who uses pacifism and why?

I play Frederick (cre/phi) and I ALWAYS use pacifism, even when I'm at war. I think it's too costly for a city to use a lot of specialists without the bonuses to GP points. My strategy is to build a few early wonders (oracle, parthenon and great library) and then generate great people. But most of all, I use it because I think great people and specialists are what makes Civ4 fun

Oh, and I'm talking multiplayer here. I don't play single player anymore cause civ4 has no AI.

 

Ooopss.. you're right.

If I'm playing a GP strategy then I normally get my first engineer from the GPP from the pyramids, and use it to build the Parthanon or the Great Library. After that I'm Great Scientists all the way... so I've never actaully gone for a Caste system Great ENgineer - and realiased that I can't do it

Robin

 

GPP are not like $$$, because, if you go to the store and spend your dollars on boxes of cereal, each box of cereal costs the same amount. In Civ4, when you spend GPP to earn Great People, each Great Person costs more GPP than the previous one. That's what makes additional GPP less valuable, the more that you have.

 

How can they be less valuable, since having more GPP will get you GP faster??

 

I don't see how having more GPP will get you GP faster.
(I think you might have meant to say having more "GP", not "GPP".)

Having more GP might get you GP faster, if you use your GP to join cities or to build wonders. If you use your GP for tech, golden ages, or other, then they won't increase the speed at which you get GPP, IMO.

Wodan

 

More GPP (Great People Point, which you get more by being philosophical and pacifist as opposed to just pacifist or just philosophical or neither) will get you GP (Great People) faster, no?

That's my whole point here, and even if the % increase from pacifism is smaller when you're a philosophical civ than when you're not, in the absolute you still get more GP Points per turn therefore you can crank out your Great People faster than otherwise.

 

Assuming that your goal is generating more great people, partly true.

However, if that isn't the goal, and instead the goal is generating a fixed number of great people in less time, your diminishing return doesn't apply. A great person isn't a fixed benefit; the earlier you get it, the larger a benefit it is. If your Civ and my Civ both generate 10 great people in a game, but I generate mine on average in 2/3 of the time, that is a lot of extra turns of increased Science, Culture, Production, or Hammers coming to me. Further, some advantages of GP, like that of Engineers, are mutually exclusive, because the wonders are: your Engineer is worth a fraction of what mine is, because I got it earlier, and built a key wonder that you did not.

A further weakness of your argument is that buying a box of cereal doesn't accelerate the rate at which you can buy more boxes of cereal, and yet judicious use of great people accelerates the rate at which you gain access to more great people, directly through the building of wonders and shrines, and indirectly through faster access to great people-increasing technologies through academies and direct purchase of techs, etc.

Your assessment uses a ceterus paribus that doesn't exist.

 

I agree with Yzen Danek. In terms of an ultimate goal, especially in terms of researching a technology first or finishing a wonder first, generating Great People is a race. The nature of a race is that if you're not first then you lose. Thus every additional benefit, despite dimishing returns, becomes even more valuable.

Taking the "limit" so to say, of this scenario, let's say that one of the victory conditions is to generate a certain number of Great People. For example, in addition to space race, culture, etc.., the first person to generate 101 Great People wins the game. In this case, even if the "relative" benefit of [Philosophical + Pacifism] over just [Pacifism] were so tiny that only 1 extra Great Person would be generated for every 100 Great People normally generated, the "ultimate" benefit is worth inifinitely more because that extra Great Person wins you the game. Everyone else's efforts towards generating Great People are reduced to worthless. In other words, taking this limit, worth of [Philosophical + Pacifism] goes to infinity and worth of [Pacifism] goes to zero.

Similarly, every Combat promotion increases a unit's strength by 10%. With Combat1, the promotion confers 10% more strength. Combat2, though, will confer less relative strength. Convoluted combat math aside, is it not true that in the big picture, the average Combat2 unit stands to defeat the average Combat1 unit? IE, the Combat1 unit stands to die completely and the Combat2 unit stands to live and fight another day (while getting more experience).

In race situations, the relative benefit tends not to mean anything, so long as its positive.

Also, please explain something to me. Does the required number of GPP increase for everybody once *anybody* has made a Great Person, or is it based only on the number of Great People you *yourself* have generated? In other words, if by the time I generate 1 Great Person, 3 others have been born elsewhere as well, will my next Great Person cost 200 or 500 GPP? I never paid attention to this before.

 

Sure, there are any number of reasons that any particular civic might be more or less valuable in any particular game. Getting GP quickly is one of those.

Conversely, if you already have a lot of Great People, then an additional one might be less valuable because you've already filled the greatest needs.

All I attempted to do was post a simple explanation of why Pacifism earns fewer Great People for philosophical civs than for non-philosophical ones. It's not meant to be a universal argument that philosophical civs should never use Pacifism. It's only gotten so drawn out because some people don't understand the basic argument and need it re-explained. If you understand the argument and also understand the ways in which it is not universal or absolute, then we don't have any disagreement.

 

It's the number that you generate. The 1st one you make costs 100 GPP, the 2nd one you make costs 200 GPP, etc.

 

After trying out Pacifism as Saladin (Phi/Spi), I must say that Pacifism is a very good civic, even if you have a large standing army.

What I did was combine Pacifism with Vassalage. That way, the free units offset the maintenance penalty, while I still got the GPP bonus. It worked out quite nicely, at least until until I declared war on Egypt and switched to Theocracy.