Building the ultimate super-city.

[Blake]

Okay. What's the best city imaginable and how do you build it?

Well firstly, you'd want atleast 6 religions founded in it. I mean it must be the holyist city too. 7 religions is asking a bit much without a rigged start, or repeated restarts until the dice roll your way. But 5 or 6 religions is definitely possible.

Next, national wonders.
The National Epic is a HUGE no-no. I'm thinking that Oxfords and Ironworks are probably the nats of choice, but Oxfords and Wall Street would be acceptable. You want this city really cranking out commerce and hammers. It needs to have lots of super-specialists, but it doesn't actually have to breed the great people.

The ultimate city needs crony cities. One city should have the national epic, and lots of great people points, from wonders or specialists. This city churns out great people, which are shuffled over to the super-city to join it. The tricky part is that if you want the Holiest city, the 2nd city can only be founded (or flipped/captured) after Islam, making it like a OCC until Divine Right. Then again if you want the Ultimate bastion of atheism you could have a lot more flexibility here, but you'd probably want all the religions in the city anyway for more temples, as the Global Theatre shouldn't be in the Ultimate City.

The reason it's best not to play OCC is that it's better to have crony cities, a city devoted entirely to pumping out great people can pump much better than an Ultimate City which also has to build lots and lots of stuff like cathedrals.

Civ Traits:
I think Phil is pretty important, because the ultimate city needs lots and lots of super-specialists. The other traits are pretty weak I think. Spiritual is good because you want to build lots of temples to get lots of cathedrals, it's kind of a natural choice. So arabs are good. Phil/agg (alex) phil/fin (victoria) would also be decent choices. Aggressive because you need a crack army to defend the ultimate city, when some civs see a truly great city, they get jealous. You can also think of the army as like Crusaders, with the righteous mission of bringing all people into the fold, of the Ultimate City, the One City to rule them all, so to speak. Or you could use the army to capture cities of other religions, and bringing a missionary back to the ultimate city, this is if you go the route of the ultimate unholy great city.

:
I'm not sure what the point is either. Just something to do I guess.

Mecca .

[gentle]

Nice idea !


One question...OCC til Islam, what in-game time would that be or what date is your screenie ?
(approximately ^^)

[Blake]

In that game it was 425 AD, that was using CS Slingshot and a GP to help research Divine Right (on Noble heheh). The start terrain was less than ideal but I decided to forge ahead anyway (being on Noble, heheh). It's kind of a novelty/learning strat (and I've learnt heaps playing around with it!) but I might try it seriously on Monarch if I get a really ideal start, like a food resource and a goldmine on a river with some floodplains.

I've decided in practise it's probably best to found 1 religion in the capital and build the shrine for it, then found the other religions in other cities and spread them for temples only. But it is amusing to have the ultimate religious Mecca city.

[Weltenreiter]

While your assessment of the importance of GPP and Philosophical is most likely correct, I wouldn't overlook Gandhi.

You only have one city (no other cities to need or 'steal' forests), and your culture radius will expand pretty fast, bringing more forests into (or at least closer to for reduced penalty) your borders.

I figure to build one city up one would want to heavily abuse chopping, and chopping is one of the situations where fast workers really shine.

[DeepO]

I wonder if a bleaked down ultimate city is worth considering in real play. One where you e.g. go for 3 or 4 religions instead of 6. As novelty it will certainly work, but would such a city also get enough bonusses to offset the expansion hit in 'normal' games?

6 Shrines... Wall street will be a lot more important than Copernicus. Copernicus is not so overpowering when you build all monasteries, libs, unis, etc. It only adds another +100% to a max (IIRC) +320%. Wall Street will add 100% to a max +100% from other buildings. That's relatively more.

Also, adding GMs instead of GSs could make the global theatre more important. But still, 6 caths normally will get the job done

DeepO

[Dog of Justice]

I was figuring a super-city would eventually want a basically infinite number of Great Merchants, which in turn allow for lots of regular specialists in addition to super specialists, and these regular specialists would all be Merchants...

So, I think National Epic + Wall Street is actually the way to go to be truly uber. But when I found out that the cost to generate great people eventually increased at a n^2 rate instead of just linearly, I lost my enthusiasm for actually implementing the idea.

[gentle]

I really liked that idea and played several games on Noble to test it.
It is an excellent way to avoid having all the religions being scattered throughout the empire ^^
My approach is the following: Found all religions in the capital and built all wonders there to produce GPs.
I managed to found all religions till 575BC and generated 9 GPersons till 1AD (the city generates more than 100 GPs/turn Oo..insane).
Well, after having found all rels I spread 1-2 cities if there is enough space left and then aim towards astronomy to claim the new world (terra map).
I didnt pamper religions in any way (didnt even build temple) but wanted to have them found to have that godly city.

This style of play is very entertaining. OCC seems dubious to me (=P) but this is really fun.

thx blake ^^