Great Profits (Prophets)

[Common Sensei]

I decided to play an experimental game in which I would attempt to do the following

1. Produce no Great People other than Great Prophets.

2. Any and all Great Prophets would be put into the capital city as super-specialists with the exception of the first one should I manage to found a religion.

3. To assist with the first point, only build wonders in the capital city that produce Great Prophet points, except for the National Epic and Wall Street.

4. ...

5. Profit!

I wanted to use a Philosophical leader to generate even more Great Prophets. I chose Frederick, planning to use his other Creative trait to help with the early land grab. I also did not want to use Elizabeth (Philosophical, Financial) for this as I wanted any economic results to stand on their own.

The game started off fairly well, despite having Montezuma as a next-door neighbor. The second city was sent down a little further than originally planned to cork a bottleneck and stifle his expansion completely. As a result, I founded Judaism in the capital city before the second city was built, which only helped with this economic experiment.

Of the wonders that generated Great Prophet points, I only missed out on Stonehenge. I built the Oracle to get Metal Casting. Next was The Parthenon for the GPP rate bonus, but since doesn't give Prophet points I did not build it in the capital. Chichen Itza followed (though the wonder effect isn't that great).

The next wonder was Angkor Wat. This wonder was fantastic for this approach. For all the Priest specialists used to help with the GPP rate, this practically turns all of them into Engineers, boosting production as well as economy. The last wonder was the Spiral Minaret, with the National Epic and Wall Street National Wonders rounding it out.

There was only one non-Prophet generated in the capital, a Great Artist who managed to beat the overwhelming odds and spawn despite a 5% chance. There were 14 Great Prophets total, the first used for The Temple of Solomon.

The capital city of course had a Market, a Grocer, a Bank, and as mentioned, Wall Street. I also ran the Bureaucracy civic from the time I discovered Civil Service until the end of the game. This provides a total commerce bonus of 250%. With each Great Prophet providing a base 5 gold, multiplied by 14 of them for 70 base, this generated a total of 245 gold from the Great Prophets alone, before inflation penalties, and aside from the other commerce and gold the capital was generating.

Also something of note is the production bonus they provided. The 14 Great Prophets provided a base 28 bonus hammers. With a Forge and Bureaucracy (75% bonus), this turns into 49 bonus hammers. Adding in a powered Factory (125% bonus), this becomes 63 bonus hammers.

Note the screenshot. There is no Ironworks in the capital as that was built in a different citiy. There is a bug in the game which prevents showing more than 6 super-specialists. At this point in the game, 11 of the 14 Great Prophets were in the capital (you can see number 12 down below).



Same capital, after all was said and done (14 Great Prophets inside)



As I was hitting the financial expansion barrier in the early going, a spawned Great Prophet would let me expand further. This was an extreme case of Great Prophet use, but it's interesting food for though, especially for OCC games.

Thoughts?

[Zan]

I must have misunderstood the great people generation algorithm as my understanding would probably make more efficient to spread the prophet generating buildings across many smaller cities with no other GP generation and then moving them to the capital.

Isn't the needed cost to generate a GP in a single city exponential?
If it is so, each building after the first (in the same place) produces a smaller effect than placed in any other city.

[Common Sensei]

As I understand it, the first Great Person costs 100GPP. Once you get that first person, the cost increases to 200GPP for the next one everywhere.

[Quillan]

At one point I thought it was on a per city basis. It isn't. The first great person appears once any one of your cities accumlates 100 GPP. Any other cities that are producing points don't get a great person at 100. You get the next one when one of your cities reaches 200, and another once a city reaches 300, and so on. So, if you have one city that hits 100 points and another is at 95, the one at 95 will have to get another 105 points to produce the second. This tends to spread the great people around the empire in the early going. Once you get a great person factory up and running, they generate so many points that they'll usually outstrip all your other cities.

[Zan]

You are right. I can't believe I never saw this.

[Urban Ranger]

How does this compare to building shrines and using missionaries to spread the word?

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
How does this compare to building shrines and using missionaries to spread the word?

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.

[baboon]

Originally posted by Zan
You are right. I can't believe I never saw this.

Therefore, it's wise to specialize. A GPP city (floodplanes), a commerce city (river/coast), a production city, with the appropriate national wonders in it.

Usually my capital becomes a GPP/Commerce hybrid, because I start to build Stonehenge and Pyramids in it, so it would be a waste not to use it for GPP.

[baboon]

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 you don't have to bother building missionaries. It fits perfectly in my strategy where I want to build units to conquer the world. So far I tried not to get Prophets, but I'll change that, they seem to be the best specialists.

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by baboon


And you don't have to bother building missionaries. It fits perfectly in my strategy where I want to build units to conquer the world. So far I tried not to get Prophets, but I'll change that, they seem to be the best specialists.

I've found that the strategy really pays dividends, so to speak, once you get Banking and build a Bank in the capital. The money really starts to roll in and you can go crazy with expansion and conquest and still run a really high science rate, perhaps even 100%. Also by this time, with Bureaucracy up, the extra hammers from the Great Prohpet super-specialists mean that any unit at all will take 1 turn to build usually.

[Quillan]

This is a nice one, Sensei. I'm sorta using it in my current game. I've reached about 1700 AD now, and with two super profit specialists in my capital, I'm making 105 gold a turn even on 100% science. I want more, but I didn't have any city locations suitable for making a real great person factory.

[Common Sensei]

Here is a side by side comparison in the same game using a non-Philosophical, non-Spiritual civilization. Once city has a Holy City with a structure built versus another city with seven Great Prophets and four regular priest specialists placed to help generate Great People.

Note how many cities it takes for the holy city to match just the base economic output of the specialists. On a non-Pangaea map, especially continents or archipelago, it would be quite a pain to "spread the word" to this extent, not to mention occupying the build queues of about 30 or more missionaries to plant the religion where it did not naturally spread.

Bureaucracy does not factor into the amount of money the specialists generate as I once thought, but it does factor into the bonus hammers, so you do not have to rely on your captial to be the "G-man" city for gold, but it certainly helps for production.

Holy City:



Specialist City (Capital):

[Enigma_Nova]

A useful strategem.
Angkor Wat is really central to this, though - I assume that was one of the first steps on your beeline.
An Industrious/Philosophical Civ would work damn well for this strategy, but none exist. =[
Saladin's religious spam is great for making use of the Holy City Shrine that usually goes along with a Great Prophet.

Have you tried going with Mao and using Caste System / Beauro / Merchantilism, or is Saladin's early Mysticism just a bit too powerful?

[Blake]

I've been playing around with super-cities and trying to figure out how to REALLY optimize them.

I think it makes some sense to have just a few cities at the start and try to found 2 religions (conf/tao), 4 is better (but you'll need to burn GP's at higher difficulty levels to snag Theo and divine right).
In all you need 3 Great Cities:
Profit city.
Creche City
Research city.

Creche city is where the GP's are bred, it takes the Globe Theatre and National Epic, it pumps out GP's that get shuffled to another base.

Profit City hosts the Shrine of your state religion, and takes all the Great Merchants, Great Prophets and Great Engineers. It's a dual hammer/coin city. It should have Wall Street and Ironworks (or maybe Heroic Epic, but I'd rather use Profit City for building wonders).

Research city obviously takes all the Great Scientists and has Oxfords, it should probably be terraformed with cottage-cheese, but could also have some normal scientist specialists and help generate Great Scientists. Note that if you have a good Coastal Science City you might want to build Globe Theatre in it (instead of the Creche city) and make it the biggest city in your empire, thus attracting the best trade routes, which can easily add another +40 commerce, which amplified by Oxfords is a really nice boost.

Great Artists should just be used as Culture Bombs.

So basically the idea is to make 2 Mighty Cities, both full of super-specialists, with optimal national wonders. A 3rd city breeds the buggers.

This strategy further assumes that you'll run Suffrage+State Property and get the Kremlin (so make Communism a high priority), and really abuse rushbuy, since if you keep your empire fairly small the Profit city will be living up to it's name and you'll have lots of gold to burn.

Almost forgot, the point of founding religions is to have extra temples and such for making lots and lots and lots of priest specialists, which are uber with the +1hammer wonder. The happiness also doesn't hurt.

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
A useful strategem.
Angkor Wat is really central to this, though - I assume that was one of the first steps on your beeline.
An Industrious/Philosophical Civ would work damn well for this strategy, but none exist. =[
Saladin's religious spam is great for making use of the Holy City Shrine that usually goes along with a Great Prophet.

Have you tried going with Mao and using Caste System / Beauro / Merchantilism, or is Saladin's early Mysticism just a bit too powerful?

Angkor Wat is powerful for this, but not central. In the Roman game above I didn't manage to get it.

Spiritual civs like Saladin don't have to focus on wonders to start the prophets going. It still works well for non-Philosophical, non-Spiritual civs (as above), but non-Prophets appearing hurts the strategy more than it does Philisophical civs, though, since you are getting less of them.