RCP question

[asleepathewheel]

I must've missed all the early talks of RCP and have just noticed it fairly recently. But I'm grateful that I only found out with a few weeks til its gone in Conquerors. It seems like more of a burden to me, knowing that I could have a more efficient empire, but at a price of feeling for the land. I want to eyeball the land and figure out the best defensive and productive locations. I do a lot of ralphing. (it keeps the weight down) I feel the pull of the min/max with this and I'm torn. Thank god they took out IFE quickly.

to Firaxis for fixing it.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Theseus
I don;t really bother with RCP outside of the first ring, and am still confused about what to do with the whole set up when the FP and a Palace jump come into play.

My fave is a 4/4.5 ring around the capital with usually 2 hopefully 3 (i'm playing a PBEM with FOUR!!!) camps (remember, the thing about the camps is that they get good productive land, if they are poor about production they are worthless, save the food for the settler/worker pumps). The camps are usually built at 2/2.5 although I am currently playing C3C beta game with the camps at 3/3.5 to good effect (that is they are 2-tiled not from the capital but from the inner ring).

However, I don't see why this setup does not forgo the defensive advantages of 3-tile since you can effectively 3-tile the inner ring between themselves. That is, 4-tile with respect to the capital, and 2-tile from the camps.

My general rule of thumb with rings after the inner one is simple: be flexible. That means don't RCP just for the sake of it since you might end up forgoing cities in more practical places. This means that your 2nd "ring", say 3-tiled from the inner ring can contain not one but perhaps two different city distances, usually 7/7.5 or 8/8.5. As you keep plopping more cities simply try and find good cities the same distance you have other cities.

This mentality helps when capturing cities. Say you just kicked the everliving crap out of your neighbor and captured distance 10, distance 9, and distance 12 cities. They are at good sites too. What do you do? Simply build all your next cities at any of those distances and you are effectively RCPing. Saves you a settler build from having to raze them and rebuild in an RCP way. I guess the best way to describe this technique would be "RCP backfilling".

Finally with regards to palace jumping and the FP, it really is not that hard if you follow a more-or-less strickt city placement style, be it 3-tile or 4-tile for example. Just try and get a feel of the continent as you are expanding, think of a good site that would make a good capital and jump there (and try to RCP a bit around it). By that time, strict RCPing should not be a priority since your empire will be large and you should be on your way to bigger and better things. RCP is best for the start which wreckless REXing can lead to corruption disasters, by the time you have 30+ cities, it really doesn't matter much, the best thing you can do is to try and build cities at distances you already have rather than build more and more perfectly placed rings.

With the FP there's a bit of a problem because of the famous FP corruption bug. If finally understood it well after reading some stuff at CFC. Bascially once you build the FP, you achieve rank 1 corruption for all cities which are closer to the FP than they are to the capital. This sounds a bit difficult to project at first (trust me, alexman explained it to me and I really didn't understand it until I saw a pic). The following threads at CFC should help:

this thread by Qitai explains the bug:

A Rank Corruption Discovery and Exploit to negate rank corruption


this is an EXCELLENT thread by SirPleb of the the bug in practice. Lots of pictures

SirPleb deity, with Palace rank exploit

hope this helps

[Solomwi]

That's why I friggin' love Arrian.

Apparently, I'm not the only one watching "Extreme History" with Roger Daltrey (History Channel).

In case I'm wrong, and assuming everyone knows that Roger Daltrey was the lead singer of The Who, you should all be watching it. If for no other reason because the promos are hilarious, with Roger chiming in after (voiceover) "on the History Channel"... "where the friggin' past comes alive" (voiceover) "In Roger's case, a little too alive." It is one of the most entertaining shows I've ever seen. Kind of like "The Osbournes" with class and educational value.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Solomwi
Apparently, I'm not the only one watching "Extreme History" with Roger Daltrey (History Channel).

In case I'm wrong, and assuming everyone knows that Roger Daltrey was the lead singer of The Who, you should all be watching it. If for no other reason because the promos are hilarious, with Roger chiming in after (voiceover) "on the History Channel"... "where the friggin' past comes alive" (voiceover) "In Roger's case, a little too alive." It is one of the most entertaining shows I've ever seen. Kind of like "The Osbournes" with class and educational value.

Damn, I'd love to see that show, too bad I've been cable-less for the last 2 months

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Solomwi


Apparently, I'm not the only one watching "Extreme History" with Roger Daltrey (History Channel).

In case I'm wrong, and assuming everyone knows that Roger Daltrey was the lead singer of The Who, you should all be watching it. If for no other reason because the promos are hilarious, with Roger chiming in after (voiceover) "on the History Channel"... "where the friggin' past comes alive" (voiceover) "In Roger's case, a little too alive." It is one of the most entertaining shows I've ever seen. Kind of like "The Osbournes" with class and educational value.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out. Now that I get directtv instead of crappy cable I actually get that channel and other interesting ones. Or at the very least I can tivo it and watch it when I have some free time.

[vmxa1]

I think that the advice on being flexible is on the money. I have started a pass as 4 ring and I hav tried to be flexible in the second ring.
I still have not done any work on camps, but expect to do some soon.
I suspect being flexible and not trying to jam all the cities I can into a 3 ting, would have worked better.
The other question I have been looking at is to jump out to do some second ring cities befor the first ring is finished.
I the situation I depict, it seems worht doing to cut of all access. This allow back filling a more leisurely pace.

In a 3 ring, you do not need any camps as such as you have any number of cities to use as camps. The other thing that you mentioned is easy to over look. The idea of using good production sites for the camps.
Thanks for the thoughts. I have read the threads, but will need many reading to get it to sink in.

[vmxa1]

BTW I have not watch the show as of yet. I am waiting for a topic that I have more interest in.

[Tolwyn]

I isually play no RCP or OCP but in a more ICS kind a way

In the "land-grab-phase" I always build in a CxxC form in all directions. only exception is if there's a special bonus tile on a intended city tile. I found this extremely powerfull as this allows me to work almost all tiles within my borders.This still allows me to have Size 15+ cities in late game (keep a few cities small)
On monarch level I outbuild and outxpand the AI in ancient times. then build forbidden palace in the centre of your then empire,pick a neighbour,take his good land and good cities and build your palace there with hopefully help from a GL. And voila ...an very efficient empire

[WackenOpenAir]

I use CRP.
i normally build my ring2 at distance 4 and 7.

you can use it to any extend you want to though.

if you would order all your cities from closest to capital to furthest away from it, you could have a list where all cities are at different distance. each city would than have like 4% more corruption than the one higher on the list.

city1, distance 2 : 20%
city2, distance 3 : 24%
city3, distance 4 : 28%
city4, distance 5 : 32%
...
etc.

now if you place 2 cities at the same distance, they will both be treathed as the closer one for waste. some examples.

city1, distance 2 : 20%
city2, distance 3 : 24%
city3, distance 3 : 24%
city4, distance 5 : 32 %
...

city1, distance 2 : 20%
city2, distance 2 : 20%
city3, distance 4 : 28%
city4, distance 4: 28%

in other words, you don't need to place all your cities in a ring in order to have a benefit, placing multiple cities always gives you a benefit. the more you place on the same distance, the greater the benefit though. the city ring is the highest benefit you can get.

actually i always placed my cities in a ring already before i ever read the article about it. while my rings were not 100% perfect, i did place far most of my cities at distance 4 - 4.5. simply because that is a good distance for a good empire where you can move between your cities, don't have to walk your settlers to far away and have enough squares for all your cities.

another advantage of the distance 4 is that you will have 2 places next to eachother to choose from for your cities to build. so you can always pich the best, and have a smaller chance of a not being able to build your city there.

the ring at distance 4 gives you up to 8 cities (9 with capital) that is my initial empire from witch i build my swords / horses / knights. I will build these cities ASAP.

they all have very low corruption (20% or so)

the next ring at distance 7, i usually build much much later. i prefer to build another ring at distance 4 around the forbidden first. this distance 7 ring has a corruption slightly over 50%

cities outside the 7 ring don't need to be in a ring, they are useless anyway. In fact, they are not worth building ever at all, they are only worth conquering (and i don't think your opponents will generally build them all at the same distance for you) the exeption is high food places, where you can use the city to rush build stuff in governments that alow so, or else rush buy workers / settlers with money.

i do not yet know what is exactly the idea behind camps yet. in my games EVERY city gets a barracks immeadiately, and every city builds military units unless something else is needed.

[planetfall]

For one, I am glad RCP is going away. Taking time to figure out the diagonal distances was too annoying.

-- PF

[vmxa1]

I ran a test with the 4 ring and an 8 ring with a not strict placement. This is I did nto fill the diagional one in all cases and it has turned out far better than the others.

planetfall, there are several charts already layed out for the locations at all ranges.

[Stuie]

Originally posted by Master Zen ....although I am currently playing C3C beta game with the camps at 3/3.5 to good effect (that is they are 2-tiled not from the capital but from the inner ring).

I thought they fixed RCP. Is there still some advantage to ring placement??? Or are you testing to make sure there is no advantage??? Or what??

[pvzh]

Does anybody know how they fixed RCP?!

[MrWhereItsAt]

All it can mean is that the formula for corruption is changing to be less reliant on the rank idea. Perhaps for cities placed at the same distance there is an additional rank factor based on size, or date of establishment, or perhaps if your 2nd. 3rd and 4th cities are placed equidistantly from your Palace they all get rank 4 - REALLY discouraging RCP!

We won't know for sure until C3C comes out and we can test it.

[bongo]

They can still use rank for corruption calculations in the exact way they do today, the only thing they have to fix to remove the RCP-exploit is to make sure cities never have the same rank(very simple, oldest city gets lower rank, not-so-simple, the city that will benefit most for lower corruption gets lower rank)

edit: I tink the not-so-simple idea is the best as it will save you for the trouble of thinking of which city to build first.