*Spoiler2* Gotm18-Celts Magnetism+Gravity

[Moonsinger]

Bamspeedy,

You are way too good with that 'close' building style. Here is something we can compare to: at 1020AD, I got 2075.1 points for happy people and 80.7 point for the specialists with the space out building style.

PS: I also took control of the 8th luxury around 650AD too.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Moonsinger, at 1020AD, I had 2638.9 for happy people, 270.3 for specialists, 2629.3 for territory. 5538 total score.

So for population, I'm ahead by 750 or so points, but what did you have for territory?

 

[Moonsinger]

Bamspeedy,

As usual, you are way ahead of me. At 1020 AD, I got 2529.2 for for territory. 4685 point in total score. Therefore, you are 853 points ahead of me. That's it! I'm going to try out your building style in my next. With the Jason scoring system, your building style will work much better because by the time I can get my cities to grow beyond size 12, my dairy cows won't have enough time to make up for those lost points, especially when I'm not milking them to 2050AD.

 

[Shillen]

You both are way way ahead of me in score at that point. I only had 2422 points, but I wasn't even close to the domination limit yet. I only had 38.4% of the land. As I stated in another post I blame it on 3 things. The Aztecs built the pyramids so I conquered in a straight line instead of conquering outward to get the Pyramids. I'm thinking it wasn't worth it. I let the Great Library research for me rather than doing my own research and having a unit advantage. I didn't attack anyone until 50BC which is just way too late. And actually there's a 4th. I used monarchy instead of republic, which was a bad choice. None of my wars lasted long enough for war weariness to have been a problem. Live and learn. I won't be milking any more games though; I just don't enjoy it at all.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Well, we'll have to wait and see what I end up at for score. If I ended at 1020 A.D., I would have had a Jason score of 10,013 pts. If I match the 'max score' by milking until 2050 A.D., then I'll have a Jason score of 10,000. So I'd lose 13 points (and score even worse if I don't score over the max score). It will be interesting to see if I break the 'max score' or not. If I don't, then it sure wasn't worth it to milk in my game. I imagine that I will lose Jason points as I keep playing because with ICS, you are at max population so much sooner, so you just don't have any more growth to do, so the Jason scoring curve starts catching up quicker. With a more spaced out build, you still have more growth happening, so this might be more than the normal curve for the Jason score.

Monarchy was pretty much a mandatory government in my game. From the time I started wars with my neighbors until I started on Egypt., I don't think I ever had more than 3 turns of peace (and most of the time the short periods of peace was just from when I finish one civ, and get ready to start on another).

 

[cracker]

Originally posted by Bamspeedy
... I imagine that I will lose Jason points as I keep playing because with ICS, you are at max population so much sooner, so you just don't have any more growth to do, so the Jason scoring curve starts catching up quicker. ...

I think that the hidden penaly of ICS is inside your statement. With ICS you hit the maximum population that you can sustain at a lower level than with an appropriately spread out build plan for that map.

You basically are topped out at a lower population but are not acheiving the maximum population that can be sustained on the map. Under ideal circumstances you would calculate the maximum sustainable population with a city layout that is slightly tighter than OCP and have enough workers standing by when sanitation is discovered and every square is irrigated with rails and then instantly add hospitals and join workers to cities to hit the peak population load in a single turn.

With ICS you lose 2 population points per city location if you can maintain equal happiness distributions at larger populations with fewer cities.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Yes, Cracker, we had a long debate about this in the HoF thread. Metropolises do offer a higher potential (because for every extra city center you have, ICS gets a content person out of it, instead of a happy person). ICS gets a high population faster, but the more spaced out approach has more long-term potential. The real question is whether or not the more spaced out approach has enough time to catch up to make up for the jump-start ICS gets.

Yes, you can join workers into the cities, but you also have to build the hospitals (and mass transits-building these in 100's of cities can take quite a while), and have enough happy improvements to keep everyone happy (which is hard to do in cities where luxury spending does no good).

If you build on grassland, you do get only food for 1 person, instead of 2. Plains, you would lose out on 1 food (half a person). Building directly on desert tiles, hills, etc. you get more food, but a content person instead of a happy person using that tile. Overall, this comes out to about a 10% difference in the internal game score, but if you can achieve the max population more than 10% sooner, you come out ahead in score.

I think for ICS, it will pay to finish somewhat early for the Jason score, and for the more spaced out approach, finish later. This depends, though, greatly on the land available (enough land for the settler flood to work). GOTM17, I shouldn't have built so dense, as land was hard to get, and it showed by EMan beating me by 2-300 pts.

 

[SirPleb]

More data for comparison, my score at 1020AD:
1877.2 for happy citizens, 3127.6 territory, 135.0 specialists, 5140 total.

I think I'll drop further behind Bamspeedy for some time from that date because my tech is way back, I'm still some way from Steam Power at that date. But when I get Steam Power it will be a quick transformation, I'll be up to about 350 native workers by the time it is learned.

I'm going for my first zero pollution game this time, so I'm filling in my land with a dense build as I go.

Originally posted by cracker
With ICS you lose 2 population points per city location if you can maintain equal happiness distributions at larger populations with fewer cities.

But this does vary depending on the terrain it is built on. If a city is built on grasslands then you lose 2 points. (Times the difficulty level of course.) On plains, lose 1.5 points. On desert 1 point. On tundra/hills 1/2 point.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by cracker
Under ideal circumstances you would calculate the maximum sustainable population with a city layout that is slightly tighter than OCP and have enough workers standing by when sanitation is discovered and every square is irrigated with rails and then instantly add hospitals and join workers to cities to hit the peak population load in a single turn.

That was exactly what I did in my game. I had over 250 workers and about 300 foreign workers and over 75 settlers standing by before I entered the industrial age. I'm looking forward to see if it stand a chance comparing to the close ICS build by Bamspeedy. Here is a minimap of my world after conquest:

 

[alexman]

I wasn't aggressive enough in expanding, so I got off to a slow start. Just nine cities by 1000 B.C. Since I was planning to be a bloodthirsty warmongerer, I thought it was better to build barracks and units instead of granaries (I still built an early one in Alesia, near the fish). In hindsight, this was not my most brilliant idea...

My Gallic Swordsmen ran out of steam after conquering Rome, the Iroquois, and France (for the Pyramids), just in time to upgrade some horsemen and continue with knights against Carthage. Then I went through minor skirmishes while researching all the way from Invention to MT (the lazy AI let me do all the work), and I finished everyone off with Cavalry in 1040 A.D. (conquest).

---

Silly question from a non-milker:
I don't see why you have to choose between ICS and OCP when milking. Why can't you start your build pattern using ICS, therefore reaching maximum population faster, and then disband some cities to make room for metropolises when you get hospitals?

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by alexman
Silly question from a non-milker:
I don't see why you have to choose between ICS and OCP when milking. Why can't you start your build pattern using ICS, therefore reaching maximum population faster, and then disband some cities to make room for metropolises when you get hospitals?

IMO, that would be a lot of works and very little gain. For example, let's say that you disband 3 cities of size 11 to make room for 1 city of size 40+. The main question here is why kill 33 people (all are happy citzens and specialists) and wait for another 40 turns or more for them to be reborn? Of course, now you also have to deal with pollution as well spending big money on rushing a hospital and the mass transit.

 

[Capt Buttkick]

Here is perhaps another silly question from a non-milker:
Why milk?

It's boooring...

 

[el_kalkylus]

Originally posted by Capt Buttkick
Here is perhaps another silly question from a non-milker:
Why milk?

It's boooring...

Milking is boring, but when you are done milking the result is very satisfying. Something like that.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Capt Buttkick
Here is perhaps another silly question from a non-milker:
Why milk?

It's boooring...

Boring is really a relative term. One thing may seem boring to one person, but not to the other. For example, many people find that it's extremely boring that they have to go to school every day and then have to do homework after school ,etc. On the other hand, a lot of people do enjoy school and homework. For these people, the thrill is to learn something new, to discover something new, and one day, they may boldly go where no one has gone before. If school and homework is boring for everyone, we all would still be living in the stoneage by now.

 

[cracker]

Just a gentle reminder to ALL, to keep the focus of the discussion on issues that apply to this Gotm18-Celts and hopefully not have things drift off into another parallel discussion of general scoring and general milking issues. You can still accomplish the same things but the discussions need to actively bear some relationship to and use examples from the game at hand.

 

[Nightfa11]

An interesting technique.

At this point in my game, I had Greece down to one city. They were way behind in techs and I had a bright idea.

What if I gave Greece the necessary techs to advance to the next age (industrial), keeping the optional techs to use towards buying whatever tech (usually nationalism, as I'm still playing PTW 1.14...upgrading after this GOTM) they get...

Sooo...I gifted all the necessary techs through Theory, Metallurgy and Magnetism. I had troops placed at the border of their final city. Got the next tech by giving them a bunch of money, then eliminated them the same turn....

Cheap, yet highly satisfying and effective. Obviously no war weariness issues.

Is this something that's been done or thought of before?

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Nightfa11
At this point in my game, I had Greece down to one city. They were way behind in techs and I had a bright idea.

What if I gave Greece the necessary techs to advance to the next age (industrial), keeping the optional techs to use towards buying whatever tech (usually nationalism, as I'm still playing PTW 1.14...upgrading after this GOTM) they get...

Sooo...I gifted all the necessary techs through Theory, Metallurgy and Magnetism. I had troops placed at the border of their final city. Got the next tech by giving them a bunch of money, then eliminated them the same turn....

Cheap, yet highly satisfying and effective. Obviously no war weariness issues.

Is this something that's been done or thought of before?

Yes, it has been done many times before. In my game, I personally made sure that Greece was a live and well at the end. I gave Greece a very nice city in the tundra and had my troops camping near by to protect it from the Aztecs. Since the two free techs that I got from Greece were on a different path of the tech tree, I was able to trade my other techs for the two free techs from Greece without any problem.

 

[Timko]

Sweet lord this talk of having enough workers to upgrade all cities from 12 to 20 odd in one turn once a hospital is built just scares me. I realised from the earlier spoiler that I wasn't building enough workers but I didn't think anyone would have had enough to do that.
When do people start cranking them out? Do you have some cities just constantly building them?
Also I was curious about how people used workers, if you fully automate them or not. If you are going for a wonder you need as much production as possible and the automated worker seems to give a lot more irrigation than mines.
Finally this gotm map had a lot of grassland at the start and so most of my workers were building mines on the grassland before I got republic and I would like to know when people started converting it to irrigation.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Timko
When do people start cranking them out? Do you have some cities just constantly building them?

I start cranking them out when a city can no longer grow. If the food bin is full and the rate of grow is 9999999999, it's time to produce another worker or settler. If not, all those food would be wasted.

Also I was curious about how people used workers, if you fully automate them or not.

In this GOTM18, I manually control all of them as I usually do with any other games, but that's just me.

Finally this gotm map had a lot of grassland at the start and so most of my workers were building mines on the grassland before I got republic and I would like to know when people started converting it to irrigation.

If it's not a core city, I would start irrigation immediately. If it's a core city, I leave the mine there for a bit longer and I irrigate only enough food to support up to 12 citizens. Note, you can always produce worker from corrupted-well-irrigated city to join your mining city to make up for the slow rate of growth.

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by Timko
When do people start cranking them out? Do you have some cities just constantly building them?
Also I was curious about how people used workers, if you fully automate them or not. If you are going for a wonder you need as much production as possible and the automated worker seems to give a lot more irrigation than mines.
Finally this gotm map had a lot of grassland at the start and so most of my workers were building mines on the grassland before I got republic and I would like to know when people started converting it to irrigation.

I don't automate the workers at all, they just waste time doing the wrong things.

My early workers spend their time on roading and mining the "core" area, i.e. the central cities which aren't corrupt. I always mine grassland in the core area, unless a tile has a food bonus in which case it is a candidate for irrigation very early in the game.

As I expand and start to get corrupt fringe towns I have those towns produce workers and settlers. A completely corrupt town can still produce a worker in ten turns so this is a good use for it. In most cases I don't wait for it to grow first, just start it producing units right away.

Some of my early workers stay in the core region continuing there until all tiles are roaded and mined; some of them move out roading toward the front lines. The new workers produced on the fringes have a first priority of helping with that roading task, connecting everything. After that, any excess worker capacity is used to irrigate the fringes. There's no point mining them since they're corrupt, might as well improve food production.

When Steam Power is available railroading becomes an immediate priority. By this time I usually have the core regions (palace and forbidden palace) 100% mined and roaded and have very few workers remaining in those areas. My current technique is to gain a bit of automation in this phase - after discovering Steam Power, as soon as each worker finishes its current task, I shift-ctl-R the worker and target one of my core cities. Not many turns after this they all congregate in the core, having created a rail network which connects most regions. (They were scattered fairly evenly in fringes before that.) Next they railroad the entire core (want the improved production and commerce asap) and then they spread out again to continue improving the outlying areas.