Implementation of a specialist based economy.

[gdgrimm]

I play Civ by letting the RNG have as much control as possible for the game start.

This leads me to have very few opportunities to run a really good SE. I have done it a few times, but it's pretty rare.

[zeace]

Have a look at http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=154146

About halfway down I posted a save of a game where I went extreme with specialists. I actually had 4 GPP cities at one point, with 3 cities each only producing a single type of GP.

Admittedly I gamed the settings a little and restarted a couple of times until I found a continent with tons of floodplains, and it's only at Noble. But I managed to build a large number of wonders and got lots of specialists.

[Quillan]

Tass, I had a graphic demonstration of the power of specialists last night. I'd started a game, huge/marathon/continents/Prince and it so happened that I had stone near where copper showed up. So, once I settled the city, I hooked up the stone along with the copper, and managed to build both the great wall and the pyramids with the stone (and a bit of judicious whipping ). I switched to Representation in the early going in this game, and I had a city with about 7 floodplains, lots of grassland and a corn source that was already dedicated as a great person pump. Because of distances, cities (I had 4 at this point) and units (I'm prepping units to take out the Incas) I was down to 50% science. I didn't really notice anything until I turned off the science specialists in my capital after I got the great scientist and built the library. One science specialist there shaved 3 turns off Code of Laws! ONE SPECIALIST! 4 scientists (two in the capital and two in the GP city, both of which had libaries) had CoL down to a 24 turn research process!

This is the first time I'd ever gotten the Pyramids and used Representation that early in the game. OMG what a huge difference that makes!

[darrelljs]

Re: Implementation of a specialist based economy.

Originally posted by Comrade Tassadar So, how does one get a specialist economy working? And is it worth the lack of cottages?

Read Blake's Epic 7 report for an excellent example of a specialist economy. I tend to transition over to a cottage based economy after Democracy, but Blake takes it all the way home here with ease.

Darrell

P.S. Aside to Blake, you haven't updated your front page in a while with links to your latest events.

[Diadem]

Wow, that's a very nice report. Read the entire thing, extremely funny.

CHOPPING a spaceship? Wow! I never even thought of that. That's brilliant.

[Jaybe]

I especially appreciated Blake's interstellar spaceship hoax theory in his Epic-7 report.

[Jaybe]

I especially appreciated Blake's interstellar spaceship hoax theory in his Epic-7 report.

[Blake]

Thanks for the free plugs to my report . Altough it's not strictly a specialist based economy.... more of a specialist boosted economy.

Basically the way I figure it a specialist economy needs two things:
1) Pyramids.
2) 0% science.

Generally a specialist economy is best used when you want to expand rampantly. The point of the full scale specialist economy is that you have next to no commerce, so that when you use the cultural slider for happiness it costs you next to nothing - that is the true power of the specialist economy.

However I find that usually cottages are so powerful that you want to merely boost your economy with a few specialists and the settled GP's, but the idea of using "free" slider happiness is definitely intriging, presumably you want to be organized in order to minimize expenses and quickly get courthouses, a shrine or two would also help cover the expenses (since you have little commerce it's hard to cover expenses), finally you could use Merchants or Wealth (Warlords Only) to cover any deficit.

[Diadem]

Hmm, that's an interesting angle.

In civ4 the cultural part of the slider is kind of neglected. I barely ever use it. In civ2 I used it all the time, often running periods of 100% culture to grow my cities ('We love the president day' + democracy + 19 turns = size 20 cities everywhere, and having a maintenance dosage of sometimes 30% during normal times.

In civ4, no such thing. I guess it is because there are no happy citizens. Just content ones, and unhapy ones. And though I still occasionally get messages about 'we love the leader day' I have yet to figure out any pattern or point to those.

With plenty of other happiness modifiers (resources, religion) you can usually keep your citizens happy without needing the culture slider. Except sometimes in war. Your might be able to grow a few cities a bit bigger by using the culture slider, but that's usually not worth the loss in science / gold. You're better off halting the growth of those cities - especially since that usually involves replacing farms by cottages (or well, not building those farms in the first place), which yields even more commerce.

The culture slider is really only useful for warmongers and OCC players. OCC combines well with a specialist strategy, but you usually build the globe theatre anyway (hmm, but perhaps we don't have to... That's an idea. Sacrificing a bit of commerce so I can get rid of those accursed great artist points.. That's got to be worth it. I like the irony of using culture to avoid artists as well).

For warmongers. Hmmmm.. Perhaps it could be interesting. But you usually capture your AI cities will lots of fully improved towns around them, and to replace those by farms to run specialists seems to be kind of a waste I'd rather keep my wars short and effective so I don't suffer to much war weariness.