Emperor games C3C: how to improve your skills

[Mountain Sage]

1700AD: The Culture Powergraph. This is the price you pay when you don’t build Temples, Libraries and Universities soon enough.

[Mountain Sage]

1700AD: The typical mid-Industrialization build-up.
Techs: we just got Steel and grabbed Hoover Dam; 5 turns to Wall Street, Byzance has Communism. Gold 10’981 (-109/turn), Combustion in 10 turns.
Military: 9 Riflemen, 18 Cavs, 43 Infantry (at 75 gold/each from Swiss Mercs!). Total 138 units cost 86 gold/turn.

[Mountain Sage]

1814AD: Byzance has Fission and Computers. 7’230 gold (+0/turn) and Space Flight in 17 turns.
Militray: 45 Marine, 9 Transport, 19 Destroyers, 5 Marine Armies, total 184 units.
All Marines are pre-positioned. If I don’t manage to steal these 2 techs…

[Mountain Sage]

1861 AD: My Marines are still fishing in their boats. Byzance went to war with Rome and the Hittites and the Inca, which stopped all its research. The game’s over with +3 techs and 12’700 gold. This is another example of the AI killing itself.


My next game (beginning of January) will be extreme archipelago and all seafaring civs (we as the Vikings?).

See you then (I will be on holiday for two weeks, no Civ and no alcohol! )
Yes, it IS a holiday (or should I say holyday?)

[nbarclay]

MS, did you pay any attention to what building your FP did to your waste and corruption? I ended up finally building mine around the middle of what used to be the Byzantine continent in 1625, and it ended up really costing me in corruption in outlying areas from my original core. The effect was especially noticeable in what had originally been Portugal, some of which I'd managed to get in pretty good shape. If I caught and recorded things correctly, building the FP cost me close to 20% of my research initially, but that was before I finished my conquest and started getting conquered cities up to speed. (I wish I'd thought to save the game before and after the FP was completed so I could do a more precise and careful comparison.)

Nathan

[nbarclay]

I finished my game, but I'm not ready to finish reporting on it yet. After the game, I tried an experiment abandoning my Forbidden Palace city to see how that would affect my empire. With science at 100%, I got 1909 science per turn with the Forbidden Palace and 2082 science per turn without it. With the science slider at zero, I was at +1697 gold per turn (including some foreign income and a bunch of cities set to wealth) with the Forbidden Palace and +1810 without.

With the Forbidden Palace corruption bug, it is almost certainly possible for a second core to be a net benefit eventually, but only after the second core is nearly as well developed as the original. While the second core is being brought up to speed, it is a drain on the civ's economy. If a second core cannot be set up by the early industrial era, I seriously doubt that its benefit after it is brought up to speed can outweigh its cost before.

Mountain Sage, I'd be curious to know the results if you would load your last save and compare your income before and after abandoning your Forbidden Palace city. That would give a data point on the effects of a Forbidden Palace located close to the capital.

[Mountain Sage]

Sorry about the late reply, I tried to put together some figures about the influence of the Palace/FP in my game.

The Palace was trasferred from Erin to Ur in 890 AD (via a GL), when the FP in The Hague was 6 turns away. Why? Because I was at war with Rome and I wanted to use the GL immediately, hoping to get another one (which I didn’t, of course).
And why in Ur and not in Eschende, for instance? I wanted to avoid to ‘lose’ the axis Umma-Breda, and the terrain was anyway better there.

In 980AD, the PF went up accordingly in The Hague.

Overall statistics (I smoothed them out for those 3 years)
880AD: income 518, expenses 531, corruption –286. Theology in 1 turn research 40%, happiness 10%
890AD: income 525, expenses 543, corruption –302. Education in 17 turns, research 40%, happiness 10%.
980AD: income 596, expenses 572, corruption –291. Education in 6 turns, research 40%, happiness 10%.

It seems that the transfer of the Palace and the building of the FP did not affect much the income and corruption figures, as well as the tech research.

Some statistics for my towns:
Town name / red-bue shields in 880AD / red-blue shields in 890AD / red-blue shields in 980AD / net gain-loss shields 880AD/980AD

Delft 1-2 / 2-1 / 0-1 / 0
Lauersoog 1-2 / 2-1 / 4-1/ -4
Erin 0-11 / 11-1 / 3-10 / -4
Den Helder 0-1 / 0-1 / 0-1 / 0
Roxane 0-3 / 6-2 / 1-11 / +7
The Hague 3-14 / 9-9 / 1-17 / +5
Eindhoven 4-4 / 1-7 / 2-6 / +4
Arnhem 2-1/ 2-1 / 2-1 / 0
Utrecht 5-4 / 7-2 / 6-4/ -1
Groningen 5-5 / 6-5 / 7-4 / -3
Umma 4-4 / 5-3 / 7-1 / -6
Lagash 8-7 / 4-11 / 6-9 / +3
Maastricht 4-7 / 3-8 / 3-9 / +3
Breda 4-2 / 2-4 / 2-4/ +4
Holwerd 2-1 / 1-2 / 2-2/ +1
Haarlem 1-6 / 15-3 / 0-7 / +2
Ur 11-4 / 0-11 / 0-17 / +24
Sumer 5-1 / 2-4 / 2-4 / +6
Leiden 2-1 / 2-2 / 1-3 / +3
Enschede 7-1 / 3-5 / 4-4 / +6
Emerita 4-1 / 3-2 / 4-1 / 0
Lagos 12-1 / 9-4 / 12-1 / 0
Sagres 2-1 / 2-1 / 2-1 / 0
Oporto 5-1 / 4-2 / 5-1 / 0
All others without changes (I forgot Middleburg).

Overall winners: Roxane, The Hague, Eindhoven, Lagash, Maastricht, Breda, Holwerd, Haarlem Ur, Sumer, Leiden, Enschede total + 68 shields.
Overall losers: Lauersoog, Erin, Utrecht, Groningen, Umma, total – 18 shields.
Overall shield benefit: +50 shields.

If you put the difference on the map, you’ll see that all the cities near Ur are +, as well as those between Ur and The Haugue. The losers are cities on the northern fringes included Erin (3 tiles only from the FP).

My conclusion is thet even with the corruption bug (in this game at least), it is worth building the FP, but you must pay special attention not to penalize your most productive cities (as Erin, Umma and Groningen).

You’ll find below 2 screenshots with the map and the grids. I’ll let Alexman & Co. to give us better statistics. I’m off for 2 weeks, see you in 2004, but keep me informed!

[Mountain Sage]

And the eastern part:

[Mountain Sage]

The useless part

[Enriquillo]

Just started this game, first emperor game in a long time (before PTW). It's not so bad as I remembered. You just have to check your happiness every turn, so no lazy playing anymore.

I pulled one of my new favorite tricks in C3C: I researched Code of Laws and then Philosophy and got Republic as my free tech. I started switching governments in 1400 BC.

I pulled the same trick, thanks for letting me borrow a good idea. I didn't think I could beat the comp to Philosophy doing this, but I did.

My start was a bit different from the others, I moved towards the coast before settling A'dam. R'dam was founded close by and The Hague was on Ivory. Needed that luxury real bad on emperor.
Utrecht was to become my military outpost to jump onto Sumeria whenever the time would arrive.
After that I settled 2 cities close to A'dam, to try and turn them into decent military producing settlements.

So far I'm way ahead of you guys (it helps not having to build much military vs the AI)

[Enriquillo]

1000BC now, 13 turns from Currency and choosing to stay in Despotism for now. Republic is too expensive at this stage I reckon.
Also just 8 turns from Zeus, so can't waste any time on anarchy.
Those Ancient Cav rock! Makes it so much easier to defeat those sissy Sumerians.
The Mausoleum is just a prebuild for the great library, i'll let the sumerians build the Mausoleum before I take their capital, hehe.

I had a bit of an advantage with my navy, due to knowing exactly where to sail to, so I won't brag about that bit
Did some good trading and found all other civs soon after this screenshot was taken.

[Enriquillo]

Ok, last post for tonite, 270bc , two Sumerian cities down, a couple more to go.
Took their capital the turn after their free temple wonder thingie got completed, NICE!

[vmxa1]

Sounds good, don't forget that those temples it makes are not perm, you will need to build your own at some point or go with temples.

[Cerbykins]

LEarned the hard way by me, right in the middle of a major war with war weariness to worry about

Still...when it does finally wear off...you've got the good you wanted out of it in the first place. You probably have a load of marketplaces and such up to sort happiness, while the wonder quelled the problem REALLY early on. Plus, the culture the temples gave IS permanent, so your borders stay built

[Enriquillo]

130BC, I'm happy to report the Sumerians have left the building

My capital is moved to Eindhoven and the GL completed in Amsterdam. I'm still the ruling despot of my prospering nation.
The big money grab is under way, science at zero and still researching due to a specialist or two.

It turned out I only got one free tech from the GL before I turned up the science again. I had met every other civ, it felt like I was playing on a lower level, not emperor for sure.