SGOTM 14 - Fifth Element

[MeowZeDung]

Though Meow if you're looking to culture bomb more than a couple of times, you are going to need specialists. Lots of them. You're going to want to run philosophy too.

Well, yeah. That's why the GPFarm exists and why I've been saying that getting it up and running is more important imho than the mids, which as you said yourself are a gamble anyway. Other cities will also pop GAs and run artists as they are able. I am not against a SE at all (though two LCs need to be cottage heavy, even in a SE), so long as the Mids are in hand and don't interfere with our rex/gpfarm. However, the mids are NOT guaranteed even if we settle gold/stone next and WILL interfere with rex/gpfarm.

I'm assuming "run philosophy" is a typo. Did you mean bulb philo? I thought that was why we had our current GS?

If WT or BL could please explain their GAge plan I'd appreciate it. I don't see how popping anything other than GArtists helps us with culture. Does a golden age provide 4k or more culture? 20 turns of 1 (or is it 2?) extra gold per tile in our LCs doesn't seem to me like it would get us 4k between the three of them even. If my (admittedly untested) assumption is correct, then it would be more valuable to just keep popping artists to settle/bomb.

 

[unclethrill]

I have been keeping up with the discussions. I can't post much now but will later.

 

[BLubmuz]

Many other things deserve a comment from me, just this for now:

I'm assuming "run philosophy" is a typo. Did you mean bulb philo? I thought that was why we had our current GS?

It's just a typo, i think. WT would mean "pacifism". Obviously the GS we have is for bulb Philo, what else?

If WT or BL could please explain their GAge plan I'd appreciate it. I don't see how popping anything other than GArtists helps us with culture. Does a golden age provide 4k or more culture? 20 turns of 1 (or is it 2?) extra gold per tile in our LCs doesn't seem to me like it would get us 4k between the three of them even. If my (admittedly untested) assumption is correct, then it would be more valuable to just keep popping artists to settle/bomb.

I posed the question for GAges, because it's strictly related to MoM or not.
If we decide NOW how many we'll run, we're deciding for the MoM too.

The main usefulness for GAges in this game are:
- ability to switch civics without anarchy, which otherwise we must take in account since we need many (i can explain this even if it seems obvious). Our final setup will be: Repr (if we get mids) - FS - Caste - Merc or FM - Pacifism (running Confu or Tao)
but we need OR and slavery in the build phase, but we need caste before we reach the final setup, or the NE city will be useless.
- speed up the GPersons generation
- more commerce and more production are welcome, but not the main reason.

 

[WithTea]

Yes I meant pacifism. Slip o' the finger.

 

[WithTea]

Golden ages double great person production in all cities. Hammers are increased along with commerce. Government changes are done without anarchy.

I do not have a specific plan to give you. Blub has one which is worth considering. I was speaking of an approach. I have not been completely up to date due to my health, which is thankfully starting to turn around. Not about to run a marathon, but I'm significantly better.

I was trying to gather how people were approaching it. If you're going cottage then what Blub is saying will not help, but I do think that cottage is the wrong approach. If we utilize great people as fuel for the golden ages it helps our overall civilization. Extra Great Prophets are better spent pumping up golden ages than simply sitting as as a super priest. Harder to say with scientists, but one spent helping the civ along than as another academy is a trade I'd make. More golden ages means more great artists.

If we pull four golden ages total, with MoM, we are looking at 60 turns of golden age, in what should be a no more than three hundred turn game. twenty percent of the game we would be out teching and out producing the AI's. To top it off that's sixty turns of double great artist production. In other words we just saved sixty turns worth of waiting for great artists.

 

[BLubmuz]

I do not have a specific plan to give you. Blub has one which is worth considering.

I don't have a detailed plan, nothing which can be discussed. I've just put the question as one important question to answer to now. I'm sure that with only 2 GAges the MoM will pays for itself, with 3 it's no contest. Let's let aside the culture and the GA points.
We can consider to run at least the Taj one, but we need another one before that.
Not sure about the 3rd, which requires 2 different GPeople

I have not been completely up to date due to my health, which is thankfully starting to turn around. Not about to run a marathon, but I'm significantly better.

Happy to hear this!

I was trying to gather how people were approaching it. If you're going cottage then what Blub is saying will not help, but I do think that cottage is the wrong approach. If we utilize great people as fuel for the golden ages it helps our overall civilization. Extra Great Prophets are better spent pumping up golden ages than simply sitting as as a super priest. Harder to say with scientists, but one spent helping the civ along than as another academy is a trade I'd make. More golden ages means more great artists.If we pull four golden ages total, with MoM, we are looking at 60 turns of golden age, in what should be a no more than three hundred turn game. twenty percent of the game we would be out teching and out producing the AI's. To top it off that's sixty turns of double great artist production. In other words we just saved sixty turns worth of waiting for great artists.

No, 4 GAges are out of question, i hope the game will finish soon and 3 different GPeople are not easy to pop. Then the normal GAge on Normal speed is 8 turns, 12 with MoM. No discussions on this, please. But, aside the GArtists which can be settled to have the culture benefits, in SG9 we calculated that using a GS to bulb after Edu/PP was a waste. Having the MoM the benefits for increased commerce surpassed the beakers of the bulb. I verified later those calculations and i always found that correct. Not even considering the GPeople generation and the production.

Thus, better weight the answer carefully.

 

[unclethrill]

Okay it is late here so I'll be to the point.

1. I like mids because I think we will need at least Cur but likely Frigates/Rifle for the WoZ and for sure Astro. I like them but I think that getting our GPF up and running is most important. All of my tests have been safe getting Mids on T100 and settling GPF and then stone have netted the Mids on T100 or T101.
2. I have always gone for a specialist economy for culture but after reading several article in the War room, I think that a cottage economy may be a better and faster solution for this game. I know that we can argue this all day long but I think the cottage solution may be better. With that said, it is IIRC 1250BC and according to Jesu's article, we need to be established and building cottages by 1000BC. If this is not in the cards then we may be forced into a specialist economy.
3. Golden Ages are great but if we go cottage instead of specialist then they are less useful.
4. WT - glad to hear you are feeling better!!
5. Military ---- We can talk about diplo all we want but the bottom line is that we have random personalities and there are likely to be psycho a$$holes that will declare on us no matter how nice we are. We will need to have a solid military that can defend against a large SoD. We have to be prepared for this and I just would hate to neglect our military and lose our "perfect" game to a raging Asoka.
6. BLub, thanks for the link to the dot-maps. I couldn't find the post as hard as I tried. It isn't that I ignored it, I just couldn't find it.


So that is my take on the situation. Hopefully that is clear as mud and the leaders in the discussion can feel free to take as many of my points out of context for use to support their arguments!

 

[pnp_dredd]

Dredd's economy is usually slavery based, and therefore food oriented. As specialists are always the first to die with slavery, he's going to be looking like a cottage economist.

Sorry dredd if it looks like I give short shrift tothe slave economy. I do know that it is incredibly powerful. It is also the economy I'm least comfortable with. Hence my single game playing the Aztecs for HoF.

Slavery isn't an "economy", it's a tool to utilise in the early game to facilitate simultaneous REX and infrastructure. In a culture game I'd switch into Caste as soon as the GP farm is ready, hoping for around 7-8 cities by that point, and backfill the last couple of cities.

In this situation it's not clear whether a cottage or specialist economy is the way to go.

usually I would push for a specialist economy: we're a Philo leader with plenty of food, and with a fairly short tech path. However the issue is GS contamination, as we need to run GSs but we want to pop GAs. But overall I think specialists are still the way to go.

We can get around this somewhat by building the 'mids, which I support, but not as the absolute #1 priority at this stage (#1 priority is the GP farm).

But after that I don't support any other world wonders apart from Sistine and Taj.

Any more than that and we're running a "wonder economy"!


We need to remember, when considering golden ages, that each artist is worth 5000 culture, which is 7-10 turns of culture in a decent LC. One GA from Taj is sufficient. We need to maximise Great Artists, and not get starry eyed at the advantages of extra golden ages without considering the costs. In a Space game it's worth building MoM and have a pile of concurrent golden ages, but it's not the way to achieve a fast cultural VC.

My priorities are: #1 the best GP farm (LC2); #2 mids; #3 the best LC3; #4 9 cities with infrastructure; #5 fast teching powered by beuro capital, cottages in LC3 and representation (Artists in cities which have sufficient food to pop a great person, scientists/merchants elsewhere); #6 getting cathedrals up; #7 ability to build the military we need; #8 squeezing out every last Artist.

If we prioritize #7 too highly then we're sure to win, but sure to win more slowly than other teams which take a risk.

 

[pnp_dredd]

Again, you keep forgetting we're not alone.
First survive,
Second win the game,
Third win this competition.

That's not the way it works. This is the recipe for a guaranteed win and a guaranteed middle-of-the-pack finish.

We're playing against the other human SGOTM teams firstly, not the AI. If we have the above attitude, then we get beaten by any team who has a single goal:

Use the most streamlined strategy to win fast, taking some risks to optimise towards victory

 

[WithTea]

We need to remember, when considering golden ages, that each artist is worth 5000 culture, which is 7-10 turns of culture in a decent LC.

To clarify it is 4K culture per great Artist not 5K. Though I like what you said about a wonder based economy.

Though that isn't how I would put the strategic wonders that were being discussed. Also if you are planning on getting the Taj Mahal it only makes sense to get the MoM. Especially for the culture. With just two golden ages it pays for itself, and you're already planning on one of those with the Taj.

 

[BLubmuz]

That's not the way it works. This is the recipe for a guaranteed win and a guaranteed middle-of-the-pack finish.

We're playing against the other human SGOTM teams firstly, not the AI. If we have the above attitude, then we get beaten by any team who has a single goal:

Use the most streamlined strategy to win fast, taking some risks to optimise towards victory

If the competing Teams will fail their foreseeing about the location and the unit the WOZ is, following my strategy we gain no less than 20 turns on them. Mine is not properly a "worst case scenario", because it's probably what Neilmeister was thinking when he set up this game. If i was him, knowing that some of us asked for a sort of "mastery victory" i would have created the WOZ as a powerful unit, but not so advanced (MI, MA) to force too much the players. IMO a rifle is what we can expect. As we have seen (i posted the results weeks ago) a MG is too weak if attacked by Cuirass, so, no, too easy.

We have seen that the military option is to discard and that space is too long.
This let Diplo (UN, the AP is forbidden for this competition) or culture. With a Philo Leader Culture can be faster in this scenario, where Diplo can be very hard to achieve, due to the AI teams. So probably the top teams in this game will be the ones capable of win by culture and tech fast, with all the needed structures (also wonders) to do that.

Also, the survival is not assured unless we can set up quickly a city by the horses and defend it with a couple phants.

Then, you (plural) seem to be in a hurry for the NE city, but are waiting to switch to slavery. Can you please explain me how that NE city can be effective running slavery?

Then the GAges question. Do we plan to run 2 or 3 (and thus build the MoM, but this is another topic) and have the last revolt with Repr+Slav until the Taj or afford some turn of anarchy to:
- revolt to Caste+OR (building phase)
- choose a religion
- wait for the Taj to revolt to FS and pacifism?

More wonders (helped by chopping) = more GPeople = more GAges = more GAs = quick finish.

Now can you (Dredd) deign to explain us
- why you played without a detailed PPP after i said yours was inaequated and
- why you ignored my suggestion to build a worker in NY the same turn it reached size 3? those 2 or 3 turns are lost forever! And you keep talking about the REX.

 

[BLubmuz]

1. I like mids because I think we will need at least Cur but likely Frigates/Rifle for the WoZ and for sure Astro. I like them but I think that getting our GPF up and running is most important. All of my tests have been safe getting Mids on T100 and settling GPF and then stone have netted the Mids on T100 or T101.

As i said, in 2 games out of 10 the 'mids were BIADL on turn 95-96. I don't think that delay 1 settler will be a disaster compared to the loss we have not running Repr. Unfortunately we can't decide a safe date, the game do this for us. In many attempts i built them long after turn 100, but there're those 2.
Can you please give us a comparison for a city settled 3 turns earlier running 6 artists for say 50 turns with and without Representation? only one city with 6 artists.

Can i tell you? 6*3*50=900 raw beakers. Beaker more, beaker less 1/3 of the cost of Edu. Peanuts?

 

[unclethrill]

As i said, in 2 games out of 10 the 'mids were BIADL on turn 95-96. I don't think that delay 1 settler will be a disaster compared to the loss we have not running Repr. Unfortunately we can't decide a safe date, the game do this for us. In many attempts i built them long after turn 100, but there're those 2.
Can you please give us a comparison for a city settled 3 turns earlier running 6 artists for say 50 turns with and without Representation? only one city with 6 artists.

Can i tell you? 6*3*50=900 raw beakers. Beaker more, beaker less 1/3 of the cost of Edu. Peanuts?

I guess I see the point. The discussion is Mids on T94 or T99. It is 6 turns to guarantee the Mids. The GFP settled only 6 turns later.

I see your point finally. Lets settle the Stone city first. Settle GFP second and get the mids chopped out so that we can whip us some settlers.

 

[MeowZeDung]

Ok, so before I draft my first PPP please correct me if I have this wrong:

Settle Gold/Stone next: BL, UT, and Beestar
Settle site D next: WT, Dredd, and myself

For mids: BL, UT
Would like mids, but think it's risky: WT, Myself
Against: Dredd, Beestar

This is confusing the crap outta me (not everyone's reasons, WT did a very good job of summing them up in his post about economies, but rather their votes on city sites).

Beestar, if you are against the mids, why are you voting to settle stone/gold before the GPFarm? Keep in mind, unless we are popping GL other than GAs then over half of our culture will come from bombs/settled artists (~20 GA x 4k = 80K out of our total of 150k)

If the majority of the team is FOR the mids, then I will change my vote to settle gold/stone first. If we know for sure that we are gunning for the mids then there is no other smart way to do it.

However, if we are NOT as a team in favor of the mids my vote for site D next stands.

In other words, it seems to me that the issue is exactly what WT said: CE or SE. Being a Phi leader SE is great, but going for culture dictates that atleast 2 of the most developed cities in our empire need to work as many cottages as possible and therefore restricts their ability to run specialists.

So, if we could all please place a brief vote as to our preference: CE/no mids vs SE/mids I think that will give me what I need to move forward with a PPP.

MZD sez: CE/no mids, we already took our big risk with an early wonder and a fantastic CS sling. Now it is time to lay the groundwork for a cultural win: cottages and a GPfarm. Yes, we may have to delay dropping research to 0% after lib/music/drama depending on what our scouting does/does not reveal about the WOZ, but this is not a typical cultural game and won't finish as fast as one no matter what we do.

 

[pnp_dredd]

I'm not against 'mids, I just think they're #2 priority rather than #1. It's pretty clear that I'm not getting my point across clearly, and I think the same goes for nearly everyone. My priorities are: #1 the best GP farm (LC2); #2 mids; #3 the best LC3; #4 9 cities with infrastructure; #5 fast teching powered by beuro capital, cottages in LC3 and representation (Artists in cities which have sufficient food to pop a great person, scientists/merchants elsewhere); #6 getting cathedrals up; #7 ability to build the military we need; #8 squeezing out every last Artist.

I vote SE/mids but settle the GP farm first.

As you say, we've already spent a long time getting a CS sling, so I don't want to prioritise 'mids as the very next thing we do.

However, 'mids are going to be really useful, and as a philo leader and with lots of food, an SE is the best way to go. It's not uncommon to run an SE but have a cottage-heavy bureaucracy capital - we'll have that and 1 other cottage city, everywhere else gets specialists.

I'm pretty sure we could still get 'mids by turn 95, even with settling the GP farm first, with optimisation. This would probably involve a switch to slavery this turn, after trading for BW. Slavery also means we can whip 2 settlers from Washington very quickly, for only 4 population, and get our REX kickstarted. NY could whip a settler or a worker. I can test this if it's of interest to people - my previous test with slavery yielded 7 cities by turn 93, but there was little interest at that stage.

 

[pnp_dredd]

Then, you (plural) seem to be in a hurry for the NE city, but are waiting to switch to slavery. Can you please explain me how that NE city can be effective running slavery?

A GP farm works best when we're running rep/caste/pacifism, of course. We want to switch INTO those civics once our GP farm is complete.

If we want to use slavery we should use it now, or never (indeed we should be in slavery by now, and be rushing to 6-7 cities by turn 95...). We would want to switch to Caste as soon as the NEpic is built, or perhaps after popping a GS by running 2 scientists.

Slavery and OR go together, to REX, and spread religions, which is what we need at this point.

rep/caste/pac go together, once our REX is finished and we have the GP farm up.

why you ignored my suggestion to build a worker in NY the same turn it reached size 3?

Again, I'm assuming that we'll take the sensible option and run slavery to turn our population and food into more cities, religions and infrastructure which are needed for a fast cultural VC. In this case it makes sense to grow NY. Also, you were suggesting archer-archer from Washington, and by building just one archer we shaved some turns off the first worker! And you were keen to waste worker turns building roads... However, I don't think it's useful to rehash the last turnset, I'd really like to focus on the next PPP and the overall picture if that's OK?

 

[MeowZeDung]

I'm pretty sure we could still get 'mids by turn 95, even with settling the GP farm first.

Would you mind testing this? As I said, I am not strictly against the mids either, I just don't see how they are safe without settling gold/stone first, and since I agree that GPFarm is more important I have by extension ruled out the mids in my mind.

fwiw I have tested BLs proposed cities eg gold/stone followed by N of lake GPfarm. I wasn't able to get the mids until turn 103, but it was a quick and dirty test and had I been going slower and microing closer would have gotten sub 95 for sure. But, that's gold/stone first.

 

[beestar]

MZD, thanks for organizing and structuring the current state of play.

To clarify, I'm against the pyramids. We need to go cottage as much as possible. Please remember a specialist economy gets its beakers mainly from bulbing, not from specialists' beakers. This means generating a lot of Great Scientists from an NEpic city - but every GS means one less GA, i.e. 4000 less culture. It is not worth the tradeoff.

I'm for Site D next and I think this settles the vote in favour of Site D next. (Food is not for running NEpic specialists immediately, as I said earlier - it's for early productive capacity to build workers and settlers. )

 

[beestar]

If the competing Teams will fail their foreseeing about the location and the unit the WOZ is, following my strategy we gain no less than 20 turns on them. Mine is not properly a "worst case scenario", because it's probably what Neilmeister was thinking when he set up this game. If i was him, knowing that some of us asked for a sort of "mastery victory" i would have created the WOZ as a powerful unit, but not so advanced (MI, MA) to force too much the players. IMO a rifle is what we can expect.

This is a fair bit of reasoning about what the military threat is, and I think BL is right that guessing WOZ correctly will give a substantial advantage. BL, remind me your reasoning: why is WOZ separated from us by ocean, rather than coast tiles?

My recommendation is to avoid Pyramids and grow cottages as fast as possible. Switch to 100% science if we learn we need to go deeper in the tech tree, but not before that.

Building Pyramids now is 500 hammers early in the game when hammers are scarce and the compounding benefits of other investments is large. If we don't get Pyramids, and realize later on in the game that we need to tech deeper, then we would switch from 100% culture to 100% science to make up for any tech deficit.

So the question is, is Pyramids better than running cottage economy at 100% science for a few turns? Math behind the spoiler cut

Spoiler :

Pyramids enables +3 raw beakers per specialist. Let's say we run an average of 7 specialists per turn over the next 150 turns (I think this is very generous as we won't be running full specialists in NEpic city until late in the game). That's 3150 extra beakers from our investment. These are multiplied by library etc., but most of our specialists are in NEpic and we won't put an Academy there. About +25% on average = ~4000 multiplied beakers.

In contrast, if we realize in the late game that we need more powerful units, we'll have about 50 commerce x 2 legendary cities, 75 commerce from Bur capital LC, and 10 commerce x 6 other cities, then we can achieve about 200 raw beakers at 100% slider from our entire empire. Running 16 turns generates the 3600 raw beakers. +25% library in most cities, +75% library+academy in capital, actually gives 331 bpt, so 4000 mutlipled beakers takes 12 turns.

I think it's better to keep the flexibility to go culture OR science late in the game, by going cottages. PHI doesn't force us to go specialists, as the trait only helps us in the GP Farm and perhaps 1 secondary artist farm. Going Pyramids now forces an overemphasis on science. And encourages running specialists which is a bad idea in our LC cities, and not great in our support cities because the map isn't really that food heavy.

I've made pretty rough assumptions so feel free to try different numbers. But don't make the mistake of saying 'oh, let's build Pyramids, it will shave 12 turns'. The question is, do we invest 500 hammers in Pyramids, or do we built settlers / granary / workers to get all of our cities growing faster, so we can generate those empire wide beakers earlier?

 

[beestar]

Let's assume we generate one Golden Age from burning a Great Person. Is it worth burning two more GPs on another Golden Age? The answer is no, because the additional multiplier of a Golden Age doesn't offer much benefit.

Have some math:

Maximum GPP rate is 8 artist specialists x 3 GPP/turn = 24 GPP/turn
Assume 4 GPP/turn for buildings in this city
Total = 28 raw GPP/turn

Philo = +100%
NEpic = +100%
Pacifism = +100%
Golden Age = +100%

When we run Pacifism we are generating 112 GPP/turn in NEpic city
When we are in a Golden Age, we are generating 140 GPP/turn. This is better than normal by +28 GPP/turn.

For an 8 turn long Golden Age, we gain an extra 224 GPP. For a 12 turn MoM-powered Golden Age, that's 336 GPP.

We've burned up 2 Great People for that. You'd better generate at least 2 more Great People to make up for the two you've burned.

Great Person costs are 100, 200, 300, 400 ... etc. We've already created 2 GSes (100GPP, 200GPP), and let's say we plan on generating at least 9 Great Artists for culture bombing (300, 400, 500 ... 1100 GPP). We burn the first two Great Artists for the golden age, and that means we need to generate a 1200 GPP great artist, and a 1300 GPP great artist just to break even.

It's not going to happen when all we got from the Golden Age is an extra 336 GPP.

In fact, it is clear from this calculation that we shouldn't ever burn a Great Artist for a Golden Age, and that we need to try to produce only Great Artists from now on. (edit: unless they can help us generate 4000 culture by the time we would have born the 9th Great Artist, so we don't need the 9th Artist)


FAQ

Spoiler :

Q0. You said the first two Great People were Great Artists, but that's impossible - you need two different Great People.

A0. It made the math easier. Okay, fine. GPP3 (300GPP) is a GS, and GP4 (400GPP) is a Great Artist. That means we only have 8 Great Artist bombs. To get 9 bombs, we need to replace the 4000 culture from the GA we burned, and the 4000 culture from giving birth to a GS instead of a GA. That's still 1200+1300 GPP.

Q1. What about the advantage of avoiding Anarchy?

A1. You just burned two Great Artist equivalents. If you save 4 turns from not revolting twice, that had better generate 8000 culture in your LC city. Can you generate 8000 culture in a single city in 4 turns?

Q2. What if our baseline is lower, and we're not running Pacifism for most of the game?

A2. Fair point. If we are not in Pacifism, then we only produce 84 bppt, compared to 140 bppt in an 8-turn Pacifism Golden Age. The Golden Age gives 56 extra beakers * 8 turns = 448 extra GPP. Still not enough to compensate for the loss of two Great People.

Q3. You forgot the GArtist from Music

A3. That's not a question, but the answer is, then we have 10 Great Artists to bomb, and that's even better. But fine, even if we only need to spawn 8 Great Artists to bomb 9, the equation is clearly in favour of not running a Golden Age (edit: for the purpose of accelerating Great Person growth)

Q4. What about our first Golden Age, the one that only burns one Great Person?

A4. Even 448 extra GPP doesn't compensate for losing a Great Artist, and being forced to generate a new 1100-GPP Great Artist.

Q5. What if we spend a non-Great Artist on our first golden age?

(Edit: revised my argument here)

A5. If we're so unlucky as to generate our next Great Person as a non-GArtist, then we can consider spending it on a Golden Age. But we should avoid spawning non-Great Artists, unless they can help us generate 4000 culture in an LC before the 9th Great Artist would be born. Perhaps a shrine could help us run 100% culture sooner, or a bulb could help us tech toward maximum culture generation.

Finally, running science specialists risks spawning a Great Scientist, which costs us 4000 culture. That's a big reason why I'm against a specialist economy - a standard one relies on birthing Great Scientists and lots of bulbing, which is a bad idea as I hope I have demonstrated.