Economic Scholia

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by DeepO

Oh, I'm just joking here, of course... I still consider one of the best things for this kind of calculation Excell, so it's not really needed to write programs or so. But many people have a handcalculator on their desk next to their pc, while the same thing exists in the start menu. Somehow, people are not used to thinking of a PC as a big calculator

For the things it can do, I generally regard a good old-fashioned hand calculator as both easier to start and easier to use than the calculator program is. Plus, the hand calculator doesn't cover up part of the computer screen. In my view, Windows' calculator is most useful either when a good hand calculator isn't handy or when the results of a calculation need to be copied into a program.

[DeepO]

The biggest advantage of windows calculator? It doesn't get lost under stacks of paper on my desk

I guess I could of course also tidy my desk, but for that I'm too lazy

DeepO

[Arrian]

I still say we contact Soren and just ask him about disease from fp.

-Arrian

[alexman]

Well, I did a simple test, and the answer is 0.5% per tuen chance of disease for every floodplains tile a city is working.

I think that's good news. Before getting two settlers out, the plan is to work flood plains for about 10 turns with the city larger than size 1. That means that we have about a 5% chance of getting hit before we have 3 cities. Not bad odds.

[Dominae]

Thanks for the info alexman. From experience, I was sure the figure was under 2%. If we are alone, we'll be glad to have Flood Plains, because your REX phase will be awesome (I'm secretly hoping for a Flood Plain with Wheat just North of our capital...oh yeah, that would nice).


Dominae

[zeit]

These are good news indeed.
Working those floodplains also suits our culture- we are egyptian after all, and deserve to some nile running through our empire.

btw, what's REX?
i realize it has something do with the speed of expansion...

[notyoueither]

Rapid, Early Expansion.

It entails building settlers soonest, have cities founded by settlers build settlers soonest.

It is related to the geometric model of expansion. City builds two cities. They build two cities. They build two cities...

Sometimes, a food rich city will build many more than two settlers.

[zeit]

Yes, sounds just like what i studied at Ecology classes: on the basic level you have the unlimited growth potential of a population (exponential), then you add the layer of enviromental limitation (like land, and food producing tiles, in our case), the most complex limitation we have studied so far was inter-species competition (aka- other teams grabbing our land). In the end, such competetion can lead to a state of equalibrium (we decide to stay in our territory, and they in theirs) or one species takes control and wipes out the other (from that habitat, that is).

[DeepO]

Originally posted by zeit
In the end, such competetion can lead to a state of equalibrium (we decide to stay in our territory, and they in theirs) or one species takes control and wipes out the other.

When I had biology (long time ago), I was taught differently... shouldn't that be:

In the end, such competetion can lead to a state of equalibrium or our species takes control and wipes out the rest ?

As to the 0.5%: good news indeed. Thanks for testing it, oh mighty Kalif! (Are we allowed to slime(translation?) outside our PBEM threads?)

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Thanks, Alex. Would you mind describing more about the methodology behind your test?

If we do find out we're on an island, I want to research Pottery the moment we finish The Wheel so cities with food bonuses can grow faster. In the absence of enemies, we can go with a pure REX strategy, and we'll need very heavy REXing to avoid being left in everyone else's dust.

[alexman]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Would you mind describing more about the methodology behind your test?

Not at all:
1) Create map with nothing but floodplains.
2) Place 100 cities of size 2 on the map, and change their center tile and another of their tiles to bonus grassland. (Each city is working a bonus grassland and a floodplains tile).
3) Play the first turn of many games (64 in my case).
4) Record the total number of cities that were affected by disease in all tests.
5) Divide the total number of disease instances by the total number of tests to get the answer in percent.

Edit: When you change the non-center grassland tiles to flood plains, the cities are working two flood plains tiles instead of one, and you get twice as many disease occurances.

[nbarclay]

A total of 6400 city-turns ought to be a very solid sample size! Thanks again for the work you put into it.

[Shiber]

That's great news!
Alexman, for running these tests.

[alexman]

Actually, I just realized that I ran half as many tests with the two floodplains worked per city, but forgot to multiply my results by 2. So the answer is 0.5% per floodplains tile, not per city.

The 5-warrior plan has us working 14 flood plain tiles (in 10 turns) before the third settler is done, so that means about 7% chance to get hit by desease before 3 cities.

[nbarclay]

Still not a bad gamble.