Understanding Vox Populi and making decisions

[Roamy]

Hello friends, I've been pumping in hours and hours of Vox Populi since I found it a few weeks ago and I'm coming to an unfortunate conclusion:

I suck.

I am going to use this thread to detail my most recent game, try to analyze a bit where I could have screwed up and maybe maybe some of you lovely people who's posts I've been perusing can offer some insight, so my decisions start to become actually informed.

Initial analysis of my usual pitfalls:
-I seem to gravitate towards more peaceful, taller play. I am trying to teach myself to focus on maintaining a strong army that is relatively recent. Preferred victories are culture/science/diplomacy in roughly that order.
-Compared to Civ5, every building seems great to me. Where in Civ5 I knew the "core" buildings to have a functioning, solid city before I started specializing it towards my victory condition, in VP everything seems great. Especially around rennaisance/medieval there's so many buildings to build and I'm pretty sure I'm prioritizing the wrong things.
-In Civ5 I played at deity and became quite good at manipulating the ai/diplomacy. Which allowed me, compared to VP, to be much more peaceful because I was usually able to distract civs into fudging with each other while I trucked to a victory.

The game in question:
-Ethiopa, most recent beta (from yesterday or the day before), epic speed.
-Immortal difficulty, Planet Simulator (Pangea), strategic balance, default VP settings excepting no tech trade, transparent diplomacy on, time victory turned off.

Overview of my lands at turn 343 (when I kinda gave up)

Spoiler :

Starting strategy:
-Went Stele/shrine/granary/council/Worker/Settler.
-Went Tradition and aimed to have second city out at 2nd policy icon (so 3rd policy), 3rd city at 3rd etc. Went a bit faster around unlocking Ceremony, because AI was encroaching on areas I wanted. (see bullfeathers Persia city right below my capitol just to get the one gem.
-Managed to snag Artemis, Hanging Gardens and Oracle.
-Other cities went Stele/Shrine/Council/Granary/Water mill(well) and afterwards whatever would reduce unhappiness the most since for some reason that was tanking hard. Maybe too many cities?
-Biggest unhappiness comes from Poverty, Distress and Illiteracy, even though I have all the appropriate buildings for those in all cities.
-Tech I went pottery first, then wheel, mining, calendar, mathematics. Afterwards rushed to education to get into medieval, and machinery afterwards hoping I could snag Notre Dame.
-Army is a mix of melee and at least one Composite per city, with two horsemen and 1 skirmisher thrown in for good measure.
-Pantheon and religion, went new Earth Mother (because Stele and salt), Ceremonial Burial, Mandir, Creativity and Symbolism. My plan was to go for a GP focused Tall culture play, but cities were struggling too much to be able to get a lot of specialists going. Also probably way too late getting the culture specialist building because I felt I was playing catchup constantly to my unhappiness. Capitol was fine though, no problems.

Actually going to leave it here for a bit to mull over my play, if there's specific things I've left out I'd be eager to share.

Tl;dr I guess is that it felt like my play was much more solid than previous games, or at least the early early game. It still failed horribly and I'm struggling to figure out what I should prioritize better, what the core buildings should have been in this particular game, and why I failed so hard.

Perhaps others can help me to "git gud". Insight is very greatly appreciated, if you lovely folks don't mind helping a scrub. <3

 

[crdvis16]

So was your main issue just happiness? You're right around 50% which isn't THAT bad.

How were you in tech/policies? Are you competitive with the leaders in both? If you're towards the top in tech/policy then you're still in decent shape IMO.

I wonder if you're trying to work too many specialists in secondary cities and worrying about your secondary cities too much in general? When I play tradition my secondary cities are there to get my monopoly, provide unit cap, be defensible (settled defensively), and build things that free up my capital to build everything. So I'll often build military/trade units in secondary cities so that the capital can focus on more important stuff. Because of all that, my secondary cities don't need to grow beyond being able to work the best tiles they have and maybe some guild specialists. I think tradition works best with that mindset.

I also wonder if you missed an opportunity with your religion. Ethiopia often founds early and therefore might have a leg up to go with a spreading religion. Council of Elders or Apostolic may have been better choices, spreading aggressively to snowball. Maybe going after the religious wonders (Hagia or Borobudur) to supplement your spreading, too. To me, Ceremonial Burial would probably be what I got if CoE and Apostolic weren't still available. That may be more of a nit pick, though- a great person strategy with Tradition is probably always decent.

 

[Roamy]

I think I fell behind in almost everything, to be honest. Happiness tanked pretty hard, sure, but my science and culture wasn't particularly competitive and as you can see in the screenshot I am ranked lowest (even though score doesn't mean that much). The game just became a clusterfudg and I had several bigger civs breathing down my neck looking to take my territory.

I guess two specific questions I wouldn't mind having answered is:

-What do the better players consider a "core" spine/skeleton of buildings to get in almost every city to try and make them productive/start snowballing a bit. Which ones should I maybe only prioritize if the terrain allows for it. I feel I was playing too much catchup in the game and after a decent early game just threw away everything in the medieval era.

-Looking at a tradition start like mine, which specialists would you be using? I assume culture and science guys at the start (due to the early numbers being worth quite a bit), but I assume you don't do it TOO early because of the food and urbanization deficit. Also, production or food internal trade routes versus science/diplomacy modifiers from external ones? It's so many numbers I'm just overwhelmed in making my choices. :<

 

[mikes61293]

Its hard to give you exact advice without more pictures and info but here's what stands out to me:

- Your territory is seriously lacking in improvements. Farms on fresh water give +1 food, farms with 2 adjacent farms give +1 food. You want to try and create farm triangles around rivers. Gondar and Axum have some great spots for this.
- You're having unhappiness issues because you're lacking in development
- In vanilla science is king. In VP it's not as important and it's easier to catch up. Focus on culture and production early.
- Internal production trade routes can really help a newly founded city get off the ground quickly. In your case I would be running internal trade routes from Addis Abada once you got your stone works up.
- Watermills are a great building to get your production going
- Happiness is based partially on techs. Your rush for education and science hurt you.
- It can be useful to settle great person improvements on resources to create some super tiles. This lets you work more good tiles and more specialists. I would have settled all of the academies on the horses around Addis Abada.

 

[crdvis16]

I think I fell behind in almost everything, to be honest. Happiness tanked pretty hard, sure, but my science and culture wasn't particularly competitive and as you can see in the screenshot I am ranked lowest (even though score doesn't mean that much). The game just became a cluster**** and I had several bigger civs breathing down my neck looking to take my territory.

Depending on how far back you were in science I would think you could probably catch up there. Between spies and Ethiopia's UA you'd probably be OK. Catching back up from culture can be a lot harder, though, and is something you probably can't afford to fall too far behind in unless you plan to remedy it with military.

For happiness, did you overgrow your secondary cities perhaps? Are you not bringing in enough sources of happiness (mostly lux trading)? Could you have grabbed some CS allies? Even if you aren't going for a diplo win you should probably find a way to ally your nearest CS neighbors.

And yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about empire score, especially playing tradition. The important first order metrics are tech and policy count IMO.

Last- Tradition is typically going to have a low unit cap. It's probably most imperative with Tradition to have defensibly settled cities that use the terrain as protection and to create kill tiles/bottlenecks. You need to be able to survive DoWs from bigger armies with minimal losses and be able to handle the unhappiness that comes from lost luxes and the hit to your economy from lost trade routes.

I guess two specific questions I wouldn't mind having answered is:

-What do the better players consider a "core" spine/skeleton of buildings to get in almost every city to try and make them productive/start snowballing a bit. Which ones should I maybe only prioritize if the terrain allows for it. I feel I was playing too much catchup in the game and after a decent early game just threw away everything in the medieval era.

It's really hard to give a satisfactory, easy answer. I honestly don't think it's even the right question to ask, especially for Tradition. For Tradition, your capital should be a monster that's building everything while your secondary cities are often not major sources of yields but are more for support.

Even if you were playing progress where secondary cities are providing more significant yields it's still difficult to give an easy answer. Many buildings are really situational. A market might be fairly low priority sometimes unless you're poor, suffering poverty unhappiness, the market buffs your nearby luxes, is buffed by your pantheon, etc etc. A library might usually be high priority but probably less so if you went council of elders as Ethiopia and you're swimming in science already. Even buildings that are normally low priority might be worth building if there's a CS quest.

-Looking at a tradition start like mine, which specialists would you be using? I assume culture and science guys at the start (due to the early numbers being worth quite a bit), but I assume you don't do it TOO early because of the food and urbanization deficit. Also, production or food internal trade routes versus science/diplomacy modifiers from external ones? It's so many numbers I'm just overwhelmed in making my choices. :<

For Tradition I will typically work the free specialist slots in my capital until they produce a great person and then will switch to the next. This usually means that in the early game I'm working 2 or 3 specialists at a time on a rotation. Once I've filled out the Tradition tree and gotten reduced food consumption on specialists I will typically be working every specialist slot in my capital that's available for the remainder of the game. This usually includes pumping up the population of my capital via Hanging Gardens, internal food trade routes, and/or religious beliefs that help with growth.

I often won't work specialists other than guilds in my secondary cities for a while. Secondary cities are at a huge disadvantage at actually being able to produce great people compared to the capital. The capital will probably have produced 1 or 2 great people of a given type before the secondary cities would even be working a slot and even then the capital has more specialist slots of a given type and more +% great person generation buffs. Guilds are the exception as the guild itself gives a lot of great person points so the field is a bit more even for the secondary cities. Later in the game I will work specialists in Tradition secondary cities more for yields than actually being able to produce a great person.

For trade routes I believe the consensus is that early on the production/food internal routes are better (and I agree with this, especially for Tradition). You can often get like 8 food compared to something like 3g 1s or something for a dangerous external route. I will often do multiple internal trade routes to my capital through the mid game to pump up the population to support all those specialists. Later on it makes more sense to go external, especially if your target can give you science/culture from the route and because food becomes less and less important as a yield as the game goes on. Also, the external routes being more dangerous matters less when they are proportionately easier to replace if lost later in the game.

 

[JamesNinelives]

I'm coming to an unfortunate conclusion:

I suck.

Immortal difficulty

Honestly, if you're playing on Immortal - even if you're loosing - you don't suck that badly .

It's so many numbers I'm just overwhelmed in making my choices.

Totally normal for learning VP lol.

My main advice is:
- if you are having trouble with happiness, try expanding more slowly.
- trade for luxuries! Crdvis16 mentioned this but just to reinforce the point: you have +113 income, you can afford to buy them and it's totally worth doing so. If the AI has spares they aren't using, you can usually get them for a reasonable price. Even if you can't, they can be worth paying for if you have happiness issues.
- build another recon unit or three and scout as much of the map as possible, even the water tiles. There's probably at least one city-state you haven't met yet and city-state quests can give you relatively easy yields. The earlier you meet them, the sooner you can start doing CS quests! Looking at your screen, I think one of the quests may actually be 'discover X city-state which you haven't met yet lol'.
- There's another that wants gold - and it's worth paying double the usual price to get that CS influence plus it gives you lump sum gold for doing the quest anyway. Another one wants a road - totally worth the loss of income for instant production and a CS influence boost.

Ceremonial Burial

Ceremonial burial can give you some very nice faith output in the long term, particularly if you are agressive or produce a lot of great people. It lacks the initial boost that most of the founders have though, so if you're having trouble try a different founder if possible. Apostolic Tradition, Council of Elders, and Holy Law all kick in relatively quickly and don't require a specific playstyle to make them worthwhile.

Good luck!

 

[Roamy]

These are all very very worthy posts, I greatly appreciate it. I was worried my initial post had too MUCH info in it and people would respond with TL;DR, but seemingly amongst fellow civ fanatics I could have gone more.

I will try out some of these suggestions in a new game and post progress of it soon (tm).

 

[crdvis16]

If you have the time and inclination you could do a photojournal where you take screenshots at important decision points and explain your thought process on how to proceed (there's a subforum for these). Where to settle, initial build and tech orders, policy choices, religious choices, diplomacy, etc.

#1 having to explain your thought process will force you to be more contemplative in your decision making.

#2 people will review and question your choices which can unearth assumptions you're making which may be in error.

#3 it's entertaining for others to read

 

[tu_79]

After you have built your monument and shrine in capital, do yourself this question:

Are any of your cities working on tiles that can be improved but you do not have enough workers? Order a worker next.

Then.
Are any of your border cities defenseless? Then order some garrison.

Also you need to learn how to improve your terrain. Farms are better in fresh water (river, lake, oasis), and better if there are two adjacent farms, making a triangle for example.
Lumbermill works with adjacency too.
Villages get boosted by a connecting road and by passing trade routes, the same as towns (great merchant unique improvement). I think I see an Academy where there should be a Town.
Mines are great even if you are not working them. Sometimes you have to switch to production (building a wonder, for example) and you'll be grateful to have mines around.

I can't understand why you don't have more great people tile improvements (GPTI). You are playing really tall, so you should have produced a few great people. If you want tall tradition to stand a chance, you need lots of people working on over the average tiles and specialists.

One last thing, even if you want to play peacefully, you should fight here and there to give your units some experience. Just don't take cities, and it will be considered peaceful gaming.

 

[Stalker0]

-What do the better players consider a "core" spine/skeleton of buildings to get in almost every city to try and make them productive/start snowballing a bit.

Monument + Shrine, and Barracks + Arena + Forge. I think people can forget the 3 building trifecta that feed off each other. This goes you a solid core.

One thing I think people often forget (myself included), CS + Chanceries. Once you start getting those CS friends and allies going (and you should especially for the cultural CS, the amount of culture they generate is very significant), chanceries are the best building in the game (until the wire service, which then becomes the best building in the game )

There's nothing that has more bang for the buck once you get your CSes going, so make sure not to forget them.

 

[Cokolwiek]

One thing I think people often forget (myself included), CS + Chanceries

What? It is one of the most powerful building in the game, easily at least 8 production, 5 gold in most games (8 from cs - 3 maintanance). It scales as good as stables with four pastures but for any city.

For core buildings I would definetely say:
Any science building in any city is mandatory sooner or later, and become priority in capital and if you will work specialist straight away
Production buildings which are forges when mines, workshops when lumber mills and deer or furs, train stations are must, while factories aren't good in tall empires
Tiles building only applicable if you have three or more relevant tiles, NOT worth if one tile, low priority when two: stables, stone works,
Culture buildings are also must sooner or later, but they are the lowest priority in build order usually
The rest of buildings is not needed really and you should build them only when it is necesary to keep needs in check and as tradition you need to watch out more for your income and building maintenance than wide play. Like hundreds time more.

I would disagree with a notion that tradition needs only capital and sattelite cities are just to get monopolies, don't need to grow etc. You need those cities to give your production and gold. And you can make at least two, three if possible shiny cities, with great production to give you income, units, NOT guilds, but engineers, later scientists, and build wonders that don't need to be in the capital or during time when you rapidly unlock several wonders. I tend to delegate sistine chapel, eiffel tower to such cities.
Not always, but because you should have pile any great person modifier in the capital and scale price so much which will make secondary guilds useless, you don't want those guilds in those high growth and production cities, but in worse spots fourth and fifth city.
Tradition and rationalism give strong bonuses to grow to all cities, not only to capital, which is a fact that many people forget and tend to focus on capital in things they shouldn't and invest in guilds in secondary cities that they give them one writer or artist for entire game, instead of working more good tiles, growing, and locking engineers and scientists.

 

[Cokolwiek]

- In vanilla science is king. In VP it's not as important and it's easier to catch up. Focus on culture and production early.

I disagree strongly. Science is still most important and is a gate to production and culture that unlocks wonders, buildings and increased yields. If you allow anyone to be on par in science he will grab your wonders and guard against your tourism better. Early it is ok to focus on culture and production AND growth not because they are better than science, but because early science options are extremely limited and councils are worthless, they are just added to cost of universities. It is no coincidence that ai snowballs usually begin in science, which translates to higher yields and wonder acces, getting those wonders and culture buildings, hence more culture, and snowball is ready to go.

As @tu_79 mentioned bulbing scientists or engineers is worthless early game, until rennaisance or industrial, then bulbing is better. You should have way more farms to grow, and way more academies and factories. Each of them increases future bulbs by 20%.

- Happiness is based partially on techs. Your rush for education and science hurt you.

Science never hurt you. Science win games. By getting science you also unlocks buildings and yields that decrease needs and give hapinnes. If you struggle you simply made wrong decisions previously and should focus on improving infrastructure, and managing growth, not on slowing science. Never!

 

[Stalker0]

If you allow anyone to be on par in science he will grab your wonders and guard against your tourism better.

For Tier 1 wonders (Stonehenge/Pyramid) its all about the hammers.

For Tier 2 wonders (Maus and ToA) I think science is most important.

Past that, I think culture is far more important than science for most wonders. I am much more often limited on policies than I am on getting the needed tech. There are exceptions (Roman Forum is more tech limited for example), but most wonders I think its culture that's the bottleneck.

 

[CrazyG]

Try is getting settlers earlier, especially if you have access to Stele, those really reward fast expansion.

Build more workers, and build them earlier. A lot of times a worker is more important than a granary is.

With tradition, usually I pick a wonder that I want and make it my next goal. An example group of wonders that I like going for as tradition would be Hanging Gardens, University of Sankore, Notre Dame, then Leaning Tower of Pisa, so early on that defines my science path. Of course there are plenty of good options, but these 4 are all amazing for a big capital city. Generally culture and production are the barrier, much more than science.

 

[Cokolwiek]

I disagree. If culture is the barrier playing tradition you are doing something wrong. Production should not be a problem if you make two strong production engineer oriented sattelite cities. As tradition statecraft is also very, very useful, especially you should have no problem being culture bootlenecked with its finisher, and you many times desperately need strategics from alliances for coal (less so) but aluminum, and mainly oil and uranium with you limited borders, and limited trade possibilities later. Science is twice as important to tradition than to wide also because technology selling will make up substantial part of your income late game (up to a third, we are talking 200 or 300 gpt. Artistry is really not the only way to play tradition. I consider statecraft to be stronger a little stronger for ultra tall tradition (three or four cities, or one city challange)
You should always generally take either hanging gardens or great library (I would say gardens are substantially stronger), either artemis or petra (very rarely) or halicarnassus (its immense with marble, stone starts), oracle and parthenon could be strong, but also far more competetive than those previous ones, great wall could be must have if sourrounded by warmongers, its useless otherwise, you should always strive for pisa and uffizi to get in capital.

 

[JamesNinelives]

Past that, I think culture is far more important than science for most wonders.

Generally culture and production are the barrier, much more than science.

Interesting to me to hear people say this. I tend to have the policies before I have the tech. Might be because I tend to play high-culture civs and not high-science ones? Or my policy choices? I agree production makes a big difference though.

 

[JamesNinelives]

With regards to building stuff,

-Managed to snag Artemis, Hanging Gardens and Oracle.

Those are all great choices for you, IMO.

The only buildings that stand out to me as being much more useful in specfic situations than in others are 1) Herbalist and 2) caravansary. Other than that, I like to have most buildings in my cities, at least with regards to the early-game anyway. I often build workers before many buildings though as improving the land can be very powerful .

My build order is probably not optimal, but it's something like:
Shrine, Pathfinder, Monument, Warrior, Worker
Wonder (e.g. Temple of Artemis, Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Petra)
Settler, Archer, Settler, Archer

In secondary cities it tends to be:
Shrine
Building related to my pantheon (e.g. Herbalist, Barracks, Walls, Stoneworks) or Work Boat for God of the sea etc. Skip if not relevant
Worker, Settler (when possible)

I also tend to take Progress which grants a free worker and helps me get more out of the ones I have.

If you have the time and inclination you could do a photojournal where you take screenshots at important decision points and explain your thought process on how to proceed (there's a subforum for these). Where to settle, initial build and tech orders, policy choices, religious choices, diplomacy, etc.

I like the idea of doing a photo-journal myself at some point but ever though I'm pretty experienced at this point I'm extremely self-conscious of my choices XD.

 

[tu_79]

If we are talking Ethiopia, then both Stalker0 and CrazyG are right. Ethiopia is great for Progress tree, with her two buildings in one and her almost guaranteed religion.
Also, free techs every now and then from her Unique Ability are converted into culture from Progress scaler.
Probably not optimal, but I've been playing tall progress Ethiopia for a while. Ethiopia strong start makes up for tall Progress slow start, as long as I have peaceful neighbours. Then Artistry, and I get ready to encroach. Mehal Sefari is such a good defender. As I said, probably not doable in highest difficulties.

 

[Heinz_Guderian]

Ethiopia is great for Progress tree, with her two buildings

Her?

 

[Cokolwiek]

Her?

Traditionally countries as "enitities" are referred to by such feminine form, not only when patriotically and affectionately speaking. It is only recent trend to reduce countries, ships and tools to "it", which is more aligned with other languages.

It may also stem from lanuguage differences. In English both Russia, Egypt, and Germany are weak. In my mother tongue Russia is she-weak, Egypt is he-weak, and Germany are it-weak.