to recover, but it does keep players in the neighborhood of the ballpark. It'll miss in those cases where the player has a large enough gold reserve to survive the crash.

 

[Mutineer]

yee, when I think about it I see difficulty in designing set of rule..

Because usually rex is not a purpose. We rex in order to achieve something, like claim land, limit AI, Claim resources. Packing cities as tight as possible does not do anything.

If one use Infinite city spamm system one can pack out more cities. But what you want to test?

 

[cabert]

I'd say the exercise as it is has its own virtue.
But there is no clear "you win" position from the sheer number of cities to be achieved.

You can have another exercise where you want to max your land (which means border pops count!)

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

You can have another exercise where you want to max your land (which means border pops count!)

Max population is another I considered.

 

[Wreck]

Max pop seems pretty good, at least with the results of this rexercise that most impress me (Uncle JJ and Valivator). At least on this particular map with its lack of happiness before Calendar or Monarchy, getting a good pop demands both teching and rexxing; getting cities requires just rexxing.

But I still think that even maxpop is too vulnerable to gaming via building settlers and then plopping them down on the last turn. 80 resources for +1 pop is a pretty good deal. My score on pop was much higher than all the people who were playing normally.

How about this as a compromise: score is the sum of pop of all cities that have at least 2 pop. This would eliminate last-second settling, at least. It does also punish some normal play (i.e. whipping monument in city settled late), but I think that is pretty minor.

 

[RD-BH]

Results:
1 AD
11 cities [5,4,3,3,4,3,4,1,1,1,1]
30 pop
6 totem
2 granary
15 warrior
8 worker
3 dog soldier
3 chariot
+19 gold per turn

Notes:
chop-rushed first settler
whipped a defender against a barb archer
chopped riverside forests and cottaged
lost Moundville to a barb warrior (I wasn't paying attention)
rebuilt Moundville with next settler
(concentrating on chop/whip-rushing could easily yield more cities)

Enjoyed this rexercise,
Thanks, VoR 8)

Screenshots


Gamesave
View attachment Rex AD-0001 [11 Cities][30 Pop][6 Totem][2 Granary][15 Warrior][8 Worker][3 DogS].CivBeyondSwordSave

 

[pi-r8]

"Rexing" is a terrible strategy, especially if you're not organized or financial. It works OK on noble-monarch because the maintenence costs are low enough that extra cities won't cost you much, and the AIs are passive enough to let you steal all the land and not attack you. On higher difficulties you'll just end up crippled by maintenance costs, and with all several pissed off neighboring AIs. 1 well developed capital city can easily outtech a 12 city empire full of 1 pop cities working new cottages. By the time the big sprawling empire finally catches up, you'll be in the modern age if not the future, and you'll have lost the opportunity for any sort of rennaisance or industrial blitz against backwards AIs, so you'll have to duke it out in a space or culture race using only your initial 12 cities.

 

[Ryuujin]

Ran across this and gave it a go, if a little late.

9 cities (9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 2, 1, 5, 2)
41 pop
1 Stonehenge / 9 Totem Poles
1 Oracle
1 The Church of the Nativity
5 Granary
3 Barracks

9 Workers
9 Chariots
6 Dog Soldier
3 Archers
2 Warriors

Could probably do better with a 2nd go around. Need to cottage more. A lot more.

 

[iggymnrr]

I like the idea of this challenge. I'm a REXaholic even on emperor or the occasional foray into immortal. Cavaet: barbs are usually off. Secret: imperial decree to build workers everywhere. The lowly worker will get you far. Harness the power of land as quickly as possible.

 

[vranasm]

finally got to record what i wanted to do like 6 weeks ago.

My approach (actually third one) on this map

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVuS8JWBIw

managed to get 11 cities (in the 2nd training one I got 1 city more and better tech standing, well such is life).

I hope people will find it enjoyable and will try the map

 

[Habitus]

I'll actually give this ago

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

finally got to record what i wanted to do like 6 weeks ago.

My approach (actually third one) on this map

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVuS8JWBIw

Nice! I enjoyed watching that.

Looking at your play, I think you fell into a trap -- one that I did not deliberately place in the game. My feeling is that you desperately need fog busting to avoid various barbarian problems, and given the size of the map, you badly need mobility.

In other words, a much higher ratio of chariots to dog soldiers.

Likewise, it might make sense to float more warriors for city garrisons, to get the big units out where they can be useful. There's a maintenance tradeoff to be made there, though; not clear cut.

 

[vranasm]

Nice! I enjoyed watching that.

Looking at your play, I think you fell into a trap -- one that I did not deliberately place in the game. My feeling is that you desperately need fog busting to avoid various barbarian problems, and given the size of the map, you badly need mobility.

In other words, a much higher ratio of chariots to dog soldiers.

Likewise, it might make sense to float more warriors for city garrisons, to get the big units out where they can be useful. There's a maintenance tradeoff to be made there, though; not clear cut.

chariot are ineffective against spears, which are usually units which cost me a few.

I lost 1 city on being a little bit unlucky with combat (like come'on axe on 4.4% odds almost killing DS for warrior to mop up? that's bad luck really, even if a bit bad play too).

I think with this amount of land there is no way how to spawnbust it correctly.

What I did wrong is the direction of expansion. It should be towards the river and not south. In my test run I expanded to river first and then to south.

In the video some of the southern cities were lagging in improvements and most importantly connection to routes.

I certainly could use more workers, but lately I try to follow Duckweed's mantra about making settlers first and worry about tiles later.

I think that south city (unluckier lost) threw me back around 10-15T (it's not only about settler cost, but the growth of the city too), so I could imagine if I didn't lost it I would have more workers, since I eventually had to stall on settlers .

This land is atypical, I didn't mentioned it in the video (even if I wanted), but the lack of happy resources is the real challenge here and I suspect that was the part of the challenge and you took out the happy sources deliberately (otoh you choose map where we have solid area for cottages, even if capital could use 1-2 flood plains ;-)).
I think in 12 cities you usually can expect at least 1-2 types of early game happy sources.

How you like the beginning? I did the WB, worker and techs thing a bit other way then you proposed at page 1. I think it played out nicely, the worker after 2 chops could lay down some cottages (which at the time of 1 AD were towns)

 

[Kid R]

@vranasm. I was confused for a moment in your game when Charlemagne popped up...

Agree with BW first because all the forests around are free hammers which should be leveraged as early as humanly possible (and no need for health in this challenge).

My result:

Cities: 15
Pop: 47
Further settlers waiting for positive cashflow: 6
Totem poles: 5
Other buildings: 0
Whips: 0
Forests chopped: all
Warriors: 7
Dogs: 5
Chariots: 1
Workers: 10
Tech: BW, mysticism, currency deep select.

Some thoughts about the exercise:
Building units isn't the problem here as we have so much forest to chop - the trick I think is to get at least 3 workers even before the first settler, and always settle near more trees. I had no barbarian problems at all, with 4 or 5 dogs posted around the perimiter, and built enough settlers for several more cities if the upkeep cash had been available.

I think the limit to this exercise (if positive cashflow is a rule) would probably be less than 20 cities. Main reason is the lack of happy, because e.g. the 15th city costs an extra 10-15 which is a tough ask when no city can work more than 4 tiles. In this time frame (pre-0AD) I also found the AIs weren't being too hot at roading, and I could only get foreign trade with 1 of them even though I had open borders with all, so only about half the cities got doubled trade routes. Next time I would send a work boat around the rim and get sailing early on.

I think I could get around 18 (no strike) with another try, it would just be a matter of working more commerce tiles and less hammer/food tiles, since I didn't even use all the settlers I built in the first try. Probably a library or two would have helped the tech situation too, although not the maintenance situation. I'm open minded about whether whipping is beneficial, but I suspect not since no cities seemed to be particularly high in food, and as I said I think commerce is the limiting factor in this exercise, not production.

In summary I was surprised how it was possible to remain competitive in tech with a ton of tiny cities, and it was a very useful exercise to see how maintenance skyrockets under these conditions. Not very common in typical games though