Cradle Middle Game Thoughts

[hexagonian]

How about this then...

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Tank
Attack 55 (from 60)
Range 45 (from 60)
HP 18 (from 20)
Movement 5 (from 7)

This will be in line with what I did with earlier flankers - slightly weaker attack/more movement than front-line units. I would like to keep Tanks as flankers. You will not be able to focus your entire military on them, but you will need to augment them with your groundpounders.


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Mobile SAM
Attack 20 (from 15)
Defense 30 (from 20)

This will boost them up comparably to Artillery. They still will have greater range, and better movement than artillery.


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Hover Infantry
Movement 4 (from 5)


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Fusion Tank
Range 55 (from 70)
HP 23 (from 25)
Armor 2 (from 3)
Movement 6 (from 8)

Same philosophy as with reg. tanks. Emphasis on flanking ability, but Hover Infantry should chew them up straight on.


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War Walker
Defense 40 (from 60)
Armor 2 (from 3)

This is your future Artillery unit, so it should be weaker on the front lines but a killer from range. It will be a step up from SAMs too.


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Leviathan
Cost - 7,000 (from 9,100)
Attack 60 (from 90)
Range 60 (from 90)
HP 25 (from 30)
Armor 3 (from 4)
Movement 1 (from 3)

A great late game defensive unit.

[Peter Triggs]

I've been playing with the Mobile Sam and trying to make it a counter to the Tank. From the Great Library:

The ultimate unit in the ranged line is the MLMS, or Multiple Launch Missile System. Not only can the missiles of this most modern of artillery weapons wreak incomparable destruction on land and sea units, but it is also, since the MLMS Installation provides Active Defense against any enemy aircraft within its range, one of the most potent anti-aircraft weapons in the history of modern warfare.

Any similarities to a like-named unit in a forthcoming RTS game are completely co-incidental.

We still need a proper Mechanized Infantry unit to sit defensively in the front line and absorb the tank's attacks while this ranged unit fires back from the rear.

[Dale]

How about Panzerkruppe, or Half-track?

[Velociryx]

Yes! I believe that will do the trick!

The main thing was with rails, that seven point movement was just TOO extreme. I was getting my tanks from my core cities, all the way around the planet via rail line and into battle in two turns (on a gigantic map....on a standard sized world, I'm quite sure I could mass build them and attack with them the moment they rolled off the assembly line).

So, curtailing their movement rate and taking the scythe to their attack factor accomplishes the goal....outstanding!

As to my latest game....played to 1928 last night, and one of my Lieutenants got a bit big for his britches. Just before I got Technocracy, the buffoon attacked me, captured a city, and promptly begged for peace. I got Technocracy, switched govs, ignored the attack, and the following turn, he did it again.

Was researching Chaos Theory (anxious to see what Hover Infantry look like!), so I made peace again and positioned my aging tank force within striking distance of a couple of his cities. He seems to be behaving, but that's still not gonna stop me from extracting a measure of revenge.

:: calculating::

Let's see....he took two of my cities, so an appropriate response would be:

a) recapture those two cities
b) burn down two of HIS cities
c) capture four of his cities and keep them (war reparations).

yeah, that oughta put things back to plumb!

New personal best: 32,700 PW points in a single turn (new round of terraforming, Megamines went in everywhere I had older mines or rough terrain/desert....WOW!)

-=Vel=-

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Since your now advancing into beyond the middle phase of the game. Let me add my two cents for pre-rennaisance era findings. Since this is but my first cradle game y'all are gonna have much more experience than inthese matters. (Y'all - howza 'bout that I'm already onmy way to becoming a southern boy)

I found myself rapidly becoming outpaced in terms of technology averaging about 8-14 techs behind tech leaders presumably because I went to war early and afterthat followed the sound advice of building t-forming infrastructure (namely food and mines) as opposed to facility infrastructure.

I continued prosecuting my war even after city limits were exceeded and proceeded to enslave. In doing so, I found from the notes here I could direct the slaves to specific cities with large garrisons. I ended up with cities with 30+ population points most of which were slaves. After taking enough bases forcing a peace, forcing a pact, and then extorting technologies upon threat of destroying cities I was able to achieve relative tech parity.

Now comes the dubious part. By emptying the 30+ population selected bases and allowing them to revolt and then simply retaking them the next turn all slaves became citizens and then the vast majority of the citizens were set to scientists for massive tech. Each city was contributing something onthe order of 1500 science points each.

Wow!!! All of a sudden from 8-12 techs behind I'm now tech leader and momentum building as I start cranking now on facility infrastructure all within the course of 20 ish turns.

One oddity I see is that the pop points don't require apothacaries etc., moreover the pop points don't jive with population listed (for example pop listed is say 120570 yet Number of workers/specialists is 38 which would correspond to 380000+). If I intend to grow this city organically I have to allow the population number to grow organically to catch up to the workers.

From this, I think it similar to SMAC in that specialists become huge. Matter of fact I'm now thinking the two most important resources of the game become Food, and Production and allow trade for money and specialsits for science. Yet I have not enough expereince with the game to say if this is correct.

Thoughts?

[hexagonian]

I do not know if there is a possible way to close that slave revolt loophole, because the game is structured to convert all of the revolting slaves into citizens. (After all, a successful slave revolt should mean that the slaves become free.) This would probably go down as an exploit. (unfortunately the only way to bypass this is to choose not to do it in a game situation)

As for the Apothecaries, you do not need them for slaves - You are able to grow the city beyond the cap but only with slaves until you do build an Apothercary. Slaves go to the closest cities with garrisons and are not governed by the city size caps.

In those situations, the growth bar should be showing 'starving' even though in actuality, your city is not starving...

Does your city have slaves? This may be the discrepency in your population numbers. Slaves will be counted as workers, but they cannot be used as specialists (as you already noted)

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

At the point where I enslaved the pop was maxed before Apoc's at 12 (no Apocs were built). After enslavement of other Civs it jumped to upper thirties of which all but the orignal 12 were slaves. Allowing to revolt and then retake had pop of 38 all citizens and no apocs/physicians/bath house facilities. (nothing but outhouses LOL)

This is consistant with capture though of any city. Often you'll have taken the city and in the process destroyed those population enhancer facilties. You still have the pop points but aren't allowed any further growth until they are built. In this case however the pop points and the raw population tally didn't agree and after I built the requisite facilities to allow growth the population didn't grow until I actually had the raw population tally exceed via organic growth the pop point number (confused yet? LOL )


PS growth indicator indicates starving as you indicate but no pop loss occurrs also as you indicate.

Og

[Velociryx]

Dang....been trying to reply to this for most of the day, but the firewall at work was misbehaving!

Og, I agree with you. I think specialists have the potential to unbalance the game. VERRRRY potent! Is there perhaps a way to tone down how much Oomph a specialist in any given category will give?

Also, was looking over my own map, specifically at the terraforming I have done thus far.

It consists of two things: Mines and commerce enhancers.

This is because the Latifundia (and all the econo-boosters that follow it) in Cradle is SO good, that I've never seen a need for a regular farm. I think it's really cool that we get more terraforming options in Cradle, and they're very well thought out, but two games straight now, I've found myself gravitating to the same two things every time. I never build farms.

In fact, I plow the farms I DO get by proxy under to make room for more shopping malls!

If a coastal town needs food, I get it from the sea (which is a natural, since the only commerce booster you can build in the sea is coastal, leaving wide swaths of sea tiles wide open for food production to support those aforementioned specialists).

My interior cities are almost universally my production powerhouses, and my coastal cities are my specialist havens.

-=Vel=-

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

*** Nodding ***

With the power of specialists all I'm looking for at this point is maximum food to power maximum growth quickly. So on grassland I'm going with that which gives me most food output (at present advanced farms IIRC). Lati's are going on forest and plains, mines(advanced is all I've gotten so far) on hills, mountains etc. but if it's green its getting the farm at this point. As for the sea I was going with ports for awhile but now its all about strictly food production. I still use a smattering of commerce building t-forming options but normally only when food output is equivalent or close to my other options as is the case with Lati's on a number of different terrain types.

I take care of my money issues by building caravans and trade routes and work on trying to maximize my science output via the specialists which I believe are getting their contribution multiplied by facilities such as academies, uni's etc.

In any event it was quite plesent to have such a dramatic mid game swing although truth be told most of the swing came from me strong arming the other civ into yielding his techs or paying the consequences.

Og

PS By the by, 'poly was getting hammered for quite a bit today. I was getting a number of errors loading pages and responses so it may not be your firewall as much as it was the traffic.

PPS I also found my game coming together similarly. Original core cities normally become the production havens whilst outer most cities become the specialist ones (normally because as I absorb slaves from other civs I have a base or two as a jumping off point and garrisoned with a size 12 army this then logically becomes the base getting all the enslaved pop points from victim civ).

[hexagonian]

RE: Specialists

Of course this can be adjusted...Here are the specialist settings. BTW, how many entertainers are you needing to use to maintain happiness in those 30+ pop cities?

POP_ENTERTAINER
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_RELIGION
Happiness 2

POP_FARMER
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_AGRICULTURE
Food 30

POP_LABORER
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_ARCHITECTURE
Production 30

POP_MERCHANT
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_BUREAUCRACY
Commerce 20

POP_SCIENTIST
EnableAdvance ADVANCE_PHILOSOPHY
Science 30

Suggestions?????

RE: Tile Improvements
Players have three areas to improve regarding Tile Improvements (Food/Commerce/Production)

This has been trickier to strike a balance, because the AI places an inordinate priority on building food enhancers - often neglecting commerce/production improvements. (This also seems to be hardcoded.) The Latifundia was created to have the added food benefit, so at least the AI would build them. The problem, as Vel noted, was that they become almost too attractive in comparison to the normal food enhancers like Farms/Advanced Farms.

The decision on what to build has to be made on Plains/Grasslands because Farms cannot be built on Forest tiles. Here's the comparison...

Farm/Pasture
BonusFood 5/10, based on terrain

Trading Posts
BonusFood 5
BonusGold 5

Latifundia
BonusFood 10 (Forest 5)
BonusGold 5 (Forest 10)

Advanced Farms
BonusFood 20 (This was 15/Plains, 20/Grassland in 1.32)

Outlet Mall
BonusFood 10/20, based on terrain
BonusGold 10/20, based on terrain

I generally build Pastures/Farms until I get Latifundias and then exclusively build Latifundias, though you are probably beelining to the tech that enables Latifundias more than I am.

Now there are several ways to go about this
1. Push Latifundias until later in the game. As it stands now, they are too close on the heels of Trading Posts - in fact, in looking at the tech tree, players can bypass Trading Posts altogether. This will also mean that players will have to build more of the earlier improvements. It does not bother me that players have to replace old improvements - in fact you should be doing that anyhow.
2. Add a production benefit to Advanced Farms so a player will have to choose an emphasis on production or commerce.

Suggestions???

Vel, you map is done - I'd like to get everything tweaked (units, what is being discussed here, plus anything else that can be adjusted) before sending it to you though.

[Velociryx]

SWEET news, Hex!

It's a pity that we can't do something in SLIC that'd make the bonuses for the terraforming improvements be player-or-AI specific (ie - make it such that a farm produced by and controlled by the AI grants a hefty production and commerce bonus, but if that farm falls into human player hands, it behaves as a "normal" farm.) <---that'd solve the AI's hardcoded tendency to build farms and still leave lots of juicy choices for the human.

Still, I like adding a smallish production bonus to farms....that'd take it to the next level, I think, and bring back in some element of choice (and in those cases, I'd prolly be doing just what Og's doing now....farming all the green).

As to the specialists: anytime you have that sorta concept in the game, there will be people (Og, me, others) who will run it to an extreme and do what they can to break it. The Engineer in SMAC is a perfect example of this.

One of two possible fixes:

a) either make it so that output from specialists doesn't get run through the city's science, production, or gold enhancers (not sure if this is even possible)

or

b) consider halving the outputs of specialists. That way, you've got to make a tough choice. Yes, you can skew your cities into science, or gold, or production specialization, but there's very definately a tradeoff to be had. Even at an output of 15 science per specialist, I can almost guarantee you that by the time you run that through all of Cradle's science enhancers, my scientist will be cranking out more than I could by working the land. At 30 it's no contest.

Production specialists: I doubt they'll get used much, if at all ('cept on occasion by the AI) if you add the production bonus to farms. As it stands now, even with a minimized workday, about half of my 54 cities are rampant polluters (1250+ production), so if you're gonna make one specialist higher, the production would be the obvious choice (tho this would make it really easy to catch up in the early game with the AI) (militarily). :: shiver:: on second thought, don't increase laborer...that's just too tempting NOT to exploit....

-=Vel=-
PS: Played to 1956 last night....Hover infantry out and running around. Techs coming in in 2-3, and now only 1 tech behind the leaders....I'm building nature preserves everywhere I don't have mega mines, and have YET to do the first bit of sea forming (tho I inherited a goodish amount).

I've come up with a new term for those lingering little squigglies that sometimes remain when you capture an enemy territory....estates!

(sometimes, some smallish borders remain even after capture....I've been referring to those as "estates" belonging to the other side....territory that we let them keep ahold of for one reason or another....makes a good story device)
-V.

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Velociryx
(sometimes, some smallish borders remain even after capture....I've been referring to those as "estates" belonging to the other side....territory that we let them keep ahold of for one reason or another....makes a good story device)
-V.

Reservations?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Velociryx
SWEET news, Hex!

Still, I like adding a smallish production bonus to farms....that'd take it to the next level, I think, and bring back in some element of choice (and in those cases, I'd prolly be doing just what Og's doing now....farming all the green).

As to the specialists: anytime you have that sorta concept in the game, there will be people (Og, me, others) who will run it to an extreme and do what they can to break it. The Engineer in SMAC is a perfect example of this.

LOL. I prefer to think of it as experimenting with the boundaries of the game. Actually it wasn't that novel of an approach for me as I simply applied my learning of the power of specialists that I developed via SMAC and used it on this game.

Finally, I guess I gotta learn to shut my mouth. 'cause if I keep telling you guys ways that I used to beat the game, you'll end up taking them all away from and then I'll have to learn to play the game for real. LOL

Again the math is kinna simpel here to develop what is or is not a good use of specialists.

If each scientist is yielding 30 points. You'ld need to have a worker that can likewise pull in at least 30 points of commerce to stay even. (For purposes of science output, higher as the as a portion is lost as crime and a portion is lost in allocation to gold, both dependent on goverment choice.)

Of course running specialists means you give up the advantages of production and food.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Velociryx
I've come up with a new term for those lingering little squigglies that sometimes remain when you capture an enemy territory....estates!

(sometimes, some smallish borders remain even after capture....I've been referring to those as "estates" belonging to the other side....territory that we let them keep ahold of for one reason or another....makes a good story device)
-V.

I guess the AI put at that place a fort and then maybe put another improvement on it and so it keep the tiny territory.

-Martin

[Velociryx]

Yeah....that's a better term for what we do....'speriment with the boundaries of a game....I like it!

One caveat tho, re: specialists:

Research is derived from your total commerce such that (I think):

Total Commerce Collected - Loss via Crime = Net Commerce

Net Commerce * Science Rate = Science Collected

Net Commerce * (1-Science Rate) = Income

So your worker generating 30 commerce wouldn't generate you 30 science till you were running a Technocracy with 100% science and no crime. In the early game, with a cap of 50-60% science, that's when you really see the huge difference that specialists can make. One point of pop, by himself, can generate the same science that it'd take 4+ workers in the field to do.

-=Vel=-