SE Without Pyramids?

AbbieRevo · Jun 12, 2008

The title really says it all.

Whenever I can get the pyramids I switch to representation, go for CoL and Caste System and pump Scientists like crazy.

But it's the only way I know how to run SE, and I've heard others saying it's possible without the pyramids.

So.... How?

DaveMcW · Jun 12, 2008

Do everything the same, except you only research half as fast.

Yes you can win, no it isn't much fun.

JBossch · Jun 12, 2008

I agree its still possible albeit - at least on higher difficultlies - in an altered form. In situations with no mids (and I have stopped chopping it out on sans-stone starts the way I sometimes did in my strict SE days) there is still often potential, given enough food and non-cottage commerce, for a strong SE even if it is a bit of a hybrid. I think that without mids (and often even with them) your long term planning should include a transition to a more cottage reliant system, gradually phasing down to your 1-2 best GP farms.

This type of strategy can be formulated in a number of ways, depending on geography, diplo situation, etc.
Just a few ideas:
-I would still consider running two scientists in every city that can support them at some early point to keep tech afloat. These cities can be transitioned to cottage cities or production cities when it is expedient. Using specialists instead of early cottages trades long term gain for a short term leverage, even without Rep.
-Maximize trade routes to give yourself some financial breathing room. Some combination of good scouting, currency, the GLH and/or ToA, good diplo, harbors, etc. (Btw, this stuff can and should be done on CE as well of course, I'm just talking about prioritization.)
-Captured territory often makes great cottage land even if your early core cities are still more SE oriented. Let the AIs work those cottages for you.
- A lot of an SEs strength is not the beakers or gold or whatever they produce, but the extra GPs they produce. It is important to manage their creation a lot more than just "pile as many GPPs into a city from as many different sources and hope I don't get a GArtist."
The extra GPs, especially if micromanaged to produce certain ones, can be employed in a lot of different ways. I won't go into them all here but I suggest you keep your bulb list close at hand. Heres one if you need it.

Spoiler :

I hope this helps but I want to reiterate that I am no longer of the opinion that a super strict SE is optimal without the mids except in some rare cases, though I'm sure Obsolete would have something to say about that.

TheMeInTeam · Jun 12, 2008

IMO, with the pyramids you don't have to bulb as much and can settle specialists and tech pretty darn well (actually, I find I can get higher BPT via settling than my CE until liberalism/printing press come into play and the cottages take off). If you don't have them, I'd endorse mostly bulbing (maybe using a bureaucracy capitol with cottages as a boost). Bulbing will only give you a lead for so long and eventually the ability of a bulbing strategy sags in the renaissance. That implies that at some point along the way you'll want to expand via war

.

I bet great players who manage pacifism + caste can probably do a settling strategy without the mids and keep up, but I doubt that could keep up with the much simpler strategy of just using cottages.

unclethrill · Jun 12, 2008

As Dave said, do everything the same you just don't get the boost nearly as early.

I'e found that the 'mids are available awfully late even on higher levels though

AbbieRevo · Jun 12, 2008

Hmmm.....

I guess the question is whether a Specialist dominated economy is viable without Representation.

I've personally started leaning towards hybrid recently, but I've always enjoyed that massive tech lead that you can get with the mids.

So, is the best strategy with non-mids SE the bulb-pop beeline, or does it still make more sense to settle a super-science city?

oyzar · Jun 12, 2008

Settling is only really good if aiming for the long game... But why are you aiming for the long game if you are playing primarly a SE??(Hint: CE is usually better in the extreme long game).

Johnpecan · Jun 12, 2008

Abbie,

It's extremely possible to run a SE without the mids. I've done this effectively in my games through immortal. It just takes a lot of practice.

In response to the bulb vs super science city. I like the super science city. Either way, I usually just bulb once in the game, to knock out most of Liberalism. Obviously without the mids a settled great scientist is only about 70% as effective as with the mids (1h 6b vs 1h 9b), so bulbing is very reasonable without the mids. I would recommend picking out future great science cities and building academies though, over bulbing or settling.

Artichoker · Jun 12, 2008

AbbieRevo said:
But it's the only way I know how to run SE, and I've heard others saying it's possible without the pyramids.

So.... How?

Play a Philosophical leader. There's no way to guarantee you can get the Pyramids, but there is a way to guarantee what leader traits you have.

johnny_rico · Jun 12, 2008

I don't really run cottages much anymore. If building the pyramids isn't realistic, warfare with neighbors certainly should be. Gather land, war efficiently, build the Great Wall. The Great Wall will go a long way into seeing what your opposition is researching by settling that initial great spy. After that, use bulbs and effective diplomacy to maximize trading options to stay viable in tech. Keep the top military so you can bully. Free religion is probably your best bet for religious civics to keep trading partners maximized.

Keep cities coastal and possibly pursue the colossus, ToA, or Gr Lt house. While these wonders will pale in comparison to the pyramids, they'll make up some ground.

Heriditary Rule can keep happiness high to run lots of farms + scientists, then you can switch to caste system to run even more scientists while starving cities. Research goes up while population goes down -> this will reduce maintenance costs. Without the 'mids, a lot more micro-management is needed but it does provide a lot of flexibility. Cottages are a much easier solution. Build cottages, queue up standard builds (happiness, health, and research) and then leave them on auto-pilot. It's all a matter of preference.

Occasionally, I'm willing to cottage my capital and run a SE without the 'mids. Farm and run specialists everywhere else. But even that is pretty rare these days for me.

I think a SE, run correctly, can go toe to toe with a CE for the duration of the game. Run correctly is the hard part; a lot more needs to go right for you than it does in a CE. Once the cottages are built, they'll just grow and once you hit free speech, universal suffrage, it's pretty tough to match that hammer and research output, but it can be done.

vicawoo · Jun 12, 2008

Spend the 500 hammers taking over a few cities.

Mesix · Jun 12, 2008

When going for a cultural victory, a SE and the Sistine Chapel make a potent combination.

madscientist · Jun 13, 2008

SE without the pyramid means you have to get ALOT of farms and monarchy/CoL early. You will need to run more scientists to tech well enough however this will actually get you faster GPs. HR means you have no happy can and can grow vertically pretty high. You will have to make sure you get graneries/harbors/grocers/aqueducts for health.

Doable, but you need a different approach.

Rusten · Jun 13, 2008

Short answer; more whipping and less caste system (alternate).

UncleJJ · Jun 13, 2008

madscientist said:
SE without the pyramid means you have to get ALOT of farms and monarchy/CoL early. You will need to run more scientists to tech well enough however this will actually get you faster GPs. HR means you have no happy can and can grow vertically pretty high. You will have to make sure you get graneries/harbors/grocers/aqueducts for health.

Doable, but you need a different approach.

Absolutely right. Many people think that not only are the Pyramids a waste of time and hammers but that Representation is a lot weaker than HR in the early game. It is easy to research to Monarchy in the time it takes to build the Pyramids. And if you REX while researching to Monarchy instead of building the Pyramids you can have several more cities. From there it is one small step to CoL and you can continue to REX or start turning on your neighbours and expand by conquest.

HR allows any of your good cities to continue to grow until the health caps are reached. That can often mean the difference between having a size 17 city under HR versus a size 11 under Representation. Also HR continues to give a controllable bonus to any and all your cities while the Representation only affects 6 or so (depends on map size) afterwhich they are on their own. Furthermore the Representation bonus skips around to your largest cities so it can be annoying when your 5th through to 10th cities are nearly all the same size and the bonus comes and goes. That means that in the critical period of the game from the late Classical, through the Medieval and into the early Renaissance the HR solution will be working a lot more tiles than the Representation one, and probably running more specialists even if they do not have the +3 beakers bonus.

Let's address another myth. The extra beakers from Representation do not double your research, nothing like that; unless that is, all your research would otherwise come from a few scientists and the Research slider is permanently at 0%. That is not an efficient way to run your empire. It is better to run the slider as high as you can in which case commerce will dilute the effect from the bonus beakers. And anyway as I've shown in other threads the equivalent beakers gained from the 3 GPPs from a scientist are at least 5 times as valuable as the extra 3 from Representation. So a more accurate estimate would be that a scientist with Representation is worth 16% more than one without (true up to the first 5 GPs). Obviously if you can run 16% more scientists under HR (due to larger cities or more cities) then Representation is not better, and it is easy to see that an HR empire can run a lot more depending on how it is played. That is why experienced SE players don't bother with the Pyramids, a) it slows you down and b) HR is the better civic anyway.

Note this situation is no longer true later in the game when there are other sources of happiness and once the GPP cost of GPs rises. Then the beakers from Representation begins to be a major contributor to a SE. At that stage there are more specialists and many cities will not be producing useful GPPs (those that can make a GP). Also there will be more settled GPs and GGs by that time including a few captured from other civs. Strangely enough the time that Representation becomes better than HR for a SE is just about when Constitution is being researched :lol:

So ignore the Pyramids and beeline Constitution (by lightbulbing towards Liberalism) and you can have a powerful SE running Representation in the late game, when it really counts.

As madscientist says a different approach is required, but it's the best general approach at that stage of the game anyway. With HR your larger cities can get a lot of beakers from commerce as well as run scientists. Running Slavery as well as HR means most cities and especially the big ones with plenty of food will have a lot of infrastructure (granary, courthouse, library, marketplace, forge maybe multiple temples and monasteries) This infrastructure means that the Research slider is usually at 50% or more and lots of specialists can be run even if they are of different types. To keep the slider high several tricks can be used to raise gold and fund deficit research. These include, building wealth, running merchants, selling techs and trading resources and dummy building wonders.

obsolete · Jun 13, 2008

I think people are missing some of the obvious issues here.
If you build the pyramids, you may get about 3 GEs to pop. That's 3 other wonders you can RUSH.

So getting 4 wonders in total for the price of 1...

Good ones....

Is certainly worth quite a bit don't you think?

madscientist · Jun 13, 2008

obsolete said:
I think people are missing some of the obvious issues here.
If you build the pyramids, you may get about 3 GEs to pop. That's 3 other wonders you can RUSH.

So getting 4 wonders in total for the price of 1...

Good ones....

Is certainly worth quite a bit don't you think?

On the other hand, every GE you get that's one less GSpy (to steal techs), Prophet (Gold from a shrine), Scientist (Academy or vital bulb), or Merchant (GOLD). Sure the GE is valuable for numerous things but the point of the thread is running a SE without early representation from the pyramids.

You can also argue the pyramids are invaluable for a war monger because of early access to police state.

UncleJJ · Jun 13, 2008

madscientist said:
On the other hand, every GE you get that's one less GSpy (to steal techs), Prophet (Gold from a shrine), Scientist (Academy or vital bulb), or Merchant (GOLD). Sure the GE is valuable for numerous things but the point of the thread is running a SE without early representation from the pyramids.

You can also argue the pyramids are invaluable for a war monger because of early access to police state.

Absolutely right again

You can't have your cake and eat it. The first GP only costs 100 GP but you can only have one of them, if it's a GE then it can't be a GS and so on... Those early cheap GPs are just as much a resource as forests are for chopping.

For me the Pyramids is just a useful source of 2 GE GPPs, which is not to be sneered at but never worth the 500 hammers.

And then as you say Police State can be invaluable to a warmonger in the middle game with a huge stack of drafted rifles and cannons. The only thing stopping you from a massive war with your neighbours is the crippling WW and at that time you only have jails to give 25% relief and then the very expensive culture slider. Police State gives another 50% relief and that can be worth 8 happiness or more in an intensive war. There is no substitute for actually researching Fascism and building Mt Rushmore to completely remove the spectre of WW but before that time the Pyramids is superb and highly valued.

Artichoker · Jun 13, 2008

There's a cost to growing big under HR, and that cost comes in several forms:

1) maintenance of higher city pop

2) maintenance of military units used to bring happiness

3) food allocated to city growth

Under Representation, the saved cost on factor 3) can be used to gain more hammers through whipping (or working higher yield tiles).

The saved cost on factor 2) frees military units for other purposes, which allows a bigger portion of the army to be allocated to active duty.

The saved cost on factor 1) allows city maintenance to be spent instead on small cities rather than large cities. If those small cities can get below the happy cap without extra help, then they can carry the economy instead of larger cities.

Kesshi · Jun 13, 2008

UncleJJ said:
*snip*

UncleJJ,

You talk about growing cities large. Under a Rep. SE, I purposfully leave cities small. I've had multiple size 4 cities pumping out nearly 20 beakers per turn with just a Library. This can be achieved with a quick whip and a short-regrowth time. Early in the game, that can be about 1/4 of your entire empire's research. Plop down 3 or 4 cities with the intent of only building a granary and library and running 2 Scientists, and you can double or nearly triple your tech rate without sacrificing a whole lot.

With Representation I can make some smaller cities incredibly useful to my civilization. Also, I can incorporate the starve-the-city-with-specialists-while-I-get-1-hammer-for-no-whipping-hammer-penalty strategy. I feel that the power of Representation is the ability to manage your empire with smaller cities, where as HR is the ability to manage your empire with larger cities.

And lets not forget that Mercantilism can come very early if you focus on it. With a 20 city empire, a simple swap to Mercantilism means 20*3 or 60 extra beakers bare minimum. If you have a library in every city (I usually do) that's 60*1.25, or 75 extra beakers. If you make your specialists work as scientists, then that's 120*1.25, or 150 extra beakers. Without Representation, not so much.

HR is NOT greater than Rep for a SE. First off, it takes very long to grow to a size 17 city. Second, I can probably fit 3-4 size 4 cities in the same area you can fit 2 size 17 cities, and again, they take less time to get up to speed. Third, the pyramids aren't that expensive if you're Industrious, which is quickly becoming my favourite trait.

To be honest, I think Representation is so powerful that it's actually overpowered.

SE Without Pyramids?

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