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Here's my thesis: the best civics combination when going for a domination win is what might be understood as neo-liberalism -
Universal Suffrage
Free Speech
Emancipation
Free Market
Free Religion
The philosophy behind this is that cash-rushing is the critical tool to beating back the AI's advantages on higher difficulty levels. Maximizing your economy lets you counteract the loss of each one of the benefits from the civics you're not using, while giving you significantly more strategic flexibility.
Before I get into the analysis, here are my parameters (which I realize might be so narrow as to make this useless for anyone else): I tend to play continents or terra maps, on marathon, monarch or emperor difficulty, single-player, with no mods. I turn off cultural and diplomatic wins, but keep space race on, not because I'm going for it but just to keep me on my toes.
For this post, I'm going to try to build on what I've learned from the great strategy threads on this forum. I assume the reader, from those threads, is fairly advanced in her understanding of Civ4 strategy in the early- and mid-game: grabbing and spreading multiple religions, coastal city placement, early caravels, exploitative tech trading, Great Person type-focusing, production vs. commerce city specialization, resource acquisition, maintenance and upkeep management, and of course, military tactics. I'll focus instead on the period just before and during the bid for invasion (the moment you get the Kremlin and the Pentagon, while setting up the Eiffel Tower run, is probably a good marker), explaining why I choose the above civics over the other options. Also, I have found an alternate civics approach, which focuses on delayed frequent Great People popping; that's briefly run through at the end. The key here is that, either way, you examine civics not in isolation from each other, but as a unified strategy which uses the benefits of each to compensate for the vulnerabilities and opportunity costs of the others.
GOVERNMENT
The chief purpose of your government civic, other than getting you cash-rushing, is dealing with unhappiness. I think the better way to go is theaters and a liberal use of the culture slider. Theaters are cheap and necessary to get the Globe running in your pop-stuffed mega-science city, while plenty of culture is necessary to rush border expansion in conquered cities. This strategy also matches up elegantly with your war plans, since you won't start getting significant war weariness, and thus a need to crank the culture slider, until your invasion is well under way, which means most of your relevant research is done and you can afford to turn down the science slider accordingly.
- Hereditary Rule: War weariness can make this a tempting option, but ultimately it requires too many troops sitting at home, which is lost production and, through unit support cost, a big drag on the economy. If you're really worried about happiness, jails and Mt. Rushmore are superior options. If those still aren't enough, you've got much more serious structural problems relating to luxury resources, commerce, and religion.
- Representation: Putting aside its incredible value in the early- and mid-game with the Pyramids, and the fact that it's cheaper than Universal Suffrage, this just can't overcome the absence of cash-rushing. As noted earlier, I prefer theaters and the culture slider to deal with war weariness (it also works everywhere, as opposed to just your top cities). And by the time you're getting your invasion ready, the three-beakers-per-specialist bonus just ain't enough to make a dent in the huge research costs. Let's be generous and say you've got an average of 5 specialists in 20 cities, and a cumulative +100% bonus to science in each, so Representation gets you 3 * 5 * 20 * 2 = 600 extra beakers per turn. That's an enormous boost in the early game, not so later on.
- Police State: The difficulty here, other than prohibiting cash-rushing, is that you don't want to use both of the benefits to this civic simultaneously. In other words, you've got to build your invasion force before you declare war. Before the invasion, the ability to cash-rush troops and key buildings, plus the raw hammer bonus to towns, more than makes up for the 25% bonus. Using Police State during the invasion is more defensible, but the high upkeep cost potentially forces you out of better uses for your economy. 10% more commerce directed to overcoming the upkeep cost of Police State is 10% less commerce devoted to culture, meaning one less happy point (1.5 with coliseums added) and significantly slower border expansion (even more noticeable with Free Speech and/or the Eiffel Tower, which of course are must-haves).
LEGAL
The legal category is where the map type and other circumstances give you the most flexibility. Free Speech is a great civic - no upkeep plus the raw commerce bonus is a big boost to your economy. The cultural doubling is fantastic for any warmonger, but it's especially beneficial for continental invasions since your native cities' culture can't reach across the ocean.
- Vassalage: Miss the Pentagon? Or going for 10 out of the box? Neither put you in a great situation. The Pentagon is one of only seven wonders that produce Great Engineers, and starts you with level 2 units without running either of the expensive XP bonus civics (what's more, keeping it from other civs forces them to do so). The costs of getting to 10 XP for new units are, in my opinion, prohibitive - high upkeep for Vassalage, medium for Theocracy, not to mention the opportunity costs of the civics you're missing out on. Settling for 6 XP lets you run a sounder economy and cash-rush a few more troops, and there's nothing that one level 3 unit can do that two level 2 units can't. The extra free unit support is usually swamped by the high upkeep cost.
- Nationhood: This has a lot of appeal if you're playing Pangaea-type maps where, unlike with continents, you're potentially on the defensive and tend to have barracks in every city instead of just the production ones. I think I'd still stick with Free Speech, though, since it makes for a better economy. That means a bump to the culture slider to make up for the happiness, and cash-rushing is a kind of slow, pop-preserving draft.
- Bureaucracy: Like Representation, a great civic that fades with time. If you've got plenty of cottages started early, as you should, Free Speech will come out ahead on commerce civ-wide, especially since there's a fairly wide difference in upkeep costs. And even if you've got a small civ with the capital as the primary production center, easier cash-rushing makes up for the hammer bonus.
LABOR
Eventually, you will be forced into Emancipation whether you want it or not. Lots of different leaders love it, and the AI seems to know just how bad it'll hurt you. It can be useful for the conqueror at any rate, since the AI's cottages are often under-improved.
- Slavery: It's free, and whipping unhappy conquered citizens is useful. There's even a good case to be made for waiting until the AI forces you to switch, especially if your own cottages are fully improved. I particularly enjoy pop-rushing happiness-boosting buildings, but then, I enjoyed nerve-stapling, too. But don't think it's a substitute for cash-rushing - money is made to be spent; it has no other purpose. That isn't true for citizens, of course, and it takes much longer to get them back. There's also much less fine-tune control - if whipping one citizen leaves you even a single hammer shy of completion, you're stuck with whipping two.
- Serfdom: By the time you're readying your invasion force, your terrain improvements should be basically complete. Sure, there are railroads to build and maybe some bio-farms to move around, but nothing that justifies the switch.
- Caste System: If you have the food to support it, you can make back the upkeep cost compared to slavery, and pull off some interesting stunts with Great People, while you're waiting for the inevitable AI Emancipation wave. Otherwise, you'll probably leave it on Slavery from the moment you get Bronze Working.
ECONOMY
Unsurprisingly, economic civics are all about money management. Assuming you've got a harbor in virtually every city, Free Market's raw commerce bonus is incredible; it's cheap on the upkeep, too.
- Mercantilism: If you ignored the GPP factor, this'd be very straightforward, as the trade route bonus and the lower upkeep cost of Free Market would easily trump the free specialists' economic bonus, and cash-rushing takes care of the production boost from any priests or engineers. But specific Great People work great for the domination player – Merchants give massive cash for rushing, a well-placed culture bomb can make your invasion much smoother and prevent opportunistic third civs from settling on your newly acquired continent, and nothing need be said about the value of Engineers. Still, unless you've set yourself up for it well in advance, pulling off the Great People timing is so difficult that I prefer to stick with the much more flexible commerce bonus.
- State Property: An interesting civic. Build (or better yet, capture) Versailles, and most of the benefit here disappears. It's true that you'll still save a good chunk of cash due to persistent distance maintenance and the higher upkeep costs compared to Free Market. The problem is that, while it's easy to check the sum total distance maintenance cost in the finances advisor screen, it's difficult to calculate the civ-wide cash benefit from the extra trade route, so comparisons are difficult. But it seems to me that Free Market doesn't do too bad. And the key difference is that trade routes provide raw commerce, which gets magnified by the buildings you've chosen, and directed by the sliders you've set, which means you're in control of how the bonus works. State Property does make workshops and watermills useful, but the amount of pre-planning and re-working those improvements require make this fairly incidental.
- Environmentalism: Probably the most under-powered civic in the game. It comes late, has high upkeep, requires keeping jungles around, provides a usually unnecessary health bonus, and doesn't even get much of a happiness boost.
RELIGION
The most important quality of Free Religion for the domination-minded is that a conquered city gets culture points for any present religion, not just your state one. That means you don't have to keep cranking out missionaries and can stick to wealth production in your core cities. And the 10% research bonus represents a bump on the culture or cash sliders while keeping nearly the same final science rate. Losing the religious spying effect is easily counteracted by spies.
- Organized Religion: Great in the early- and mid-game, of course, but when you're staging the invasion you're primarily working on units. The upkeep savings and wealth production mentioned above gives you the cash to make up for the lost production bonus on the remaining buildings. If you need a few missionaries, you should have leftover monasteries from the early game.
- Theocracy: At this point in the game, non-state religion spread is crucial - more culture and temples in border towns and newly conquered cities is vital to pulling off a domination win. As for the XP boost, see the Vassalage discussion. It's cheaper than Vassalage, but no free unit support bonus makes it a wash.
- Pacifism: Your invasion force makes this economically prohibitive. The upkeep savings over Free Religion is swamped by it, and counteracted by the functional 10% commerce boost mentioned above. I've covered my skepticism on a mixed GPP/commerce approach in the Mercantilism discussion.
That's that for my primary strategy. The alternate strategy I alluded to at the opening of this post is focusing entirely on specialists and GPP generation, and on top of that, delaying Great Person completion until you start building your invasion force, then cranking them out in rapid succession. Here's the alternate civics combination -
Representation
Bureaucracy
Caste System (or Slavery)
Mercantilism
Pacifism
The delay is due to the significant rise in required GPP for each subsequent Great Person - this means that there are, practically speaking, only so many Great People you can generate, and they're much less useful in the early game (for example, you can't maximize the Great Merchant cash bomb until caravels, or really benefit from cheap 2-person Golden ages until you've got fully populated cities). So your food is better spent in the early game growing your cities rather than sinking them in sub-optimal specialists, other than those for grabbing the necessary Great Prophets for shrines or pulling off the CS slingshot. This strategy works best when you're dealing with primarily inland cities (no harbors to make trade routes more attractive) that can generate tons of food, you pull off the Pyramids, and you've got a Philosophical or Industrious leader (there is no leader who has both).
Depending on your production situation, it may be better to use your food advantage to pop-rush with Slavery, or crank your cash using tons of merchant specialists with Caste System (for both the raw cash and by popping Great Merchants) then switching to Universal Suffrage to use it up.
I hope that this sparks an interesting discussion.
Universal Suffrage
Free Speech
Emancipation
Free Market
Free Religion
The philosophy behind this is that cash-rushing is the critical tool to beating back the AI's advantages on higher difficulty levels. Maximizing your economy lets you counteract the loss of each one of the benefits from the civics you're not using, while giving you significantly more strategic flexibility.
Before I get into the analysis, here are my parameters (which I realize might be so narrow as to make this useless for anyone else): I tend to play continents or terra maps, on marathon, monarch or emperor difficulty, single-player, with no mods. I turn off cultural and diplomatic wins, but keep space race on, not because I'm going for it but just to keep me on my toes.
For this post, I'm going to try to build on what I've learned from the great strategy threads on this forum. I assume the reader, from those threads, is fairly advanced in her understanding of Civ4 strategy in the early- and mid-game: grabbing and spreading multiple religions, coastal city placement, early caravels, exploitative tech trading, Great Person type-focusing, production vs. commerce city specialization, resource acquisition, maintenance and upkeep management, and of course, military tactics. I'll focus instead on the period just before and during the bid for invasion (the moment you get the Kremlin and the Pentagon, while setting up the Eiffel Tower run, is probably a good marker), explaining why I choose the above civics over the other options. Also, I have found an alternate civics approach, which focuses on delayed frequent Great People popping; that's briefly run through at the end. The key here is that, either way, you examine civics not in isolation from each other, but as a unified strategy which uses the benefits of each to compensate for the vulnerabilities and opportunity costs of the others.
GOVERNMENT
The chief purpose of your government civic, other than getting you cash-rushing, is dealing with unhappiness. I think the better way to go is theaters and a liberal use of the culture slider. Theaters are cheap and necessary to get the Globe running in your pop-stuffed mega-science city, while plenty of culture is necessary to rush border expansion in conquered cities. This strategy also matches up elegantly with your war plans, since you won't start getting significant war weariness, and thus a need to crank the culture slider, until your invasion is well under way, which means most of your relevant research is done and you can afford to turn down the science slider accordingly.
- Hereditary Rule: War weariness can make this a tempting option, but ultimately it requires too many troops sitting at home, which is lost production and, through unit support cost, a big drag on the economy. If you're really worried about happiness, jails and Mt. Rushmore are superior options. If those still aren't enough, you've got much more serious structural problems relating to luxury resources, commerce, and religion.
- Representation: Putting aside its incredible value in the early- and mid-game with the Pyramids, and the fact that it's cheaper than Universal Suffrage, this just can't overcome the absence of cash-rushing. As noted earlier, I prefer theaters and the culture slider to deal with war weariness (it also works everywhere, as opposed to just your top cities). And by the time you're getting your invasion ready, the three-beakers-per-specialist bonus just ain't enough to make a dent in the huge research costs. Let's be generous and say you've got an average of 5 specialists in 20 cities, and a cumulative +100% bonus to science in each, so Representation gets you 3 * 5 * 20 * 2 = 600 extra beakers per turn. That's an enormous boost in the early game, not so later on.
- Police State: The difficulty here, other than prohibiting cash-rushing, is that you don't want to use both of the benefits to this civic simultaneously. In other words, you've got to build your invasion force before you declare war. Before the invasion, the ability to cash-rush troops and key buildings, plus the raw hammer bonus to towns, more than makes up for the 25% bonus. Using Police State during the invasion is more defensible, but the high upkeep cost potentially forces you out of better uses for your economy. 10% more commerce directed to overcoming the upkeep cost of Police State is 10% less commerce devoted to culture, meaning one less happy point (1.5 with coliseums added) and significantly slower border expansion (even more noticeable with Free Speech and/or the Eiffel Tower, which of course are must-haves).
LEGAL
The legal category is where the map type and other circumstances give you the most flexibility. Free Speech is a great civic - no upkeep plus the raw commerce bonus is a big boost to your economy. The cultural doubling is fantastic for any warmonger, but it's especially beneficial for continental invasions since your native cities' culture can't reach across the ocean.
- Vassalage: Miss the Pentagon? Or going for 10 out of the box? Neither put you in a great situation. The Pentagon is one of only seven wonders that produce Great Engineers, and starts you with level 2 units without running either of the expensive XP bonus civics (what's more, keeping it from other civs forces them to do so). The costs of getting to 10 XP for new units are, in my opinion, prohibitive - high upkeep for Vassalage, medium for Theocracy, not to mention the opportunity costs of the civics you're missing out on. Settling for 6 XP lets you run a sounder economy and cash-rush a few more troops, and there's nothing that one level 3 unit can do that two level 2 units can't. The extra free unit support is usually swamped by the high upkeep cost.
- Nationhood: This has a lot of appeal if you're playing Pangaea-type maps where, unlike with continents, you're potentially on the defensive and tend to have barracks in every city instead of just the production ones. I think I'd still stick with Free Speech, though, since it makes for a better economy. That means a bump to the culture slider to make up for the happiness, and cash-rushing is a kind of slow, pop-preserving draft.
- Bureaucracy: Like Representation, a great civic that fades with time. If you've got plenty of cottages started early, as you should, Free Speech will come out ahead on commerce civ-wide, especially since there's a fairly wide difference in upkeep costs. And even if you've got a small civ with the capital as the primary production center, easier cash-rushing makes up for the hammer bonus.
LABOR
Eventually, you will be forced into Emancipation whether you want it or not. Lots of different leaders love it, and the AI seems to know just how bad it'll hurt you. It can be useful for the conqueror at any rate, since the AI's cottages are often under-improved.
- Slavery: It's free, and whipping unhappy conquered citizens is useful. There's even a good case to be made for waiting until the AI forces you to switch, especially if your own cottages are fully improved. I particularly enjoy pop-rushing happiness-boosting buildings, but then, I enjoyed nerve-stapling, too. But don't think it's a substitute for cash-rushing - money is made to be spent; it has no other purpose. That isn't true for citizens, of course, and it takes much longer to get them back. There's also much less fine-tune control - if whipping one citizen leaves you even a single hammer shy of completion, you're stuck with whipping two.
- Serfdom: By the time you're readying your invasion force, your terrain improvements should be basically complete. Sure, there are railroads to build and maybe some bio-farms to move around, but nothing that justifies the switch.
- Caste System: If you have the food to support it, you can make back the upkeep cost compared to slavery, and pull off some interesting stunts with Great People, while you're waiting for the inevitable AI Emancipation wave. Otherwise, you'll probably leave it on Slavery from the moment you get Bronze Working.
ECONOMY
Unsurprisingly, economic civics are all about money management. Assuming you've got a harbor in virtually every city, Free Market's raw commerce bonus is incredible; it's cheap on the upkeep, too.
- Mercantilism: If you ignored the GPP factor, this'd be very straightforward, as the trade route bonus and the lower upkeep cost of Free Market would easily trump the free specialists' economic bonus, and cash-rushing takes care of the production boost from any priests or engineers. But specific Great People work great for the domination player – Merchants give massive cash for rushing, a well-placed culture bomb can make your invasion much smoother and prevent opportunistic third civs from settling on your newly acquired continent, and nothing need be said about the value of Engineers. Still, unless you've set yourself up for it well in advance, pulling off the Great People timing is so difficult that I prefer to stick with the much more flexible commerce bonus.
- State Property: An interesting civic. Build (or better yet, capture) Versailles, and most of the benefit here disappears. It's true that you'll still save a good chunk of cash due to persistent distance maintenance and the higher upkeep costs compared to Free Market. The problem is that, while it's easy to check the sum total distance maintenance cost in the finances advisor screen, it's difficult to calculate the civ-wide cash benefit from the extra trade route, so comparisons are difficult. But it seems to me that Free Market doesn't do too bad. And the key difference is that trade routes provide raw commerce, which gets magnified by the buildings you've chosen, and directed by the sliders you've set, which means you're in control of how the bonus works. State Property does make workshops and watermills useful, but the amount of pre-planning and re-working those improvements require make this fairly incidental.
- Environmentalism: Probably the most under-powered civic in the game. It comes late, has high upkeep, requires keeping jungles around, provides a usually unnecessary health bonus, and doesn't even get much of a happiness boost.
RELIGION
The most important quality of Free Religion for the domination-minded is that a conquered city gets culture points for any present religion, not just your state one. That means you don't have to keep cranking out missionaries and can stick to wealth production in your core cities. And the 10% research bonus represents a bump on the culture or cash sliders while keeping nearly the same final science rate. Losing the religious spying effect is easily counteracted by spies.
- Organized Religion: Great in the early- and mid-game, of course, but when you're staging the invasion you're primarily working on units. The upkeep savings and wealth production mentioned above gives you the cash to make up for the lost production bonus on the remaining buildings. If you need a few missionaries, you should have leftover monasteries from the early game.
- Theocracy: At this point in the game, non-state religion spread is crucial - more culture and temples in border towns and newly conquered cities is vital to pulling off a domination win. As for the XP boost, see the Vassalage discussion. It's cheaper than Vassalage, but no free unit support bonus makes it a wash.
- Pacifism: Your invasion force makes this economically prohibitive. The upkeep savings over Free Religion is swamped by it, and counteracted by the functional 10% commerce boost mentioned above. I've covered my skepticism on a mixed GPP/commerce approach in the Mercantilism discussion.
That's that for my primary strategy. The alternate strategy I alluded to at the opening of this post is focusing entirely on specialists and GPP generation, and on top of that, delaying Great Person completion until you start building your invasion force, then cranking them out in rapid succession. Here's the alternate civics combination -
Representation
Bureaucracy
Caste System (or Slavery)
Mercantilism
Pacifism
The delay is due to the significant rise in required GPP for each subsequent Great Person - this means that there are, practically speaking, only so many Great People you can generate, and they're much less useful in the early game (for example, you can't maximize the Great Merchant cash bomb until caravels, or really benefit from cheap 2-person Golden ages until you've got fully populated cities). So your food is better spent in the early game growing your cities rather than sinking them in sub-optimal specialists, other than those for grabbing the necessary Great Prophets for shrines or pulling off the CS slingshot. This strategy works best when you're dealing with primarily inland cities (no harbors to make trade routes more attractive) that can generate tons of food, you pull off the Pyramids, and you've got a Philosophical or Industrious leader (there is no leader who has both).
Depending on your production situation, it may be better to use your food advantage to pop-rush with Slavery, or crank your cash using tons of merchant specialists with Caste System (for both the raw cash and by popping Great Merchants) then switching to Universal Suffrage to use it up.
I hope that this sparks an interesting discussion.
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