Science vs. Commerce???

[neuronico]

Hello Gang,

First of all, let me say that I'm a long time Civ fan (my very first computer was a Macintosh laptop with 3MB RAM, with Civilization I loaded on it- black and white screen).

I've played Civ II since it came out (about 4 years now) and just got started playing CTP2. I'm confused about an important game concept as it related to converting commerce into science.

Q1: How does the game convert commerce into science? Is it a straight % of whatever you have allocated to science?? eg, I'm a Corporate Republic allocating 80% to science. I have about 1100GP coming in from trade routes every turn. Is 80% of that commerce from trade going towards my science?

Q2: How can some of my cities have a negative science output??? What would take away from science commerce? Would it be crime?

Q3: What direct effect would making Nature preserve improvements have on my science output?

Q4: Does Capitalization commerce go towards science output? Since I have so much money coming in, I don't really see the need in my current game to use Capitalization, unless this is the case.

I currently have some of my larger cities building Infrastructure, with my Public Works set to 0%. These cities have all improvements built already, so I'm trying to beef up my science so I can improve them further.

Any help is most appreciated! Thank you so much for your answers!

Cheers,

Tim

[me_irate]

Hmmmm where to start. first of all the trade routes have nothing to do with your commerce(to the best of my knowledge). You just recieve gold from trade routes nothing more, which explains you being so well of in the monetary dept. the way ctp2 does resources is really messed up. I used the cheat menu once and i got far more confused and actually got angry at the game for awhile because of the way improvements work. im not sure about nature preserve, but a farm gives +75 growth and upgraded farm gives 250 growth in despotism.(changes with gov) but if you have a port with =+15 commerce resulting in a 20 commerce square and assuming all of it goes to city,(which it doesn't once again the ctp2 system) 80% of that would go to you in science and 20 would go to you in gold. giving you 16 science and 4 gold from that square. my advise to you is not to worry about it, farms and stuff are practically useless. upgraded improvments are good. i still build farms because i like to and bad habits from civ2. im sorry but thats all the help i can give, i tried to figure it out but thats as far as i got. still makes me angry thinking about it. anyway if you really want to know experiment with the cheat mode.

actually i want to complain some more, the food you see doesn't make sense. suposedy 2 food per citizen so in a size 20 city you need 40 food. lets say that im producing 4 more food than i need. sometimes it would give me 200 growth or something, =50 growth for each food. in another city i do the same thing and would get 80 growth per extra food. this game would be good if the system made sense.
[This message has been edited by me_irate (edited May 18, 2001).]

[Locutus]

The system really isn't as complicated as it may seem. It's different than Civ2 but that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense or anything. There have been many threads about this subject in the past but I'll try to explain it all once more in large outlines.

Q1) I must admit even I am not sure on Trade. Some people claim that it increases Gold, others claim it increases Commerce. Even the manual isn't very clear on this matter, it speaks of 'profit', 'price' and 'gain', stuff like that. But since Gold is mentioned once or twice in the manual and because my own experiences indicate it, I think that Trade only affects Gold, not Commerce. Not very historically accurate, but Civ2 wasn't any better. I think Science is calculated on a city level and an 80% science setting just means that 80% of the Commerce collected in a city is converted into Science points. City Improvements, Wonders and Scientists add more Science to this 'natural' income.

Q2) I don't think I ever saw a city with negative Science output myself, but I think it is indeed possible to have negative Science. Upkeep for Buildings, losses due to Crime and penalties (or bonuses) from Government are subtracted from (or added to) a city's Commerce and not from it's Gold. Having many Buildings, a high Crime rate and an unfavourable Government for Science & Commerce may mean that so much Commerce is eaten by these things that the city needs more Commerce than it produces, thus making the Science and Gold income of that city negative. The best way to deal with this is to sell those improvements that you don't strictly need or change Governments.

Q3) Ah, yes... This is very different from Civ2 and if you don't know how it works you may well never figure it out. In Civ2 land was worked by Pop, 1 Pop worked 1 tile. Without specialists a city of size 6 would have 6 workers in the field and 1 on the city tile itself (the infamous ICS problem, but that's a different story). All the other 18 fields in the city's radius would be unworked and not produce any kind of resources.

CtP2 is different though. In CtP2 all cities work the tile of the city itself all the time (again ICS) as well. However, in a small city (size < 7), the city radius is only 1 tile large instead of 2 while each and every tile in this radius is being worked. A size 1 city collects 1/6 of all resources on these 8 tiles, a size 4 city 4/6 and a city 6 city works all the tiles 100% (6/6 of all resources). Once a city reaches size 7 the city radius grows larger and the second ring of tiles can be worked. Now this may seem illogical at first but the first 6 Pop will keep working the first ring at 100% effiency while the second ring gets worked by the 7th Pop at 1/12 efficiency (the next radius growth will take place at size 18, 18 - 6 = 12, so 1/12 of all resources in this ring is collected). So in a size 12 city, the first 6 Pop will work all tiles in the inner ring at 100% efficiency while the next 6 Pop will work the outer ring at 50% efficiency (6/12th of all resources).

Making a Pop a Specialist means one less man in the field, thus making a size 12 city essentially a size 11 city. The first ring of the radius will still get worked at 100% but the second ring now only collects 5/12 of all resources rather than 6/12. In a size 7 city 1 Specialist means that the first ring gets worked 100% while the second doesn't get worked at all, a second Specialist in this city would make that even the first ring doesn't get worked at full effiency anymore: only 5/6.

So building a Nature Preserve, which adds +30 Commerce, doesn't necessarily mean that you'll actually collect +30 Commerce in your city. If you build it in the inner ring of the radius of a size 12 city when this city has no Specialists, this means that you'll benefit from the preserve optimally, collecting the full +30 Commerce. However, building it in the outer ring, only 50%, so +15 Commerce will be collected. In a size 7 city with at least 1 Specialist building any kind of Terrain Improvement would be futile since the second ring isn't being worked at all and no extra resources would be collected from it (though it might be in the future so you might still want to build it).

I said earlier that this system may seem illogical at first, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. In Civ2 a city had a certain, static, influence over an area around it and this area could be worked. This area was split in 24 (25 including the city itself) arbitrary pieces and each of these pieces could either be fully exploited or not exploited at all. This is not very historically accurate though. In reality, people will start working the land close to the city and only move further out once they run out of room. So in reality the land will get worked in concentric circles rather than in arbitrary squares (yes, I know there are plenty of other factors that have an influence on which land is worked and which isn't but roughly this model is more realistic than the Civ2 model). This is exactly how CtP2 works. You could look at it as if the first ring of the city radius exists of six smaller, invisible, rings that will get worked one by one as soon as there are enough people available. The same goes for the second ring, that consists of 12 smaller rings so as soon as the first 8 tiles are fully worked, the first ring of the second set of tiles will be worked. In this system the first 18 smaller rings completely ignore the fact that the real map doesn't use rings centred around cities but more or less arbitrarily divides the terrain in 25 square tiles.

Anyway, add to the above system the bonuses and penalties due to Crime, Government, City Improvements, Wonders, Wages/Rations/Workday settings and the way in which these things interact (new government -> different Wages/Rations/Workday settings, different Crime rate, different growth/production/commerce/science coefficients, etc) and it's almost impossible to actually calculate the exact numbers on how many resources a city would collect in under certain circumstances. However, nor Civ2 nor CtP2 is a math game, numbers matter but it's never been the idea to actually be able to calculate the exact numbers that you would get under certain circumstances. So going into the cheat menu and trying out different things may not work as well as one might want, as me_irate already found out. You can do some experiments but something like changing government is too drastic as it affects so many things, you'll never be able to understand the differences between the before and after numbers. All you really need to know is roughly how the formulas work and the numbers that go with everything and what that means for your game (Bank is +15% Gold, a Bazaar +10% -> Bank is better than Bazaar, presuming the city collects enough gold to justify the 3 extra upkeep).

Q4) No, Capitalization only gives you Gold, not Commerce. From the sound of it you need to sell some banks and stuff so you'll get less Gold but more Commerce (and thus Science) due to lower upkeep costs.

me_irate,
the food/growth problems you're describing are caused by overcrowding, that affects how fast a city can grow. I don't remember the exact details on this system but I suggest you search the forums for old threads on the subject, it has been explained by other before. Roughly said: in cities of the same size with the same amount of food surplus, the more overcrowding the slower the growth (and again, there are many factors that influence the amount of overcrowding).
[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited May 19, 2001).]

[David Murray]

*yawn*

Are you guys forgetting that it's...JUST A GAME?!! :O

[Locutus]

Yeah, so? What wrong with enjoying a game and wanting to understand the mechanisms behind it? It makes me enjoy the game more if I know what exactly is going on behind the scenes. Also, it's fascinating to see how it works as I'm a programmer myself and may one day decide to program a Civ-game myself.

[David Murray]

[me_irate]

maybe you can clear this up for me,

like i said lets build a farm anywhere in the city. doesnt matter of size or anything it just gives a +75 growth if you build a upgraded farm anywhere you get a +250 growth doesn't matter terain or anything. so in essence it doesn't it doesn't matter if you increase extra food in city at all the growth has nothing to do with extra food. it says 2 food per citizen, well if you figure that up and you have 4 extra food to me it should make every extra food= so much growth. and from my understanding this is really dumb. also granary boost a fixed amount of growth 150 or 250 or something like this. the actualy increase food 10% has nothing to do with it.

[Locutus]

me_irate,

I played with the cheat menu a little but, not very much so I could be all wrong but I'm getting the impression you just didn't do enough testing. It's true that in a size 1 city with nothing in it, adding 1 or 2 farms adds +75 growth. But this is certainly not the case under all circumstances. If you add even more farms or work with larger or more cities or build some improvements in the city you'll get completely different number, numbers that are a lot less constant. It's logical that very early in the game with only 1 or 2 small cities in the civ and virtually no crime or overcrowding or other complicating factors yet, the numbers are very linear. Let me work it out for the farm example.

Adding a farm will add +10 food to 1 tile. Since 1/6 of the resources is collected only 10/6 = 1.6 food is added to the city, which is rounded down to 1 (in CtP2 all decimal numbers simply have their decimal part truncated). In citysize?.txt there's a number called GrowthRate, which I believe represents the amount of growth that 1 food unit represents, presuming there are no interfering factors. This number is, surprise, surprise, 75. So adding a farm in a small city with little or no influence from government, overcrowding, crime, etc, will almost always add 75 growth. Not because this is constant or something unexplainable but because the division of food makes truncation necessary, meaning that all changes that cause an extra food collection that lies between 1.0 and 1.999999 will be truncated to 1, or 75 growth. I didn't experiment with it but I'm sure the same issue applies to the Granary. With bigger cities or in empires with more cities, where things are much more complex, numbers are much less linear.

No offense, but understanding a complex system is not something that that can be done in 15 minutes by quickly investigation 1 or 2 examples. It takes thorough testing under many different circumstances and some sound logic reasoning to be able to fully explain complex systems like the CtP2's resource system, and you shouldn't get discouraged if you don't understand your first few observations.

[me_irate]

thanks, actually a friend of mine did most of the testing. he told me his results and how he got them. i duplicated and mine matched his 90% of the time. but, i also experimented with larger cities and got simular numbers, but like you said, it would still only =75 growth even in a size 6 city. i found your other posts most enlightening, thanks for the info.

[neuronico]

Locutus,

Thank you for your thought-provoking response. I think I understand this commerce concept a bit better now, and how it relates to my citizens' use of the city squares.

The Corporate Republic government which was implemented when I posted my original questions, has since changed to a Technocracy. I noticed quite a few changes in production, happiness and science output. This was quite an enlightening experience, watching these metrics change and seeing how interdependent they all are.

I would like to ask a few follow-up questions as well. Since winning the GlobalSat wonder, I can see that my primary adversary, the English, has many dead tiles throughout his empire. How much more can that empire pollute before I start suffering the effects of global warming? Will the pollution meter have to be fully red before something like this happens?

In addition, what is the effect on other empires' regard for me when I build the Eden Project wonder and their large cities are destroyed? Will they be upset with me? I'm trying to plan whether I should re-build my military prior to building that wonder. Any ideas?

Thanks again for your great response, Locutus.

Cheers,

Tim

[Locutus]

Glad I could help.

I have to admit I have little experience with pollution, if I ever even get that far in the game, I don't pollute much myself and I usually manage to control AI pollution as well through diplomacy or conquest. But I think that the bar indeed has to be completely red before floods start to happen. In fact, IIRC the first flood will occur as soon as the bar is full. Until then, you should be save from the unpleasant consequences of pollution as long as you 'play nice' yourself. Only one way to find out for sure though...

You probably want to rebuild your military before building the wonder anyway as it's a good opportunity to take him out of the game altogether (his production will drop radically and as a consequence his military will be severely weakened), but I don't think building the wonder will actually cause a decrease in regard.

[Rhuarc]

Thanks for the explanation Locutus! I didn't post about it, but I have been pndering that same question for quite a while now!

[Darkknight]

It's not just a game it's life

[vision]

NEAT - You guys really broke it down - I'm extited! I bought CtP2 a while back and was kinda pissed with it. But now I LOVE this game and have been really 'getting into it' over the past week.

I really love the level of involvement, patience and knowledge required to play these games vs. the 'git-and-kill' games that I seriously AVOID.

Thanks guys
Vision

[Peter Triggs]

There's probably more links. I know this has been discussed before, but to be honest I never paid a lot of attention to it. I do seem to recall that St Swithin (Winnie Lee) one of the original developement team posted an explanation of how the system works. Locutus knows more about this than anybody around now, with luck he'll be on line later tonight.