HermannLombard
Warlord
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2006
- Messages
- 277
So what tech path do you like early on? I know you want to get to Banking, but there are a lot of ways to get there (and you see Acoustics as a wasteful detour).
Happiness:
Happiness controls your expansion speed. You can push this down to -9 without problems. If it is higher than -9, you aren't expanding as fast as you could; if it goes -10, you are dead in the water until you fix it (which can sometimes take a while). The reason you can push it negative is that if you are building settlers, there is no penalty for single-digit unhappiness. Those 9 points are free expansion capacity...use them.
The catch, however, is that you need Colosseums, if you are building Colosseums while unhappy, you are losing food=growth=science. To keep the system running smoothly, you need to keep your cities in sync and cycle between building settlers while unhappy and building infrastructure while happy. If your cities are out of sync, you are inefficient. If your happiness is out of cycle, you have gone off the rails.Unfortunately this is an extremely unstable setup. After finishing a round of Colosseums, your happiness just went up, but that's when you want it low. After finishing a batch of Settlers, your happiness is way down, but now you need to immediately raise it by 20 points to handle the next batch of Settlers, or immediately raise it 12-13 points before building Colosseums. 9 points is not enough, because your cities will grow while building infrastructure.
Excellent info Paeanblack. On the bolded point, how would that work? I mean, I understand why you are building settlers when you are at -9, but when you are at -9 you need to be thinking of building coloseums to get you back to in the positive area. If not, you're at -9, once the new wave of settlers at settled, you could easily be -20. I think this is an impossible position.
The only thing I can think of is simply never go into the negative.
@Paeanblack: What speed are you playing these games on?
How are you gaining 15 happiness out of Meritocracy and still have enough culture to actually get there quickly?
Frogs. Only Napoleon can run a proper ICS.
I think he likes to play Gandhi. Gandhi has some advantages when you get tons of food.
Frogs. Only Napoleon can run a proper ICS.
Napoleon can get a lot more social policies without sacrificing his expansion speed. That early strength is so unbelievably powerful that I'm pretty sure nobody else is competitive with it.
I filled out the whole liberty tree, the first freedom policy (the second best ICS policy after meritocracy) and the first order policy by 490 AD. And that was without a concerted monument-building effort.
Napoleon can get a lot more social policies without sacrificing his expansion speed. That early strength is so unbelievably powerful that I'm pretty sure nobody else is competitive with it.
I filled out the whole liberty tree, the first freedom policy (the second best ICS policy after meritocracy) and the first order policy by 490 AD. And that was without a concerted monument-building effort.
IMO the liberty tree policies are suboptimal for ICS, except the tree itself which you should unlock for the cheap settlers.
What's the alternative for REX+ICS?
Honour I guess? On higher level you will need ot beat the AI back if you want loads of cities. Not that Honour is that exciting either.
Maybe piety for the 20% happyness?