Strict Build Order Challenge

[shyuhe]

I've been wanting to try this challenge for a while and I hope it'll be educational to many of the players out there. The premise is that I must follow the same building queue in all of my cities. I will run two queues - one for production cities and one for commerce cities. Upon founding a city, I will classify it as either production or commerce and will not change the classification throughout the game.

I will play a demo game following this rule with three exceptions. 1) I can insert a military unit into the front of the queue at any time 2) I can insert national wonders into the queue at any time and 3) I do not have to adjust the queue until the current building is completed (to avoid hammer decay from constantly adding to the queue as new buildings become unlocked). I will avoid all world wonders to simplify the queue process.

I'm not sure about the finer details of the queue order yet. As each new building becomes available, I will add it in to a growing list of buildings. Some buildings will never make it into the queue (as I think some buildings aren't very useful).

I will be playing my demo game with Isabella of Spain. Since I won't be building any castles, there will be no influence from her UB (the citadel). And I love spiritual. The map is a standard continents map at normal speed on monarch level. Here is the starting position:

The queue will be updated in the next post as the game progresses. To begin with, the queue order will simply be barracks --> nothing. This is because I'm going to skip monuments all game.

I've attached save in case anybody is interested. So on with the game!

 

[shyuhe]

Reserved for the queue

Current commerce city queue
----------------------------
granary
library
barracks
lighthouse
forge
courthouse
market
monastery
aqueduct
colosseum
temple

Current production city queue
----------------------------
granary
barracks
courthouse
forge
market
aqueduct
lighthouse
temple

 

[Bleys]

ACK skipping monuments? They are usually my very first build with non-CRE leaders (well, I play vanilla, so its Obelisks). I suppose if your going to leverage the SPI into a religion, you will get culture there, but that could get dodgy pretty quickly. You need culture for border pops though, I play CRE a lot JUST to pop borders fast in the early game, no other reason.

 

[shyuhe]

Ok here we go. I played through 450 BC. I still can't make that many buildings as the starting land turned out to be pretty bad and it forced my tech route.

The tech order went agriculture -- AH -- wheel -- mining -- BW -- pottery -- writing -- meditation -- priesthood -- CoL.

I started AH because of the pasture resources nearby. I then found horses to the far NE near some floodplains and built my second city out there (pretty far). I then needed wheel to connect the two cities, followed by BW to chop the trees near Madrid. Pottery was next because I needed cottages to keep my economy afloat and to open up the granary. The single best building in the entire game. After that, I took writing to open up libraries (in case I crashed my economy) and then beelined CoL (for caste system artists to pop borders).

In terms of game play, I met three neighbors, Mansa, Brennus, and Hannibal. Mansa is to the east and built the oracle (stunting his early growth). Brennus is to the north and Hannibal to the NW of Brennus. While I am reluctant to do so (because it will make the rest of the game easier), I think I will have to rush Brennus because he built stonehenge in a border city that is pushing up against my city borders. I have a small stack of chariots that should be able to take that border city. I may push on to raze one more city of his before taking peace, or I may eliminate him completely. I haven't quite decided yet...

I can now build 4 buildings, the granary, library, barracks, and courthouse. I will not build any libraries in my production cities (I have 1 so far). Here are my queues so far:

commerce: granary -- library -- barracks -- courthouse
production: granary -- barracks -- courthouse.

The empire:

And the attack stack:

I ended up building most of these chariots because my commerce city (Barcelona) ran out of buildings Madrid has been pumping out all of my workers/settlers. And yes, I have been whipping most of my buildings in to place.

 

[shyuhe]

ACK skipping monuments? They are usually my very first build with non-CRE leaders (well, I play vanilla, so its Obelisks). I suppose if your going to leverage the SPI into a religion, you will get culture there, but that could get dodgy pretty quickly. You need culture for border pops though, I play CRE a lot JUST to pop borders fast in the early game, no other reason.

I thought about this for a bit. While a monument would definitely help with the early border pops, I decided I didn't want to build them in all of my cities up through astronomy as it's a waste of hammers after you have access to religion and/or caste system. Plus, you want to settle your first few cities to be powerful without border pops. It takes too long to pop borders even using monuments (10 turns + building time) so you want the initial 9 squares that the city is built on to be good. In that case, you don't really need the border pops till later so I decided to forgo all monuments. Since Isabella is spiritual, I figured I'll be swapping in and out of caste system for most of the game so popping borders shouldn't be an issue.

I also skipped the three early religions. I wanted my game to be generalizable to other games as well so I took Confucianism - a religion that should be obtainable at any difficulty level (you can sling it off of the oracle on immortal/deity).

 

[Ibian]

Query: What be the point?

 

[tycoonist]

Query: What be the point?

experimental. embrace your creative side

 

[shyuhe]

It's also meant to be more instructive to newer players of CIV. I remember when I first started playing the game, I was overwhelmed by the number of buildings available as I didn't know what they did. Hopefully this exercise will create a list of buildings in order of usefulness that newer players may find use for.

 

[Winston Hughes]

Interesting idea. I'll be lurking.

 

[Refar]

Should be instructive for people having trouble with city specialization.

 

[futurehermit]

looks like once you take stonehenge from vienne you won't need to worry about the monument/no monument issue

 

[Bleys]

Worked out, didnt it future. I am glad too, because your starting spot was truly "not good", I likely would have regenerated. I dont wait for mega-strong starts, but I certainly dont like poor ones.

 

[shyuhe]

I moved on with my game. Got some more buildings to build I ended up declaring war on Brennus who was dogpiled by Hannibal and Mansa. I only took Vienne and Hannibal has taken peace. MM and I are still at with Brennus (although I haven't really ventured into his territory).

The tech order went: IW -- hunting -- sailing -- alpha -- math -- archery (trade) -- currency -- calendar -- monarchy (trade) -- masonry -- construction -- MC (trade) -- CS

As a result, I can now build: aqueduct, market, colosseum, forge, lighthouse. So here are my build queues:

commerce city: granary -- library -- barracks -- lighthouse -- forge -- courthouse -- market -- monastery -- aqueduct -- colosseum -- temple

production city: granary -- barracks -- courthouse -- forge -- market -- aqueduct -- lighthouse -- temple

I did make one mistake. I accidentally built a library in a city that I had intended to be a commerce city. Ooops Since I can't destroy buildings, I'll let it be. I've also moved my capital inland as Madrid really was not built on stellar land. I may build the Moai in it later but until then, it's a pretty bad city (no strategic resource in the bfc!).

Here are my cities:

And the diplo situation:

Hannibal is teching the fastest of all the civs (he's more advanced than me). However he's pleased so I'm not too worried. MM is at war and not teching super fast. I'm thinking of teching up machinery to enable maces then going to finish off Brennus. I will probably then head east to whittle down MM. I think I can field an army of maces/trebs before he can get engineering himself.

I had serious happiness issues until I got monarchy/calendar online. My research was at about 30% for a while as I struggled to get to the necessary techs. I had no pre-calendar happy sources near my cities (except the fur to the south that was in a very bad location).

Regarding the build queue itself: I don't think temples are very high priority in most cities. I generally don't build them until I'm nearing a modern war so I put them at the bottom of the list. Colosseums are far inferior to theaters and are another building that I normally don't build early on in the game. I put the courthouse above the market although I'm not sure if that's the correct decision. In this game, my cities were very spread apart and I had some steep maintenance costs (until I moved my capital) so I wanted to build courthouses before markets in most of my cities. Long term though, I think markets before courthouses may be a better decision (with the extra bonus).

And I've attached the save again in case anybody is interested.

 

[Bleys]

This gets more and more interesting as you play farther. I love it.

Again though, with temples, I guess I am a border-popping culture nut, but I build them pretty quickly, especially with an SPI civ. Happy faces plus culture equals win/win to me. I like seeing alternative ideas and thinking though, maybe thats why I think this is a great exercise and very instructive for us nubs, especially the two different queues. I usually build a granary/library/barracks/courthouse in every single city, period.

 

[shyuhe]

You should never build a library in a pure production city. It just won't produce much and the hammers are better spent on military. The only reason I'm building barracks everywhere is because I plan on using nationalism eventually. If I am skipping nationalism, then I would probably not bother building barracks in all of my commerce cities too.

I've been swapping between slavery/caste system for most of the game since I got CoL. I basically stay in caste system to avoid slave revolts but I will swap in to slavery when 2-3 cities are ready to be whipped. Since I'm running caste system, I can pop borders in 2-3 turns with artists in new cities. You can't beat that speed

 

[Bleys]

That is a killer feature of SPI. I use the caste-slavery swap for cash purposes, too, into Caste, run a few merchants in a bunch of cities a few turns, and boom, instant cash without hurting your research too much. I have used the artist trick as well, its especially strong in newly conquored cities.

Speaking for myself, I rarely have such "pure" cities that I cant get some benefit from a library. I also like the ability to run a couple Science Specialists, especially if I am running a hybrid, without having to be in Caste to do it.

I play vanilla though, so slave revolts arent a factor. I whip a lot, keeping tight control on the growth of my population with it rather than swapping tiles in every city every few turns. That gets tedious.