Economy Overloading

[burrito_bandit]

Hello all,

i was wonder how econ caps work in RoN. are they hard caps or soft caps?

[albiedamned]

They are hard caps in that you cannot ever exceed the commerce cap except in knowledge (which has no cap). However the commerce cap goes up everytime you research a commerce tech at the library. And certain civs have cap bonuses in individual resources, which allow them to exceed the cap for that bonus by some amount.

[burrito_bandit]

ha! ok thanks

that explains why my first quick battle went so horribly wrong.... i built tons of resource structures and never had the pop cap for a decent army

for some reason i thought they were soft caps. i guess i didnt listen closely enough when the game mentioned that excess resources go through attrition.

[albiedamned]

You just mixed three entirely separate game subjects into one: commerce cap, population cap, and attrition. Commerce cap affects only your resource gathering rates. If you exceed your commerce cap in any resource (except knowledge, which has no cap), then the commerce cap display on the top left will start flashing to alert you. Population cap of course controls how many civilians and military units you can have. Population cap is shown on the top right part of the screen, and will also start flashing when maxed out. You increase your population cap via military research at the library (as well as some wonders). Attrition is a technology you research at towers. There are three levels you can research eventually. Once you research the first level, enemy units in your territory will take damage if they are not within range of a supply wagon.

[burrito_bandit]

i meant resource attrition, not troop attrition.

when your reserves of a resource are higher than your collection cap, you will start losing those resources.

[albiedamned]

There is no resource attrition - you never lose resources. What happens is you fail to gain any resources gathered above the commerce cap. So for example if your resource cap is 100, and you have two cities each with 5 farms, then you are attempting to gather 120 food per 30 seconds (each farm generates 10 plus each city generates 10). However you will actually only gather 100 food per 30 seonds. Thus your last two farmers are wasting their time. But you don't actually lose resources, you just fail to gain them. And it has nothing to do with how much of the resource you have in reserve, it only has to do with the gather rate. As far as I know there is no limit to how much you can have in reserve, although there may be a limit and I just haven't reached it. But if there is a limit it's very high (>10000).

[vootguy]

I tend to over do the economy as I lean a game... and while playing the demo on 'Moderate' skill level (which is no joke by the way) I've had most of my resouces up past 20,000.

Off-topic... I like how I can play this game with my turtle style of Civ2 ... just entrench a balanced army at the choke points, add a supply truck or 2 and you can last for quite awhile.

[burrito_bandit]

are you sure about that? i swear i thought a tooltip came up saying that having large amounts of a resource would introduce a small amount of attrition.

i could have sworn that i saw it in action too..... if you watch your resources closely enough you will see it happen. or i thought i did.....


ill check tonight.

[burrito_bandit]

hehe yeah, moderate is no slouch for a beginner. ive only played one quick battle against moderate, and it got really bogged down in the industrial age. or was it modern?

basically i focused on econ and expanded my city limit as fast as was practically possible. i decided to try to make primarily cavalry units to see if that was a viable option (it worked well in Empire Earth) and because i favor highly mobile armies. my hope was that having a superior econ would offset the high cost of cavalry.

turns out i was misguided in my econ attitude due to the resource caps. many of the villagers i had working on resources were wasted. the cavalry turned out to be enormously expensive, and my army size was never more than maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the enemies (my econ was probably not significantly better than the enemies). i was quite happy with the power of the cavalry troops though. even an undersized cavalry army was able to beat off several attacks.

once gunpowder came into the game, i built the terracotta army improvement, and started using my barracks (im not stubborn :P). i had my army buildings constantly pumping out troops, and supply wagons healing my guys on the line (i was *shudder* french). still, the computer kept up assaults which kept the point of contention (a city) tied up.

the computer was out-teching me the whole game, with my age increases following his by a minute or two. when he got nukes (i still dont even know how to get these guys) he started nuking cities behind my lines. it wasnt really that much of a problem cuz i could easily rebuild the stuff that got killed, but all in all i threw in the towel cuz it was pretty late and the game wasnt anywhere near completion.

was a pretty good battle and i certainly look forward to more tonight

[albiedamned]

One comment on your all cavalry strategy (at least in the early part of your game). The game has ramping unit costs in that each unit you build will cost a little more than the last. However I believe (I did some tests) this ramping only applies to units which come from the same type of production building. So in other words, every light cav, heavy cav, or ranged cav you build will make the next light cav, heavy cav, or ranged cav cost more, but it will not affect the cost of the next infantry unit. So because of this, it costs a lot less to build a mix of infantry and cavalry then all of one of the other.

[albiedamned]

Originally posted by burrito_bandit
are you sure about that? i swear i thought a tooltip came up saying that having large amounts of a resource would introduce a small amount of attrition.

i could have sworn that i saw it in action too..... if you watch your resources closely enough you will see it happen. or i thought i did.....


ill check tonight.

Probably what you saw was the warning that you exceeded your commerce cap and you were wasting the excess. There is a warning for that. I'm certain that resources never experience attrition directly. Resources constantly go up based on the gather rate (and ruins exploration and building completion bonuses and plunder etc.), and go down when you spend them on something like a tech or a unit or a building.

[burrito_bandit]

ahhhh good to know. i noticed that they got more expensive but thought maybe it was because of increasing ages or upgraded unit types.

a combined arms approach is surely more solid anyways.

[Imp]

Someone mentioned that there is no cap for knowledge. Technically true..... but when I played the trial demo, knowledge stopped permanently at +999, like all resources.

But yea, that's not likely to be reached, in any age.

[Flayer]

yep nothing can go above +999. Ive had knowledge at +999 before in a diplomacy game, so it is possible.

[Timeline]

Yes, actually that knowledge cap can get very annoying