Some musings on the Colossus

[obsolete]

Well I think we can agree that any tech called SCIENTIFIC METHOD, should do ANYTHING BUT nerf your science. Another major Firaxis Fail.

The second major fail in this department, is how Computers also nerfs your science. What genius came up with these brilliant ideas?

 

[stopstopp]

Computers- People get addicted to a game called civilization and productivity falls?

Sci Method- Ok I got nothing.

 

[Iranon]

Scientific Method reducing beaker output makes some sense... a rift between religious and secular science and many resources being squandered on infighting. How much you lose depends on how much old-school scholarship tradition matters in your empire.

Admittedly, Scientific Method and Computers should probably offer a little more for science immediately, instead of being mostly gateways to useful things.

*

Coast is an excellent filler tile. Food-Neutral, reasonable direct yield and a good choice on the regrow from a whip, before you stifle growth with mines or specialists.
Even if you prefer cottages over Colossus-boosted coast, you may not necessarily want to clear the land for them - regrowing chop hammers and access to lumbermills later on may be considerations in coastal cities with low sustainable production without the whip.

 

[bhavv]

Collosus and Great Library should have later expiration dates. And Metal Casting shouldn't cost so much.

I agree, I think that Collosus should obsolete with Sci Method, and Great Library with Physics, maybe even computers. Metal casting is also a very expensive tech to get, and oracle further dilutes your GM farm with GP points (Hannibal players usually try to build the Stonehenge / GLH / Collosus / GL / National Epic in their capital, adding oracle = more GPs which they dont want). Great Merchants are epic sweet, settle them down, run lots more Merchants with the free food bonus under caste system, get a flood of GMs, and just keep settling and you get a huge epic city. Its even more awesome when you do it with Pericles without needing the stonehenge (then all you get is GMs and a few GSs).

Well I think we can agree that any tech called SCIENTIFIC METHOD, should do ANYTHING BUT nerf your science. Another major Firaxis Fail.

The second major fail in this department, is how Computers also nerfs your science. What genius came up with these brilliant ideas?

Scientific method shouldnt nerf the GL. The GL is not meant to be a religious thing, it is a centre of learning all types of knowledge. Going by sense, Computers would obsolete that because computers can provide all the knowledge of books and libraries from the convenience of ones own home (Internet and education software).

However, Scientific Method did obsolete earlier forms of thinking and understanding the world we live in. It provided such an unimaginable boost to our way of thinking and future discoveries after that point, that some people even consider Philosophy to have been obsoleted by it. But in the real world, the Sci Method did not obsolete or invalidate and stop people from following earlier methods of thinking - we still have lots of religious scholars and philosophers today, the only thing that Sci Method did was provide a new way of thinking and discovery. From a game perspective however, I think that monasteries go obsolete before you get the opportunity to massively rake in the benefits of having lots of religions presents in each city with 5+ monasteries. In most of my religious games, I usually manage to get 2-4 religions spread with each monastery built in every city, but usually the 4th religion pays off for very little time. If monasteries could work for the rest of the game, it would be very broken and overpower religious economies.

 

[pi-r8]

Scientific Method reducing beaker output makes some sense... a rift between religious and secular science and many resources being squandered on infighting. How much you lose depends on how much old-school scholarship tradition matters in your empire.

Admittedly, Scientific Method and Computers should probably offer a little more for science immediately, instead of being mostly gateways to useful things.

*

Coast is an excellent filler tile. Food-Neutral, reasonable direct yield and a good choice on the regrow from a whip, before you stifle growth with mines or specialists.
Even if you prefer cottages over Colossus-boosted coast, you may not necessarily want to clear the land for them - regrowing chop hammers and access to lumbermills later on may be considerations in coastal cities with low sustainable production without the whip.

How do you feel about lumbermills, in general, as a late game tile improvement? With a railroad, forest and lumbermill you get 2food 3 hammers, or 1 food 4 hammers on plains. So not quite as good as a workshop with state property and caste system, but it's the best you're going to get on flat land if you're not using those civics. On the other hand cottages are just so tempting in the late game, since they quickly grow to towns which can produce 7 commerce and 1 hammer with the right civics. I guess if you're not using either of those two civic options, lumbermills would be a good option though.

 

[Iranon]

I quite like them. Most tiles are worth working in the endgame, so I'm often looking at total yields rather than individual tiles. Forest + lumbermill is about on par with a mine (no chance for discoveries, but a little health).

Replacing mines with flatland lumbermills means I'll get the opportunity to build more windmills at the expense of farms or cottages. I like windmills, considering them the best improvement in the game with all benefits and still rather good without Environmentalism.
Flatland lumbermill and 2 windmills vs. farm and 2 mines: You lose a hammer but gain between 2 and 8 commerce.
Replacable Parts can be a defining economy tech, imo a hippie economy is a viable alternative to farm/cottage/workshop spam. One drawback is that you'll have to make do with 'filler' tiles in the early game - forests can work, collossus-boosted coast is better.

 

[stopstopp]

Coast is an excellent filler tile.

Coast is plain horrid, running a specialist is much better than working crap coast unless you have colossus, need the extra commerce, want to grow and you don't have something better, or have a resource. Coast evens gets worse throughout the game, while virtually every other tile gets better, taking out snow and desert.

 

[whats a navy]

Coast is plain horrid, running a specialist is much better than working crap coast unless you have colossus, need the extra commerce, want to grow and you don't have something better, or have a resource. Coast evens gets worse throughout the game, while virtually every other tile gets better, taking out snow and desert.

Financial coast with lighthouse is not horrid and seems you give a lot of examples of when coast might be used.

 

[kossin]

Specialist is only better than coast when you are at happy cap and have a food surplus.

Even if you have Pyramids, the most commerce+science comes from running the city to high pop first and then running specialists. And then you always want to consider whipping infrastructure where food>>>specialists obviously.

Finally, when your available tiles are used, growing on coast has another usefulness: allows for a whipping- spam for massing an army quickly when you gain an advantage.

 

[stopstopp]

Specialist is only better than coast when you are at happy cap and have a food surplus.

Even if you have Pyramids, the most commerce+science comes from running the city to high pop first and then running specialists. And then you always want to consider whipping infrastructure where food>>>specialists obviously.

Finally, when your available tiles are used, growing on coast has another usefulness: allows for a whipping- spam for massing an army quickly when you gain an advantage.

I didn't see it that way, so I guess that means 2 more food is worth more than 4 more rep scientist beakers.

Isn't there some type of ratio on how much food is worth comparing to hammers and commerce?

 

[Carboniferous]

Isn't there some type of ratio on how much food is worth comparing to hammers and commerce?

Yes, the oft-quoted values are 4 : 2 : 1, i.e. 1 food is worth four times as much as 1 commerce, and twice as much as one hammer. You can use this to work out the relative value of tiles.

Where it starts to fall down a bit is in assessing how much specialists are worth in relation to working tiles. What you really want is the relative value of food to hammers and to the converted forms of commerce (gold, beakers, culture and espionage). Of course this depends more obviously on the city in question (e.g. is this a science city or a military one?).

 

[Absolute Zero]

I agree, I think that Stonehenge should obsolete with Sci Method,

Considering that it can be built from the very start of the game, I don't see what's wrong with its current obsoletion at Astro.

Besides, by that point in the game, the free monument isn't as significant, as there are many more ways to get culture.

 

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

I think that the Great Library going obsolete with Scientific Method is crazy. If anything, it should receive a bonus! More scientists will show up, boosting your research, and then they can store that research for the future in the library! I think it should obsolete with Computers.

 

[stopstopp]

I think the Great library shouldn't go obsolete. It's like saying we have a new technology, Oxford is being shut down now because this tech makes it useless.

 

[mirthadir]

I didn't see it that way, so I guess that means 2 more food is worth more than 4 more rep scientist beakers.

Isn't there some type of ratio on how much food is worth comparing to hammers and commerce?

Rep specs need to be fed. For every pre-bio scientist you need 2 farms. Flip this instead to 3 coastal tiles and you get the same net food and the same net yield. The scientists get GPP, but frankly this is already pretty loaded towards the specs in an atypical manner. It is only post bio where coastal tiles really start to suck

Food is the most variable input in the game. You can convert using the whip (where efficiency scales inversely with city size) at come out around equal at pop 10 comparing a grassland farm vs uncivic boosted WS, you can draft (where rifles and muskets come out ahead pretty much all the time, but it starts falling behind with infantry or mech inf. Kremlin and multipliers (grainery vs forge/factory/power) also comes into play. To make life more interesting whip anger can further muck up the calculations.

Comparing commerce requires you to look at your options Rushbuy and upgrading provide direct comparisons to hammers. Going direct from food to commerce requires guessing about average growth time for cottages.

4:2:1 has some merit but I'd say that you can hit just about anything in that range.

 

[pi-r8]

I quite like them. Most tiles are worth working in the endgame, so I'm often looking at total yields rather than individual tiles. Forest + lumbermill is about on par with a mine (no chance for discoveries, but a little health).

Replacing mines with flatland lumbermills means I'll get the opportunity to build more windmills at the expense of farms or cottages. I like windmills, considering them the best improvement in the game with all benefits and still rather good without Environmentalism.
Flatland lumbermill and 2 windmills vs. farm and 2 mines: You lose a hammer but gain between 2 and 8 commerce.
Replacable Parts can be a defining economy tech, imo a hippie economy is a viable alternative to farm/cottage/workshop spam. One drawback is that you'll have to make do with 'filler' tiles in the early game - forests can work, collossus-boosted coast is better.

interesting! I've never used windmills or lumbermills much before, I'll have to take a shot using the "hippy economy" lol.

 

[Iranon]

Yes, the oft-quoted values are 4 : 2 : 1, i.e. 1 food is worth four times as much as 1 commerce, and twice as much as one hammer. You can use this to work out the relative value of tiles.

Where it starts to fall down a bit is in assessing how much specialists are worth in relation to working tiles. What you really want is the relative value of food to hammers and to the converted forms of commerce (gold, beakers, culture and espionage). Of course this depends more obviously on the city in question (e.g. is this a science city or a military one?).

I think this overvalues food a little... this would make most specialists a liability even under Representation (-2 net food) if they won't spawn Great People.
I'd rate relative usefulness as 3:2:1. I like engineers better than scientists and think Representative scientists are a reasonable way of using excess food but not a net gain - I'm perfectly happy to whip them away. 1 food whipped translates to 1.5 hammers at size 10... whipping has several advantages and is more efficient at smaller sizes, but also means you'll be working less tiles in total and there's a limit on how much you can use it.
Incidentally, iirc the AI evaluates them at 5:3:2 for some purposes so that would be the 'official' rate.

 

[SillyGoat]

I think that the Great Library going obsolete with Scientific Method is crazy. If anything, it should receive a bonus! More scientists will show up, boosting your research, and then they can store that research for the future in the library! I think it should obsolete with Computers.

Considering that

a) The GL is one of the most popular wonders in the game

and

b) The Great Library of Alexandria was burnt to the ground in 48 BC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria )

It would make more sense, both from a balance perspective, and from a historical perspective if the GL obsoleted at University. It's already one of the best early-mid game wonders. There is no need to make it more powerful.

 

[SillyGoat]

Well I think we can agree that any tech called SCIENTIFIC METHOD, should do ANYTHING BUT nerf your science. Another major Firaxis Fail.

I won't disagree that SciMeth is one of the worst techs in the game, however, it does open up 2 of the best techs in the game (Bio and Comunism) so I'm quite willing to give Firaxis a pass on it in the name of game balance. Losing a few monastaries and GPP (if you actually have TGL) is a small price to pay for access to boosted farms, workshops and 0 distance maintenance.

The second major fail in this department, is how Computers also nerfs your science. What genius came up with these brilliant ideas?

Computers nerfs science? It obsoletes a couple of wonders that you may/may not get if you are playing on a difficulty level that challenges you. Computers gives you the ability to build the Internet which does anything but nerf your science, and since tha AI doesn't prioritize computers it is a viable option at least up until Immortal.

Seems balanced enough to me.

 

[Cusanus]

I think this overvalues food a little... this would make most specialists a liability even under Representation (-2 net food) if they won't spawn Great People.

You don't think they are?