I like ORG over FIN. Is something wrong with me?

[Theben]

I meant by decreasing the cost of extra cities. Unless that is what got 'nerfed' from vanilla to Warlords. I'll admit I haven't played an ORG civ since switching to BtS.

[Blake]

I've always preferred Org over Fin.

The main thing is that Org works well for expansionist play styles - the bigger and faster you grow, the more Org does for you. Fin is far more neutral, it provides some benefit to large empires, but provides relatively equal benefit to small empires... Org provides more benefit to the rapidly expanding empire.

Org has two really great qualities:
1) Cheap courthouses.
2) Freedom from Anarchy

By the latter, I mean you run a very restricted set of civics and have fun. Vassalage and Org Rel are so nice for organized leaders, since the main penalty of these civics is nullified, while they are perfectly conductive to what you want to do... that is, expand expand expand!
Vassalage gives you stronger military, and Org Rel lets you crank out the missionaries and essential infrastructure (Granary, barracks, courthouse type thing).

Organized goes great with religion (shrines) because you typically have lots of cities, and are running Org Rel so missionaries are easy to mass produce. Of course you should endeavor to capture a shrine rather than building it yourself .

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Theben
I meant by decreasing the cost of extra cities. Unless that is what got 'nerfed' from vanilla to Warlords. I'll admit I haven't played an ORG civ since switching to BtS.

Org decreases the civics cost, not the cities' cost. That is linked to size/cities/etc. I believe, but the 'number of cities' maintenance and the 'distance' maintenance is not reduced in ORG, no.

[Garth Vader]

I thought that the cities maintenance was reduced in ORG as well. I haven't done an official test for real numbers but I know it feels like I can support more cities.

[Quillan]

Financial in vanilla let you build half-price banks. That was removed with Warlords. I've been playing with both recently, and overall I think I too prefer Organized to Financial. FIN does give a nice initial benefit in the early game, if you have the setup to take advantage of it, but as you grow the savings from ORG become so huge it generally overtakes the financial benefit.

[wodan11]

Early benefit is generally better.

While ORG may have a better late-game benefit, to do a proper comparison we should factor in the time change.

It's like when people say "19XX dollars" or "the same cost in 2008 dollars" or whatever. 10 commerce in the Ancient era is worth far FAR more than 10 commerce in the Modern era.

On the other hand, it to a great extent depends on your strategy. Perhaps you're playing a "tight" game with the plan to build up and have a modern era domination, or something. That would totally change the estimation of which Trait woudl be more beneficial.

Wodan

[Blake]

Basically financial provides a boost to commerce, and Organized provides a boost to production.

If you try to maximize production as Financial, you wont benefit any additional commerce... to benefit from Financial, you basically need cottages.

But you CAN maximize production as Organized and get some liberation from expenses. Courthouses are built with production, missionaries are built with production, that kind of thing. So strong production goes great with organized.

That's the important thing to understand, Financial is commerce-centric and organized is production-centric...

Generally the production vector is king, because everything is built with production, and having a massive number of units results in victorious wars - even if the units are a little obsolete.
And vassalage helps to support the massive spammed army of organized...

Because taking peoples stuff rules in CIV, when you play to the strengths of Organized it's ultimately a better trait than financial... even if for a "normal" empire (where you've had to compromise production for commerce to pay expenses), it might be a wash...

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Blake

Org has two really great qualities:
1) Cheap courthouses.
2) Freedom from Anarchy

By the latter, I mean you run a very restricted set of civics and have fun. Vassalage and Org Rel are so nice for organized leaders, since the main penalty of these civics is nullified, while they are perfectly conductive to what you want to do... that is, expand expand expand!
Vassalage gives you stronger military, and Org Rel lets you crank out the missionaries and essential infrastructure (Granary, barracks, courthouse type thing).

I’m not sure I agree that this is such a strong argument. It may be partly because I am not very good at looking after costs so tend largely to ignore civic costs from most decisions I make. Or perhaps, its just that I assume they all get thrown into the overall comparison of benefits and costs for any civic. In other words, if the benefits of the civic are high enough, then I don’t mind paying the costs because I get a higher benefit from that civic. Civic costs feature more as a second order consequence of the decision as to which civic I use.

So something like Org Rel, will have important benefits at certain points in the game – largely in that early phase when critical infrastructure is being whipped. After that, I will tend to look towards Pacifism at a time when I can churn out lots of GPs. Or, if I am being more aggressive, Theology might feature.

My belief is that all Org does is change the civic cost element of this calculation and so makes the high cost civics more benefit. But it is still only half of a second-order calculation therefore does not fundamentally change how I select civics.

To give a rather crude example, let’s suppose I can value the benefits of running Organised at 100 (choose whatever currency you like). And suppose it also costs 50. That’s a benefit of +50 to me (or +75 with Org).

Now let’s suppose that I want to run Pacifism whose benefits are 200 (same currency) but costs 50 for unit costs and 20 civic costs. The net benefit is therefore +130 for non-ORG and +140 for ORG. In other words, both prefer Pacifism in this case. Let’s also suppose that we have a fixed timeframe in which we will run Pacifism so there is an additional cost of anarchy that has to be recovered over that time frame. I’ll call this cost 10 to give the comparative benefits at

Non-Org 120 (Pacifism) vs 50 (Org Rel)
Org 130 (Pacifism) vs 75 (Org Rel)

All that changes is the marginal benefit from switching.

Of course, the comparison will be different if the “benefits” of Pacifism are lower or those or Org Rel are higher. For example, reduce Pacifism’s value to 140 and the comparison is 60 vs 50 for Non-Org and 70 vs 75 for Org.

So all Org is doing here is changing the threshold at which we will want to change civics. In particular, it increases the relative values of running higher cost civics. But whether this changes the number of times that civics are switched is a completely different matter. All it seems to say to me is that, if you decide to go for a domination win early, you can make an early decision on civics and stay with them forever. But that's true of almost any early decision on victory conditions.

[Blake]

couerdelion, you should try using numbers for an expansive warmongering empire with a large army, rather than a small empire running an enormous number of specialists.

[fed1943]

So, with Fin both commerce profit and expenses are bigger, with Org
both are smaller.
Let's assume I don't care about expenses and adopt the civics I like.
And I expand by war.
Then, it is cities+pop for Org v. coastal+cottages+happy resources
for Fin (windmills left out because I want production).
I guess Fin shall not be left behind and it's faster.
Best regards,

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Blake
couerdelion, you should try using numbers for an expansive warmongering empire with a large army, rather than a small empire running an enormous number of specialists.

I’m not disputing the fact that the scenario you’ve identified is one where the civic comparison will suggest the production/military civics but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy and relies on the assumption that you have effectively chosen your victory conditions almost from the start based on the ORG trait.

Perhaps I am one of those people who likes a bit of variation in games so prefer to go for the alternative victory – because I agree that domination is probably the default setting. The only problem with this approach is that you sometimes find that terrain doesn’t help you and forcing yourself through a domination route then becomes either monotonous or unnecessarily fiddly.

p.s. The numbers were purely hypothetical so bear little resemblance to any reality.

[Blake]

Originally posted by couerdelion


I’m not disputing the fact that the scenario you’ve identified is one where the civic comparison will suggest the production/military civics but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy and relies on the assumption that you have effectively chosen your victory conditions almost from the start based on the ORG trait.

It's like Aggressive and going to war . You have to maximize the benefit of the trait. For organized, that means rapid expansion, at sword point if it can't be done peacefully.

[MJW]

Expending so much that it guts your econ. is active.

Sitting back and enjoying the extra gold is passive.

[MJW]

This is a good example about what Blake was talking about:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=178607&page=7

[Supr49er]

Originally posted by Hauptman
You could always just play Darius and get them both...

If you windmill rivered hills and cotages along rivers, Financial is HUGE early game.

Cheap factories are real nice. But org's other traits are too hard to even notice..

Darius is pretty good to play as.