SE vs CE nuances

[Photi]

It's funny though how I find myself getting low food land the majority of the time. The capital may have decent food, and only sometimes get an abundant of food, but the land around is usually lacking food. I often can't run an SE even if I wanted to.

who are you playing against? yourself right? if you want to practice an SE start with a map that will lend itself to an SE (like tropical). if you didn't roll a good se map, start again or use worldbuilder. it is not hard to plunk down a pig here or there or to add a freshwater lake or to change plains to grassland or to give yourself stone, do that and then you can practice what you started out to practice. practice in almost anything is contrived. after you get the feel for it, challenge yourself by setting your own parameters. like "ok, this time no worldbuilder roll 3 maps pick one and run a mainly SE" etc.

 

[vicawoo]

It is good to learn how to play an SE, but a lot of civ is adapting to take advantage of your situation.

Sometimes you need another commerce city to fuel your expansion, but there's a dearth of special resources. So you can take a relatively empty patch of grasslands and farm it or cottage it. If you can't irrigate, you should cottage. A more rigid player might refuse to expand and slow down growth.

 

[Roxlimn]

Also, it really isn't all that rigid. Farming and growing a city is dead easy and quite fast. Late in the game, under Universal Suffrage, you can really set up a Science City really fast and work it with Scientists for an immediate boost of science while slowly converting its tiles into Towns.

The online-speed for Science output done this way is remarkably fast, and also pretty incredible if you switch to Rep after finishing the Science buildings. Towns need a fair bit of time to get established, and only really work wonders under a specific set of Civics. Hybrid techniques will serve you well in adapting to situations.

 

[Qwack]

If you guys want to practice/learn SE, here is a start I rolled yesterday for one of my Solo games that is almost perfect for SE. Pericles is leader. I played until 1 AD and posted that save also if anyone wants to check that out in terms of how you can play an early SE.

The map is hemispheres temperate/medium and emperor level.

 

[Diamondeye]

When I run an SE (or mostly a semi-SE, meaning I still use the slider, but focus on specialists for my research), these things usually happens:

1) I stay in slavery - whipping Granaries, Forges and Libraries early is so useful
2) I usually get a little ahead in the tech race.
3) When philosophy pops, I usually shift to pacifism, and I often, through the entire game, underbuild my military and die in th elate middle ages - I need help with balancing this, I simply can't run enough farms a scientist and have enough to have a nice production as well... I also use Engineer specialists, but it doesn't seem to matter

 

[tempuraki]

When I run an SE (or mostly a semi-SE, meaning I still use the slider, but focus on specialists for my research), these things usually happens:

1) I stay in slavery - whipping Granaries, Forges and Libraries early is so useful
2) I usually get a little ahead in the tech race.
3) When philosophy pops, I usually shift to pacifism, and I often, through the entire game, underbuild my military and die in th elate middle ages - I need help with balancing this, I simply can't run enough farms a scientist and have enough to have a nice production as well... I also use Engineer specialists, but it doesn't seem to matter

Whip troops out of every city you have. Power should not be a problem with SE/FE because civil service is important, and it gives maceman, which is pretty much the best melee unit out there, so just whip everywhere for a round and you will have a decent size army for defending and/or offending, then go back to building/teching. Repeat this when you get grenadiers/rifles, and even infantries.

The biggest strength of SE/FE over CE is in the extra food, so use it! You can have bigger cities to whip more expensive things, and after you whip, you can grow your city back faster. That's why I also think SE is more fun in a way, because more things are happening, when I play CE, I am very reluctant sometimes when it comes to the whip, because I need the pop to work those cottages.

 

[JackOfClubs]

I started a game with Gandhi and said to myself, "I'm going to try out an SE this time!" ---and ended up rolling a map like this:



Oh yay.

I ended up cottaging again.

I don't see the problem here. You have 8 farmable tiles in your fat cross plus one Rice resource. That means your total food count before Civil Service could be 30. To work those tiles would require 9 pop at a food cost of 18 leaving you with a surplus of 12. This would allow 6 specialists at stagnation level, or 5 if you left 2 food for additional growth. That would be a total of 14-15 pop. Do you often find your cities able to grow that big that early in the game? I'm usually lucky to find sufficient health or happiness resouces to get to 10. Also, until you get to Code of Laws you won't even be able to hire that many specialists.

After CS you will have 2 more tiles that can be farmed for an additional specialist. This isn't a perfect city for running and SE, but it is respectable. It does look like you have a lot of non-farmable land in your other cities, but Fruit looks promising and there are a couple of Cow resources that can add at least one specialist before CS and maybe a couple more after. Egg is also good with both Fish and Crab. As someone mentioned before, you don't need specialists in every city. Generally I recommend having one Super Science city (which will also tend to be your GP farm) and a handful of other cities running a couple of specilists each. Prior to Education you will want to have at least 6 libraries, so that you can build Universities -> Oxford as quickly as possible, but having fewer early in the game is quite usual.

One other thing: Having Stone and Marble that close is an SE-player's wet dream.

 

[mnf]

Fruit looks like this:



The stone got connected really late but I still got the Pyramids and the Great Library, I think.

Maybe I really should have went on with specialists on that map. I cottaged and got involved in an early war and after I took out my neighbour, it was 1500AD and I was still 4 turns to Liberalism.

A started another game and got to Liberalism by 1400s. Can't seem to pull it into around 1000AD, though.