Paeanblack
Prince
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2001
- Messages
- 518
I've been playing 100-150 turns into several games trying to achieve one goal: launch the spaceship as early as possible using any options available from the "basic" game setup screen. Most of this post is just my rambling trying to get all of my thoughts on this in one place.
I am currently convinced that relatively pure REX+ICS will be the dominant strategy for this goal...surpassing even the 4HotA rush+expand. What I've discovered is that even with pretty good planning, it is really easy to go off the rails and get bogged down. A few suboptimal steps, especially around turn 70-90, will kick you off the continuous exponential growth track and add 50-100 turns of delay on the spaceship.
My interpretation of the vocab:
REX - Rapid Early Expansion. Basically this means producing settlers in all cities continuously. It means not building anything but settlers without an absolute, concrete reason to build something else, and even if that's the case, flip a coin and build a settler anyways half of the time.
ICS - Infinite City Sprawl. This doesn't just mean lots of cities, it means packing the map at the utmost density. The key metric is average road length, or #roads/#cities. Ideally this ratio is about 1.6-1.7, but a real game will push this up to about 1.8 or so.
Going off the rails: Sometimes the exponential expansion just falls completely flat, due to a bunch of variables. It's easy to spot when it happens, but hard to predict. I think this is what explains the wide variance I'm getting (and other people are reporting) in the success of REX+ICS.
My rough benchmark is the 10-city/55-science threshold (researching 2nd tier techs in 1 turn). Sometimes I get this by about turn 85, and I restart and play the exact same way and it takes 125 turns. So far, I haven't been able to point at the one spot and say, "That's where I blew it"
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.
Culture:
Everything revolves around the Liberty tree, and the two crucial SPs are Liberty and Meritocracy. Liberty lets you build a settler in 6-7 turns in a Maritime-fueled junk city on the polar ice cap. Meritocracy allows you to expand your empire by 50%, as long as it is entirely filled with size-2 cities producing Settlers AND you maintain a sufficient worker pool to keep up with the road building. The intermediate SP Citizenship helps with the last bit.
Meritocracy means a free expansion cycle...but it is a moving target. At some point, you will start expanding so fast that you won't get another SP until you've filled the map with cities. However you need to get Meritocracy in before this happens. Ideally, you want to hit your third SP right when your settlers are in position to drop 6 or 7 more cities. In the previous expansion wave, you picked up all of the available luxuries within 12 tiles of the capital. The timing is really harsh. If you find yourself waiting on Meritocracy before expanding further, you've gone off the rails. Without Meritocracy at the right time, luxuries just won't be enough to carry you to the Forbidden Palace.
I think culture ruins are probably the most important ruin in this type of game. Just getting one of these is a game changer, because it can get you to Meritocracy a full 50 turns earlier with a given exponential expansion rate.
I am currently convinced that relatively pure REX+ICS will be the dominant strategy for this goal...surpassing even the 4HotA rush+expand. What I've discovered is that even with pretty good planning, it is really easy to go off the rails and get bogged down. A few suboptimal steps, especially around turn 70-90, will kick you off the continuous exponential growth track and add 50-100 turns of delay on the spaceship.
My interpretation of the vocab:
REX - Rapid Early Expansion. Basically this means producing settlers in all cities continuously. It means not building anything but settlers without an absolute, concrete reason to build something else, and even if that's the case, flip a coin and build a settler anyways half of the time.
ICS - Infinite City Sprawl. This doesn't just mean lots of cities, it means packing the map at the utmost density. The key metric is average road length, or #roads/#cities. Ideally this ratio is about 1.6-1.7, but a real game will push this up to about 1.8 or so.
Going off the rails: Sometimes the exponential expansion just falls completely flat, due to a bunch of variables. It's easy to spot when it happens, but hard to predict. I think this is what explains the wide variance I'm getting (and other people are reporting) in the success of REX+ICS.
My rough benchmark is the 10-city/55-science threshold (researching 2nd tier techs in 1 turn). Sometimes I get this by about turn 85, and I restart and play the exact same way and it takes 125 turns. So far, I haven't been able to point at the one spot and say, "That's where I blew it"
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.
Culture:
Everything revolves around the Liberty tree, and the two crucial SPs are Liberty and Meritocracy. Liberty lets you build a settler in 6-7 turns in a Maritime-fueled junk city on the polar ice cap. Meritocracy allows you to expand your empire by 50%, as long as it is entirely filled with size-2 cities producing Settlers AND you maintain a sufficient worker pool to keep up with the road building. The intermediate SP Citizenship helps with the last bit.
Meritocracy means a free expansion cycle...but it is a moving target. At some point, you will start expanding so fast that you won't get another SP until you've filled the map with cities. However you need to get Meritocracy in before this happens. Ideally, you want to hit your third SP right when your settlers are in position to drop 6 or 7 more cities. In the previous expansion wave, you picked up all of the available luxuries within 12 tiles of the capital. The timing is really harsh. If you find yourself waiting on Meritocracy before expanding further, you've gone off the rails. Without Meritocracy at the right time, luxuries just won't be enough to carry you to the Forbidden Palace.
I think culture ruins are probably the most important ruin in this type of game. Just getting one of these is a game changer, because it can get you to Meritocracy a full 50 turns earlier with a given exponential expansion rate.
tx for the reply though
