Best governments...

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Dominae
The problem with the Monarchy beeline is that the Republic beeline has something extra going for it: the free tech from Philosophy. You would have to be building a lot of troops (at the expense of your REX) for Monarchy to make more sense economically. Might as well just REX better, build up faster, and strike stronger but later.

Ahhhh... you forget the Feudalism beeline.

[joncnunn]

Fascism is for when you currently have a small in size empire that's extremely well developed [mostly Metros high enough to still be a Metro upon switching] and want to conquer the world.
The very high free unit support for Metros in this govt will allow you to afford to build that large army of Tanks / Panzers and then send them forth.

Communism is for when your empire is already realtively large but the cities aren't as developed and you want to conquer the world. Equal unit support across city sizes and the communial shield production will allow lots of cities to build military units to conquer still more territory.

Conquests didn't add any peaceful govts, it just toned Republic up and in the process gave it too similar to Democracy in many players mind to be worth the switch. Conquests also increased max anarchy by 1 turn for everybody to 2 turns Religious 9 turns non-Religious and also made it partly dependenant upon # of cities in the empire, which also discourages changing of govts for non-religious for the humans. [AI doesn't care : correct AI behvivor on Emperor+ given AI max govt transistion time, but wrong on lower leveles]

Originally posted by theDragon
I know that I may be commiting Civ-blasphomy because I STILL have yet to get Conquests (which keeps sounding better and better ) But I have to ask a few questions that i feel have to be addressed:

What happened to Fascism? And Monarchy? I mean, I play a normal game by beeling to Monarchy then making my way out to Democracy or Republic later. Communism if war is going to be a long deal. But the unspoken of (certainly not without justification ) has been Fascism. Is there any good reason why you/the AI would ever choose such a government? I mean, do you all find any AI using it, and does anyone use it at all? Or is it once again just between two standard governmental systems?

[joncnunn]

First, we can ignore SPHQ on distance corruption. Only commie's can build (or benifit from) it and they have no distance corruption.

I suspect you were trying to place the FP city too far from the palace, resulting in every city out there naturally being at max corruption with a Court House.

That city really should be in the 35 - 50% shields wasted under most govts with a Court House unless you really luck out on luxaries in the early game. Unless you get a MGL, the entire region should also have had Court Houses built prior to the FP compelting. Under Republic, that can be done via cash rushing, just like the CH and MP of the city building the FP probably were.

Attached is my latest turn, in the early 600s with my FP build in progress. It was initally placed with the intention of playing peaceful rest of game, athough a small annexation of America to get the Saltpeter would also be supported by this placement.

All cities owned by me were peacefully built during my REX with the exception of New Orleans which I demanded the Americans had over with 2 Warriors right outside its boundary the turn it was built, and Lincoln complied.

Originally posted by lebensraum

well ... ... it depends

in theory fp still gives a second core, it's just that the second core ain't worth - blip

corruption by distance is still reset according to fp location. ie corruption due to distance is calculated based on the nearest corruption reducing wonder. There are three of these - palace, fp and sphq.

corruption due to city rank is not reset by proximity to fp. ie - city rank is calculated purely according to distance from the palace. this is the major difference with c3c.

corruption is capped anyway. so reducing distance corruption in a city with high rank has no real effect. the cities surrounding fp get no benefit unless they are in the unusual situation of having high distance but low rank.

otherwise, like you said, it basically just increases the ocn and cuts corruption in the actual fp city

how jon manages to get two cores out of that lot is a mystery hidden from we mortals



Of course things are different under communism, but to discuss that i'd be getting dangerously close to on-topic

[joncnunn]

I'm thinking a Fascist player attacking a player with stronger culture should just raize to the ground every city he takes.
(Well, maybe wait a turn after capturing and then hiting the abandon city button in some cases where it would speed the conquest of the next city.)

Later, there will be living space for his tribe to settle down in.

Originally posted by Theseus

Yes, this well and truly sucks. You're gonna be in Fascism to BE a warmonger... The lack of cultural expansion was a major PITA in AU 505.

My answer in that game was mediocre: In an effort to benefit from the many captured improvements, I was building cultural improvements via poprush (they still fend off CFing, I believe), and making up for the lack of cultural expansion by laying down late-game camps all over the place, at 2- and 3-tile CP from captured cities. Ugly.

The best approach that I can think of (post-playing 505, unfortunately), would be to poprush units while selling off improvements, get a captured city down to a very low pop and no buildings of note, and just abandon the dang thing, replacing it with your own de novo town. Laborious, at best.

[Modo44]

Originally posted by joncnunn
I'm thinking a Fascist player attacking a player with stronger culture should just raize to the ground every city he takes.
(Well, maybe wait a turn after capturing and then hiting the abandon city button in some cases where it would speed the conquest of the next city.)

Later, there will be living space for his tribe to settle down in.

Pop-rush a Granary, pop-rush whatever you need (Courthouse, culture, ...), at size 5 pop-rush a Settler (you'll probably want it anyway, given the bad AI city spacing). City gets to size 1, with Granary and lots of food (AI territory will usually have too much Irrigation) - quickly becoming 3, and accumulating culture. Works every time.

[Commy]

Seriously, in real-life, I don't see corruption being based off distance from the capital. Look at America. You don't see Los Angeles half corrupted because it's on the other side of the country. Then look at Mexico. The capital is right in the middle, and I think you get the picture there...

[vmxa1]

What difference does ti make how they choose to model it? They picked a way and now we are force to use it. Matters not to me how they do it, just so long as they tell me how.

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Commy
Seriously, in real-life, I don't see corruption being based off distance from the capital. Look at America.

America counts as a Democracy for Civ3 purposes. Extremely low corruption. And, it counts as a well developed country, having Courthouses and Police Stations everywhere.

To couter that, take a look at Russia. In Civ3, they are an underdeveloped, huge, Republic. And corruption is killing them.

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by joncnunn
First, we can ignore SPHQ on distance corruption. Only commie's can build (or benifit from) it and they have no distance corruption.

oops ...

I suspect you were trying to place the FP city too far from the palace

(/ ot & already common knowledge)
this is something i've yet to get a proper handle on - needs more practise.
but, your fp core still sounds more like an enhancement of the first core. ie. something of a crescent-shaped extension to the original core. i guess when i was talking about a 'second core' i meant an independent section of territory, with its own radius of productive cities.
i'm inclined to think 'core' is not the right term for (c3c) fp-enhanced territory.

seems like it's more about finding the right conjunction between palace/ fp location and it is proximity to the palace which is the critical factor in a city's productivity.

for eg. let's say (squidgy figures here ok!) you have ocn = 10. a city right next to the fp with rank 50 is not going to benefit. so to me, it's not part of the core. but a city with rank 15, which might be on the far side of the empire will benefit significantly. so in terms of productivity, it's definitely in the F-PET

sorry people i'll just go away now, and wait till mark creates the civ3-semantics forum

(/ot ... honest)

Attached is my latest turn, in the early 600s with my FP build in progress. .

thanks, j ... it'll take me a few days to get a look at it,
our people are technologically backward

but thanks for letting me look over your shoulder

[joncnunn]

In that game, ran out of space so yes, the FP core started at the P core.

Yes, rank order 50s is the wrong place for the FP.

And note that I did consider the city south of there [that settler granted by a goody hut], I narrowly rejected it on grounds that I'd be too tempted to declare war on America just to get New York [America got that one with a free settler from goody hut as well] with that location.

When the FP completed, I hadn't built the CH in the city north of it, so could see the double benifit offered by FP clearly in that case.

Edit : You guys will have to look up with the raw city number of the FP site I chose as well as the one I narrowly rejected if you wish to know them. I'm highly intutive with both the corruption patterns and city placement in Civ III. Note also that it's a large map. (Started with 8 civs though; I like a little extra space between civs.) As you can see I didn't quite explore throughly enough in a few spots before founding the city and consequentely missed some whales on the east coast.

Originally posted by lebensraum

(/ ot & already common knowledge)
this is something i've yet to get a proper handle on - needs more practise.
but, your fp core still sounds more like an enhancement of the first core. ie. something of a crescent-shaped extension to the original core. i guess when i was talking about a 'second core' i meant an independent section of territory, with its own radius of productive cities.
i'm inclined to think 'core' is not the right term for (c3c) fp-enhanced territory.

seems like it's more about finding the right conjunction between palace/ fp location and it is proximity to the palace which is the critical factor in a city's productivity.

for eg. let's say (squidgy figures here ok!) you have ocn = 10. a city right next to the fp with rank 50 is not going to benefit. so to me, it's not part of the core. but a city with rank 15, which might be on the far side of the empire will benefit significantly. so in terms of productivity, it's definitely in the F-PET

sorry people i'll just go away now, and wait till mark creates the civ3-semantics forum

(/ot ... honest)



thanks, j ... it'll take me a few days to get a look at it,
our people are technologically backward

but thanks for letting me look over your shoulder

[Mace]

/off topic (sorry)

Originally posted by lebensraum
but, your fp core still sounds more like an enhancement of the first core. ie. something of a crescent-shaped extension to the original core. i guess when i was talking about a 'second core' i meant an independent section of territory, with its own radius of productive cities.
i'm inclined to think 'core' is not the right term for (c3c) fp-enhanced territory.

That's exactly what I was getting at earlier. I just didn't explain it nearly so well...

seems like it's more about finding the right conjunction between palace/ fp location and it is proximity to the palace which is the critical factor in a city's productivity.

for eg. let's say (squidgy figures here ok!) you have ocn = 10. a city right next to the fp with rank 50 is not going to benefit. so to me, it's not part of the core. but a city with rank 15, which might be on the far side of the empire will benefit significantly. so in terms of productivity, it's definitely in the F-PET

Seems like it. So this means, just make sure that the cities around the FP are low rank. In other words, when you place your FP, put it around cities of low rank. Is this a good way of thinking about it?

I wanted to make that one thing clear for myself...
/end offtopic

[Terra Nullius]

hey jon, sorry for the outrageous delay

hardware problems

as of last week, i finally posses my own rocket-fuelled 300 mhz p2 (with a whopping 3gig hard drive!)
which is great
did what any sensibe person would do and deleted everything except civ and de-fragged
then two days ago, the cd stops recognising disks
pull out that one, pop in a friend's cd drive and it says my hard drive's failed.
remove all cd-drives and the machine wakes up and makes the coffee

i'm heading back to my place to try out my american screwdriver ...
if that don't fix it what will?

anyway .. sorry but this is taking forever
i'll get back to you when i've got a solution
cheers

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by Mace
So this means, just make sure that the cities around the FP are low rank. In other words, when you place your FP, put it around cities of low rank. Is this a good way of thinking about it?

again.. sorry for the delay mace

no. it's probably still a confusing and unhelpful way to think about it

the cruel gods of civ constrain me once again to repeat my mantra ..
dominae was right

interms of placement, you might as well ignore the cities surrounding the fp. this is sort of contrary to what jon and i have been going on about.
i guess i'm looking for places where special contingencies or tactics might allow you squeeze a few extra drops out of the corruption formulae.

as i general rule, i'm more inclined to say, put your fp in any city that has good production/ potential

the thing is, some cities will benefit from building the fp, but only rarely will a city benefit from actually being close to the fp. so unless you have a personal strategy to do otherwise, the only thing you really need to think about is to make sure the actual fp city is decent

now as to timing the fp build on the other hand ...

[Dominae]

Originally posted by lebensraum
the cruel gods of civ constrain me once again to repeat my mantra ..
dominae was right

/me blushes

(I'm pretty sure it was alexman who made me see the light regarding building the FP - ASAP, in a high-Shield city.)

[UnOrthOdOx]

Originally posted by Modo44

Pop-rush a Granary, pop-rush whatever you need (Courthouse, culture, ...), at size 5 pop-rush a Settler (you'll probably want it anyway, given the bad AI city spacing). City gets to size 1, with Granary and lots of food (AI territory will usually have too much Irrigation) - quickly becoming 3, and accumulating culture. Works every time.

I also tend to mix in a few drafts for MP purposes as well, but yeah, that's about what it boils down to. Special bonus to having pyramids.