Thoughts About Growth and Health

[Erebras]

When I first started playing, it was pretty much a no-brainer to go for the virtues that give you growth, free worker, and free colonist, but lately I've abandoned that in favor of industry and knowledge.

My overall mindset is to amass as much culture as possible. Somehow, to me, the more virtues the better. And I like jumping ahead to get AEGIS units as quickly as possible, so I get a free knowledge advance after unlocking enough Tier I virtues (choosing Augmentation, I think it's called), and then another free advance after building institute (choosing Surrogacy, I think it's called). If I've already chosen enough Might virtues to allow a +20% affinity, then choosing Surrogacy gives me more than one progression in Purity, which is nice.

But as for Health, my strategy has been to NOT cut down any forests except as required by plantations and mines or what have you, and then build biowells everywhere that doesn't benefit from a generator. You end up, with not a single virtue in Growth, with a Health meter of +40 to +60, provided you build all the clinics and gene gardens and all, and each biowell generates culture with the right advance. Why not cut down forest? So that a biowell is more productive foodwise, and continues to produce a NUT (production), and invaders have a harder time of it while stumbling through the trees after your defenders.

Granted, this is a rather passive strategy. You end up with culture, food, and production that better players can amass by clearcutting and devoting well-fed citizens to specialist tasks, but it seems to work for me. The 2 energy per turn doesn't seem to break the bank at all when you get to that point in the game when you have the population and trade routes to deal with the outlay (and magrails should be free by then, too!).

Any thoughts or ideas on what I've just said?

 

[Xenotitan]

Beelining for the free settler at the start of the game is a more powerful choice than opening industry or knowledge. You can use it to get a trade route up to your capital quickly for a large food and production boost, speeding up everything in your early game. After that switching to a tree other than prosperity is a good idea though.

As for "everywhere that doesn't benefit from a generator", isn't that every workable land tile?

I think biowell spam is fairly effective but it gets beaten out by academy spam.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

When I first started playing, it was pretty much a no-brainer to go for the virtues that give you growth, free worker, and free colonist, but lately I've abandoned that in favor of industry and knowledge.

<snip>

Any thoughts or ideas on what I've just said?

I've been through that phase, but then lately, I'm beginning to return to prosperity. Pushing colonists ridiculously hard, staying below -20 health and eternal war with 3 other colonies sounds like a recipe for disaster. Sometimes though, if you have a lot of room, the science output is amazing.

 

[Ryika]

If you use random loadout and get started with worker + Titanium (or at least gold/copper) + no bonus culture, then I'd say skipping the settler in favor of early industry is somewhat viable, just because you have to choose between giving up a free settler or losing a lot of uptime for the good virtues (that's one of the reasons double-culture is so strong - you get everything right at the moment it becomes useful) + you have the hammers you need to still get the first settler rolling fast enough.

In any other situation I'd always pick the free colonist. In a scenario where you start with African Union + Culture Loadout NOT picking the free settler is extremely wasteful. Not only do you lose that free city and a TON of early <everything>, no, you'll also get all the virtues before you can even make good use of them.

The worker on the other hand is a wasted policy that doesn't get you anywhere, I personally would not pick it in ANY scenario.

 

[Erebras]

Good thoughts, all. I think I put too much emphasis on the fact I went through a prosperity phase and then dropped it, which was inadvertent. My focus is more on biowell spam (as one has called it) and whether or not I was overdoing it with those and generators, or if not clearcutting was causing me to miss the forest for the trees (Ha! I'm so glad I could put that idiom in somewhere!).

I don't use academies, or academy spam. I'm too new at the game to do so, but my gut reaction is that you end up with a buttload of science and a buttload of unhealthy people. Is this worth it? I thought a +20% bonus to everything because of high health would be a good thing in its own right, which is why I do it.

And you guys are referring to culture loadouts and colonist loadouts (or whatever the phrases are), which I guess is referring to taking advantage of a sponsor's strengths by amplifying the effect with the right cargo choice and specialists, such as, what?, a hydroponics lab on top of the already growing Africans or artists with the culture-driving Africans (free relic) or Franco-Iberians (free 11th virtue).

Am I right that this is what you're getting at?

 

[Ryika]

Academies are pretty much a must-have for a fast victory, either combined with getting Biowells first or getting them directly.

Health is really weak, as long as you stay above -20 health there's really not much of a difference to -1. Above that you get the 10%, but getting 20 health just for 10% more science when you could just have built academies instead of more biowells is just not worth it. (That's different if you choose Prosperity as your main virtue tree, then being in positive health is actually doable and quite useful, but Prosperity is in general rather weak and too slow.)

And yes, "culture loadout" is African Union + Artists, to get the free settler asap and then all the other virtues pretty much at the point they become useful. Franko-Iberia on the other hand is rather bad, their bonus comes very late and when they finally get their free virtue, Africa is already ahead in both, empire development as well as total virtues.

Rule of thumbs for generators: Don't build them. Get Thorium Reactors instead, with the +2 Gold quest Decision. Make sure that you trade in all your resources for Energy per Turn and get Solar Collectors if you need them. Industry also passively helps a lot with Energy Problems, the +1 gpt per Resource is really strong.

 

[tedeviatings]

Rule of thumbs for generators: Don't build them. Get Thorium Reactors instead, with the +2 Gold quest Decision. Make sure that you trade in all your resources for Energy per Turn and get Solar Collectors if you need them. Industry also passively helps a lot with Energy Problems, the +1 gpt per Resource is really strong.

You might have played too much harmony lately - not every affinity has solar collectors to solve all of their energy problems
That said I usually only build generators if I don't have more efficient ways to generate energy (solar collectors, station trade routes, buildings, ...) and I'm about to go negative in a couple of turns. But this actually happens rather consistently so I usually end up getting some. Once my monetary problems are solved they're replaced with more useful tile improvements of course.

 

[Erebras]

Get Thorium Reactors, instead?!
One is a tile improvement, the other is a city improvement. It's not an either/or decision, and I get both, ending up with huge surpluses of money to quick-build or throw lavish parties at CEO Fielding's place. (We trashed the Kavithan Temple, so we've been banned.)

I see merit in academies, instead of generators (at least in theory). To be fair, I usually end up building generators along river grasslands, and with the right tech advance, they produce +5 or +6 energy. Add a well-placed solar collector overhead, and you could see massive amounts of energy production in a single hex cluster.

I am not familiar with "trading in" your resources for energy. Is that code for trading a strategic resource to another civ in exchange for energy per turn?

I'll have to investigate using academies. I'm thinking beelining for advanced techs allows you to get the jump on building warp gates or hiring Jodie Foster to talk to a facsimile of her dad, but in a game of total domination, the emphasis would be more on advanced weaponry, which, of course, is not tech advances so much as affinity levels. If academies can or do generate culture, I'd be inclined to think they'd do as good a job as biowells insofar as culture-production is concerned.

 

[Ryika]

You might have played too much harmony lately - not every affinity has solar collectors to solve all of their energy problems
That said I usually only build generators if I don't have more efficient ways to generate energy (solar collectors, station trade routes, buildings, ...) and I'm about to go negative in a couple of turns. But this actually happens rather consistently so I usually end up getting some. Once my monetary problems are solved they're replaced with more useful tile improvements of course.

Yeah, that's true, although I usually just sell all my resources 1 by 1 for 2 ept each when my starting location doesn't have enough energy by itself. A ton of micromanagement, but it allows my tile improvements to run with maximum efficiency.

Get Thorium Reactors, instead?!
One is a tile improvement, the other is a city improvement. It's not an either/or decision, and I get both, ending up with huge surpluses of money to quick-build or throw lavish parties at CEO Fielding's place. (We trashed the Kavithan Temple, so we've been banned.)

Gold is there to be converted into other stuff, the best way to convert it into other stuff is by using advanced tile improvements, namely Biowells and Academies. Rushbuying stuff has a very bad return rate (3 gold per 1 hammer - exception is the recycler, because it basically kickstarts your new city) and production should overall not be an issue anyway, but the one thing you can never have "too much" of is science.

So yes, get reactors so you don't need to get generators.

I see merit in academies, instead of generators (at least in theory). To be fair, I usually end up building generators along river grasslands, and with the right tech advance, they produce +5 or +6 energy. Add a well-placed solar collector overhead, and you could see massive amounts of energy production in a single hex cluster.

It doesn't really matter how you place stuff, the outcome will always be the same. If you build a generator on a river grassland tile and an academy on a non-river tile next to that tile, the total outcome will be the same as when you swap their positions. A solar collector that is placed in "open space" will always generate 7 Energy per Turn as long as all the tiles are worked - independent of the tile improvement that is below it. As there aren't really any big %-modifiers that you only get in one city stacking yields is actually not important at all.

I am not familiar with "trading in" your resources for energy. Is that code for trading a strategic resource to another civ in exchange for energy per turn?

Don't know if that's "code" for that, but at least that's what I meant.