We Love The Ruler Day Part II

[Deity Dude]

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147718

Can someone answer my question

[Deity Dude]

BTW - The question was - what effect does this have in Civ IV - I cant find it in the manual or the civlopedia.

[playshogi]

You don't pay maintenance cost for that city that turn. That's the cost in the upper left corner of the city screen.

[DirtyMartini]

Sorry,

I did try to answer the question, right before I hijacked your previous thread.

Dirty

[Deity Dude]

That's all?!?! Maintenance cost for 1 turn in a city. No wonder why I could never tell what the benefit was.

[Hauptman]

Originally posted by Deity Dude
That's all?!?! Maintenance cost for 1 turn in a city. No wonder why I could never tell what the benefit was.

When 3 or 4 cities pop it that could mean 20 gold that turn. Not a big deal? well when you are cutting it real close to the wire on tech/cash balance it is infact a big deal. You can usually get another 10-20% research for 20 gold...

[DirtyMartini]

New sig Hauptman? It is pretty amazing.

[Deity Dude]

Originally posted by Hauptman



When 3 or 4 cities pop it that could mean 20 gold that turn. Not a big deal? well when you are cutting it real close to the wire on tech/cash balance it is infact a big deal. You can usually get another 10-20% research for 20 gold...

I guess I was just remembering the impact in Civ II. +1 growth in Population per turn, extra trade arrows and shields, etc...

[JackRudd]

We Love The Ruler Day was indeed significant in Civ II. Once you got into Republic/Democracy, you could just set your luxury percentage to 50% and all your cities would get to size 8 really quickly. Very soon, your research would bury that of any competitors who didn't do that.

This was munchkinishly overpowered. In addition, it removed strategic choice - you could get more research by ramping up luxuries than you would by ramping up science; a similar thing held for taxes. These two effects added up to A Bad Thing.

[Deity Dude]

I agree - I have found that Civ IV downplays the power of wonders and WLT_D. Actually I think this is a good thing. I always thought the WLT_D in Civ II was almost a gimmick.

So, even though I was surprised at the weakness of WLT_D in Civ IV I am glad that it is that way.

In my latter days of Ci II we used to play "no wonder" games all the time., At the end normal games started to turn into wonder races as oposed to actual civ building.

Another reason I prefer Civ IV to Civ II

[The_Paladin]

I wonder if it would be possible to develop a strategy around getting WLTKD in a large portion of your cities every turn.

If you could actually manage it... it would actually be quite powerful. It eliminates all maintenances costs. I could have a huge empire - no courthouses, no forbidden palace - but still have practically no maintenance. That would definitely send the ORG trait out the window. Technically, just so I don't confuse people, the ORG trait works on civic upkeep not city maintenance. The two are separate from each other and WLTKD would have no effect on civic upkeep.

Off the top of my head one possible way of achieving this might be to grab drama, build theatres and coliseums everywhere, and throw the culture / luxury slider up to, say, 20%. That would get you 6 happy faces per city (2 for 20% luxury, 1 free from coliseum + 1 extra from 20% luxury from coliseum, 2 extra from theatre for 20% luxury).

So you lose 20% "Commerce" to culture but can grow cities much larger. Now if you have a large enough empire with, say, 50% of it in WLTKD you might just save more commerce a turn upkeep than you are losing by having culture at 20%. Combine that with the fact that you can have 6 extra people per city... hmm... seems like something worth trying. Though ironically those extra people add unhappiness... which likely lowers the chance of getting WLTKDs . Actually... I'm thinking out loud here but you could make that work for you too. The cities you want to get to full size you build a courthouse in and keep close to your capital / forbidden palace. Thus it doesn't matter if they are in WLTKD. The more distant ones that can't grow to full size however would benefit from WLTKD and you would keep below max size.

I'm not 100% sure of the mechanics of WLTKD though... it seems you have to have big enough cities and no unhappy people but I don't know how much the percent chance of WLTKD increases with each point of extra happiness.

This forum is great!! I keep thinking up new ideas to try because of posts here.

[Quillan]

It's a nice idea, but unfortunately the occurrance is random. Even if you meet all the criteria for it, there is no guarantee it will happen that turn, next turn or any time within the next ten turns. When I've got a good empire set up with lots of luxuries, I usually see one or two every turn, but it moves from city to city. I have seen one city have them back to back, but that's not the normal situation.

[The_Paladin]

Originally posted by Quillan
It's a nice idea, but unfortunately the occurrance is random. Even if you meet all the criteria for it, there is no guarantee it will happen that turn, next turn or any time within the next ten turns. When I've got a good empire set up with lots of luxuries, I usually see one or two every turn, but it moves from city to city. I have seen one city have them back to back, but that's not the normal situation.

Yeah I tested it after I posted this and realized that it is far too random (and doesn't occur nearly enough) to make it even remotely worth while. I was testing it with 4 cities, 100% culture, all size 10 with at least 15+ extra happiness and 10+ extra health and WLTKD occurred so rarely it was sad. It seems almost that the amount of extra happiness / extra health has actually nothing to do with WLTKDs... odd but that's at least what my numbers suggested.

The thing I did notice is that once a city is in WLTKD, it doesn't announce it each turn but if you check the maintenance is still stays at 0 (and the fireworks still go off). What's funny though, and this may be a bug, is that when it does eventually wear off that city, it will tell you again that it celebrated WLTKD but when you look at it, its maintenance is back.

That is, city A celebrates WLTKD on turn 100. Now on turn 101 it comes and says again city A celebrates WLTKD but if you look at that city, it has maintenance again. Makes me wonder if something is actually wrong with the whole thing...

Has anyone else encountered that problem? The easiest way to test it is to get your capital up to size 10, everyone happy using culture slider. Max the slider so and keep it that way till the city celebrates WLTKD. Now lower the slider to drive the capital into unhappiness. The next turn it should come up and report again that the capital celebrated WLTKD but this is incorrect, which you can check by looking at its maintenance.

I guess this is we hate the king day...

[Huskerfan]

Maybe it represents a time frame for a set number of turns that the city celebrates (i.e. first message "WLT_D" starts, second message for the same city the celebration ends)?

Could one then change that city's specialization for that number of turns to take advantage of the zero maintenance? Change worker tiles, specialist assignments, build queue?

Sorry, probably just random, meaningless thoughts to try to exploit WLT_D.

[The_Paladin]

Originally posted by Huskerfan
Maybe it represents a time frame for a set number of turns that the city celebrates (i.e. first message "WLT_D" starts, second message for the same city the celebration ends)?

Could one then change that city's specialization for that number of turns to take advantage of the zero maintenance? Change worker tiles, specialist assignments, build queue?

Sorry, probably just random, meaningless thoughts to try to exploit WLT_D.

I thought that too but it seems to be that when you get the first message it lasts, well, until you get the second message - that's when it stops. Like I say it may be there's something wrong with the overall system.. or it may be there's something wrong with the way I've tested it (like I ended the turn too fast and the message appeared again).

Just for comparison sake, if you look at the likelihood of a WLT_D in the XML, it is as likely as your state religion is to spread to the furthest city away on the map (apparently religion spreads faster as the distance between cities gets closer) each turn, both take values of 1000 in the globaldefines.xml file. You know how often a state religion spreads... so that's how rarely a WLT_D occurs .

So considering that... I'm not really sure how to use it effectively or at all. Frankly it seems like an almost useless effect, which is odd for a Civ game. The devlopers/testers have done such an excellent job of balancing most things that its a surprise that WLT_D is so, well, uninspiring.