The "Expanded OCC" and it's negative effect on measuring the effectiveness of buildings and corporations

[sampsa]

You won't win a game of civ4 deity by watching a bunch of Lain videos and then trying to imitate what he does. That is not how the game works, and it's the same in any game, sport etc. To me the whole claim is just an excuse.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

You won't win a game of civ4 deity by watching a bunch of Lain videos and then trying to imitate what he does. That is not how the game works, and it's the same in any game, sport etc. To me the whole claim is just an excuse.

Even if you don't follow each step strictly, if there is a meta with established best choices that you always have to make that's the same.

 

[sampsa]

Even if you don't follow each step strictly, if there is a meta with established best choices that you always have to make that's the same.

There is not.

 

[antimony]

Even if you don't follow each step strictly, if there is a meta with established best choices that you always have to make that's the same.

It's not clear to me what you're suggesting though. Should a player learn all strategies on their own and not read this forum to avoid being spoiled? Or they should learn from those published strategies and games, but understand why something works rather than just repeating it? If the latter, I don't think anyone would disagree; you will be a better player if you understand why some decisions are more efficient than others.

 

[antimony]

I don't really like this strategy. I see absolutely nothing about it that could not be improved by simply spacing the cities out by a tile or two to avoid overlap and maximize productivity.

Care to elaborate on this though? Why is more land for each city always better? You're trying to maximize the productivity of an empire not of individual cities.

 

[need my speed]

I don't really like this strategy. I see absolutely nothing about it that could not be improved by simply spacing the cities out by a tile or two to avoid overlap and maximize productivity.

Most of your cities are not going to work every single tile around them (or it will take too long to be irrelevant).

 

[Bibor]

But the original post was focused on this idea that the effectiveness of bureaucracy, corporations or buildings was based only on some very specific game plan. Yet even a change as drastic as banning slavery wouldn't change the fact that bureau is really strong in a riverside capital, or the relative strength of state property vs corporations, or the fact that granaries would be the most popular building (since again growth is good almost everywhere).

Well, when you have strategies like strike economy, one can be pretty certain almost everything relevant has been discovered about this game. This game has a rule set, which includes units, buildings, wonders etc. that are "not needed" for a victory. That's because a victory is not needed either. In fact, one can retire from a game at any given time. Like a car, this game can be used on a racetrack or offroad. The moment discussion goes in the "racecars are the bestestest" direction, you know we took a wrong turn.

 

[antimony]

Well, when you have strategies like strike economy, one can be pretty certain almost everything relevant has been discovered about this game. This game has a rule set, which includes units, buildings, wonders etc. that are "not needed" for a victory. That's because a victory is not needed either. In fact, one can retire from a game at any given time. Like a car, this game can be used on a racetrack or offroad. The moment discussion goes in the "racecars are the bestestest" direction, you know we took a wrong turn.

Your initial post was making a point about how we evaluate the "effectiveness" of certain game elements wrong because these evaluations are only valid under a narrow range of victory conditions and game plans, and that is the specific question I was trying to address, but now you're shifting to a different argument, which is that it can be more fun to not try to optimize, and not worry about whether or how fast you win. This is of course true and there is no point debating how different people enjoy playing the game differently.

 

[Bibor]

Your initial post was making a point about how we evaluate the "effectiveness" of certain game elements wrong because these evaluations are only valid under a narrow range of victory conditions and game plans, and that is the specific question I was trying to address, but now you're shifting to a different argument, which is that it can be more fun to not try to optimize, and not worry about whether or how fast you win. This is of course true and there is no point debating how different people enjoy playing the game differently.

I see. That's not what I wanted to accomplish. I was adding to the argument that, by the very nature of creation, it's impossible to make every element of the game "just as ideal" as another element, especially if we talk about absolute optimal "paths of least resistance" that gameplays can take.

If this game would be about getting a river from point A to B, then a straight line would be optimal. Yet the map and opponents add rocks and elevation to the riverbed, so twists and turns is what makes this game interesting. As with any river flow, certain patterns emerge. But the toolkit this game provides has to deal with all cases, even edge cases that are at the edge of the distribution. So, if you want espionage, which is a mechanic in the game, you get espionage buildings, modifiers etc. You don't *need* espionage to win, perhaps not even in 99,9% cases. But the mechanic is in the game, and the buildings and units are there. If you need them. Trumpeting about "how useless they are in most cases" is just boring repetition of a known fact. That still doesn't mean you can't make a game where you steal half the tech from opponents. You can do it, the mechanics are there.

So, to repeat my OP: While this game is way past its prime, I still believe there is room, especially for new players, to experiment, try and play this game as the idividual players "feels" it could be played.

 

[Fippy]

I think everyone knows that games can be played how peoples want..how much chatting potential does that have on a strategy forum?
There are no rule sets here.. @drewisfat i.e. shows different strategies often (and one of his favorites is espionage), and he does so on deity. I also play relaxed on deity btw.

When shadow game threads plop up - or peoples ask for help to improve their game in general - then we use estabilished mechanis cos it's what they want.
"Trumpeting" are usually those who are more interested in philosophy questions than participating in those games.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

It's not clear to me what you're suggesting though. Should a player learn all strategies on their own and not read this forum to avoid being spoiled? Or they should learn from those published strategies and games, but understand why something works rather than just repeating it? If the latter, I don't think anyone would disagree; you will be a better player if you understand why some decisions are more efficient than others.

In general I make a point of avoiding looking up strategies, metas, reading strategy guides and wikis and generally engaging with what can be described as educational behavior when it comes to strategy games if I can help it. I prefer to figure these things out my self and learn from my own experience rather than simply absorbing that of others. And I enjoy a 90% run on a lesser difficulty but born from my own labor and experience far more than a max difficulty 100% run done by going down a check list of best choices that someone else figured out for me.

For lack of a better explanation it feels like cheating on a test. What is the point of a good grade if I don't feel like I deserve it?

And just to make things clear, in the odd case that they weren't. I am talking about my own preference here. As in the way I enjoy playing these games. Like, I know that there are people who enjoy the opposite and that's fine.

 

[sampsa]

For lack of a better explanation it feels like cheating on a test. What is the point of a good grade if I don't feel like I deserve it?

Would you study for a test?

 

[Bibor]

Would you study for a test?

Yes, we can discuss that. This is a game I don't play professionally. That doesn't mean I'm not eventually interested in experts opinion or how other people play. It's also a single-player game, so no expectations from other players, just your own. So no, it's very unlike a test, of which the point is to prove to someone else that you're competent in a topic.

I'm of the strong opinion that interest in a topic should come (chronologically) before competence in it. Since interest is emotion, discovery and wonder is part of that process.

 

[sampsa]

I think it's much better to speak directly about the subject instead of making a clumsy analogy to something completely different and then set the rules how exactly that analogy is supposed to work. "That's not how a piano works!".

This is a game I don't play professionally.

Really? I've made millions

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Would you study for a test?

No and I newer have.

I have studied to learn information, to acquire skills or to gain experience. I have studied to better my self or to acquire knowledge that will be useful in the future. And I've even done it for fun or for the heck of it. And if that knowledge happens to also help me pass a test so much the better. But I have newer studied for the sole and explicit purpose of just passing a test or getting a better grade. And that is the distinction I want to make here.

 

[sampsa]

You are proving my point on why these analogies are worthless.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

You are proving my point on why these analogies are worthless.

Put it this way.

If you were taking a class at school would you rather have a bad grade but come out with knowledge and experience or a perfect grade because you discovered what the questions are going to be in advance and memorized the answers?

 

[sampsa]

If you were taking a class at school would you rather have a bad grade but come out with knowledge and experience or a perfect grade because you discovered what the questions are going to be in advance and memorized the answers?

I have no interest in these analogies, like I said already.

However, if by this strange analogy you are trying to ask whether you should learn to play Civ 4 by trying to understand how the game mechanics work or by memorizing some pattern, the answer is very clear - focus on understanding.

 

[drewisfat]

Compared to other single player strategy games, I think civ 4's strength is how many different strategies might be "best" depending on the situation. To the extent there is a meta, it's in bulbing to win liberalism, not really Oxford bureau caps as OP suggests. And even bulbing liberalism is really only viable with good leaders and a lot of land. Often you're forced to attack earlier, which undermines a lib rush, or you've got UUs that justify a different path altogether.

I actually think deity makes *more* strategies viable than lower difficulty levels. Consider the first big tech you should go after the opening worker techs. On Monarch-Emperor, Alphabet is always your best choice unless tech trading is impossible. On deity Aesthetics may be the best trade bait, but it is not that simple, because happiness and AI aggression are factors. I can craft plausible situations to justify literally any tech at that stage.
You're more likely to be punished with a loss for poor choices the higher the difficulty level, but that is different from the difficulty level being the culprit for limiting strategic choices. Ironically, units become better and infrastructure becomes worse the lower the difficulty level. Grocers are a fairly common build in deity games that go late. It's hard for me to imagine building them in a Noble game though, when I can start killing off AI with warriors or chariots at the latest.

 

[MassRiflemen]

I think it would be fair to say that the developers of Civ4 gave us plenty of options on how to play this game. Over the years, as we, the players, learned the game and it's mechanics, combined with the fact that the development on this game ceased a long time ago, meant that certain strategies started to first take shape, then solidify and ultimately crystallise in our playstyles.

The best known of these is probably "The Bureaucratic capital" play, which in this post I call "Expanded One City Strategy" (for reasons that I will present shortly). In this strategy, the main city is the capital, with the ideal one having as much food as possible (taking up as few tiles as possible, ideally corn or flatland pigs), while also having as much grassland flatland riverside tiles as possible, for cottages. Around this city there is a first ring of cities, overlapping with tiles workable by the capital. These cities are also focused on food, and the triple role of these cities is to "work the cottages" of the capital while also providing infrastructure and military units for the rest of the empire (whipping). The second ring of cities (and beyond) is almost exclusively tied to food (and sometimes other resources), and serves again as infrastructure for the capital, as well as whipping points for units.

The goals of this strategy are to get to Civil service as soon as possible (for Bureaucracy), to Oxford University (for science boost) and to a size large enough to work all the cottages "prepared" by the capital and it's first ring of cities. Other cities are there "just to prepare the terrain", either by providing infrastrucutre, worked cottages or whipped units, whereas the capital serves to provide the brunt of the research (science) to a point where this research will unlock units (usually Cuirassiers, Cavalry, Infantry and/or Cannons) that enables overpowering one or more (preferably all) AI players for a victory.

As many players will point out, this strategy heavily relies on buildings essential for growth (Granaries, Lighthouses) for frequent whipping, with the rest of the production queue being filled with workers, settlers, military units and merely an occasional building, like a barracks or the 5+1 universities needed to build Oxford. All this means that cities other than the capital are basically whipping outposts. And little else. It's not uncommon to see cities with population 3 in the middle of the game, with 40+ unrest turns remaining.

This "Expanded One City Strategy" is a very valid one, probably the most powerful one, it's not the only one. Playing on the Deity difficulty level tends to push players into optimal strategies such as this one. That's the main reason I don't like Deity: a world where everyone's has a finance PhD, because that's the optimal play, it becomes boring real quick.

UN victories, space race victories etc. favor growth, development and powerful cities. These strategies require buildings and corporations, because these games don't rely on conquest as much, but rather on total population and its productivity (and possibly diplomatic relations).

While this game is way past its prime, I still believe there is room, especially for new players, to experiment, try and play this game as the idividual players "feels" it could be played. As such, I'm a strong advocate of not resorting to simple answers like "Build granaries and whip" when asked about the strategies on buildings and corporations. Or "get to cav and whip" when asked about how to win militarily. These questions come up relatively often (as often as they can after all these years) – let us provide some context and variety when appropriate. This game deserves as much.

Bro just do what I do.

Turn off tech trading on a huge pure land map on Immortal (forget deity on huge brah)

All of sudden every building appropriate to the city feels like an accomplishment and long term asset to your empire. You can't win without them.

Turn off tech trading and play the game like it's meant to be.