Great Profits (Prophets)

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Diadem
What early religion? I always get beaten to buddism, usually by one turn, on monarch or higher. Polytheism might be possible if there's no AI going for it (most seem to want buddism, others might not have mysticism). But if the AI does try for polytheism, which is more likely the more AIs are around, you'll loose.

Most likely because you're not focussing on commerce, but on food or production instead. Any river start will let you get an early religion (so 1 of the 3) up to at least Emperor. And CoL is a near-win too, if you focus on it. (scientists! Academy!)

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Diadem

Right now this is my usual strategy, playing as ghandi:

I start by researching some worker techs. Which wants depends on my starting position of course. If you have cows getting animal husbandry is a good idea. I already have mining, so my workers will have enough to do now. I might take the time to get The Wheel as well.

Then I go for monotheism, starting with masonry. I always seem to get monotheism using this strategy. So that's good.

Meanwhile in my city I usually start with a warrior, then a worker once my city is size 2. Usually this means my worker will be about finished (give or take a few turns) by the time I get animal husbandry. That's good timing

After that it's either a settler or stonehenge. Pyramids are next. You can't choprush it, but you don't need it if you start that early. If your city has a good productionspeed you can have it done before the barbs start throwing serious things at you.

After monotheism, you can try for the Oracle if you're feeling lucky, or go for ironworking if you feel less lucky

Erh, sorry, forgot to answer this in previous post

The reason why you're not reaching the Oracle in time is because you pass too many techs before starting on it. The max I go to before starting is to writing and a lib, and in most games this means I will already have priesthood and thus can start on prebuilding the Oracle before my lib completes.

DeepO

[solo]

Even with a library, and more focus on science, I think you need a little luck to beat the AI to Oracle at Immortal and above. In the game where I did it, I got Fishing from a hut and was able to work some clams early, both for rapid growth and a little extra commerce. This got CoL researched in time for the slingshot to Civil Service.

On a replay later, using the same start, I was beaten to the Oracle by 1 turn using basically the same opening.

In subsequent games with other starts and different crews of AI opponents, I have not even come close to getting Oracle first, but still haven't played enough games at Immortal to come to any firm conlcusions, yet.

[DeepO]

Yeah... I didn't play Immortal yet (no point, I'd lose), but even on Emperor luck starts to become much more needed. On Emperor, it doesn't depend on your tech rate, but on the situation: can you sustain that tech rate, or not? Marginal terrain, unfriendly neighbours, barbs, all could be factors in you not being able to get there first.

DeepO

[Diadem]

Originally posted by DeepO

I don't agree at all.

Yeah. Neither do I anymore The Angkor Wat is a really good wonder. It generates Great Prophets, that alone is a reason to build it. And the bonus is nice. In my latest OCC game I was running 8 priest specialists. That's a big hammer bonus there

I've played a few OCC games by now, where GPs are ital. The The Wat is important because it will let you run priests. Having the hammer bonus from them is a good extra... and will make the GPr pump much more viable. But great priests should not receive a hammer bonus, or you will have a game mechanic which is unbalanced, and exploitative.


I've been thinking for a while about a new approach to Great People by the way. I haven't tried it yet, so I wouldn't know how it works.

Build a city surrounded by a lot of foodplains or other high-food resources. Get as much surplus as you can. Tech to Code of Laws, and run Caste System. Get as many merchants in your city as you can. Probably that is quite a few There are very few wonders that give great merchants, but get any you can.

Basicly, try to get as many GPs as possible, and try to get as many of those as possible to be Great Merchants. Add these all to your GP producing city. Thanks to Caste System, this is a viable strategy.

Why Great Merchants? Well, first of all they give a lot of cash, even more than Great Profits do (6 vs 5). But they also give food. One food per Great Merchants. With only a handful of GMs that's not an impressive bonus, but what about having 30 GMs? That's a HUGE boost in city size.

Of course, building Globe Theater in that city is top priority. Doh. The other national wonder national epic I guess. Or play OCC and build 'em all.

With Globe Theater hapiness will not be a problem. Health will, of course. Your city will be much bigger than it's health limit. Well, big deal. Means we'll just have to supply 3 food per citizen, instead of the usual 2.

Imagine a city with 5 floodplains, 5 plains and 10 grassland tiles (which is pretty mediocre, food wise). All farmed that's 60 food - 80 after biology. Say you get about 20 health and another 30 food from Great Merchants. That makes a total city size of 43. That's 23 great merchants. Say hello to completely insane GP production!

Production will be a problem in that city. But you'll drown in cash, and science will not be a problem because of Representation. If you pick a spiritual civ, you can run representation, then once you've stockpiled a hoard of cash, switch to Universal Suffrage, buy a few wonders, and switch back again.

I haven't tried this strategy yet, but it might actually work. The total number of Great People Points needed goes up quadraticly with the number of GPs you have. If each GP gets food, and foods add more GP production, then you are essentionally reducing a quadratic equasion to a lineair one. Potentionally, that can give a huge boost in number of GPs you can get.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Diadem
I haven't tried this strategy yet, but it might actually work. The total number of Great People Points needed goes up quadraticly with the number of GPs you have. If each GP gets food, and foods add more GP production, then you are essentionally reducing a quadratic equasion to a lineair one. Potentionally, that can give a huge boost in number of GPs you can get.

Oh, it works, I do it every time I see a fp city. Biology and 6 fp = size 16 city with 10 merchants. Build banks and Wall Street there, and you'll have loads of fun.

Didn't Blake have a thread somewhere were this was detailed?

Anyway, what is not right is how GP points scale. It's true up until the 10th GP, not afterwards anymore.

the numbers are:

100, 200,... 1000,
1200, 1400,... 3000,
3300, 3600,... 6000,
6400, etc.

You can easily get to >20 GP if you focus on them, and PHI leaders can get to >30 GP (so far, 32 built GP is my record, on Monarch. Add a few from techs as well)

DeepO

[Blake]

I think you don't want to add GP to your GPP pump, this is because the pump needs to have National Epic and maybe Globe Theatre, while you maximize the benefit of GP specialists with Wall Street, and prehaps IronWorks and Oxfords (now obviously you can't have all 3 in a city). What I concluded is that it's optimal to focus on cash, for example Great Merchants and Great Prophets, if you add both to a low food - high hammer hills/plains city, it will grow large enough to work all tiles (but only that large), and you can add Ironworks and Wallstreet. It'll pump out a truly sick amount of hammers and cash, this beast fuels your economy and throws the SS into orbit.

So IMO, the power of GP Specialists is ALL in putting them through the +100% multipliers, this is what creates a decisive advantage over "cashing in". It creates 50% "more" GP value, 20 Prophets in a city with Wallstreet produces as much cash as 30 Prophets in a city without Wallstreet.
Note also, as great as Merchants are, Prophets are better. Actually not quite true, if 2 Merchants let you work another mine, they become effectively 2.5p-6g, compared with 2p-5g. However, if the city grows beyond it's worker count, the best you do is create engineers, the GM's thus become 1p-6g.
Thus, IMO, GM's are better for making up food in low-food cities, than adding yet more food to high-food cities (the unhealthiness in a high-food city is another factor).

In general though, I find myself using different National Wonder combos every game, sometimes I end up with both Wallstreet and Oxfords in my "super-trade city", due to lack of religion and lack of Merchant/Prophet generation (along with a 30%+ cash allocation), sometimes National Epic will be in my early wonder city, othertimes in a specialist-based GPP pump. Sometimes Globe Theatre goes in my big trade city, since the GPP pump is staying at low enough size to not need it. (and if your pump is coastal, it's a little sub-optimal to have it as the largest city, as it'll steal the best trade routes, better the best trade routes go through Oxfords).

Great Specialists and National Wonders... all very complex and strategic indeed.

[Diadem]

Well like I said, I haven't tested the strategy yet. The Formula Deep0 gave makes getting extra GPs even harder than I already thought it was. The costs go up faster than quadratic. That's pretty bad. That makes any strategy that tries to get the very max out of the number of GPs you can get very tough.

So probably it's not worth it. It's nice to get an amazing number of points more, but if that only gives you 2-3 extra GPs it's just not worth it.

Oh, and by the way, the reason I put my GPs in my GPP city is simple: I often play OCC. There are few other cities for me to put them in

You should try playing OCC. You can build all national wonders if your city then. Really nice. Westpoint and Red Cross in a city that also has Heroic Epic and Iron Works. That's any unit in the game in 1 turn with 14 starting exp and a free medic one.

I think a conquest victory might be possible on monarch, though very hard. They should call it a Extermination Victory. You can only raze cities on OCC. But genocide has always been fun

[solo]

I just managed a spaceship win on Immortal, using Bismarck(Ind, Exp) of Germany. My major piece of luck this game was finding Stone next to the starting settlers. They hopped aboard and I was able to crank out Pyramids, Stonehenge, and used the Oracle to get Mathematics so I could also build the Hanging Gardens, to boost production of Great Engineers, which I think are the best to try for in OCC, since each one added to my city gave me 3 hammers and 6 science.

Except for 1 Great Scientist used for the Academy, all GP's produced were joined to my city, so that in its prime it was producing 57 base hammers at the end and over 600 beakers in science, during the middle part of the game, when I was maxing out science.

I never built the Globe Theater. Instead, I kept my population at about 15 to 16 citizens, since that was the number I could keep happy and healthy. I ran most of the game using 1 engineer and 2 scientists as specialists.

This is my first Immortal game where I got a tech lead, which I hung onto long enough to beat the AI in the SS part race, finishing in 2009 AD.

I think the key was joining all Great Engineers produced instead of using them for speeding wonders. They could be built quickly enough with Industrious and the specialists hammer bonus.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Diadem
Well like I said, I haven't tested the strategy yet. The Formula Deep0 gave makes getting extra GPs even harder than I already thought it was. The costs go up faster than quadratic. That's pretty bad. That makes any strategy that tries to get the very max out of the number of GPs you can get very tough.

Well, the cost is not quadratic, but geometric. Or at least up to the boundaries at 1000, 3000, 6000, 10000 points. Quadratic would indeed be too much, geometric (or multi-geometric if you like that term better) makes stuff like adding GMs to cities viable for a while, but the moment you hit a boundary it stops. Purely for GP generation, adding all GM that you generate to your GPpump will make it viable until you reach 1000 points. After that, and the use of that tactic will diminish, slowly going to zero.

This is as it is supposed to be, or at least AFAIK. It's quite hard to balance stuff like this, while still giving plenty of options to get advantages in some stages of the game. Up until your 10th GM, adding these to your GM city will make more GMs possible, which is kind of a perpetuum mobile (it generates 'free' gold, while not costing anything more than the initial investment). After that, your GP rate will drop faster than you can add GMs to the city. You will still get the gold those 10 GMs are generating, which is a high, but limited bonus for putting a city aside for pure GM pumping.

Is it the best way of settling GMs? Nope. Aren't GPr's or GS better? Well... in some situations, yes. But use the GMs wisely (cities that simply can't have enough food, e.g. incense cities in the desert), and you can get killer combinations, many times better than what you can get with a settled GS or GPr.

DeepO

[Dog of Justice]

Actually, Diadem was correct in using "quadratic" to describe 100+200+300+... With some simple algebra you can express the sum as 50n^2+50n.

The true cumulative cost is asymptotically cubic.

My own view regarding GPP generation is that they are usually no longer worth the cost after the first 10-15. A dedicated GP pump city is useful to get the "cheap" ones, but beyond that, while you can certainly still win by continuing to go for GPs, I'm pretty sure you're better off phasing the pump into a production city to accelerate your spaceship or whatever.

My very first dream regarding the game was to enter "Great Merchant recursion", but when I discovered that the cumulative cost increased cubically instead of quadratically I knew it just wasn't worth it.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Dog of Justice
My own view regarding GPP generation is that they are usually no longer worth the cost after the first 10-15. A dedicated GP pump city is useful to get the "cheap" ones, but beyond that, while you can certainly still win by continuing to go for GPs, I'm pretty sure you're better off phasing the pump into a production city to accelerate your spaceship or whatever.

This is why Philosophical is more powerful than a "mere" +15% Great People output (or whatever): the extra GPs from Phi. appear in the early-game, when their effects are still significant (and that's an understatement).

I'll gladly take 3 GPs for every 2 of yours for the first 150 turns, even if it means that for the rest of the game my GP production advantage slips away exponentially (or is it geometrically?).

[Diadem]

Originally posted by Dog of Justice

My very first dream regarding the game was to enter "Great Merchant recursion", but when I discovered that the cumulative cost increased cubically instead of quadratically I knew it just wasn't worth it.

Well that was exactly the idea behind the Great Merchant strategy I outlined above. And exactly the reason I threw it out of the window again. So we agree

GPs are still great, but it's better to focus on quality than quantity. Take for example The Parthenon. It increases your GP production by 50%. But if you are philosophical and you have national epic and pacifism that 50% is actually only 12.5%.

In OCC games, which I play often, you do not want to generate artists. They are almost entirely useless. So building the Parthenon is probably not a good idea. It gives you a slight increase in GP production, meaning you'll get those GPs a bit earlier, but you'll also get artists instead of prophets and engineers.

[Cort Haus]

bump

[dacole]

Originally posted by Common Sensei


It's more efficient, from what I can see. Two great prophets are immediately equal to ten missionaries. Once you have a market and a grocer, those same two become equivalent to fifteen missionaries. Add the bank and you're looking at twenty missionaries. Wall Street makes it thirty missionaries. All missionaries you never had to put in your build queues.

And that's just from an investment of only two great prophets. Mine was an extreme case, but not the full extreme. I'm playing a game like this now as Saladin (Spiritual and Philosophical) and with a very early religion like Buddhism or Hinduism, you don't even need the wonders so much. In fact, you really only need a lot of farms. The great prophets will easily take up the slack from the trees you can chop down, especially if you go for Angkor Wat. Not only that, but a very early religion means getting the Great Prophet snowball going even earlier, and the first two or three Great Prophets come very, very quickly for a Philosophical civilization.

Of course you loose the ability to see what is going on in other citiees to which you have spread your religon in this strategy. What their garrisons are and what they are building and the units they have around them. The economics though are amazing! I wonder if the increase in research rate would be as great if you did the same thing with great scientists?