Fair enough, but it goes to show, that I reckon playing "normal personalities" is probably the biggest advantage the player has. Gandhi could have been a psycho, but you knew in 3000 whatever BC that he isn't programmed to be, hence you could employ a strategy of no defence whatsoever for a long time.
A long time ago I remember studying charts for how the AI behaves. Everything from how much it is willing to trade tech, to being bribed. I took note of how each AI behaved, and remembered that. Though, playing enough times will over time give you a good round figure too.
I always believed a strong player should know in detail how each AI is going to behave, and should maximize against this accordingly. But the random personalities issue is interesting. I’m not too familiar with that option because I don’t change much from the defaults. In fact, I’m not sure if it means Ghandi can make pratoreans or not, but the thing that worries me is Firaxis has tweaked and balanced out the synergies with the personalities. I’m not sure if the random personalities break the optimization or not, because I’m still not sure how random personalities really works.
Interesting study though, your example, but one last point...was it really any fun at all?
I think so. Was never sure what would happen. Would I run into a close civ and warmonger early, or find good builder resources and build. Etc, etc, always something. I definitely don’t care to play the same map over again, after the first time you sort of know the terrain, and who is located where. That’s too much of an advantage and a lot of the (surprise) factors are gone. Monarch/Normal is the lowest I’ll settle for these days. There was actually a point where I ended up drafting a few units, so there was some challenge even still in it.
Very nicely done indeed. I'm overly impressed with the insane production your capital has produced. I've never ever seen a city with over a few hundred a turn, let alone near a 1000!!!
I posted a bit on this sort of thing in another thread before. And again, DaveMcW wrote a little article a long time ago showing that it is possible with workshops and waterwheels to turn even pure flat-grasslands into a giant power-house. Generally I don’t like to build workshops because of the food penalty, but there are a few players who do go crazy with them like there is no tomorrow. Water-wheels is another story though with me. I really am starting to love waterwheels lately, and of course they sometimes are the DOMINANT choice over anything. Prime example, sitting on tunda with a river. What the hell else could you build then?
I've never even thought about trying this strategy, and a lot of people on these boards are way better players than I'll probably ever try to be, but the main thing I don't understand at all is how you were able to win the Liberalism race with just two cities and no cottages.
Again, one properly managed strong city can be more powerful than many smaller ones. Of course smaller cities allow you to do land grabs, which is a big reason people do them.
But lets look at it this way..
My fortress ended up making a library. That’s 25%. Then I ended up with making the great library, that’s 2 specialists. And then later, my other scientist that popped out made an academy. That’s another science booster.
Also, my little sister city had a library in it too, but that’s just a little extra.
Now.. the fun part. All great persons which were absorbed into the city are making production. This is production you CANT get from tiles. It’s all freebies which do not need a plot to be worked, and do not need to eat up any food.
For each scientist I absorbed, I am getting 6 beakers. Each engineer, I get 3. Now, those are not just being contributed to my pool, but they also get filtered through all my science building modifiers. So, even when turning tech slider to zero, my science buildings can still d work. It’s a 2-bird with one stone issue.
Now throw in the fact I am running representation… Now I get an extra +3 beakers per specialist. But not only my running specialists are getting the boost, all my absorbed great people also get the +3 beakers. This means all my priests & great prophets, etc. contribute extra science at that point.
Lets take a closer look now.
1 Great prophet = 2 Hammers + 5 Gold.
Turn on rep and we get… 2 Hammers + 5 Gold + 3 Beakers.
The gold we get, goes through our modifiers… so the value we get from them is more than 5 gold. And gold can be turned into science as well. As for the beakers, that’s already raw science, but they will get boosted yet even higher going through the wash. And as for our hammers, that also gets filtered through by forges and the like. And if we want, we can and do change city production to science. This converts our total hammer production into actual science.
And even more interesting… if you run priests in your cities, the Ankor wat will double the hammers from them, and that double is done BEFORE the science conversion when you decide to convert hammer power into pure science in the city.
Anything the priest/prophet makes production wise, can be converted into science in one way or another.
Ok, not trying to get too indepth here but…
Lets say you have 3 great scientists you don’t know what to do with. You have 3 crap cities, and one good capital. Most newbs thinking on science production will use them to make academies in the poor cities. Maybe that +4 culture is what they can’t resist, who knows.
But…. If your cities are poor, and your paying those maintenance costs, and don’t have much gold on hand, those academies are really not doing anything. But you wasted 3 great people!
If you absorb those as a super-specialist in the capital instead, then each gives you +1 hammer, and 9 breakers when running Rep. That’s 27 raw beakers and 3 hammers! So even if you have 0 gold, you’re still making good science. But even still, all those breakers are being filtered through all your other buildings you’ve made in your capital. And the extra hammers is always nice.
Oh.. and did I forget to mention… running beuracracy also gives a big boost?
Food & Hammers…
Middle Save
And before I forget, here’s my middle save from when I took my break. I spot a cottage in a middle city that I missed pillaging when I took it (it was too small to see then). There is one cottage also in Ghandi’s original capital. I also missed taking that one. There are a few ugly cottages around the city up above, unfortunately I took the city before I finished pillaging them. Ghandi LITEARLLY was cottage spamming each frieken square! It was crazy. And held up my advance so long I was just rapping him from all that gold. I eventually decided to just attack that city and hurry up with the vassalization. Now if we had been playing epic speed, we would have had a lot more time. But then… if you’re doing epic/marathon, you might as well be playing one level above anyhow.
In fact if you look, Ghandi still has cottages all over the friggen place in his domain. But to be honest, of all the spots, I can’t go too hard on him here. This terrain isn’t that bad for putting down cottages, because of the lack of rivers, etc. But even still, I cringe when trying to make excuses for him. Because we all know it’s just a fluke due to the terrain. I stopped using autoworkers with delicate leaders ages ago, because they’ll do such silly things like wasting precious time by building cottages ontop of hills LOL.
a turn, let alone near a 1000!!!
