"Expansionist" Trait is a Misnomer

[AAHZ]

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[couerdelion]

It’s more of a non-aggressive expansionism. Cheap granaries and workers mean that cities will grow faster quicker and so make settlers easier to build. If you watch EXP AI civs you’ll see that they tend to have a lot more cities faster than other civs.

[AAHZ]

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[MoonWolf]

Sorry, disagree. You can consider expansionist this way:

They want to expand, but in a "safe" way meaning the cities must grow. Faster growing = more settlers AND more power --> expanding. If the expansionists civs also had fast building of settlers, the trait would have been overkill

Imperialist:

They want an empire and they want it fast. Hence they get extra GG-points cause of their warfare society and the fast building of settlers makes it easy to secure bottlenecks, resources and making strongholds in distant lands. Think of the Arabs when they built their empire in North Africa: with the soldiers, came settlers who found cities in newly conquered land

[AAHZ]

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[snoopy369]

Expansionist is definitely the trait you want if you want to peacefully expand your empire quickly. Building your empire from settler 1 to city 6 most certainly occurs the fastest if you are expansionist as opposed to any other trait, if no warfare is required.

Exp/Imp of course would be even faster, but EXP helps more than IMP in solely expanding cities without warfare.

[Blaupanzer]

AAHZ,

Think of "expansionism" as traits to expand each city, and "imperialism" as traits to gain more cities expanding the empire. Works for me. Try imperialism and charisma together to see a lot of generals and a rip roaring base with extra health and happiness.

[AAHZ]

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[snoopy369]

I am referring to both; growing your cities leads you to build new cities.

Once I get city #2 out, the faster I can get city #3 out, the faster I expand, right? So building a faster granary, building a worker faster (to get improvements faster), etc., allows much faster expansion. (To the point that they had to cut the worker bonus - EXP was considered badly overpowered at first, with a 50% bonus.) Multiply that even further to city #4, city #5, etc.

I'd say that EXP is superior to IMP for quick city building in the early game. Of course, in the late game this is not true; but that is what IMP is essentially - the late game EXP. EXP helps when cities are small and you don't have huge cities to put out your settlers and workers quickly, but just the capital and one or two others; so EXP helps you get up and running quickly. IMP then helps in the later game with more cheaply building those settlers to fill in cities, or to occupy enemy territory, and of course with the military occupation of territory. IMP is not nearly as useful in the early game; the 50h discount it gives you not only is not truly 50h (as usually you use a lot of food to build settlers early on, which is not given a bonus), and is not nearly as useful as the worker and granary bonus (both of which are necessary to take a size1 city and make it into a size6 city).

I suggest you do a playtest - play one game both ways, or even a few games both ways. Set it up so you have no meaningful military opposition, and try to get to 6 or 7 cities as fast as possible. I'd be willing to bet EXP gets you there much faster than IMP, if both are played right.

[Virulent]

Then there is Mehmed II with his Exp/Org combo. Exp encourages large cities and Org encourages many cities. The best of both worlds.

[Slade Wilson]

It could be argued that both Cre\Fin in addition to Org allows fastest expansion, atleast on large+. Since expansion stops when you can no longer support it economically


I like playing bismark in total realism\warlords, exp+ind allowed fast expansion, workers got new cities up and running quickly, health+ allowed more trees to be chopped and that worked with the cheap forgers nicely i thought, also nice to pick up stonehenge for Cre trait. Havnt done this for awile, though.

[snoopy369]

Certainly most traits allow fast expansion; I would argue that Exp/Cha might allow for the fastest early expansion, with Fin and Org helping more in the mid game (medieval/rennaissance era), and Cha, Agg, and Pro helping more in games that are very tight maps.

The traits definitely have different strengths, one of the nice things of Civ4 - there are people who like all of the traits, and no one overbalanced trait.

[AAHZ]

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[Wolf RL]

Well, theoretically every trait in the game is "Expansive". Financial = more money = easier to sustain more cities. Creative = more territory under your control in the early run, you receive border expansions.

Protective is the only trait that doesn't fit.

[MoonWolf]

Originally posted by Wolf RL
Protective is the only trait that doesn't fit.

Sure it does, your protective units make it easier to keep newly conquered cities

[snoopy369]

Expansive is expanding via workers, mostly Food is a secondary

[Felch]

AAHZ you are not alone. I know that I sometimes get confused about expansionist not being the one that gives you more settlers.

[Krill]

If you can capture workers early on then IMP could be better I suppose, and you get to use GG earlier as you would be warmongering more.