What to rush - Settlers or Culture?

[Chieftess]

I think we should start to think about this...

We have a TON of cities already without temples and libraries...

If we can give 50 cities a library and temple over a period of time, that's 5cpt for each city, or 250cpt total. That's enough to put us at the 500cpt marker. (1,000 culture every 2 turns). Plop down a couple more culture improvements (colleseum, university and/or cathedral), and we're talking 500cpt.

I say let's stop rushing settlers, and start building culture! After getting a few more techs, we should pull back and let our commerce trait economy get us 1000 gpt to rush things with.

 

[Stuck_as_a_Mac]

I wholeheartedly agree. This was the sort of thing I wanted to get done during my term, but we lacked the budget for. Now we have the budget. Getting to 500cpt is a very good idea. Heck, we could most likely get higher than that. How many cities do we have? If all of them had the 2, and some of them 4, we could get to 500 easily.
As to economy, we own Smiths. We're Commercial. We haven't really used either of these advantages yet. If we run 0 sci for a few turns (after ensuring dominance), we could rake in the money for all the rushing we'd like to do. And c'mon. We should really have more than 2 or 3 banks.

SaaM

 

[classical_hero]

We could rush culture and still build settlers so that every city can at least get WLTKD. That way production will increase as a result making the production of culture. I also wonder whether we should start putting some workers into cities, whether they be free or slaves.

 

[greekguy]

Rush culture build from hand settlers. settlers are cheaper anyway.

 

[GenMarshall]

We should make more culture as possible. Keep building culture friendly buildings

 

[DaveShack]

What we actually need is a mixture: enough settlers to keep our ICS running to give us places to rush culture, mixed with culture rushes. The point is to have cities with population and extra food and lacking some improvements at the point that Civil Engineers are available. At that point hand building improvements becomes feasible where we have enough extra food for a large number of engineers.

So, prioritize rushing of improvements where we won't have enough food to support a lot of engineers. Build or rush settlers that can be placed in high food areas and MM'd to ahve lots of engineers.

 

[vikingruler]

I think we should focus on building culture in the majority of our cities, while the minority builds settlers while still building some culture. We have a lot of cities already and a few more wars that need fighting, that can get us land and cities, so settlers don't have to be a direct priority.

 

[Bertie]

Good discussion. I agree with DaveShack's thoughts:

What we actually need is a mixture: enough settlers to keep our ICS running to give us places to rush culture, mixed with culture rushes. The point is to have cities with population and extra food and lacking some improvements at the point that Civil Engineers are available. At that point hand building improvements becomes feasible where we have enough extra food for a large number of engineers.

So, prioritize rushing of improvements where we won't have enough food to support a lot of engineers. Build or rush settlers that can be placed in high food areas and MM'd to ahve lots of engineers.

If we can build 200 cities each with a library & temple, that's 1000 culture points each turn. At that rate culture accumulates really quickly. I know we need to build lots of culture to win, but we need cities in which we can build that culture. Trying to balance culture rushes with settler rushes makes sense. I'd build unis & cathederals once we have our 200 cities, each with its library & temple.

 

[zyxy]

I would first rush settlers, and then culture. Ideally we would do both at the same time, but we don't have enough money for that, so priorities have to be set.

The cashrushed settlers that CT is referring to come from (three) totally corrupt towns in my province, that can make +5 food per turn, but only 1 shield per turn. That means foodwise they can each do 1 settler per 4 turns, but production-wise they can only do 1 settler per 30 turns. I want to use money to reach the highest possible speed, for the following reasons:

Each of the new cities can start on a culture building right away. The sooner they start, the lower the cashrush cost will be. The cashrushed settlers come from totally corrupt cities that gain no production from having more than 1 citizen.

We will have engineers in 10 turns or so. Again, the more cities we have, the more effective use can be made of engineers. Also, each new city raises free unit support and brings in 1 gpt.

Settlers not only cost shields/gold, but also food. Meaning you cannot postpone building settlers too long (then your cities grow to size 7 and you're essentially wasting food, or they cannot grow to size 7 and you're wasting even more food).

Rushing culture is very expensive. Each new library will cost ~ 300 gold to rush, each temple ~230. They also eat 1 gpt maintenance per turn. You can dream about a temple and a lib in every town, but our net gain is currently at 200 gpt, that means one temple + one library every 3 turns, so it will be slow going, whatever we do.

We now have some 75 cities. We will need at least 150 to get close to 1000 cpt (and even then it will take > 100 turns to finish).

 

[Chieftess]

We now have about 350cpt, that's 150 away from our immediate goal of 500cpt. (30 temple/library pairs). We need to save up our gold for these rushes. 500cpt is a good number (1000 culture every 2 turns).

 

[Furiey]

we need to stop rushing Cathedrals and rush Libraries and Temples instead. A Cathedral will give the same Culture as a Library, but costs twice the upkeep and more to rush. Corrupt cities that have their Temples and Libraries rushed can then build wealth, with their citizens as Taxmen to help maintain all these cultural buildings. We do therefore need more cities so we can keep rushing those Libraries and Temples. We just don't want to spend all our gold rushing Settlers, we need a balance between the two.