Winning as Rome on a Huge World

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I must admit that I have only once used Republic in a game of Civ3 or PTW. I am so accustomed to the severe unhappiness problems that Republic brought about in Civ2, that I am biased against it in Civ3. Also, I rarely have marketplaces built in all my cities by the time Republic is availible. And the medival age is such a good time to wage war, that that's when I do most of my warmongering.

But I am open to trying Republic... I guess I just need some pointers as to how to successfully wage war during this time, and how to keep happiness flowing to everyone too as my cities grow from size 6 to size 12. (this wouldn't be so much of an issue with a religious civ, for obvious reasons)

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Arrian
Pretty much every new city I build pumps out a worker relatively soon (at the very beginning, it's warrior, worker. Later, further out when the city may only produce 1 shield for a bit, it may produce a few workers at 10 turns per). Just judging by vmxa1's comments, it would appear that you have a shortage of workers. Citizens should almost never have to work undeveloped tiles.

-Arrian

Amen to that. I have to remind myself if I am Rome that I need more workers than I normally would have. A nice Ind/C or R/ M civ can get by with less as they work so much faster. Anyway those far off cities are not going to be doing anything so great and may as well crank out a worker in 10 turns. If it is going to take 60 turns to get that temple, that worker can speed it up and pay for itself. Plus I want a road to fornt line cities ASAP unless they are in a dead end and can not be gotten over land, without coming trough my lands. I do not worry about any galleys that early.

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I'm just always worried about losing out culturally...

But I do agree, the more workers the better.

[Arrian]

Lose culturally? Methinks you may overestimate the cultural abilities of the AI. Besides, like vxma1 says, a worker first may actually speed the construction of the temple (and everything you build after that too).

Even when I play as China or Rome, I end up with, at worst, even culture with the best AI. Most of the time, I'm close to double. If I play Egypt, I blow them away - without really trying to. This is on Monarch. On Emperor, the AI keeps up a lot better culturally.

And I'm a raging warmonger. Temples, barracks, units, kill. Then lots and lots of building. Successful warmongering will get you more culture than peaceful building. Culture per city will be higher in the builder empire, but my empire will be double, triple, perhaps quadrupal the size of the builder empire, and will have more total culture. Culture is actually an issue me in a different sense: I hate cultural victories, but cannot help but fully develop my cities and refuse to sell improvements to slow my cultural accumulation. Thus, I often end up frantically racing for the SS to prevent a cultural victory by me. In my current Roman game, I've hit 80K culture and I'm flying upward, having just completed the Internet. Luckily, I'm already in the modern age and am at a 4 turns per tech pace (using 50% science... damn, commercial makes you rich!)

-Arrian

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Alright, well, here I am come with another "civilization simpleton" (CS) question: if you build a city that emanates no culture near one or more enemy cities that generate lots of culture, but your overall culture is greater than that of your enemies, will your puny city remain part of your civ, or is there threat of a switch?

Please don't mock me... I have lost cities before to culture flipping due to excessive REX. Nothing I can't deal with, but it's still a real pain in the arse when it happens.

ps, btw, feeling no shame with a cultural victory - after all, domination/conquest is pretty damn time-consuming on a huge map - I almost always win a cultural victory, ESPECIALLY as the Chinese. But yes, a lot of that comes from conquering my enemies. Yet, why does their culture remain prominent until they are utterly destroyed?

[Arrian]

Oooh, a culture flipping question!

The culture flip formula is actually rather complex. The short answer to your question is that a far-flung city w/o culture is a risk to flip if it has cultured AI cities around it.

The long answer:

Factors that influence the flip chance:

1) Overall ratio of civ's culture
2) Which civ has more culture built up *in that city* (thus if you built it and have owned it since, they will have none. You will have the advantage in this category, or at least no disadvantage)
3) The number of tiles within the full city radius (the full radius citizens of the city could work if it your borders were wide enough) that are within the other civ's cultural borders. This is a big one.
4) The number of citizens in the city that are of the other nationality
5) Relative distance to your capitol versus theirs.
6) Rioting in the city doubles the flip chance, IIRC.

Thus, if you have a far-off city without culture, and the cultural borders of another civ are bumped up against your un-expanded borders around said city, and the AI civ's capitol is closer... there is a significant risk of flippage, even if you have overall better culture and the citizens are all yours.

One of the reasons I love early warfare is that hardly anyone has a chance to build up any serious culture. Flippage not a concern, really, and by wiping out other civs and taking their territory, I'm basically ensuring my cultural superiority.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Oh, missed that last question:

Culture points accumulated by a civ endure until the civ is destoyed utterly. If you knock them down to 1 city, their culture will basically cease to accumulate (except for their palace and any other cultural buildings they manage to put up in their 1 city), but whatever they had before sticks around (although if you raze all their other cities, I think you wreck their culture). Captured cities in which they had culture retain their old culture.

Say I capture Carthage early in the game. Maybe it has 500 culture in it (Carthaginian culture) at the time. That doesn't go away unless the Carthaginians are destroyed or I raze the city. Until I generate 500 culture points of my own culture in the city, Carthage has the cultural advantage, increasing the flip chance.

This is why, when you set the F8 screen to "culture" you will seen puny, mostly destroyed civs with a chunk of culture and all of a sudden it winks out of existence *poof* when someone takes their last city.

-Arrian

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Hmm. Well, perhaps I am too overzealous in my temple building. Still, never hurts, does it?

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Yes, that ever-remaining culture factor has driven me up the wall in a few games in the past. Life-like, though...

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Arrian
Lose culturally? Methinks you may overestimate the cultural abilities of the AI. Besides, like vxma1 says, a worker first may actually speed the construction of the temple (and everything you build after that too).

Culture is actually an issue me in a different sense: I hate cultural victories, but cannot help but fully develop my cities and refuse to sell improvements to slow my cultural accumulation. -Arrian

So true, you really can't lose culturally.
This is why I play dom/conq, I see no value to cultural wins and they come too soon. I don't like space either and the UN. I will either kill them all off, play to 2050 or stop when I have had enough and the game is a lock.

I should add that I prefer to play on std maps so it is not quite such a task as this huge map.
I would only play huge if I want to run up a good score and then I would turn off Dom.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Yahweh Sabaoth
Hmm. Well, perhaps I am too overzealous in my temple building. Still, never hurts, does it?

I do not think you are over zealous. I will build temples every where, just not the first thing, unless I am up next to another civs and they have a good size city that is connected. That is a threat to roll on me.
This is not very common, since I am republic, I can rush buy that temple if I am concerned. If that is a civ that I am at war with I will smash that city or cut off its roads.
The reason they seem to have a high culture after you are hurting them, is those old temples and wonders are still adding and the graph is an average. This means to see a lower on the graph, will take a long time, especally late in the game. 5000 years of accumulation and now add 10 years of lower values is not going to show up real fast. That is why baseball players have a hard time raising their avg late in the seaon, if it is at say 300. 2 for 4 looks good, but add it to 600 ab and it has a small impact.

[Chemical Ollie]

I would love that... now I have only 172 spams left to write....

[Arrian]

vxma1,

The aforementioned Roman game ended. I actually thought I might win culturally, but upon hitting 100k, the Ottomans must have scraped together 50k, so I was able to play the 3 extra turns I needed to get the SS completed. I was glad they did.

I noticed something, watching the replay: my initial attack started REALLY late. Normally, I open up my ancient warfare in earnest around 500bc, give or take a couple of centuries. But my attack in this game started around 250AD! Wow. Granted, my initial attack force was large, but still, that's late. No wonder I encountered pikemen & med. inf when I hit the Vikings. I lost a LOT of horsemen because of that. The Romans are just slow getting going. But if you do manage to get them going... yeesh. My mid-to-late-game power was ridiculous.

To get back on-topic, the problem with Rome is, with a slow-starting civ with a 1-move UU, a huge world presents serious problems. It's just not a very good match of civ and map settings, with the exception of commercial (good for large maps).

-Arrian

[vmxa1]

Amen to that Arrian. I cranked out two games on huge as Rome and it sucked. It took so long to get rolling. As you say once I did it was nasty for them. A huge map is not good for a non ind civ. I also had crap luck wiht the Mil trait for promos and leaders.

[yxhuvud]

There is one situation where you can lose to culture win.

Deity, it's called. There every ai will outculture you once their rexing phase is over, and since the tech race goes so fast, tehy start building cathedrals really early. Sure, as long as there are several big ai's, this won't be a problem, but if one civ manage to be big enough, it can get ahead enough to be able to win.