So what Civic do you use?

[Asmodeous]

Blake, what are the chances I could get you to do the same thing you just did there but why one should choose State Property over other ones, because I see a lot of people talking about it but I never really have felt the need for it, what with Free Market being able to heavily overshadow the increased "distance" penalty...

Me.

[joncnunn]

I prefer peaceful player myself.

With the Pyraimds, I would become a Republic early and much later on switch to Democracy (about the time Democracy normally becomes advaible)

Without it, then I'll pick H.R. and when Democracy becomes adviable switch to it. (Skipping Republic unless Spirtual)

My legal pattern is Bureachcry and later Free Speech. Since I'm not a war mongler, Vassalage doesn't interest me.

For labor I prefer Serfdom as soon as it becomes adviable and switch to Emmuncipation once it comes around. In BTS, I don't want to deal with slave revolts since I rarely poped rushed anyway and in addition don't tend to have more specalists than the buildings would normally allow.

For Economy, I prefer Free Market by far. My main use for Merchantism is if I have a large empire with few coastal cities.

For Religion, I tend to prefer first Organized Religion later Pacifism and then Free Religion.

[Rockoon]

State Property has another benefit besides the elimination of the distance penalty.

It adds 1 to both workshops and watermills...

Under state property, there is no excuse for a city to be struggling with a shortage.

[Blake]

Originally posted by Asmodeous
Blake, what are the chances I could get you to do the same thing you just did there but why one should choose State Property over other ones, because I see a lot of people talking about it but I never really have felt the need for it, what with Free Market being able to heavily overshadow the increased "distance" penalty...

Okay here's the economic civics in order of potential:

State Property:
SP has two main effects, firstly is the elimination of distance upkeep - most cities will have 10-15 distance upkeep, which is halved by courthouses, so SP saves 5-7 expenses per city.
The second effect is additional food, +1f to workshop and watermill - in practise, the workshop tends to be extra hammers (because you can then afford to work it), the watermill extra food. Potentially you can get a lot of food per city, but normally it'll be about 3f per city. 1f is worth about 3c (commerce), so we can say 9c per city from the food.
Finally in BTS, SP also provides +10% production, which is a nice little boost, especially since it works for everything, unlike Org Rel / Police State (it's like a +20% boost when compared directly with those two civics).

Environmentalism:
Env's primary effect is +6 health. When you have unhealth each additional health is exactly the same as 1f. This means env is potenitally up to +6f per city - which could be like 3 more Plains Hill Mines worked at an Ironworks city.
In BTS it's pretty easy to hit severe unhealth, simply building Factories and Coal Plants is +6 unhealth. So a civ just breaking even on health pre-Industrial, will be badly unhealthy while industralizing. You can use Env to "subsidize" an industrial boom, basically getting the heavy infrastructure in first, then building the health at leisure, eventually switching out of Env if desired.
Pre-BTS Env provides +1 happy per forest, which is nice if you have unhappy and forests, happy is hard to beat.
Post-BTS Env provides +2c per Windmill and Forest Preserve, this is a very significant bonus for some maps, particulary like Highlands / Global Highlands where many cities may be working a dozen windmills (+24c per city). On such maps, Env is total no-brainer.

Free Market:
FM adds 1 trade route per city. This isn't so great.
What it comes down to, is Foreign trade routes (high yielding) vs Domestic Trade Routes (low yielding).
Lets say you have 10 cities, each city has 4 trade routes (40 trade routes total). You have open borders with 3 players, and each has 10 cities. You thus have 30 foreign trade routes to go around.
40 Routes Total, 30 Foreign, 10 Domestic.

Okay, you switch to Free Market, each city going up to 5 trade routes.
50 Routes Total, 30 Foreign, 20 Domestic.

All you've gained is 10 new domestic trade routes, which are the low level ones giving only +1c to +2c.

Free Market has provides a shuffling effect, with the 10 city example, the worst 2.5 cities lose 10 foreign trade routes (being replaced with Domestic trade routes), those 10 foreign trade routes are transfered to the 10 best trade cities (not precisely, rather the best trade routes are shuffled up through the entire chain of cities, but it's close enough). What this means, is you end up with more trade in your presumably strongest cities - like your Oxfords capital, losing it from your weaker cities with poorer multipliers. This is a good thing, but it's only a minor effect, it might be worth 1-2c per city, depending on how bad your poorer cities are.

When there are an overabundance of foreign trade routes, Free Market provides about +4 commerce per city (less inland, more coastal) - as it happens, the best trade routes are chosen preferentially, so Free Market is "scraping the bottom of the barrel" even when adding new foreign trade routes. So unless you have a huge overabundance of trade partners, you only get lower yielding new foreign trade routes.

In total, free market provides about +2.5c per city when purely shuffling, and +6c per city when there are ample foreign trade routes (This only compares with State Property's 5 upkeep saved, especially considering the upkeep difference).

Merchantalism:
Merc enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the few potentially negative civics in the game.
Merc adds 1 specialist per city, nominally this is worth about 4c per city. With Representation it's 7c/city.
That's actually not a bad effect.

But Merc also kills of foreign trade. If you have none, no problem.

Using the 10 city, 30 foreign city example. Each foreign trade route will be worth about 5c, you lose 4 of that being downgraded to domestic. So you lose 4x30 = 120 commerce, divided by 10 cities, thats 12c per city. So adding that to even rep specialists, you LOSE 5c per city.
Of course if your empire is relatively large and you have relatively few and small trade partners, Merc can easily turn a large profit... but it WONT compare with State Property, considering the upkeep difference SP pretty much wins out with just the distance upkeep elimination.

Corporations:
Finally, corporations in BTS.
Merc disables foreign corps, which is a pretty insignificant effect all in all.
State Property disables all corps. If you're using SP, you're not using corps. It's a fair tradeoff considering the inate power of SP and the expense of spreading corps.
Environmentalism makes corps more expensive, this doesn't matter too much when Env is providing a lot of benefit and you have not done much corp spreading (say for example only spreading 2 cultural corps to your 3 CV cities), but it can make costs pretty prohibitive if you spread corps significantly.
Finally, Free Market makes corps cheaper, if you have like 2 corporations, well spread, you pretty much need to be in FM or you're just wasting too much money on upkeep.

In some cases it'll make more sense to stay in Env and spread corps highly selectively (only where they're needed) than to go into FM and spread them everywhere.

[Asmodeous]

Thank you very much, good Spreadsheet.

I man Sir. Good Sir.

XD



Very informative as always, Blake. Thanks a lot.

Me.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Blake

Waste of HAMMERS. Maybe if you get it for free or something, but the pyramids is a big whack of hammers which would be better spent on expansion.

As for cottages vs Specialists:

a 0-0-6 tile does not compare with a 2-0-5 , it's equal with ~ 2-0-2.5 (the food means more cottages worked in the future). Specialists are nice to bootstrap your early research, but for financial especially you're hurting your long run by not taking advantage of cottages.
I mean you want some specialists for Academies and Academies and Academies and stuff, but to focus heavily on GP is just dumb.

I’m specifically talking about an early game “boot-strap” approach because that is the time-frame in which the Pyramids are useful. Here, the benefits are a combination of pure science and GP points and combines nicely with other GPP maximisation approaches (predominately Pacifism).

It is essentially a question of getting something now vs getting something in the future. Rep allows you to get things very quickly while you have to be a more patient with the cottage economy.

The contrasting approach uses cheap units and works cottages which is heavy on the investment side. Costs increases both with military expenditure and city size so the initial benefit will be 1g for the first extra population point (H.Rule gives +1 happy for a basic garrison that you will have anyway). Beyond that, the cottage generates barely enough to pay the extra costs needed to support the population there.

Now it goes without saying that the financial bonus starts to kick in very quickly so that each hamlet generates +2g per population. But the time it takes to get to a town is 70 turns. Over this time, the cottage tile would have generated 230 commerce while the specialist will have generated 420 science + 210 GPP.

Yes, there is the food difference and the “layering” of additional population means that the cottage approach also gets a large population. Over a long time, the cottage economy will see far more exponential growth. It is also leveraged to the extent that the cottages do not break-even until they are hamlets. However, it is working from a smaller base so higher-commerce later comes are the price of lower science now.

Additionally, the GP will be arriving sooner because of our specialist focus so the science boost we are getting will project us even more rapidly through the techs. This may even provide other sources of happiness more quickly.

A further point is that we should, in any case, be focussing on food sources, so a few specialists provide a useful “break” on growth. That they provide an additional +3 beakers is no mean thing, particularly if you have this happening in 10+ cities.

Finally, some of the additional cottage benefits turn up in the late-mid game (Printing Press and Liberalism). By this stage the Pyramids are essentially obsolete anyway.

OTOH, H.Rule does provide one significant benefit: that cities do not HAVE to be dedicated to a single cottage economy. Two obvious examples are GP farms and production powerhouses. We can at least devote several cities to our production needs (and I guess we have a lot of military production needed to support this strategy) and others get the job of paying for it – although these may also use the whip to supplement the cost.

I should also add that I am not rejecting the argument that Pyramids are expensive. We all know that they are. In fact, I don’t think anyone attempts the Pyramids without stone which changes the whole equation. Even for the Financial civ, the cheaper Pyramids is still a decent investment (225 hammers < 600 beakers or so needed for H.Rule)

[Blake]

I'd take 2-0-3 tiles over rep specialists, and financial has them in spades.

The bootstrapping works well for NON-Financial, but for financial you'll tech faster with cottages. The only way to use specialists to accelerate your tech is with academies and lightbulbs (even shrines are actually pretty dubious value on standard maps, compared with an academy in a cottaged up city). It may be worth using Pyramids if you are Ind/Fin or Phi/Fin but otherwise they're a waste of hammers - because you really want to be running as few specialists as you can get away with - rep doesn't change that.

Fin also has beakers in spades, Monarchy is not an expensive tech and it also leads to Feudalism, which is a pretty good tech, particularly defensively, but also all-round and it leads to Guilds.

In final sum, I'd still rather 2 more settlers than stone pyramids. The extra cities will help power through Monarchy and most likely will acquire extra resources to solve happy woes (directly or through trade).

[Indalecio]

Originally posted by Asmodeous
I raze cities that are close to my borders unless they're rather large, that way my culture usually just kinda fills everything in.

I hear stuff like this, and other people saying that they don't raze large cities. Whenever, I take a city, I notice I don't get the buildings that were previously in it, and since the city isn't generating any culture, the territory surrounding it usually get swallowed up by surrounding nations and the population winds up starving. So in the end I wind up with a City with a population of 1 thats subject to frequent revolts.


Anyone got any suggestions?

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Indalecio


I hear stuff like this, and other people saying that they don't raze large cities. Whenever, I take a city, I notice I don't get the buildings that were previously in it, and since the city isn't generating any culture, the territory surrounding it usually get swallowed up by surrounding nations and the population winds up starving. So in the end I wind up with a City with a population of 1 thats subject to frequent revolts.


Anyone got any suggestions?

Two things to do here.

1) Make sure you have a source of easy culture so that they can at least expand back towards your core cities. Later game there are many sources. Earlier, the best sources are Theatres (+ Artists specialists) or Caste System (for Artist specialists)
2) Continue fighting so that you capture (and maybe raze) cities nearby that are strangling the city culturally.

For later stages in the game, it often makes sense to completely eliminate the civ who owned the city. Where your culture is almost completely overwhelmed by the previous culture from that civ, you’ll get a lot of unhappiness.

[darrelljs]

Originally posted by Blake
Merchantalism:
Merc enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the few potentially negative civics in the game.
Merc adds 1 specialist per city, nominally this is worth about 4c per city. With Representation it's 7c/city.
That's actually not a bad effect.

But Merc also kills of foreign trade. If you have none, no problem.Corporations:

Killing foreign trade goes both ways though, so you are denying your opponents lucrative trade routes into your cities. For a smallish civ I think Free Market is almost always the right civic (unless you can't get open borders with enough trading partners) until health becomes a serious issue. For a large empire the debate comes down to Mercantilism vs. State Property. I think in BTS State Property is probably better, mostly because of the Caste System change to Workshops, but in Warlords I usually stay in Mercantilism.

I think all of your analysis is too focused on the tile yield and not enough on GPPs. If you look at the lightbulb value of Great Scientists a Scientist Specialist can easily be generating dozens of beakers per turn, making the Pyramids and Represenation non-essential. Of course now it gets messy because even a Financial leader will have a GP farm, and you have to start figuring out how many fewer GPs are you generating vs. a full out SE. My experience has been early lighbulbing is more than enough to get to Constitution and Biology well before the AI, at which point specialists by themselves are enough to keep the lead. At Emperor I need to be close to the lead in land, but at Immortal I need a significant land lead. I don't have enough experience with a fully maxed out CE for a Financial civ at Immortal to know how much land is necessary to win, mostly becase when I try CE on Immortal I never get to that point :lol.

Darrell

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Blake


If you haven't fallen irrevocably in love with Bureaucracy yet, I suggest not doing so. All the legal civics are useful.

*snip*

I've actually run the numbers a couple of times and decided it was roughly a wash (for the particular empires I had) between BUR and FS (loaded game in GA, switched, looked at numbers, reloaded, switched to a different set of civics, etc). My cap will have Oxford (almost every time) and thus it's not just the straight commerce. In the games where I tested out switching to FS, culture pressure wasn't an issue. I've no doubt it can be useful, it's just that it wasn't applicable in those games.

I will have to ponder the Vassalage/Theo combo some more... but I quite often ignore Theology entirely, so I would have to choose to research it with malice aforethought Which, obviously, sets me back from other research goals.

-Arrian

[-FC-Commando]

My fav's are Monarchy, Nationhood, Serfdom, State Property and Theocracy.

Monarchy for war weariness, Nationhood for extra happiness from barracks, Serfdom for quick workers, State Property for my big civ and theocracy for exp units and i hate foreign religion in my Civ.

[Blake]

Originally posted by darrelljs
Killing foreign trade goes both ways though, so you are denying your opponents lucrative trade routes into your cities.

Quite true, it's a point I forgot to touch on.

A large empire sends out a lot of trade. This is a double edged sword. Not all AI's are your opponents, some are your trade partners and will help you keep up in tech with the leading AI's.

Like say you have some friendly middle of the pack AI's which are barely able to keep up in tech - this basically makes them useful trade partners (AI's which are far behind, or are leading, are not useful trade partners...). It would probably be in your benefit for them to have extra commerce so they can research more techs for you to trade. Rather than shutting down all trade routes, you might be better off just closing borders with the antagonist civs.
Merchantalism can deprive your trading block of A LOT more beakers than the simple analysis suggests.

[Blake]

Originally posted by Arrian


I've actually run the numbers a couple of times and decided it was roughly a wash (for the particular empires I had) between BUR and FS (loaded game in GA, switched, looked at numbers, reloaded, switched to a different set of civics, etc). My cap will have Oxford (almost every time) and thus it's not just the straight commerce.

This is the distinction between a trade-based and town-based Oxfords capital.

Depending on circumstances, towns gain +40% to +33% commerce from Free Speech. So if much of your commerce is coming from Towns, then the impact of switching to FS will be blunted significantly.

But it's also possible to have a trade based capital, say on a coast, with a lot of water tiles, it's pulling in 60 raw commerce from trade alone. That big block of commerce is not increased by FS, nor is the commerce from the water tiles. This means you need *significantly* more towns at other cities.

Personally I tend to lean towards production capitals with minimal commerce improvements, thus once I get Ironworks up (usually a priority) I can shift into FS with few qualms, and I can also use Vassalage whenever I please (like when I'm not needing concentrated hammers to snag wonders).

[darrelljs]

Originally posted by Blake
It would probably be in your benefit for them to have extra commerce so they can research more techs for you to trade. Rather than shutting down all trade routes, you might be better off just closing borders with the antagonist civs.

Hmm...you are right, that's probably true in a majority of the situations.

Darrell