Sacrifice city growth for golden ages?

[Eomer]

Well its all in the title. Could it be a strategy to only found 3-4 cities and limit them to 10-12 citizens? You would max your to get as many golden ages as possible. Colloseums and other buildings would help you to gather even more golden ages, but between the GAs your production and gold output would be much lower than if you would use the for more towns.

Its just some speculation, while not being able to play civ5 till the weekend, but would the golden ages production and gold income equal the income and production you loose due to less cities?

 

[Syiss_]

With the current mechanics, I don't think you could possible get enough GA's from happy faces to make this strategy worthwhile. Plus it would be very dependent on having good city locations available that all have 2-3+ happy resources in them, and would need a lot of culture for +happiness policies.

 

[Johan de Witt]

Plus your science is linked to population. While this tactic can work on lower difficulties, I doubt you will keep a tech lead on higher difficulties.

 

[Bibor]

Manage your happiness well and you'll have 2-3 happiness golden ages per game.

 

[Eomer]

Plus your science is linked to population. While this tactic can work on lower difficulties, I doubt you will keep a tech lead on higher difficulties.

That's true though. Must look into this at the weekend. But so far it seems rather dumb than viable.

 

[UncleJJ]

Manage your happiness well and you'll have 2-3 happiness golden ages per game.

On turn 341, I have 7 big cities and 4 puppets and just started my 4th Golden age with 4 turns left to finish the Apollo project. I have 4 cities that will finish Space factories in time to build the space ship parts and 3 great people saved to continue the Golden age all the way to space. To get 4 Golden ages you need 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 happiness turns = 5000. I am on turn 341 and you don't accumulate happiness during a Golden age, so I guess I had about 250 turns to accumulate the happiness for an average of 40 per turn.

The game is only King on a large Earth map, but with plentiful resources (I have all 15 with spares to trade for gold) and building happy buildings asap it was easy to maintain happiness for most of the game. A major source of happiness are the SPs that reduce unhappiness . With Freedom, Free Society, Rationalism, Secularism and Humanism, plus Statue of Liberty, I get very good specialists and each only costs 1/2 a happiness. By running more or less specialists I can control the rate of happiness gain each turn. Basically, work tiles during a Golden age and run specialists outside in the late game.

 

[DaveGold]

I certainly find that when I'm allied to many city states I can use their resources for a big happiness surplus, trigger the golden ages, run up big cash piles during the golden age, then buy more city states for 1000 gold a shot. Players could be benefiting from your observation without knowing it as a tactic. I suspect it could be possible to do pursue it deliberately. You might be able to disconnect your science output from your population, perhaps by getting contributions from city states or using great scientists. Piety can give culture for your excess happiness too.

 

[alpaca]

I'm a bit torn. Quite obviously, exploiting the Taj Mahal is a lot more powerful, especially if you have Chichen Itza and play with Persia. The thing is that Golden Ages are more powerful for large civilizations but to amass a useful amount of excess happiness you need to invest large amounts of money or have only a small empire.

All in all, Golden Ages are good for hammers but bad for science. In my opinion, for large empires the excess amount of stuff you get from the golden age does not, in itself, warrant the cost for creating happiness buildings that you would need to obtain a happy golden age, while for small empires the benefits of the golden age are marginal.

You might also want to take into account that you can sell luxuries to the AI for a cost of 5 happy faces for an equivalent up-front payment of 10 gpt. That is 2 gpt per happiness point. So even if you have "free" excess happiness due to luxury resources, selling them to the AI and investing the money might be a better choice.

If you like, here's a bit of mathematics:

Let's say we try for the second happiness GA. This costs 1000 happy faces. Let's say we have 25 happy faces, this will mean it takes 40 turns to get the GA.

If we assume we could have the 25 citizens work tiles during those 20 turns, they should average something like 1.5g + 0.5h + 1s each. So we get 25*20 = 500 yield turns which means with my assumption of average yield 750 gold, 250 hammers and 500 science.

During the golden age, each tile yields an additional +1g +1h Happiness golden ages take 10 turns so for each citizen working tiles in your empire you get +10g +10h extra due to the golden age.

Comparing this with the above we can get the number of tiles you need for the GA to make sense at the expense of growth. If we assume 1h = 1g = 1s for simplicity, you need 75 tiles worked to break even. Obviously, if you are Persia or have CI, you only need 50 tiles and if you have both you only need 38 tiles.

This analysis becomes obviously worse for the later golden ages. So from this I would say that probably only the first golden age really makes sense. After that, I would rely on great people and the Taj exploit.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I'm a bit torn. Quite obviously, exploiting the Taj Mahal is a lot more powerful, especially if you have Chichen Itza and play with Persia. The thing is that Golden Ages are more powerful for large civilizations but to amass a useful amount of excess happiness you need to invest large amounts of money or have only a small empire.

All in all, Golden Ages are good for hammers but bad for science. In my opinion, for large empires the excess amount of stuff you get from the golden age does not, in itself, warrant the cost for creating happiness buildings that you would need to obtain a happy golden age, while for small empires the benefits of the golden age are marginal.

You might also want to take into account that you can sell luxuries to the AI for a cost of 5 happy faces for an equivalent up-front payment of 10 gpt. That is 2 gpt per happiness point. So even if you have "free" excess happiness due to luxury resources, selling them to the AI and investing the money might be a better choice.

If you like, here's a bit of mathematics:

Let's say we try for the second happiness GA. This costs 1000 happy faces. Let's say we have 25 happy faces, this will mean it takes 40 turns to get the GA.

If we assume we could have the 25 citizens work tiles during those 20 turns, they should average something like 1.5g + 0.5h + 1s each. So we get 25*20 = 500 yield turns which means with my assumption of average yield 750 gold, 250 hammers and 500 science.

During the golden age, each tile yields an additional +1g +1h Happiness golden ages take 10 turns so for each citizen working tiles in your empire you get +10g +10h extra due to the golden age.

Comparing this with the above we can get the number of tiles you need for the GA to make sense at the expense of growth. If we assume 1h = 1g = 1s for simplicity, you need 75 tiles worked to break even. Obviously, if you are Persia or have CI, you only need 50 tiles and if you have both you only need 38 tiles.

This analysis becomes obviously worse for the later golden ages. So from this I would say that probably only the first golden age really makes sense. After that, I would rely on great people and the Taj exploit.

What that breaks down to is if you have
3 pop+1 Happy for golden Ages
is approximately equal to
4 pop+0 Happy

So If Population > 3*Net Happiness
Then Golden Ages are worth it, let pop growth slow

If Population < 3*Net Happiness
Then growing population is a better option

 

[alpaca]

What that breaks down to is if you have
3 pop+1 Happy for golden Ages
is approximately equal to
4 pop+0 Happy

So If Population > 3*Net Happiness
Then Golden Ages are worth it, let pop growth slow

If Population < 3*Net Happiness
Then growing population is a better option

Interesting way of looking at it. As I just found, looking at it this way isn't quite correct, though (see below).


Let's call the yield per pop outside of golden ages y_0, the yield during the golden age y_a, the cost of the golden age c, the excess happiness h and the length of the golden age l.

Then the amount of turns you need to trigger the GA is c/h. The yield if you let the h citizens work instead of going for the golden age is Y = y_0*h*(c/h + l). The additional yield from the GA is Y_a = y_a*p*l. So the inequality we need to satisfy is

y_a*p*l > y_0*h*(c/h + l)

So a golden age will make sense if

p > y_0/y_a * (c/l + h)

With my numbers y_0 = 3, y_a = 5, c/l = 100 and h = 25 so p > 75. You're looking at p/h, the formula tells us that if

p/h > y_0/y_a * (c/l/h + 1) [= 3/5 * (4 + 1) = 3]

a golden age will be good. However, the right-hand side depends on h so you can't give a general guideline for the p/h figure.

There is an interesting result from this analysis. For a given golden age c/l will be a constant so we can solve the inequality for h to get an excess happiness we may want to aim for given our population.

h < p*y_a/y_0 - c/l [= 5/3 p - 100]

So we find that the minimum population for a golden age to be economically profitable is p = 60. Before that, h will be negative so a golden age will always be unprofitable. To really make sense, p needs to be much higher and any excess happiness below the threshold value will make sense. For example for p = 90 an excess happiness of up to 50 would be ok if you just look at tile yields and not at the cost of happiness buildings.