My latest savegame...

[Tim_Augustus]

Originally posted by jez9999
What are 'white goods'?

He means city improvements (temples, marketplaces etc)

[Bloody Monk]

"What are white goods?"

Sorry for the confusion. Tim has it right.

Call up the City List, F1
Unit like things are in yellow
WOWs are in Cyan (?)
Improvements are in white

Hence "white goods".

It used to be a common expression around these parts. Of course, Forum activity used to be a given too.

Monk

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by jez9999
What are 'white goods'?

I believe white goods are buildings such as banks, markets and so on.

RJM

(Whoops - sorry about the spam - I posted before I realised the question had already been answered twice!)

[Verrucosus]

I have never used smilies so far, but one for slapping my own head would be appropriate under the circumstances. The improvements are important factors in the calculation and they were not otherwise mentioned whereas the trade goods I thought of are part of the "quality" of the trade routes.

Bloody Monk also included the number of cities that the player wants to get celebrating in this list (definition of "most"). I used to take it for granted that one needs a large part of the empire to celebrate to make the operation worthwhile and that is still true, if the aim is to simulate the representative trade bonus under an autocratic government (which was the angle I came from given jez's comments about the merits of Communism). We'd still have to exclude cities with less than three citizens and cities (e. g. mining towns) with so little intrinsic trade value that it would take an extremely high luxury rate and give a comparatively low return to have them celebrating. Generally speaking it's a question of whether more luxuries are wasted in less developed cities by keeping the rate too low to get them to celebrate or in highly developed cities by raising the rate beyond the level necessary to maintain the celebration there.

Is there any merit in raising the luxury rate only enough to have the very best cities or even just the science city celebrate? I'd imagine that the waste of unnessary luxuries in the rest of the empire (assuming it is large enough to justify abandoning Democracy in the first place) would be too high, but there might be situations where the economy is driven almost exclusively by the core cities while the rest is used to produce troops and not even given a minimum of "white goods".

Verrucosus

[jez9999]

I often find myself using the core cities to build troops simply because the peripheral/conquered cities are so darn slow to build as they're relatively undeveloped (I always build the Pyramids wonder to try and alleviate this problem).

In addition, I don't tend to place much value on a military unit's longevity, so have a high churn rate. I am experimenting with building barracks in many cities at the start of games now, though, but this is annoying as they're expensive both in time and in maintenance, as well as needing rebuilding halfway through the game. Sun Tzu's gets obsoleted relatively quickly too, so my only vet units tend to be through valor in combat.

[debeest]

In a game where you choose to build Sun Tzu (because you're planning to conquer rather than land), once you get skilled at it, you're likely never to get to the point where Sun Tzu is obsolete. You'll conquer before then, either with elephants and crusaders, or with cavalry.

[Bloody Monk]

Celebrating Fundy

Originally posted by Verrucosus
Generally speaking it's a question of whether more luxuries are wasted in less developed cities by keeping the rate too low to get them to celebrate or in highly developed cities by raising the rate beyond the level necessary to maintain the celebration there.

Verrucosus

Exactly. And every game is different--hence the list of variables.

What I do is ramp up the Lux to 60-80%--and adjust any 'laggards' so their workers are on tiles generating more arrows--to get the Max number of cities celebrating. Remember it only takes the one turn to get the celebrations started, and they can then be sustained at a lower setting. Then I dial Lux back to 30 and see what that looks like, using income metric as a comparison. (Then 20, then 10.) What you decide is optimum will depend on how that game has developed.

Monk

[jez9999]

Originally posted by debeest
In a game where you choose to build Sun Tzu (because you're planning to conquer rather than land), once you get skilled at it, you're likely never to get to the point where Sun Tzu is obsolete. You'll conquer before then, either with elephants and crusaders, or with cavalry.

Some of us find it fun to play til the space race. :-) You bloodythirsty cannibal, you.

[debeest]

I like space race, too. But then Sun Tzu is not the place to spend your production, thassall I'm sayin'.