Back before WBC this year I spent a week in Pounder's basement and we played quite a few games with Robb who was also living there at the time. One of the games we played was Chicago Express, which is a relatively short economic train game. You start the game off by buying shares in different train companies and then you take actions to sell off more shares or to make the train companies improve themselves. The companies spend the money invested in the shares to get better and as they get better the shares become worth more. After a set number of actions all the companies pay out dividends which provide the players with more money to use buying new shares in the companies. Player money is only ever spent buying shares, is only ever earned through the dividends (there is one way to get a bonus dividend payout for a company when it gets to Chicago), and is the only thing that matters when it comes to winning the game.
In our game through a combination of not knowing the game so well and/or misplaying we let Pounder get into a very good position. He was the sole owner of two different train companies while Robb and I were stuck sharing a company. I think Robb and Pounder were sharing a 4th company and the 5th company had yet to appear on the board. Because the only thing that actually matters in the game is personal money and Pounder was set up to make the most money thanks to owning so many shares he was on the fast track to victory. His only downside was going to be that he had a limited number of actions to spend making companies better so he was going to be stuck earning base value for some of his shares while Robb and I could use our actions making a single company really good. We'd have to split the benefit but if we're able to use twice as many actions on making it better that's reasonable. We'd also be sure to get the 'connect to Chicago' bonus. Pounder was set up to win for sure, but if Robb and I worked together one of us might be able to take him down. Probably me since Robb had that extra share in the 4th company that surely wasn't going to get any better since Pounder had two other solo owned companies to work on, but maybe later turns would see shares sold of other companies that would change that fact.
Instead Robb decided that since I had nothing else to do with my actions I was going to be forced to make our company better and he'd stick the work on making it better solely on my shoulders and went off to make his company with Pounder better. This meant Pounder got the benefit from 1.5 improvement actions to Robb's 1 and my .5. Pounder ultimately won. We got into an argument over if Robb should have been working with me or not. My stance was Pounder was in a good way and would win if he got extra help from either of us in the early game. Economic games are often snowbally so you need to reign in the leader. Maybe not beat him up the whole game, but reign him in a little after he had such a good initial share phase and then reevaluate the board on the next turn and adjust. Both Robb and Pounder disagreed because they hate playing games where frontrunning is punished because it encourages smarmy actions to disguise if you're actually winning or not in order to trick the other players into reigning in someone else.
I can't say I disagree with that stance, because I hate when a game encourages you to sandbag. But I didn't think that argument actually countered my argument either. I think Chicago Express, as an economic game, is designed such that the individual players have to be constantly evaluating who will win if 'standard' actions are taken and then shifting off the standard actions to stop that from happening. You either do that or the first auction phase determines victory! Really I think it means Chicago Express is a game that we shouldn't be playing because we don't like to work in game states that it creates.
A similar situation came up in our one Civ V game which is nearing completion. It was a four player game where I was stuck on my own land mass, Matt was stuck on his own land mass, while Dave and Robb shared a third bigger land mass. Dave was a strong early game civ and was certainly the player between the four of us with the most knowledge of game mechanics at the start of the game. He very quickly eliminated Robb and started snowballing his strong early game position into a really dominating position. He became allies with most of the city states and then declared war on Matt and I which meant Dave had a stranglehold on votes at the council. He made way more science per turn than either of us. He even went so far as to switch which tech he was researching so that he didn't enter the renaissance era (which would give us spies) until he was able to get almost all of those techs one after the other. It was inconceivable that either Matt or I could win a diplomatic victory before him, or a science victory either. A culture victory was theoretically possibly but his large culture gain from getting so many wonders coupled with his declaring war on us (and therefore removing a lot of tourism multipliers) made that practically impossible.
This meant Matt and I were backed into a corner. There was no way either of us could hope to win without Dave losing his capital. Taking Dave out would open up a chance for one of us to win in any of the ways (including militarily) but if Dave didn't die neither of us could win. Even taking his capital alone probably wasn't going to be good enough since he still has a vote lead over Matt, his culture still exists to block my tourism, and his replacement capital could just start working on spaceship parts long before we'd be able to do so ourselves. Taking Dave's capital slows down his path to victory but our own paths probably require him to die completely unless we're going for a military victory. (Once either of us take his capital then anyone losing their capital would have the other one win.)
We both acknowledged this was the case and then set off to work together against Dave. Talking about how to vote at the council, trade routes, trading luxuries, research agreements... We didn't work together optimally (Matt built a constabulatory to slow down my spying on him and I researched the same techs as he did instead of diversifying for optimal spying for example) but we put in a pretty good showing of it. I don't know about Matt but I also made a lot of sacrifices as time was winding down to try to hurt Dave at the expense of my own board position going forward. (I sold all my research labs and public schools so I could afford to rush buy more units and pay upkeep on those I'd built. I also sold all of my subs once Dave was no longer in a position to build boats even though doing so means I've lost control of the sea against Matt in the short term.)
We ended up capturing Dave's capital the exact turn he was about to win the game by building the last space ship part. We knew we had this many turns and saved a bunch of suicidal bombing runs for the end just in case, but we did it. Dave was understandably annoyed at this, since he was the heavy favourite to win the game almost the whole way through but he was barely denied at the end. He asserts that I am going to win the game now (an assertion I agree with, for what it's worth) and that because of that fact Matt shouldn't have worked with me. Matt should have spent the final few turns before Dave was eliminating setting up a sneak attack on my capital so that if I pulled off the miracle on my own to stop Dave then Matt could have taken me out right away and won instead.
It goes back to the age old question of what should 3rd place do? Let 1st place win by standing aside? Work with 2nd place to make sure 1st doesn't win even if it means 2nd wins instead? For me I continue to assert that ganging up on 1st is often the right thing to do, especially early in a game or if the game has variable length. We're going to get at least an extra 6-10 turns out of this Civ game and it could go much longer than that. Matt has the fast track to a diplomatic victory once Dave is eliminated since he was getting 2 extra votes each failed UN meeting. My tourism win is going to come home before that can happen, I think. But it was obvious that neither Matt or I could win until Dave lost his capital and it was really tight on making that happen as it was. I don't think either of us could have afforded to divert much off of what we did or Dave would have won.
My big problem with the argument that Matt shouldn't help me because I'm a 'clear 2nd' is that it encourages me to sandbag my second place position in order to get Matt to help me. If 2nd and 3rd only work together when they each think they're the one in 2nd then you need to hurt yourself (and therefore help 1st) in order to keep up appearances. But I acknowledge that it's the same argument against ganging up on 1st. If Dave had sandbagged his own position then maybe he isn't such a clear 1st place and we don't work to stop him?
It's hard to say what should be done. Maybe we have the same problem with Civ V that we have with Chicago Express. Maybe it's a game that just fundamentally has a kingmaker problem. I strongly feel that if someone has a big lead they need to be held in check by the other people working against them in this sort of game. Otherwise a small early game edge is a guaranteed victory. I don't want to play a game where we concede to the person who builds the great library. On the other hand I also don't want to play a game where building the great library is a bad idea because it just gets you killed.
I do think Civ V has enough catch up mechanics going on that someone can get ahead without it being a guaranteed victory. But really all Matt and I did was making use of those mechanics to keep pace as much as we could with Dave and we're still ending up facing accusations of kingmaking. The winning odds in this game were probably something like 90%-9%-1%, but Matt and I only get our 1% and 9% chances to win if we go all in on working together. I guess the problem is if the winning odds in this game were actually 90%-10%-0% what is Matt supposed to do? If you're certain you can't win then you basically have to choose who does. Some people advocate for standing aside but I will always assert that not taking an action is an action itself. Games can have kingmaking positions in them and you can't just ignore them. Often I'll see people advocating for improving your position, which generally means 3rd beats up on 2nd and you kingmake for 1st instead. Oddly enough in this specific game Matt both improved his position and kingmade for 2nd since I'm pretty sure most people will look at the end state of this game and say Matt came 2nd if I end up winning. Sometimes people want you to improve your own score, which works way better in a Euro board game with victory points to earn than it does in a game like Civ V, but I guess there's a score number in that one and you can certainly work to make it bigger. Like by taking Dave's cities! (Though taking my cities might have been more score efficient since I sure haven't been defending myself at all!)
I donno. I think if you're against kingmaking game states you can work to avoid games that have them, especially games that have them as a core element like Chicago Express. I think Civ V is probably more on the side of having kingmaking game states than it is the side of avoiding them... So maybe it's not actually a game we want to play? I guess we probably need to have a few more games get closer to the end of the game to find out? I do think Civ V can get into game states where ganging up on the leader isn't good enough. I think Dave had guaranteed wins earlier in this game if he plays differently, for example if he built a lot of mid game boats he could have crushed me when I was way behind on tech. But with more experience we probably just become better at recognizing those game states and have to start collaborating earlier and earlier? Time will tell!
Showing posts with label Civilization V. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civilization V. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Civ V: Brutal Trading Bug
I read about a trading bug in Civ V multiplayers games a while ago but didn't give it much thought. It's incredibly abusive if you want to cheat but I figured no one I'm playing with now would be abusing it. And I guess if they were and got caught we'd just stop playing with them. But then earlier today I got hit by a side effect of the bug in a game with Robb. He wasn't trying to be abusive or anything and it only cost me a turn of scouting but it was still annoying and it now makes me think everyone should know about the bug so we don't get hit by any side effects.
The bug is pretty simple. When player A proposes a trade to player B it pops up on B's next turn. B can accept the trade, reject the trade, or modify the trade. The first two work fine but the third one has the bug. You'd think that modifying the trade would be a way to send a counter-proposal to the other player and that's exactly what Robb tried to do in our game. I was trying to bribe him with 15 gold and some horses to get open borders between us so I could go meet a city state behind his borders. He didn't want my horses and wanted more gold instead so he modified the trade to be open borders each way with me throwing in 30 gold. That was fine by me, but when it got to my turn I couldn't accept the trade. You see, the trade was modified by Robb but it was still my trade and that means Robb is the one that needs to accept it.
He doesn't even need me to see the modified trade. He can modify the trade and then accept it.
...
...
He could have, for example, modified the trade so I got nothing and he got my 3 cities and all of my gold.
...
...
Yeah, that's not cool.
Modifying trades is actually a way to speed things up with outside game communication. If Robb had asked me about it in Skype instead of just sending the offer then we could have haggled over the gold amount, he could have modified it, and then accepted it and we'd both be happy.
But outside of that edge case you really shouldn't ever modify a trade. Reject and send a new one of your own if you want. Talk about it on a message thread. But don't modify a trade and expect the other guy to be able to accept it. He can't, because of the bug.
And obviously don't modify a trade and accept it without talking to the other person. There is a log of completed trades so it's pretty easy to check if someone is abusing the bug. Certainly if you steal a city this way we just roll the turn back, kick you out, and move on with our lives.
The bug is pretty simple. When player A proposes a trade to player B it pops up on B's next turn. B can accept the trade, reject the trade, or modify the trade. The first two work fine but the third one has the bug. You'd think that modifying the trade would be a way to send a counter-proposal to the other player and that's exactly what Robb tried to do in our game. I was trying to bribe him with 15 gold and some horses to get open borders between us so I could go meet a city state behind his borders. He didn't want my horses and wanted more gold instead so he modified the trade to be open borders each way with me throwing in 30 gold. That was fine by me, but when it got to my turn I couldn't accept the trade. You see, the trade was modified by Robb but it was still my trade and that means Robb is the one that needs to accept it.
He doesn't even need me to see the modified trade. He can modify the trade and then accept it.
...
...
He could have, for example, modified the trade so I got nothing and he got my 3 cities and all of my gold.
...
...
Yeah, that's not cool.
Modifying trades is actually a way to speed things up with outside game communication. If Robb had asked me about it in Skype instead of just sending the offer then we could have haggled over the gold amount, he could have modified it, and then accepted it and we'd both be happy.
But outside of that edge case you really shouldn't ever modify a trade. Reject and send a new one of your own if you want. Talk about it on a message thread. But don't modify a trade and expect the other guy to be able to accept it. He can't, because of the bug.
And obviously don't modify a trade and accept it without talking to the other person. There is a log of completed trades so it's pretty easy to check if someone is abusing the bug. Certainly if you steal a city this way we just roll the turn back, kick you out, and move on with our lives.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Live Multiplayer Civ V
I've got a couple people interested in trying to find the time to sit down and play a live multiplayer game of Civ V. I assume we'll be playing with simultaneous movement even during wars but I'm able to be talked out of that if people have strong opinions. It does mean the game devolves a little from being a 4X and into an RTS but it also allows wars to happen without bogging the game down.
Anyway... Is anyone else interested in playing a live game with Ike and Sky and myself? We could do teams at an appropriate number of people or we can do free for all. I'm fine with either. No idea what day/time this would be, but if we get an idea of who is interested we can try to find a good time.
Let me know!
Anyway... Is anyone else interested in playing a live game with Ike and Sky and myself? We could do teams at an appropriate number of people or we can do free for all. I'm fine with either. No idea what day/time this would be, but if we get an idea of who is interested we can try to find a good time.
Let me know!
Friday, July 11, 2014
Civ V: Balancing Asynch Games?
We've mostly entered the modern era in our first asynch Civ V game and a few issues have arisen in this game and in conversations with Robb that may need solutions outside the game itself. There seem to be certain things that work in a particular way that probably only crop up in an asynch game so they weren't considered or were deliberately ignored by the game designers. Ideally there'd be a solution in game but that's not going to happen...
The main problem is the way turns are treated in the game. Each person, starting with the game host, takes a turn. Then the game does a cleanup step at the end of the cycle and the game host goes again. People used to playing a single player game will understand this concept for sure. Barbarians and city states take moves after all of the AI civs take moves, and that happens after the player takes a turn. Some of the stuff that happens during this cleanup step are crucially important and the game host always gets to act first after they happen which really isn't fair.
There are some minor advantages with going first. For example, the game host will always win a tie for a wonder if two people would build it on the same turn. Matt complained several times in the comment thread for our most progressed game that he'd missed out on wonders by one turn over and over. Rough, but at least he was legitimately a turn behind. He finished Parthenon on the exact same turn I did, but he got to have it and I didn't because he was first in turn order. Ideally the game would look ahead to see if a wonder was going to be tied for and would give it out randomly. Or maybe if a wonder was legitimately completed on the same game turn by multiple civs then they both get to have it. The game host will always be a turn ahead on troop movements, too. So they have a minor edge in both attacking and defending
The cleanup phase is when spies assigned to city states get to rig elections. This happens on a schedule and the starting player always gets to go first. Now, city state elections rarely matter. They can boost someone's influence and knock everyone else down. Where it does matter is when people are at war and an election makes it so one of the warring civs loses control of their ally. When this happens everyone is able to make peace with the city state and can spend money to become the ally. In an asynch game the game host gets first crack.
Now, I don't think this is actually something that should ever happen. Because elections are on a fixed schedule and you can look and see how much influence you have with a city state you can always pay money in advance to make sure you never lose control of the city state. Stealing a city state this way should only work against broke opponents, or negligent ones. But because you don't know where your opponent has parked their spies you don't know which allies you need to bump up and which you don't. Keeping a city state ally is so critically important that you should just pay up on all of them anyway. But the game host doesn't need to bother with this. They don't need to pay attention to city state election timing. They don't need to pay up in advance. They can just wait and see what's going on and pay up only when they lose control of a city state. Because they go first. On the other hand the person last in turn order needs to worry about all of their city states all of the time because every other player gets a crack at them if they ever lose control.
The council vote is another thing that gets generated between turns. The game looks to see who is host, and who otherwise has the most votes. And then the game prompts them on their next turns to make a proposal. If the game host is one of these two people this means they get first crack at making a proposal. Some of the proposals have options on them and the person who proposes them gets to pick the option. This means that the person last in turn order should never get to pick a world religion or a world ideology. (At least not until both options become available, anyway, and they get their second choice!)
It doesn't matter if someone has, say, 21 votes and the opponents have 14 between them. Normally I'd think that person could guarantee world ideology the first time that becomes an option, but not if they're late in turn order. This is happening in our current game, where Dave has a huge vote lead and should be able to force through freedom as world ideology. This should make Matt and I unhappy and give Dave extra happy faces. Instead Matt was able to propose autocracy as the world ideology. A vote sure to fail, but it it does pass then Dave and I will get a big chunk of unhappiness and Matt will get extra happy faces. Extra happy faces he probably shouldn't have. (Dave did get to make a different crippling proposal though so I don't feel too bad for him. I'm the one getting blown out here!)
There are a bunch of solutions to this problem from a game design standpoint. I'd make it so proposing 'world ideology' didn't have a selection at time of proposal. I'd make it so you voted like an election when it came down to it and if any ideology had more votes than the rest combined it would win and otherwise none would go in. Or you could let both proposals be for different world ideologies and let the one that passes by the most go through. But I don't get to make either of those things happen. Instead the game host gets to dominate things.
For some of these things there are outside solutions available. The council thing we could just mandate that the game pauses when proposals are made and we make them in an outside forum. Let the council host pick first. Or choose randomly each time. Or alternate. It would 'slow things down' a little, but it feels like it has to be more fair than running the game as it is. The city state thing you could pause the game and ask if the spy owner has the money to spend on their next turn to get the steal off. And if they do, you have to let them.
I don't know that there is a solution for wonders. You could always announce a couple turns in advance when you're going to complete a wonder, but with great engineers existing I think that would be problematic. I guess you could take the stance that you announce with 2 turns to go and that locks out people from using an engineer? And then if two people announce at the same time you roll randomly which one gets it and the other has to switch off on the last turn?
That feels like it would work, but is a real pain and doesn't feel fun. Maybe you just accept that turn order is an advantage for wonders? You could use it as a handicap system of sorts I guess, by putting the stronger players/civs late in turn order? I guess that could be true for everything. Just accept that people late in turn order don't get a good path to a diplomatic victory?
The other problem comes with the way the random number generator works, and the fact that you're playing a game you have to load up every single turn. Robb did some testing and you can change what is inside a hut by changing what turn you open it up. You can change what is inside a hut by taking a different action in the same turn! Attack a barbarian and you can get something different out of the hut! You can try out combats and reload if they don't work out the way you wanted. You can use significantly fewer units as scouts by moving them in one direction, restarting your turn, and then moving them in other directions.
My boats in our main game are faster than Dave's by 2 I think since I have great lighthouse and exploration opened and I don't think he does. This means I can legitimately control movement in the seas (or at least have guaranteed knowledge of the sea movement) by moving forward a bunch and then juking back so I end up moving forward a little bit. I have a couple boats that can move 6 that keep moving 3 forward and 3 back to keep an eye on a small area of the ocean. But if I was willing to keep reloading I could actually move 6 spaces in every direction every turn. With my extra vision range I could probably cover an entire ocean with 1 boat!
I'm torn on if either of these things are bad or if they're fair pool for an asynch game. I do things like write down the cards in hand in A Few Acres of Snow when I play that asynch on Yucata, and reloading to do extra scouting feels similar. Without doing it it's hard to know where units have moved when in a live game you'd be able to see which way they walked. Reloading to scum good huts would be impossible in a live game though... One thing I am sure of is I want to be on the same playing field as the other people. I've been keeping my huts with maps and haven't been scouting a circle of radius 10 every turn, but if other people are getting good huts all the time and doing big scouts then I should too.
The main problem is the way turns are treated in the game. Each person, starting with the game host, takes a turn. Then the game does a cleanup step at the end of the cycle and the game host goes again. People used to playing a single player game will understand this concept for sure. Barbarians and city states take moves after all of the AI civs take moves, and that happens after the player takes a turn. Some of the stuff that happens during this cleanup step are crucially important and the game host always gets to act first after they happen which really isn't fair.
There are some minor advantages with going first. For example, the game host will always win a tie for a wonder if two people would build it on the same turn. Matt complained several times in the comment thread for our most progressed game that he'd missed out on wonders by one turn over and over. Rough, but at least he was legitimately a turn behind. He finished Parthenon on the exact same turn I did, but he got to have it and I didn't because he was first in turn order. Ideally the game would look ahead to see if a wonder was going to be tied for and would give it out randomly. Or maybe if a wonder was legitimately completed on the same game turn by multiple civs then they both get to have it. The game host will always be a turn ahead on troop movements, too. So they have a minor edge in both attacking and defending
The cleanup phase is when spies assigned to city states get to rig elections. This happens on a schedule and the starting player always gets to go first. Now, city state elections rarely matter. They can boost someone's influence and knock everyone else down. Where it does matter is when people are at war and an election makes it so one of the warring civs loses control of their ally. When this happens everyone is able to make peace with the city state and can spend money to become the ally. In an asynch game the game host gets first crack.
Now, I don't think this is actually something that should ever happen. Because elections are on a fixed schedule and you can look and see how much influence you have with a city state you can always pay money in advance to make sure you never lose control of the city state. Stealing a city state this way should only work against broke opponents, or negligent ones. But because you don't know where your opponent has parked their spies you don't know which allies you need to bump up and which you don't. Keeping a city state ally is so critically important that you should just pay up on all of them anyway. But the game host doesn't need to bother with this. They don't need to pay attention to city state election timing. They don't need to pay up in advance. They can just wait and see what's going on and pay up only when they lose control of a city state. Because they go first. On the other hand the person last in turn order needs to worry about all of their city states all of the time because every other player gets a crack at them if they ever lose control.
The council vote is another thing that gets generated between turns. The game looks to see who is host, and who otherwise has the most votes. And then the game prompts them on their next turns to make a proposal. If the game host is one of these two people this means they get first crack at making a proposal. Some of the proposals have options on them and the person who proposes them gets to pick the option. This means that the person last in turn order should never get to pick a world religion or a world ideology. (At least not until both options become available, anyway, and they get their second choice!)
It doesn't matter if someone has, say, 21 votes and the opponents have 14 between them. Normally I'd think that person could guarantee world ideology the first time that becomes an option, but not if they're late in turn order. This is happening in our current game, where Dave has a huge vote lead and should be able to force through freedom as world ideology. This should make Matt and I unhappy and give Dave extra happy faces. Instead Matt was able to propose autocracy as the world ideology. A vote sure to fail, but it it does pass then Dave and I will get a big chunk of unhappiness and Matt will get extra happy faces. Extra happy faces he probably shouldn't have. (Dave did get to make a different crippling proposal though so I don't feel too bad for him. I'm the one getting blown out here!)
There are a bunch of solutions to this problem from a game design standpoint. I'd make it so proposing 'world ideology' didn't have a selection at time of proposal. I'd make it so you voted like an election when it came down to it and if any ideology had more votes than the rest combined it would win and otherwise none would go in. Or you could let both proposals be for different world ideologies and let the one that passes by the most go through. But I don't get to make either of those things happen. Instead the game host gets to dominate things.
For some of these things there are outside solutions available. The council thing we could just mandate that the game pauses when proposals are made and we make them in an outside forum. Let the council host pick first. Or choose randomly each time. Or alternate. It would 'slow things down' a little, but it feels like it has to be more fair than running the game as it is. The city state thing you could pause the game and ask if the spy owner has the money to spend on their next turn to get the steal off. And if they do, you have to let them.
I don't know that there is a solution for wonders. You could always announce a couple turns in advance when you're going to complete a wonder, but with great engineers existing I think that would be problematic. I guess you could take the stance that you announce with 2 turns to go and that locks out people from using an engineer? And then if two people announce at the same time you roll randomly which one gets it and the other has to switch off on the last turn?
That feels like it would work, but is a real pain and doesn't feel fun. Maybe you just accept that turn order is an advantage for wonders? You could use it as a handicap system of sorts I guess, by putting the stronger players/civs late in turn order? I guess that could be true for everything. Just accept that people late in turn order don't get a good path to a diplomatic victory?
The other problem comes with the way the random number generator works, and the fact that you're playing a game you have to load up every single turn. Robb did some testing and you can change what is inside a hut by changing what turn you open it up. You can change what is inside a hut by taking a different action in the same turn! Attack a barbarian and you can get something different out of the hut! You can try out combats and reload if they don't work out the way you wanted. You can use significantly fewer units as scouts by moving them in one direction, restarting your turn, and then moving them in other directions.
My boats in our main game are faster than Dave's by 2 I think since I have great lighthouse and exploration opened and I don't think he does. This means I can legitimately control movement in the seas (or at least have guaranteed knowledge of the sea movement) by moving forward a bunch and then juking back so I end up moving forward a little bit. I have a couple boats that can move 6 that keep moving 3 forward and 3 back to keep an eye on a small area of the ocean. But if I was willing to keep reloading I could actually move 6 spaces in every direction every turn. With my extra vision range I could probably cover an entire ocean with 1 boat!
I'm torn on if either of these things are bad or if they're fair pool for an asynch game. I do things like write down the cards in hand in A Few Acres of Snow when I play that asynch on Yucata, and reloading to do extra scouting feels similar. Without doing it it's hard to know where units have moved when in a live game you'd be able to see which way they walked. Reloading to scum good huts would be impossible in a live game though... One thing I am sure of is I want to be on the same playing field as the other people. I've been keeping my huts with maps and haven't been scouting a circle of radius 10 every turn, but if other people are getting good huts all the time and doing big scouts then I should too.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Civ V: Great Person Decimals
Matt brought up the point that he didn't think gardens were very good because you need to get at least 4 great person points (or another multiplier) before they'll do anything because the game doesn't display decimal points for great people like it does for things like food, hammers, and science. I did some testing by making a note of how many points I was generating in a game where I have a 75% bonus to great person generation and was making 9 base great musician points. With the 75% multiplier that would be 15.75 points per turn. I went 15 on one turn and then 16 on the next which shows that the game is tracking hidden decimal points when it comes to great person points.
There were other criticisms left in the comments on my post about wanting to get a garden. Dave said he spreads out his guilds (presumably to dampen the impact of having to run so many specialists in one city) and Sky decided that the hammers to build and upkeep cost to maintain of a garden makes it terrible.
I definitely used to spread out my guilds when they first came out. But back then I made a point of not building a granary if it wasn't going to give me a ton of extra food. I also only built trade routes for gold if I built them at all. (I kept having the AI declare war and destroy them all so I ended up just not building caravans and cargo ships after a while.) But it turns out a granary for just 2 food is enough to cover a specialist so it's a lot like a granary could give you 3 culture and 3 great person points! Or it can give you 2 gold and some great merchant points. Or it can just grow your city faster... Granaries are actually awesome and I've really started building them all over the place. And as a side effect to building granaries all over the place you can start transporting your food around. I used to not do this both because I didn't build granaries and because I thought it would cost food in one city to add it to the other. No, it turns out you actually just generate free food! And you should totally do that! And if you've been doing that to one city for most of the game it ends up really big and has no problem coming up with all the specialists you could desire. (If you go tradition that one city should be your capital due to monarchy.)
I definitely think any time you go tradition you should be building all your guilds in one city and that city should be your capital. If the city doesn't have a lot of food to make that viable you should be shipping in extra food from the outside to make it happen. Get the extra gold and happiness out of monarchy, get the extra culture and great people. And get a garden/national epic in that city to make more great people!
The opportunity cost of building a garden could be a thing. Gardens cost 120 hammers and 1 gold per turn in maintenance. Especially early on, 120 hammers is many turns worth of production and you could get something else instead. Especially if you don't have any guilds there's really no reason to be picking up a garden early. The writer's guild itself only costs 100 hammers! So paying more than that amount again to get only 25% of some of the benefit only makes sense if the writers' guild is a fantastic deal. I actually think it is, since great writers can be sacced for a big burst of culture to get a policy, but I can see how others may think otherwise. Once you've spent the 150 hammers for the artists' guild and especially the 200 hammers for a musicians' guild the extra 120 for a garden stops looking like such a big deal. Especially if you have other things going on in the city to generate great people like wonders or different specialists.
The 1 gold upkeep feels like nothing at all, especially if you build all your guilds in one spot. You're not building a garden in every city, so whatever 1 gold. Whatever I say!
There were other criticisms left in the comments on my post about wanting to get a garden. Dave said he spreads out his guilds (presumably to dampen the impact of having to run so many specialists in one city) and Sky decided that the hammers to build and upkeep cost to maintain of a garden makes it terrible.
I definitely used to spread out my guilds when they first came out. But back then I made a point of not building a granary if it wasn't going to give me a ton of extra food. I also only built trade routes for gold if I built them at all. (I kept having the AI declare war and destroy them all so I ended up just not building caravans and cargo ships after a while.) But it turns out a granary for just 2 food is enough to cover a specialist so it's a lot like a granary could give you 3 culture and 3 great person points! Or it can give you 2 gold and some great merchant points. Or it can just grow your city faster... Granaries are actually awesome and I've really started building them all over the place. And as a side effect to building granaries all over the place you can start transporting your food around. I used to not do this both because I didn't build granaries and because I thought it would cost food in one city to add it to the other. No, it turns out you actually just generate free food! And you should totally do that! And if you've been doing that to one city for most of the game it ends up really big and has no problem coming up with all the specialists you could desire. (If you go tradition that one city should be your capital due to monarchy.)
I definitely think any time you go tradition you should be building all your guilds in one city and that city should be your capital. If the city doesn't have a lot of food to make that viable you should be shipping in extra food from the outside to make it happen. Get the extra gold and happiness out of monarchy, get the extra culture and great people. And get a garden/national epic in that city to make more great people!
The opportunity cost of building a garden could be a thing. Gardens cost 120 hammers and 1 gold per turn in maintenance. Especially early on, 120 hammers is many turns worth of production and you could get something else instead. Especially if you don't have any guilds there's really no reason to be picking up a garden early. The writer's guild itself only costs 100 hammers! So paying more than that amount again to get only 25% of some of the benefit only makes sense if the writers' guild is a fantastic deal. I actually think it is, since great writers can be sacced for a big burst of culture to get a policy, but I can see how others may think otherwise. Once you've spent the 150 hammers for the artists' guild and especially the 200 hammers for a musicians' guild the extra 120 for a garden stops looking like such a big deal. Especially if you have other things going on in the city to generate great people like wonders or different specialists.
The 1 gold upkeep feels like nothing at all, especially if you build all your guilds in one spot. You're not building a garden in every city, so whatever 1 gold. Whatever I say!
Monday, June 30, 2014
Civ V: Great People Generation
Building your capital beside a river in Civ V gives you access to a building that provides 25% more great person points in that city. If you aren't beside a river then you can try to build the Hanging Gardens wonder to pick up the building. Otherwise you're out of luck. There's no other way to get that 25% bonus. There are a few other 25% bonuses you can get but those all stack with the gardens bonus.
My question is how much it actually matters. If you can get a 'better' city spot that isn't beside a river what are you giving up? Along a similar vein, how important is it to build the national wonder with the same bonus? How important is it to stack other buildings in the city with that wonder? Heck, how important is it to build an early wonder with great person generation built in?
I built an early pyramids wonder in my quick asynch game and 67 turns later I got a great engineer out of it. That let me rush buy another wonder (Angkor Wat) that I had no hope of building otherwise. It also came with a great engineer point, so after 67 more turns I could have had another great engineer! With no other source of great people I could have turned an early pyramids wonder into 2 more wonders for free!
Or is it actually for free? It turns out great people are generated in a bit of a weird way such that there is a cost to getting a great engineer. There's a system in place such that each subsequent great person of a given type costs more points to generate. The first great artist costs 100, the second costs 200, the third costs 300, and so on. The twist is the scientists, merchants, and engineers all share the same cost pool. So if you get a great engineer for 100 it bumps up the cost of your first great merchant to 200. Get one of those and now the cost of a great scientist is 300. If you hadn't picked up that engineer or that merchant then those 300 great scientist points would have gotten you 2 scientists, not 1.
This is a big deal because great merchants are garbage. Money is really good, don't get me wrong, but the sheer amount of stuff given by an engineer or a scientist is a lot larger than the amount given by a merchant. I guess if you have a game plan around a lot of money (diplomatic victory) then getting great merchants can be a good way to get some cash along with some city state influence. I guess the big thing is just to recognize what you're going to want and then try to avoid getting the stuff you don't want.
The other weird aspect of the whole thing is each city generates great person points for each type of great person for themselves alone. The points don't get pooled together between cities. So you can get yourself into a situation like I'm in where I have 4 cities generating 3 great engineer points and another generating 2. So I am making 14 great engineer points and if they were all consolidated I'd get a great engineer in 14 turns. Instead I'll get one in 67 turns. I will get one 67 turns after that, and then 67 turns after that. Consolidated I'd have to wait 28 turns, and then 42 turns. One of those things is _way_ better than the other.
Of course the tricky part is you can't just go and consolidate it all in one place. You can get a few great person points out of wonders but for the most part you get them out of specialists. I have so many cities making small amounts of engineer points because all of those cities and manning workshops in order to throttle my population growth while I deal with happiness issues. So I'm not really trying to get great engineers. I'm trying to get 0 food and 2 hammers! It is conceivable to imagine stacking wonders all of the same type in a city though, and then making sure that city ran the right specialists too.
But what about gardens? Considering how the costs of the great people escalates, do they even help much? How should I work such a thing out? The easiest is probably to look at the non-pooled ones first. Great artists, musicians, and writers can only have points generated from one national wonder so they're restricted to one city each. Let's compare the number of great writers generated from a city with different amounts of bonuses... Assuming you fill up the specialist slots you'll be making a base of 7 GPPpt. Here's the turn number after building the writer's guild where you'll get the Xth great writer.
Going from base to +25% means you'll sometimes be even on number of great writers and sometimes be up a great writer. You're never going to get up a writer, at least not in the first 300 turns. And for the most part you're going to spend more time even than you are up a writer. On the other hand, if you get both a garden and a national epic and compare that to a city with neither and you'll get up a full great writer after 143 turns. What about if you do have a garden in both cities... How important is it to build the writer's guild in the city with the national epic? It's pretty similar to the first case. You'll never get up a full writer. You'll sometimes be ahead 1, and you'll sometimes be even.
Now, you are still getting something. Assuming you make a great work out of each writer you'll be up 168 tourism and culture over the first 200 turns when you compare base against garden. It's a 16% boost in culture and tourism.
But is that worth worrying about getting a garden? Well, you'll be getting the 168 tourism from the great writers but then you'll be getting a similar boost for great musicians. And for great artists. And you might get the boost for the pooled great leaders too, assuming you have a garden in a city with lots of specialists and/or wonders. Is your capital really going to have room for all those specialists? It needs 6 just for the artists/writers/musicians. Then to get even more specialists for all that other stuff too? Feels a little restricted.
You can definitely do it. A full tradition policy tree, a lot of food, maybe some internal trade routes... And if you're going to do it, you want it to be your capital, because of the monarchy policy which halves the unhappiness for people in your capital. And all those people will do good things for your science production too, so it feels really strong. It's not the only way to go, but it is a good way to go. If you do go that way you're going to want a garden. So I think if I'm going to be trying for a big capital I'm going to want to be on a river. Or I'm going to need to rush hanging gardens. The 6 food from the hanging gardens will help with getting a big enough city to run all the specialists, too!
My gut feeling is a 25% boost is nice, but it's not critical. But there are a bunch of them, and if you can stack up quite a few of them you do get a pretty significant bonus. I'd need to be getting a lot out of it to want to settle someplace that isn't a river with my great person city.
I can see building a city just for great people that isn't the capital. If I can't get my capital on a river and if I can't get the hanging gardens then founding a city somewhere else, on a river, and giving that city the national epic and all three guilds is pretty reasonable. You might even be able to stack an extra 25% boost in there by rushing a wonder with a great engineer or something?
But if I get a chance I will definitely keep trying to found my capital on a river. And I'm going to keep an eye on what cities have specialists in a market or a bank to try to cut down on my great merchants. I'd really rather get extra great scientists or engineers!
My question is how much it actually matters. If you can get a 'better' city spot that isn't beside a river what are you giving up? Along a similar vein, how important is it to build the national wonder with the same bonus? How important is it to stack other buildings in the city with that wonder? Heck, how important is it to build an early wonder with great person generation built in?
I built an early pyramids wonder in my quick asynch game and 67 turns later I got a great engineer out of it. That let me rush buy another wonder (Angkor Wat) that I had no hope of building otherwise. It also came with a great engineer point, so after 67 more turns I could have had another great engineer! With no other source of great people I could have turned an early pyramids wonder into 2 more wonders for free!
Or is it actually for free? It turns out great people are generated in a bit of a weird way such that there is a cost to getting a great engineer. There's a system in place such that each subsequent great person of a given type costs more points to generate. The first great artist costs 100, the second costs 200, the third costs 300, and so on. The twist is the scientists, merchants, and engineers all share the same cost pool. So if you get a great engineer for 100 it bumps up the cost of your first great merchant to 200. Get one of those and now the cost of a great scientist is 300. If you hadn't picked up that engineer or that merchant then those 300 great scientist points would have gotten you 2 scientists, not 1.
This is a big deal because great merchants are garbage. Money is really good, don't get me wrong, but the sheer amount of stuff given by an engineer or a scientist is a lot larger than the amount given by a merchant. I guess if you have a game plan around a lot of money (diplomatic victory) then getting great merchants can be a good way to get some cash along with some city state influence. I guess the big thing is just to recognize what you're going to want and then try to avoid getting the stuff you don't want.
The other weird aspect of the whole thing is each city generates great person points for each type of great person for themselves alone. The points don't get pooled together between cities. So you can get yourself into a situation like I'm in where I have 4 cities generating 3 great engineer points and another generating 2. So I am making 14 great engineer points and if they were all consolidated I'd get a great engineer in 14 turns. Instead I'll get one in 67 turns. I will get one 67 turns after that, and then 67 turns after that. Consolidated I'd have to wait 28 turns, and then 42 turns. One of those things is _way_ better than the other.
Of course the tricky part is you can't just go and consolidate it all in one place. You can get a few great person points out of wonders but for the most part you get them out of specialists. I have so many cities making small amounts of engineer points because all of those cities and manning workshops in order to throttle my population growth while I deal with happiness issues. So I'm not really trying to get great engineers. I'm trying to get 0 food and 2 hammers! It is conceivable to imagine stacking wonders all of the same type in a city though, and then making sure that city ran the right specialists too.
But what about gardens? Considering how the costs of the great people escalates, do they even help much? How should I work such a thing out? The easiest is probably to look at the non-pooled ones first. Great artists, musicians, and writers can only have points generated from one national wonder so they're restricted to one city each. Let's compare the number of great writers generated from a city with different amounts of bonuses... Assuming you fill up the specialist slots you'll be making a base of 7 GPPpt. Here's the turn number after building the writer's guild where you'll get the Xth great writer.
| base | +25% | +50% | +75% | +100% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st writer | 15 | 12 | 10 | 9 | 8 |
| 2nd writer | 43 | 35 | 29 | 25 | 22 |
| 3rd writer | 86 | 69 | 58 | 49 | 43 |
| 4th writer | 143 | 115 | 96 | 82 | 72 |
| 5th writer | 215 | 172 | 143 | 123 | 108 |
| 6th writer | 301 | 241 | 201 | 172 | 151 |
| 7th writer | 267 | 229 | 201 | ||
| 8th writer | 294 | 258 |
Going from base to +25% means you'll sometimes be even on number of great writers and sometimes be up a great writer. You're never going to get up a writer, at least not in the first 300 turns. And for the most part you're going to spend more time even than you are up a writer. On the other hand, if you get both a garden and a national epic and compare that to a city with neither and you'll get up a full great writer after 143 turns. What about if you do have a garden in both cities... How important is it to build the writer's guild in the city with the national epic? It's pretty similar to the first case. You'll never get up a full writer. You'll sometimes be ahead 1, and you'll sometimes be even.
Now, you are still getting something. Assuming you make a great work out of each writer you'll be up 168 tourism and culture over the first 200 turns when you compare base against garden. It's a 16% boost in culture and tourism.
But is that worth worrying about getting a garden? Well, you'll be getting the 168 tourism from the great writers but then you'll be getting a similar boost for great musicians. And for great artists. And you might get the boost for the pooled great leaders too, assuming you have a garden in a city with lots of specialists and/or wonders. Is your capital really going to have room for all those specialists? It needs 6 just for the artists/writers/musicians. Then to get even more specialists for all that other stuff too? Feels a little restricted.
You can definitely do it. A full tradition policy tree, a lot of food, maybe some internal trade routes... And if you're going to do it, you want it to be your capital, because of the monarchy policy which halves the unhappiness for people in your capital. And all those people will do good things for your science production too, so it feels really strong. It's not the only way to go, but it is a good way to go. If you do go that way you're going to want a garden. So I think if I'm going to be trying for a big capital I'm going to want to be on a river. Or I'm going to need to rush hanging gardens. The 6 food from the hanging gardens will help with getting a big enough city to run all the specialists, too!
My gut feeling is a 25% boost is nice, but it's not critical. But there are a bunch of them, and if you can stack up quite a few of them you do get a pretty significant bonus. I'd need to be getting a lot out of it to want to settle someplace that isn't a river with my great person city.
I can see building a city just for great people that isn't the capital. If I can't get my capital on a river and if I can't get the hanging gardens then founding a city somewhere else, on a river, and giving that city the national epic and all three guilds is pretty reasonable. You might even be able to stack an extra 25% boost in there by rushing a wonder with a great engineer or something?
But if I get a chance I will definitely keep trying to found my capital on a river. And I'm going to keep an eye on what cities have specialists in a market or a bank to try to cut down on my great merchants. I'd really rather get extra great scientists or engineers!
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Civ V: Diplomatic Vote Requirements
I posted last week about the inevitability of a diplomatic win when you lock in an early council lead and get all the bonus votes available by being the only player in the game going patronage. But I didn't know how the number of votes needed to win was actually calculated. This is a problem because there's a big difference between an inevitable win at 22 votes needed and one at 34 votes needed. From the comments to that post I pieced a little more together, like how the patch notes from the last big patch mentioned an increase in the number of votes needed to win and the increase was based on the size of the map. The implication is certainly that the base number of votes was also from the size of the map. Snuggles suggested I play a single player game emulating the circumstances of my multiplayer game and see what happened as players/city states were eliminated. I found some time last night to do just that.
First of all I decided to run some tests to determine the initial number of votes needed to win. I tried varying all kinds of different things, looking at the victory screen, and then starting a new game. I changed game speed, difficulty level, number of players, and number of city states. Not all of those actually change things up. Can you guess which will alter the number of votes needed? The list is after the jump!
First of all I decided to run some tests to determine the initial number of votes needed to win. I tried varying all kinds of different things, looking at the victory screen, and then starting a new game. I changed game speed, difficulty level, number of players, and number of city states. Not all of those actually change things up. Can you guess which will alter the number of votes needed? The list is after the jump!
Monday, June 09, 2014
Civ V: Diplomatic Victory
I was chatting yesterday a bit with Robb about the game state in one of our asynch Civ V games. The one where the evil Dave eliminated Robb early. I have a plan for trying to win in a tricky fashion in that game, but I'm pretty sure it's bad. I'm going to try it anyway because it seems fun and I want to see what happens but it just feels like suddenly making 28 tourism per turn isn't actually going to be a realistic threat. Robb was wondering how the other people would react when I grab the final piety policy and unlock that tourism ability and my gut feeling is Dave wouldn't care because he's in a dominating position to win diplomatically. We talked a bit about how that works because Robb wasn't aware of a couple of mechanics that ultimately snowball the council into an inevitable win. I don't really know how it all works either... So it's time to look into it and figure out just how inevitable the inevitable is. Do Matt and I have any response beyond trying to sneak a faster win or somehow trying to kill Dave off despite being on different continents?
The first thing to dig into is the inevitability factor. Eventually you reach the point in the game (when 1 civ hits the atomic era or half the civs hit the modern era) where the council starts letting you vote for someone to win. There's a flat threshold of how many votes are needed and if no one gets that many votes then the top two get given 2 more votes for all subsequent council actions. Including the next victory vote. We're playing a quick game so I believe that means a victory vote will happen every 13 turns once they start happening. I honestly have no idea how many votes are needed to win. I read 60% of base votes from living civs/city states which would put our game at needing 22 votes but I loaded up a saved game from a single player game on a huge world and it only needed 22 votes so I really don't know anymore. And I can't seem to find out! I even went and installed an SQL plug-in for Firefox and went digging around in the core database for the game to try to find the formula but couldn't find it. I did go load up the game and the victory conditions screen claims 34 votes to win. That's a lot more than 22. So something funky is going on... (I also checked a 6 player game on a larger map and it needs 40 to win... Maybe it's based on map size and gets lowered as civs/city states die?)
And I think this all means there are lots of ways to get extra votes that don't increase the number needed to win. Hosting the council is worth +2. Owning the Forbidden Palace wonder is worth +2. Getting a world religion is worth +2. Getting a world ideology is worth +2. There's a tech far down the tree that gives you +1 for each of your diplomats. Dave already has the Palace so right now he has 4 votes to my 1 and Matt's 1. He also has the most city state allies so when they start giving votes he will likely continue to have more than we do together. This means he gets to pass whatever he wants, in particular the world religion and world ideologies. So when we hit the atomic era I fully expect him to have 12 votes on his own, 2 per city state, and 2 per time he fails to win. So if he has 11 allies he's apt to win the very first time the council meets to vote a winner. He has 8 right now, so he's not really going to need to get the late game tech or many of the pity votes.
How can this be stopped? Well, we can take his city state allies as a start. But he declared war on us which means the city states also declared war on us. We can't just do quests and pay them money anymore. There are really only two ways left to remove his allies. We can kill them, or we can stop using our spies to catch up in tech and start using them to try to rig elections. Killing the city states doesn't even help much. We deny Dave 2 votes but we (maybe?) knock 1.2 votes off the number needed to win. It's a gain, but it's not much of one. The best bet there would actually be for me to conquer a city state and then let Matt conquer it back and liberate it. That would restore it as a city state but with Matt as the ally, not Dave. So it would deny Dave 2 votes and keep the number needed to win constant. But I think it forces Matt and I to fight, which kills trading, and that's really bad. So maybe that could be a desperation move, but I don't like it much. Besides, if I'm going to actually beat up a city state, I want to own it myself!
How about rigging elections? How does that work? I know you can park them in a city state and then every so often (15 turns in a normal game so probably 10 turns in a quick game) the city state will hold elections and the best spy present will get to get some influence for his civ and lower the influence of everyone else. If we lower Dave below the alliance level then presumably we can make peace and spend the cash to buy the city state as an ally ourselves. But when you're at war you're always listed at -60 influence... So does rigging elections in this case even help? Will we stay at -60 after peace is declared or will we go back to our real amount? I don't know. The other thing you can do is try a coup. It has very low odds of success but if it works it flips your influence with the other player's influence. So we'd become the ally straight up instead of Dave. Failure kills off your spy. You get a new one again after a few turns but they lose any levels they might have. It seems like a bit of a desperation play but I guess it'd be worth a shot if it came right down to it.
Another possibility is to attack the other sources of his votes. Conquer the city that built the Forbidden Palace. Use an army of great prophets to convert away all his cities so he's no longer following the world religion. Bring Robb back into the game to increase the number of votes needed to win. (If that is even actually part of the formula... Man I wish I could find it!)
Or we can try to win even faster. It seems inconceivable to win a science victory because of how deep you need to go beyond the atomic era to pull that one off. Even if Dave needs 3 or 4 failed votes to win he gets that to happen in ~50 turns. You need 15 techs in atomic or above era to get a science victory, and then you need to still build the last part. No, science seems right out unless we really cut down on his external sources of votes. Culture might be possible, and it's certainly where my hat is hung, but Dave makes so much culture per turn I actually can't imagine winning this way. Not without the internet, anyway, and it's also far in the information era.
That just leaves military. It doesn't much matter if it's a full military victory or just removing Dave and then having Matt and I duke it out for science/culture. But it feels like keeping the status quo means Dave wins a diplomatic victory.
I'm not sure if I like this. I hate board games with a front runner issue. Dave did well early so now he needs to die? Do we really need to play Civ V in a way that we never seem like enough of a threat to be ganged up on? Do we need to be in 2nd place so when the world gangs up on the leader we can swoop in for the win? Do we need to always be capable of winning a defensive war against all the other players?
Though for all I know there's something going on such that Dave won't just win a diplomatic victory. For all I know his massive tech lead actually means he _is_ capable of winning a defensive war against all the other players, especially since all the other players in this case is just two people on different islands. And if beating up a city state doesn't decrease the number of votes needed he may actually be barely containable, though he will still get to decide all the council votes on his own.
I am a little less worried about Dave instantly winning now than I was when I thought it was going to be 22 votes to win. But I am just as worried about the inevitable win because 2 extra votes every 13 turns will close the gap between 22 and 34 in only 78 turns, and I think he was going to overshoot 22 easily. We'll just have to wait and see what happens I guess!
The first thing to dig into is the inevitability factor. Eventually you reach the point in the game (when 1 civ hits the atomic era or half the civs hit the modern era) where the council starts letting you vote for someone to win. There's a flat threshold of how many votes are needed and if no one gets that many votes then the top two get given 2 more votes for all subsequent council actions. Including the next victory vote. We're playing a quick game so I believe that means a victory vote will happen every 13 turns once they start happening. I honestly have no idea how many votes are needed to win. I read 60% of base votes from living civs/city states which would put our game at needing 22 votes but I loaded up a saved game from a single player game on a huge world and it only needed 22 votes so I really don't know anymore. And I can't seem to find out! I even went and installed an SQL plug-in for Firefox and went digging around in the core database for the game to try to find the formula but couldn't find it. I did go load up the game and the victory conditions screen claims 34 votes to win. That's a lot more than 22. So something funky is going on... (I also checked a 6 player game on a larger map and it needs 40 to win... Maybe it's based on map size and gets lowered as civs/city states die?)
And I think this all means there are lots of ways to get extra votes that don't increase the number needed to win. Hosting the council is worth +2. Owning the Forbidden Palace wonder is worth +2. Getting a world religion is worth +2. Getting a world ideology is worth +2. There's a tech far down the tree that gives you +1 for each of your diplomats. Dave already has the Palace so right now he has 4 votes to my 1 and Matt's 1. He also has the most city state allies so when they start giving votes he will likely continue to have more than we do together. This means he gets to pass whatever he wants, in particular the world religion and world ideologies. So when we hit the atomic era I fully expect him to have 12 votes on his own, 2 per city state, and 2 per time he fails to win. So if he has 11 allies he's apt to win the very first time the council meets to vote a winner. He has 8 right now, so he's not really going to need to get the late game tech or many of the pity votes.
How can this be stopped? Well, we can take his city state allies as a start. But he declared war on us which means the city states also declared war on us. We can't just do quests and pay them money anymore. There are really only two ways left to remove his allies. We can kill them, or we can stop using our spies to catch up in tech and start using them to try to rig elections. Killing the city states doesn't even help much. We deny Dave 2 votes but we (maybe?) knock 1.2 votes off the number needed to win. It's a gain, but it's not much of one. The best bet there would actually be for me to conquer a city state and then let Matt conquer it back and liberate it. That would restore it as a city state but with Matt as the ally, not Dave. So it would deny Dave 2 votes and keep the number needed to win constant. But I think it forces Matt and I to fight, which kills trading, and that's really bad. So maybe that could be a desperation move, but I don't like it much. Besides, if I'm going to actually beat up a city state, I want to own it myself!
How about rigging elections? How does that work? I know you can park them in a city state and then every so often (15 turns in a normal game so probably 10 turns in a quick game) the city state will hold elections and the best spy present will get to get some influence for his civ and lower the influence of everyone else. If we lower Dave below the alliance level then presumably we can make peace and spend the cash to buy the city state as an ally ourselves. But when you're at war you're always listed at -60 influence... So does rigging elections in this case even help? Will we stay at -60 after peace is declared or will we go back to our real amount? I don't know. The other thing you can do is try a coup. It has very low odds of success but if it works it flips your influence with the other player's influence. So we'd become the ally straight up instead of Dave. Failure kills off your spy. You get a new one again after a few turns but they lose any levels they might have. It seems like a bit of a desperation play but I guess it'd be worth a shot if it came right down to it.
Another possibility is to attack the other sources of his votes. Conquer the city that built the Forbidden Palace. Use an army of great prophets to convert away all his cities so he's no longer following the world religion. Bring Robb back into the game to increase the number of votes needed to win. (If that is even actually part of the formula... Man I wish I could find it!)
Or we can try to win even faster. It seems inconceivable to win a science victory because of how deep you need to go beyond the atomic era to pull that one off. Even if Dave needs 3 or 4 failed votes to win he gets that to happen in ~50 turns. You need 15 techs in atomic or above era to get a science victory, and then you need to still build the last part. No, science seems right out unless we really cut down on his external sources of votes. Culture might be possible, and it's certainly where my hat is hung, but Dave makes so much culture per turn I actually can't imagine winning this way. Not without the internet, anyway, and it's also far in the information era.
That just leaves military. It doesn't much matter if it's a full military victory or just removing Dave and then having Matt and I duke it out for science/culture. But it feels like keeping the status quo means Dave wins a diplomatic victory.
I'm not sure if I like this. I hate board games with a front runner issue. Dave did well early so now he needs to die? Do we really need to play Civ V in a way that we never seem like enough of a threat to be ganged up on? Do we need to be in 2nd place so when the world gangs up on the leader we can swoop in for the win? Do we need to always be capable of winning a defensive war against all the other players?
Though for all I know there's something going on such that Dave won't just win a diplomatic victory. For all I know his massive tech lead actually means he _is_ capable of winning a defensive war against all the other players, especially since all the other players in this case is just two people on different islands. And if beating up a city state doesn't decrease the number of votes needed he may actually be barely containable, though he will still get to decide all the council votes on his own.
I am a little less worried about Dave instantly winning now than I was when I thought it was going to be 22 votes to win. But I am just as worried about the inevitable win because 2 extra votes every 13 turns will close the gap between 22 and 34 in only 78 turns, and I think he was going to overshoot 22 easily. We'll just have to wait and see what happens I guess!
Thursday, June 05, 2014
Civ V: Spending Happy Faces
Something I've been trying to think through recently is how to make optimal use of my happy faces. Should I be forcing some cities to stop growing in order to grow other cities instead? Should I found more cities? I could leave the happy faces around and try to pick up a golden age or potentially sell some luxuries to other players.
By default you have 9 happy faces to work with, plus 1 for each natural wonder you find, plus 4 for each luxury good you have. Then you can also get some extra happy faces through policies or through local city happiness buildings. Every city you found knocks 3 happiness off of your bottom line. So in a sense every city you found kills off the potential for 3 people in your capital. People in your capital tend to be better than people in other cities and right now we're replacing them with just the base tile of a new city so this is a pretty terrible trade. If the new city gets you a luxury that's actually a net positive though since you get the city and the first population completely for free.
Another difference comes from the whole local happiness thing. If you're able to build a colisseum, a circus, a pagoda, and a mosque in the new city then you've got the local happiness to pay for 7 people in that city that you couldn't otherwise pick up. So you subtracted out 3 people from your capital and got 7 people in return. Each individual person may be worse but you've more than doubled how many of them you can have. You do tack on a 5% science penalty and a 10% culture penalty for each new city but with just a library, monument, and the two religious buildings you will be bringing in 7 culture and 10.5 science from the city. It feels like that has to more than cover the extra cost unless your capital is really insane.
Now, I can definitely envision ways to have your capital be really insane. If you go completely down the tradition policy tree your capital's people will only cost half an unhappiness each instead of the full unhappiness in a regular city. This means you'd need to trade 6 people in your capital for 7 in another city. Your capital is also likely to build a bunch of multipliers unavailable to the rest of your cities (like 50% more science from national college) which can really make the 6 people in your capital worth an awful lot. I can see settling more cities to pick up luxuries since those are happy face positive and the extra safety you get from being able to produce more military units is likely worth the policy and tech hikes. Especially since unless your capital is making 200 science or 70 culture you're eventually going to be outpacing those cost multipliers.
In my currentfour three player game I started making lots of cities early before I could stack in any local happiness for them. I'm pretty sure that was a mistake since I ended up unhappy and unable to grow for quite some time. A couple of the cities I built 'near' luxuries, but not right on top of them, and the cities took forever to border expand those resources in. It was definitely a mistake and a learning experience. I do now think I'll be getting the tradition opener in almost every game to get the faster border expansion even if I then switch to full liberty for lots of cities. I feel like I stunted my growth in lots of little ways through bad play and I may well be too far behind to make a comeback. But looking at things now, and seeing how much local happiness I can now get (and I don't even have zoos yet), I'm thinking the more cities I can build the better. Letting a city grow bigger than the local happiness is probably not wise without having a really good reason because I could spend those 3 people on a whole other size 5 or 7 city. Assuming I had more space to put them down, anyway, which is really not the case. I definitely think my land mass was designed for a full tradition build. Oh well!
For example, I think a policy with a single city would cost me 413 culture. I'm making 16 culture in my (terrible) capital so that's 26 turns for a policy. Each city I found adds an extra 41 onto the cost of the policy. So each city has to make at least 1.6 culture per turn to offset the 10% culture cost. Considering they're guaranteed to make 1 culture per turn because I have the liberty opener... I should have as many cities as I can get my hands on! Build a monument and go! Especially with a religion like I have with the ability to buy 2 buildings for 3 happy faces in each city.
I don't think I can get any wonders because I don't have any single city that's any good but I have lots of cities that are decent. I expect I should be able to hold off any invaders by just setting all of my cities to build units. But I am last in hammers, so maybe that's not even true. I really need to get some policies in the exploration tree. Unlocking 3 hammers per coastal city and 3 happy faces per coastal city (that has built a light house, harbour, and seaport anyway) looks to be really, really good. Then I can get most of my cities up to size 10 for no extra unhappiness! Snag a zoo and I can get up to 12! Of course most of these cities don't have anything resembling 12 tiles worth using. Maybe I'll eventually build buildings for specialists so I can do better than 'unemployed dude for 1 hammer' which I've had to use a few times already this game. (That population growth was a mistake!)
I'm not sure about saving up for a golden age. It would be pretty sweet but it takes so many happy faces and I'm really not that far above zero. I could stunt all my cities growth instead of just most of them to try to force it to happen. 20% more production and culture would be pretty sweet. Maybe that's how I get the policies together to work on exploration... Hmm...
By default you have 9 happy faces to work with, plus 1 for each natural wonder you find, plus 4 for each luxury good you have. Then you can also get some extra happy faces through policies or through local city happiness buildings. Every city you found knocks 3 happiness off of your bottom line. So in a sense every city you found kills off the potential for 3 people in your capital. People in your capital tend to be better than people in other cities and right now we're replacing them with just the base tile of a new city so this is a pretty terrible trade. If the new city gets you a luxury that's actually a net positive though since you get the city and the first population completely for free.
Another difference comes from the whole local happiness thing. If you're able to build a colisseum, a circus, a pagoda, and a mosque in the new city then you've got the local happiness to pay for 7 people in that city that you couldn't otherwise pick up. So you subtracted out 3 people from your capital and got 7 people in return. Each individual person may be worse but you've more than doubled how many of them you can have. You do tack on a 5% science penalty and a 10% culture penalty for each new city but with just a library, monument, and the two religious buildings you will be bringing in 7 culture and 10.5 science from the city. It feels like that has to more than cover the extra cost unless your capital is really insane.
Now, I can definitely envision ways to have your capital be really insane. If you go completely down the tradition policy tree your capital's people will only cost half an unhappiness each instead of the full unhappiness in a regular city. This means you'd need to trade 6 people in your capital for 7 in another city. Your capital is also likely to build a bunch of multipliers unavailable to the rest of your cities (like 50% more science from national college) which can really make the 6 people in your capital worth an awful lot. I can see settling more cities to pick up luxuries since those are happy face positive and the extra safety you get from being able to produce more military units is likely worth the policy and tech hikes. Especially since unless your capital is making 200 science or 70 culture you're eventually going to be outpacing those cost multipliers.
In my current
For example, I think a policy with a single city would cost me 413 culture. I'm making 16 culture in my (terrible) capital so that's 26 turns for a policy. Each city I found adds an extra 41 onto the cost of the policy. So each city has to make at least 1.6 culture per turn to offset the 10% culture cost. Considering they're guaranteed to make 1 culture per turn because I have the liberty opener... I should have as many cities as I can get my hands on! Build a monument and go! Especially with a religion like I have with the ability to buy 2 buildings for 3 happy faces in each city.
I don't think I can get any wonders because I don't have any single city that's any good but I have lots of cities that are decent. I expect I should be able to hold off any invaders by just setting all of my cities to build units. But I am last in hammers, so maybe that's not even true. I really need to get some policies in the exploration tree. Unlocking 3 hammers per coastal city and 3 happy faces per coastal city (that has built a light house, harbour, and seaport anyway) looks to be really, really good. Then I can get most of my cities up to size 10 for no extra unhappiness! Snag a zoo and I can get up to 12! Of course most of these cities don't have anything resembling 12 tiles worth using. Maybe I'll eventually build buildings for specialists so I can do better than 'unemployed dude for 1 hammer' which I've had to use a few times already this game. (That population growth was a mistake!)
I'm not sure about saving up for a golden age. It would be pretty sweet but it takes so many happy faces and I'm really not that far above zero. I could stunt all my cities growth instead of just most of them to try to force it to happen. 20% more production and culture would be pretty sweet. Maybe that's how I get the policies together to work on exploration... Hmm...
Friday, May 30, 2014
Civ V: Dangerous Bug Abuse
I decided to see if I could pull off the research bug I talked about yesterday in an actual game. So I started up a 12 player highest difficulty game as Venice with the goal of just sitting around setting up the bug and hope I was ignored until I had infinite tech. I wasn't sure how I was eventually going to win but I wanted to see if I could make it happen.
It turns out that yes, I can totally make it happen. I may have gotten lucky (I got to make a proposal at the first council meeting and was able to get scholars in residence through) but no one even looked at me funny the entire time. There's just so much space on a pangaea that it seems like if you never expand you don't get anyone's attention. My capital was truly terrible though, and I couldn't even increase my hammer production because I was skipping mining, but I got it it work.
And then disaster struck. I don't know the exact value but one turn I was carrying more than 200000 beakers over between turns and the next turn it wrapped around into the negatives. Not only was I not learning a tech per turn anymore, I'd broken poor chemistry. Even if my position was otherwise playable I'd never be able to progress beyond chemistry. (Actually I may have been able to build the national university wonder for a free tech to fix it, but stalling out with less tech than everyone else was not playable.)
What I needed to do was force a path to new techs. I'd picked up all of the cheap stuff but since the bug only applies on techs with a discount if I could have opened up a 'new to me' tech then I could have started actually spending science when I had 100k or so. Or maybe I just didn't need scholars in residence at all. Or maybe I could have started earlier with a smaller start-up value from my great scientist.
I'm going to give it some more thought about how to transition from infinite tech into a victory and how much set-up I actually need. Maybe I can just use the sailing side of the tree and can afford to at least get mining and masonry to build up my capital. Maybe I can even afford to expand a little bit? And I can probably find a better civ to play... I'm actually think Mayans for the early great prophet (I couldn't see any other way to get a religion in this game unless you can get a huge faith pantheon) and the also free great scientist which might let me get started without waiting for the university workers to generate one for me.
I did learn that I don't need to waste time using scouts to find all the other civs. As long as someone else does it the council will introduce me to everyone else and unlock all my discounts.
It turns out that yes, I can totally make it happen. I may have gotten lucky (I got to make a proposal at the first council meeting and was able to get scholars in residence through) but no one even looked at me funny the entire time. There's just so much space on a pangaea that it seems like if you never expand you don't get anyone's attention. My capital was truly terrible though, and I couldn't even increase my hammer production because I was skipping mining, but I got it it work.
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| Oops. |
What I needed to do was force a path to new techs. I'd picked up all of the cheap stuff but since the bug only applies on techs with a discount if I could have opened up a 'new to me' tech then I could have started actually spending science when I had 100k or so. Or maybe I just didn't need scholars in residence at all. Or maybe I could have started earlier with a smaller start-up value from my great scientist.
I'm going to give it some more thought about how to transition from infinite tech into a victory and how much set-up I actually need. Maybe I can just use the sailing side of the tree and can afford to at least get mining and masonry to build up my capital. Maybe I can even afford to expand a little bit? And I can probably find a better civ to play... I'm actually think Mayans for the early great prophet (I couldn't see any other way to get a religion in this game unless you can get a huge faith pantheon) and the also free great scientist which might let me get started without waiting for the university workers to generate one for me.
I did learn that I don't need to waste time using scouts to find all the other civs. As long as someone else does it the council will introduce me to everyone else and unlock all my discounts.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Civ V: Research Catch-Ups
I was annoyed at the last Civ V video I watched because the guy playing didn't talk at all to explain anything so I went searching for someone who does. Yoruus is a pretty cool dude who clearly doesn't speak English as his first language (he sometimes has to stop and think to find the right word) but he does a really good job of explaining what he's thinking. And he even uses the crazy opening I used to use way back when I first started playing where you open up both tradition and liberty to get the early culture bonuses! The more I think about it the more I actually like it, since the tradition opener pretty much pays for itself over the whole game and gives you faster border expansions. I really wish I had it in my Dutch multiplayer game since my cities refuse to border expand any of the hills near them! How am I supposed to stop growing the cities and work all the hammers without hills? I've mostly been watching his 2 player real time games so there's actually not much to learn from them but they're entertaining and that's good enough for me!
Anyway, he has some videos tagged as being important or something and they talk about a science bug in the game that can essentially grant all of the techs one turn at a time starting at the middle of the game. His test run took a civ that almost had architecture and was able to learn the entire tree except lasers, stealth, and future tech. You get knights and pikemen along the way so it's not even a super vulnerable strategy! I decided I wanted to know more about it, but rather than try to find a post about it on the internet I decided to rig up a test game of my own to see if I could figure out what was going on.
The crux of the matter has to deal with a catch-up mechanic I didn't even know existed in the game. Basically the idea is techs get cheaper the more other civs you know that have learned the tech. It makes some amount of sense. It's easier for me to figure out a book when I see that Dave has a big stack of them over there. I wrote down a bunch of numbers from my test game and it looks like there's not an exact discount but it's in the area of 6.5% cheaper per player. Or maybe it's just rounding screwing things up? I learned that the game only displays whole numbers in the tech tree but it definitely keeps track of the decimal points so it may well actually be 6.5% per player. It may also vary based on number of players or difficulty or game speed or map size. The precise amount doesn't really matter though, the important thing to know is that techs get cheaper as other people learn them and that you need to actually meet the other civs before you get the discount.
I was lamenting on Facebook that I didn't see how I could keep up with Dave in tech since he's making approximately three times as many beakers as I am. I still need to build a national college and universities and such to close the gap but it felt like I was going to be stuck way behind for the whole game. But if it turns out I only have to pay 87% of the cost of the techs that he had to pay I don't need to pass him in beakers to catch up. I just need to get close and the discounts should be a boost. There's also apparently a premium for researching the first medieval era tech where that person needs to pay like 4% more. Couple that with the other catch-up mechanic (spying) and things only look bad, not impossible. That is, if I'd met Dave. As things currently stand I couldn't spy on him even if we had spies and I'm stuck paying full price for my techs because I'm stuck on an island on my own. My worry is the first time I meet Dave it'll be an entire army landing on my little island and starting to catch-up at that point won't be worth anything. Of course he could just stay away and deny the discounts as long as possible while building up a powerful position to win the game any of the other ways. Bleh.
Anyway... Catching up is fine and all but what about that bug? It turns out the game is set up such that you can only learn one tech at the start of each turn. You can learn more than one in a turn if you learn free techs or earn science in the middle of your turn (like by popping a great scientist) but otherwise it just carries any excess science forward to the next turn. Even if that excess science would be enough to learn multiple techs at once. Like if you saved up a bunch of great scientists and used them all in one turn, for example...
Here's the state of affairs in my test game after I'd played around a bit with abusing the bug. You'll notice I'm working on learning sailing which costs a mere 36 science. I have 4159 science sitting around waiting to be spent. On this turn I legitimately earned 87 science from my city. So if everything was working properly I'd expect to add 87 to my 4159 to get 4246 and then pay out 36 science to learn sailing. I should be left with 4210 or so, with weird rounding maybe shifting things by a couple. Instead...
That's not 4210! That's 292 bigger than it should be! Which is in the neighbourhood of the ~6.5% discount for someone else knowing the tech. I made notes of every tech I picked up during this overflow streak and the pattern holds up. Tech known by 3 other civs gave a boost of around 19% to the science on hand. At least when the cost of the tech was small compared to the overflow. There was still a gain even when I was working on techs that cost over a thousand each but it slowed down and petered out. Part of that problem is I was getting techs known by only one other civ, not three. And I didn't manipulate the start very well I don't think. I certainly only got almost to the modern era before I ran out of science, but it was still a big gain.
So how did I set up my test? I made a hotseat game with 4 civs. It was a quick game. I wandered them around until they all met each other. Then I settled down and set them down different paths. One civ was going to be a scumbag cheater. His goal was to get all the research buildings in order to have as big a burst as possible when I used great scientists, and then was to pick up said great scientists. One civ just went down the bottom of the tree, taking mining and going as far as they could. The third civ followed the second civ but first it detoured up to get a national college. The last civ was designed to research all the things so it beelined straight to universities and also picked up the great library along the way. All of the civs built a worker and then tried to get as high a population as possible to max out the science gain.
I totalled up a few numbers for each civ at various points of the game. My bug ran out on turn 147 after settling so that's going to be the end point. I'm also going to look at the numbers after 50 and 100 turns. The numbers are total beakers earned (by science per turn or by burning a great scientist), total base value of techs learned, and 'free' beakers earned either by a catch-up mechanic, the bug, or rounding issues.
Now, the city spots weren't all equivalent. Russia got to settle near Lake Victoria which was huge for early pop growth. They were also beside a mountain. One interesting thing is despite growing at the same rate and being later in turn order Assyria actually got writing a turn before Babylon did. Because they had to pay 2 less science for pottery as a result of Babylon learning it first. Russia's early beaker bonus was almost entirely the free tech out of the great library which I didn't count as science accumulated. They also accumulated significantly more science than the other players thanks to the +3 from the great library. They were slower to national college because the other two civs got to build the cheaper library and then start in on it right away. But once they got them both up they were making double what the other science civs were making. And more than 5 times as much as the poor mining civ! The university really put things over the top with the science per turn sitting at 36-13-40-145 at turn 90.
I didn't do a good job abusing the bug but even still look at the end result! Babylon ended up with more tech value learned on turn 147 than Russia did despite Russia actually being such a dominating science force. Some of the 10000 free science was the legitimate catch-up mechanic but the vast majority of it was the bug coming home. And at the end, after rush buying the public school for Babylon, the science per turn ended up at 182-20-59-272. Babylon still had the oxford university to build, too, which was where 550 of Russia's bonus came from.
I actually ended up abusing the bug a little bit with Russia without meaning to. They probably only got 300 or 400 free science out of it, but when you're researching techs that cost 80 or 100 that's a pretty huge boost. (Also, Austria only got 2023 total value in techs all game... So 300 free science is really big relative to them!) They didn't even have to pop a great scientist or anything... They just plowed straight up to universities without getting any of the side techs. They researched masonry (which cost 33 beakers) while they were generating 119 per turn! And that was with only 2 civs knowing masonry... If Babylon wasn't also being cheesy and had also picked it up the cost would have been lower and the carry-over multiplier would have been higher.
There's one thing I didn't do in my test, and that's grab the 'scholars in residence' diplomatic boost. If that boost gets voted in the cost of all techs is lowered by 20% if any other civ knows it. Given what seems to be the case with the carry-over multiplier having this in play would stack up the science lying around by an absurd amount.
I also suspect you could set up the bug even when you don't have a lot of low cost techs lying around. You could, for example, research most of a tech and then switch to something else right before it finished. This should manufacture a fake low cost tech. Prep up several of these and then pop your great scientist and go to town. I suspect this is what the guy was doing in the first game I watched since he switched off of a tech and I didn't understand why but he eventually popped several great scientist at the same time to burst his way to artillery. I thought maybe he did that as a surprise move to jump up in the literacy number but he could have also done it to steal some extra beakers to get there a little faster.
Ok, so this bug exists... What should be done about it? There are people who would say anything in the game is fair to use. I feel like this bug is outside the realm of what's acceptable but I hate enforcing outside rules on a game. Even my civ that was trying to play fair ended up using the bug incidentally! Anyone that rushes national college into university while mostly ignoring the other junk is going to get extra free science for doing so. I actually wouldn't be surprised to find out that Dave unintentionally got some science out of the bug in our faster asynch game. He was making more than 50 beakers per turn before I was even close to researching writing. The writing tier of techs cost 36 with someone knowing them, the first tier only costs 23! So if he'd met Robb by that point in time and if he researched any early tech that Robb knew (mining/masonry/bronze working?) he could have triggered the bug. It probably wouldn't be for very much, but when I'm only making 11 per turn him getting 8 for free is a big deal.
How could you even fix it? You could research all the 'cheap' stuff before you power up that many beakers? You could only select a 'cheap' tech after barely finishing a previous tech so you're not carrying over more science than the cheap tech costs. Or you could just accept that sometimes it will happen.
The big thing is to not pop a great scientist for a huge amount of science and then research a cheap tech. Pop the scientist to get an expensive tech, and use it early on in the tech?
Some people have suggested banning great scientists entirely. Use them just for the improvement, never for the one shot. Which sucks, but if the alternative is making them absurdly powerful? I donno. Also you could ban scholars in residence since that's what really gives you the huge overflows. But even without it I was able to more than double my science!
Or you could just play with it as a potential strategy. I don't know how a real game would actually go if I wasn't allowed to research anything from mining forward and if I was forced to generate 3 great people without using them for 125 turns. I feel like someone should have killed me by then...
But then I think about my Dutch game... I'd need to take sailing in order to go meet up with Dave but it would have been a strong strategy to build up just science and ignore the bottom half of the tech tree. Meet Dave and then more than double my science? Seems strong. As it is I have several techs that will only take 3 turns to finish and I don't have universities yet. Even without the bug existing it's definitely right to rush to universities and eventually I will meet Dave. All those cheap techs may well become cheaper than one turn. I could probably alternate picking them up to not get extra science, but if I don't want those techs yet it seems bad for me.
Anyone have any thoughts?
Anyway, he has some videos tagged as being important or something and they talk about a science bug in the game that can essentially grant all of the techs one turn at a time starting at the middle of the game. His test run took a civ that almost had architecture and was able to learn the entire tree except lasers, stealth, and future tech. You get knights and pikemen along the way so it's not even a super vulnerable strategy! I decided I wanted to know more about it, but rather than try to find a post about it on the internet I decided to rig up a test game of my own to see if I could figure out what was going on.
The crux of the matter has to deal with a catch-up mechanic I didn't even know existed in the game. Basically the idea is techs get cheaper the more other civs you know that have learned the tech. It makes some amount of sense. It's easier for me to figure out a book when I see that Dave has a big stack of them over there. I wrote down a bunch of numbers from my test game and it looks like there's not an exact discount but it's in the area of 6.5% cheaper per player. Or maybe it's just rounding screwing things up? I learned that the game only displays whole numbers in the tech tree but it definitely keeps track of the decimal points so it may well actually be 6.5% per player. It may also vary based on number of players or difficulty or game speed or map size. The precise amount doesn't really matter though, the important thing to know is that techs get cheaper as other people learn them and that you need to actually meet the other civs before you get the discount.
I was lamenting on Facebook that I didn't see how I could keep up with Dave in tech since he's making approximately three times as many beakers as I am. I still need to build a national college and universities and such to close the gap but it felt like I was going to be stuck way behind for the whole game. But if it turns out I only have to pay 87% of the cost of the techs that he had to pay I don't need to pass him in beakers to catch up. I just need to get close and the discounts should be a boost. There's also apparently a premium for researching the first medieval era tech where that person needs to pay like 4% more. Couple that with the other catch-up mechanic (spying) and things only look bad, not impossible. That is, if I'd met Dave. As things currently stand I couldn't spy on him even if we had spies and I'm stuck paying full price for my techs because I'm stuck on an island on my own. My worry is the first time I meet Dave it'll be an entire army landing on my little island and starting to catch-up at that point won't be worth anything. Of course he could just stay away and deny the discounts as long as possible while building up a powerful position to win the game any of the other ways. Bleh.
Anyway... Catching up is fine and all but what about that bug? It turns out the game is set up such that you can only learn one tech at the start of each turn. You can learn more than one in a turn if you learn free techs or earn science in the middle of your turn (like by popping a great scientist) but otherwise it just carries any excess science forward to the next turn. Even if that excess science would be enough to learn multiple techs at once. Like if you saved up a bunch of great scientists and used them all in one turn, for example...
So how did I set up my test? I made a hotseat game with 4 civs. It was a quick game. I wandered them around until they all met each other. Then I settled down and set them down different paths. One civ was going to be a scumbag cheater. His goal was to get all the research buildings in order to have as big a burst as possible when I used great scientists, and then was to pick up said great scientists. One civ just went down the bottom of the tree, taking mining and going as far as they could. The third civ followed the second civ but first it detoured up to get a national college. The last civ was designed to research all the things so it beelined straight to universities and also picked up the great library along the way. All of the civs built a worker and then tried to get as high a population as possible to max out the science gain.
I totalled up a few numbers for each civ at various points of the game. My bug ran out on turn 147 after settling so that's going to be the end point. I'm also going to look at the numbers after 50 and 100 turns. The numbers are total beakers earned (by science per turn or by burning a great scientist), total base value of techs learned, and 'free' beakers earned either by a catch-up mechanic, the bug, or rounding issues.
| 50 turns | Babylon | Austria | Assyria | Russia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science Accumulated | 518 | 350 | 527 | 720 |
| Total Tech Value | 568 | 364 | 585 | 868 |
| Bonus Beakers | 50 | 14 | 58 | 148 |
| 100 | Babylon | Austria | Assyria | Russia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science Accumulated | 2147 | 948 | 2357 | 5296 |
| Total Tech Value | 2392 | 999 | 2441 | 6338 |
| Bonus Beakers | 245 | 51 | 84 | 1042 |
| 147 | Babylon | Austria | Assyria | Russia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science Accumulated | 7159 | 1778 | 4560 | 15572 |
| Total Tech Value | 17256 | 2023 | 4638 | 16753 |
| Bonus Beakers | 10097 | 245 | 78 | 1181 |
Now, the city spots weren't all equivalent. Russia got to settle near Lake Victoria which was huge for early pop growth. They were also beside a mountain. One interesting thing is despite growing at the same rate and being later in turn order Assyria actually got writing a turn before Babylon did. Because they had to pay 2 less science for pottery as a result of Babylon learning it first. Russia's early beaker bonus was almost entirely the free tech out of the great library which I didn't count as science accumulated. They also accumulated significantly more science than the other players thanks to the +3 from the great library. They were slower to national college because the other two civs got to build the cheaper library and then start in on it right away. But once they got them both up they were making double what the other science civs were making. And more than 5 times as much as the poor mining civ! The university really put things over the top with the science per turn sitting at 36-13-40-145 at turn 90.
I didn't do a good job abusing the bug but even still look at the end result! Babylon ended up with more tech value learned on turn 147 than Russia did despite Russia actually being such a dominating science force. Some of the 10000 free science was the legitimate catch-up mechanic but the vast majority of it was the bug coming home. And at the end, after rush buying the public school for Babylon, the science per turn ended up at 182-20-59-272. Babylon still had the oxford university to build, too, which was where 550 of Russia's bonus came from.
I actually ended up abusing the bug a little bit with Russia without meaning to. They probably only got 300 or 400 free science out of it, but when you're researching techs that cost 80 or 100 that's a pretty huge boost. (Also, Austria only got 2023 total value in techs all game... So 300 free science is really big relative to them!) They didn't even have to pop a great scientist or anything... They just plowed straight up to universities without getting any of the side techs. They researched masonry (which cost 33 beakers) while they were generating 119 per turn! And that was with only 2 civs knowing masonry... If Babylon wasn't also being cheesy and had also picked it up the cost would have been lower and the carry-over multiplier would have been higher.
There's one thing I didn't do in my test, and that's grab the 'scholars in residence' diplomatic boost. If that boost gets voted in the cost of all techs is lowered by 20% if any other civ knows it. Given what seems to be the case with the carry-over multiplier having this in play would stack up the science lying around by an absurd amount.
I also suspect you could set up the bug even when you don't have a lot of low cost techs lying around. You could, for example, research most of a tech and then switch to something else right before it finished. This should manufacture a fake low cost tech. Prep up several of these and then pop your great scientist and go to town. I suspect this is what the guy was doing in the first game I watched since he switched off of a tech and I didn't understand why but he eventually popped several great scientist at the same time to burst his way to artillery. I thought maybe he did that as a surprise move to jump up in the literacy number but he could have also done it to steal some extra beakers to get there a little faster.
Ok, so this bug exists... What should be done about it? There are people who would say anything in the game is fair to use. I feel like this bug is outside the realm of what's acceptable but I hate enforcing outside rules on a game. Even my civ that was trying to play fair ended up using the bug incidentally! Anyone that rushes national college into university while mostly ignoring the other junk is going to get extra free science for doing so. I actually wouldn't be surprised to find out that Dave unintentionally got some science out of the bug in our faster asynch game. He was making more than 50 beakers per turn before I was even close to researching writing. The writing tier of techs cost 36 with someone knowing them, the first tier only costs 23! So if he'd met Robb by that point in time and if he researched any early tech that Robb knew (mining/masonry/bronze working?) he could have triggered the bug. It probably wouldn't be for very much, but when I'm only making 11 per turn him getting 8 for free is a big deal.
How could you even fix it? You could research all the 'cheap' stuff before you power up that many beakers? You could only select a 'cheap' tech after barely finishing a previous tech so you're not carrying over more science than the cheap tech costs. Or you could just accept that sometimes it will happen.
The big thing is to not pop a great scientist for a huge amount of science and then research a cheap tech. Pop the scientist to get an expensive tech, and use it early on in the tech?
Some people have suggested banning great scientists entirely. Use them just for the improvement, never for the one shot. Which sucks, but if the alternative is making them absurdly powerful? I donno. Also you could ban scholars in residence since that's what really gives you the huge overflows. But even without it I was able to more than double my science!
Or you could just play with it as a potential strategy. I don't know how a real game would actually go if I wasn't allowed to research anything from mining forward and if I was forced to generate 3 great people without using them for 125 turns. I feel like someone should have killed me by then...
But then I think about my Dutch game... I'd need to take sailing in order to go meet up with Dave but it would have been a strong strategy to build up just science and ignore the bottom half of the tech tree. Meet Dave and then more than double my science? Seems strong. As it is I have several techs that will only take 3 turns to finish and I don't have universities yet. Even without the bug existing it's definitely right to rush to universities and eventually I will meet Dave. All those cheap techs may well become cheaper than one turn. I could probably alternate picking them up to not get extra science, but if I don't want those techs yet it seems bad for me.
Anyone have any thoughts?
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Civ V: Tourism
Matt made a comment on my post yesterday about how tourism isn't just used for a cultural victory but has some other useless, particularly defensively against ideology unhappiness. And then it just so happens that in my current single player game I'd started off ignoring tourism completely and I'm now suffering 18 unhappiness because my people want to autocracy instead of order. But what's really weird is England is unhappy with their autocracy and wish they were freedom because of Brazil. Brazil is unhappy with freedom and wish they were order because of Poland. And if Brazil was actually order then I would be happy because Brazil influences me! (I'm actually influenced by Brazil, Poland, and the Huns who are all different ideologies and I guess the autocracy one is winning the tiebreaker, whatever it is.) 6 civs are content with where they are, 3 haven't yet chosen an ideology. Something seems wrong when 3 civs cover all 3 ideologies and all are unhappy with their choices. If only Brazil would make the switch, then I'd be happy! But even if they made that switch if a world ideology was ever created I feel like I'd be unhappy unless I was that one regardless.
The really annoying thing is there are 5 order civs who are all happy. Two of them have a lot of tourism and are influencing the rest. Except me, because I have a mediocre amount of tourism now. (I built the Eiffel Tower which comes with 12 tourism and I've been making works out of my musicians because there's nothing else to do with them.) It feels like if I'd continued to ignore tourism (not build the musician's guild or the Eiffel Tower) I'd be content. I have happy faces to burn so my empire isn't actually unhappy but I'm going to be getting golden ages less frequently as I result.
But seeing how things play out in one game is one thing... I want to actually know how this stuff works. Internet, hook me up!
Tourism is a number you generate each turn, mostly based on great works you have lying around. Each turn that number is applied to every other civ in the game that you've met. Each civ has a multiplier applied to your number individually and that multiplier is based on having open borders, a trade route, a shared religion, a different ideology, and a diplomat when you have a different ideology. That number is stored individually for each other civ and is added up over the course of the game. At the same time their total amount of culture generated over the entire game is also added up. Then each turn you compare those two numbers to see what your influence level is with that civ. The actual numbers don't seem to matter at all; what matters is what influence band you're currently in. The bands are {0-10%, 10-30%, 30-50%, 50-100%, 100-200%, even more}. They will also have generated a tourism number against you, and you will have generated a culture number, so you will also be in an influence band the other way as well.
Influence bands actually matter for a lot of different reasons, many of which were added in the last big patch so they didn't exist back when I played a bunch with the 'new' expansion. The biggest one is the cultural victory which is achieved when you've managed to get every other civ into your 100-200% or higher influence band. In order to make this happen you need a lot of tourism and they need not much culture. Your culture and their tourism are irrelevant. That's why you'll often read about how culture is the defensive stat and tourism is the offensive stat. It's totally true when you're talking about the victory condition! And most of the other things too, but there's one where it's not quite the case...
First, the other things that only care about where you've put the other civs into influence bands. If you get another civ into the 30-50% band then your trade routes to that civ generate an extra science per turn. Getting them into higher bands raises that bonus. Spying works in a similar way, with a bonus that applies at the 30-50% band (only 1 turn to establish a spy in a city) and spy level up bonuses as you get into higher bands. Conquest has the same sort of deal going on with the 30-50% band granting a 25% reduction in population loss and civil disorder period when you conquer a city. You get another 25% reduction for each escalating band. So even if you don't intend to win with tourism getting a lot of it can still generate minor bonuses along the way. They seem really minor to me though, and I can't really see getting tourism in the hopes of having faster spies or anything like that. Especially since the 30% band is pretty hard to get into in my experience, at least with harder AI levels. Maybe against humans it'll be easier?
There's one other spot tourism matters and it's the ideology unhappiness thing I mentioned at the start of the post. It turns out that when you're doing ideology comparisons what you're comparing against each civ is not tourism values or culture values. It's the difference between your respective influence bands. So if someone is at 10.1% of your culture but you're only at 9.9% of their culture you're still a full influence band apart. When looking at your own potential unhappiness all you care about is influence band comparisons where you're lagging behind. Comparisons where you're tied or are beating them are completely irrelevant. All that matters is the ones where you're losing. Now compare the number of times you lose to civs matching your ideology to the number of times you lose to civs of different ideologies (with a multiple band gab counting multiple times and with civs without ideologies being completely ignored). If there are more different ones than same ones you're going to be unhappy. This is the case even if the different ones are split between the different options. In my example above I had one loss to each of the 3 ideologies and assumed there was some sort of tiebreaker. No, it turns out the two opponents get added together and 2 is bigger than 1. Note that in this case it actually doesn't matter what ideology I'd pick. I'll still be dominated by the same three civs and they all picked different ideologies from each other. I have no course of action that doesn't result in getting an unhappiness penalty.
I actually went and played a few more turns and I ended up knocking one of the opponents into the 10-30% band. That's where he had me, which meant he no longer had any influence on me. This brought things into a 1-1 tie which means I get to be happy. Hurray! Unfortunately I'm also about to bump the influence of the other order civ into the 10-30% band so my stay in happy land will be short lived. I do expect to also knock the last guy into the 10-30% band as well soon though which will remove all influence.
Note that there's a mechanic for voting in a world ideology and that is worth 2 influence points for that ideology. Once I reach the point where no civ is influencing me I will be forced to synch up with the world ideology or be unhappy. Meanwhile the no-tourism civs will be able to sit around influenced by me and another order person and will be able to stay happy!
As such it seems like if you ignore tourism then you get to follow the crowd and be happy. If you have a lot of tourism you get to be what you want unless there's a world ideology and then you have to follow it or be unhappy.
It does mean tourism has some value in a game when you aren't just trying to win by tourism though. Maybe that's good enough to justify making great musicians? Maybe I even want to use some great writers for works instead of the one shot ability? It's at least a choice at any rate. It could certainly be pretty powerful in a multiplayer game to have the other people in the 10-30% band if they all have everyone in the 0-10% band. Then everyone has to follow your ideology or eat a ton of unhappiness. So it may end up in a situation where it's 'right' to ignore tourism as long as we all collude to do so, but if someone breaks rank the other people may or may not get burned. Very interesting...
The really annoying thing is there are 5 order civs who are all happy. Two of them have a lot of tourism and are influencing the rest. Except me, because I have a mediocre amount of tourism now. (I built the Eiffel Tower which comes with 12 tourism and I've been making works out of my musicians because there's nothing else to do with them.) It feels like if I'd continued to ignore tourism (not build the musician's guild or the Eiffel Tower) I'd be content. I have happy faces to burn so my empire isn't actually unhappy but I'm going to be getting golden ages less frequently as I result.
But seeing how things play out in one game is one thing... I want to actually know how this stuff works. Internet, hook me up!
Tourism is a number you generate each turn, mostly based on great works you have lying around. Each turn that number is applied to every other civ in the game that you've met. Each civ has a multiplier applied to your number individually and that multiplier is based on having open borders, a trade route, a shared religion, a different ideology, and a diplomat when you have a different ideology. That number is stored individually for each other civ and is added up over the course of the game. At the same time their total amount of culture generated over the entire game is also added up. Then each turn you compare those two numbers to see what your influence level is with that civ. The actual numbers don't seem to matter at all; what matters is what influence band you're currently in. The bands are {0-10%, 10-30%, 30-50%, 50-100%, 100-200%, even more}. They will also have generated a tourism number against you, and you will have generated a culture number, so you will also be in an influence band the other way as well.
Influence bands actually matter for a lot of different reasons, many of which were added in the last big patch so they didn't exist back when I played a bunch with the 'new' expansion. The biggest one is the cultural victory which is achieved when you've managed to get every other civ into your 100-200% or higher influence band. In order to make this happen you need a lot of tourism and they need not much culture. Your culture and their tourism are irrelevant. That's why you'll often read about how culture is the defensive stat and tourism is the offensive stat. It's totally true when you're talking about the victory condition! And most of the other things too, but there's one where it's not quite the case...
First, the other things that only care about where you've put the other civs into influence bands. If you get another civ into the 30-50% band then your trade routes to that civ generate an extra science per turn. Getting them into higher bands raises that bonus. Spying works in a similar way, with a bonus that applies at the 30-50% band (only 1 turn to establish a spy in a city) and spy level up bonuses as you get into higher bands. Conquest has the same sort of deal going on with the 30-50% band granting a 25% reduction in population loss and civil disorder period when you conquer a city. You get another 25% reduction for each escalating band. So even if you don't intend to win with tourism getting a lot of it can still generate minor bonuses along the way. They seem really minor to me though, and I can't really see getting tourism in the hopes of having faster spies or anything like that. Especially since the 30% band is pretty hard to get into in my experience, at least with harder AI levels. Maybe against humans it'll be easier?
There's one other spot tourism matters and it's the ideology unhappiness thing I mentioned at the start of the post. It turns out that when you're doing ideology comparisons what you're comparing against each civ is not tourism values or culture values. It's the difference between your respective influence bands. So if someone is at 10.1% of your culture but you're only at 9.9% of their culture you're still a full influence band apart. When looking at your own potential unhappiness all you care about is influence band comparisons where you're lagging behind. Comparisons where you're tied or are beating them are completely irrelevant. All that matters is the ones where you're losing. Now compare the number of times you lose to civs matching your ideology to the number of times you lose to civs of different ideologies (with a multiple band gab counting multiple times and with civs without ideologies being completely ignored). If there are more different ones than same ones you're going to be unhappy. This is the case even if the different ones are split between the different options. In my example above I had one loss to each of the 3 ideologies and assumed there was some sort of tiebreaker. No, it turns out the two opponents get added together and 2 is bigger than 1. Note that in this case it actually doesn't matter what ideology I'd pick. I'll still be dominated by the same three civs and they all picked different ideologies from each other. I have no course of action that doesn't result in getting an unhappiness penalty.
I actually went and played a few more turns and I ended up knocking one of the opponents into the 10-30% band. That's where he had me, which meant he no longer had any influence on me. This brought things into a 1-1 tie which means I get to be happy. Hurray! Unfortunately I'm also about to bump the influence of the other order civ into the 10-30% band so my stay in happy land will be short lived. I do expect to also knock the last guy into the 10-30% band as well soon though which will remove all influence.
Note that there's a mechanic for voting in a world ideology and that is worth 2 influence points for that ideology. Once I reach the point where no civ is influencing me I will be forced to synch up with the world ideology or be unhappy. Meanwhile the no-tourism civs will be able to sit around influenced by me and another order person and will be able to stay happy!
As such it seems like if you ignore tourism then you get to follow the crowd and be happy. If you have a lot of tourism you get to be what you want unless there's a world ideology and then you have to follow it or be unhappy.
It does mean tourism has some value in a game when you aren't just trying to win by tourism though. Maybe that's good enough to justify making great musicians? Maybe I even want to use some great writers for works instead of the one shot ability? It's at least a choice at any rate. It could certainly be pretty powerful in a multiplayer game to have the other people in the 10-30% band if they all have everyone in the 0-10% band. Then everyone has to follow your ideology or eat a ton of unhappiness. So it may end up in a situation where it's 'right' to ignore tourism as long as we all collude to do so, but if someone breaks rank the other people may or may not get burned. Very interesting...
Monday, May 26, 2014
Civ V Great Leaders: Plant, Pop, or Save?
Historically I have always taken my great leaders in Civ V and planted them in the ground. Give me good tile improvements! Why would I want to get a one shot boost when I can set up an ongoing boost that keeps on giving turn after turn? I've never actually cared to look at the numbers, I've just always been glad to get a good square to work. Well, the video I watched had the guy save up his great scientists. I've had people tell me recently that capping the liberty policy tree was good because it would build you a free wonder when you took a great engineer. Build a wonder? But I want more production! And in the comment thread on Facebook for a post last week a small discussion broke out on if popping a great scientist early was cost effective or not... This calls for some research and math!
Let's start with the great scientist. Consuming him for the one shot effect gives you an amount of beakers which are immediately applied to your current research task. If this amount takes you over the amount needed to research it you learn the tech right away and the excess gets applied to the next tech. The amount of beakers is dependent on the speed of the game and your current research per turn. In a standard speed game this amount is equal to 8 turns worth of research. Planted in the ground the scientist will build an academy which gives 8 research per turn. If you're only making 34 beakers per turn like I am in a current game then the academy will surpass the scientist in 34 turns. If you're making 800 beakers per turn then it'll take 800 turns to break even... A game is going to last a couple hundred turns so the first option the long term plan seems reasonable. The second one is abysmally bad.
Of course that's not the whole picture. The academy planted in the ground can be augmented by buildings, tech, and policies. You're apt to plant it in your best city, so it's entirely possible to be looking at having a university, a national college, a research lab and an observatory. You may have the rationalism opener, and you may have researched things that give it +2, +2, and +4, and you'll have a multiplier of 311%. So you could actually be looking at getting 50 science per turn from the academy. It also replaces a different improvement, so it costs you something like 2 food per turn. And you get to make immediate use of the technology right away when you use the one shot. It may take 34 turns to break even but that means your Civ was weaker for those 34 turns because you were behind on tech that whole time (not to mention being behind on the food too).
How about holding on to the scientist for later? Well, if you've decided not to plant him and you're in the process of drastically increasing your science output you definitely want to hold off on it. But if you're going to be waiting a long time you probably want to plant it because you lose all of the benefits by waiting close to the hypothetical 34 turns before popping it.
Looking at it, I think planting an early scientist is going to make sense most of the time. Unless there's some tech you really want to get right away (maybe you're racing for a wonder or you have a timing attack set up with artillery or something), anyway. Later on you might as well hold on to them until you really want a specific tech right now. If you're trying for a science victory then you only really care about getting the very last tech and you get the most from your scientist by waiting for all the pop growth before using them.
How about the great merchant? His one shot gives 350 gold plus an extra 50 per era. You also get 30 influence with a city state! The downside being you need to walk the merchant over to the city state before you can use the ability. Planting him builds a customs house worth 4 gold, 5 with a relatively early tech. Just like with the scientist there are building to amplify the return from the improvement so you're probably looking at getting 8 gold per turn (with market and bank) at the cost of 2 food per turn versus scoring up 550 gold. So it would pay off in ~70 turns. 70 turns is a long time to be down money. You're also down whatever goodies the city state would have given you as a result of being friends/allies with the extra influence. The great merchant one shot seems to give a bigger return early on than the scientist and the improvement is worse. So it feels like planting them is almost always wrong. Only if there are no city states to run to? Or maybe if you have a game plan that revolves around your cash on hand solely at the end of the game? So if you're going for a big surprise diplomatic victory play and want to just horde cash all game? Ok, I can see that as being a real thing. Holding onto them seems just wrong, since the gain from waiting (50 gold per era) feels like it's probably not worth delaying the city state influence. Unless you're about to tech up into a new era, anyway. (Merchants of Venice actually give double the one shot bonus but the same planting bonus, so it _really_ seems like cashing them in with the one shot has to be right.)
The great engineer apparently doesn't automatically rush a given item. Instead he grants 300 + 30 per citizen in the city. In practice that might as well be an instant buy if the city is of reasonable size. You don't get the building/wonder/nuke until the next turn though. The planting ability is an improvement worth 4 or 5 hammers. There aren't nearly as many things that multiply hammers as there are light bulbs which makes this compare unfavourably to the scientist already. And then there's the downside of building a wonder slowly... You don't get it at all! Wonders are unique and if you're not first you're out. That said, hammers over time are also very powerful and if you're planning on pumping out a lot of units then maybe you really want 4 hammers over 2 food? I donno, I now feel like rushing a wonder that's potentially under contention is just awesome.
Great writer is one that I've been looking at closer and decided in my game today to use the one shot over the 'plant' for the first time. Like the great scientist he gives 8 times your culture per turn as his one shot ability. If you plant him you don't get an improvement, instead you get a great work that needs to go in an appropriate slot in your city and is worth 2 culture and 2 tourism per turn. It turns out 8 times your culture per turn is a pretty big number and is just going to dwarf 2 per turn for anything resembling a reasonably amount of time. If you're trying for a cultural victory then you probably need the tourism (it's not like you have many other sources of it) but otherwise using the one shot here seems like it has to be right. And you should probably save it up until it will give you a new policy? Or maybe if you're planning on rushing a specific policy that's deep in a tree you should wait? Or if you haven't unlocked the tree at all? Some of the ideology stuff is pretty great, maybe there's a good plan around saving up a bunch of great writers and blowing them all after building your 3 factories.
Great musician has the same plant ability but the work goes into a different building. It wasn't clear but it sounds like the one shot is 10 times your tourism to the targeted Civ. If you're trying for a cultural victory and one Civ has a significantly higher culture threshold to break through then I'm sure using the one shots here makes sense. Otherwise I guess you might as well plant them for the 2 culture? Frankly I'm not sure getting a great musician is even worth doing unless you want the cultural victory.
Great artist has the same plant ability with the work again going in a different building. The one shot is to start a golden age. Golden ages are awesome and unless you want the tourism for a cultural victory it feels like the golden age has to be good? It's 20% culture and production with a gold bonus of some kind for 8 turns I think? So it's actually only 1.6 times your culture per turn as a one shot which is a lot worse than the 8 times of the great writer. But it also gives gold and production so that's really good. So again, if you don't want tourism... And even if you do, you can use archaeologists to fill the same slots.
Let's start with the great scientist. Consuming him for the one shot effect gives you an amount of beakers which are immediately applied to your current research task. If this amount takes you over the amount needed to research it you learn the tech right away and the excess gets applied to the next tech. The amount of beakers is dependent on the speed of the game and your current research per turn. In a standard speed game this amount is equal to 8 turns worth of research. Planted in the ground the scientist will build an academy which gives 8 research per turn. If you're only making 34 beakers per turn like I am in a current game then the academy will surpass the scientist in 34 turns. If you're making 800 beakers per turn then it'll take 800 turns to break even... A game is going to last a couple hundred turns so the first option the long term plan seems reasonable. The second one is abysmally bad.
Of course that's not the whole picture. The academy planted in the ground can be augmented by buildings, tech, and policies. You're apt to plant it in your best city, so it's entirely possible to be looking at having a university, a national college, a research lab and an observatory. You may have the rationalism opener, and you may have researched things that give it +2, +2, and +4, and you'll have a multiplier of 311%. So you could actually be looking at getting 50 science per turn from the academy. It also replaces a different improvement, so it costs you something like 2 food per turn. And you get to make immediate use of the technology right away when you use the one shot. It may take 34 turns to break even but that means your Civ was weaker for those 34 turns because you were behind on tech that whole time (not to mention being behind on the food too).
How about holding on to the scientist for later? Well, if you've decided not to plant him and you're in the process of drastically increasing your science output you definitely want to hold off on it. But if you're going to be waiting a long time you probably want to plant it because you lose all of the benefits by waiting close to the hypothetical 34 turns before popping it.
Looking at it, I think planting an early scientist is going to make sense most of the time. Unless there's some tech you really want to get right away (maybe you're racing for a wonder or you have a timing attack set up with artillery or something), anyway. Later on you might as well hold on to them until you really want a specific tech right now. If you're trying for a science victory then you only really care about getting the very last tech and you get the most from your scientist by waiting for all the pop growth before using them.
How about the great merchant? His one shot gives 350 gold plus an extra 50 per era. You also get 30 influence with a city state! The downside being you need to walk the merchant over to the city state before you can use the ability. Planting him builds a customs house worth 4 gold, 5 with a relatively early tech. Just like with the scientist there are building to amplify the return from the improvement so you're probably looking at getting 8 gold per turn (with market and bank) at the cost of 2 food per turn versus scoring up 550 gold. So it would pay off in ~70 turns. 70 turns is a long time to be down money. You're also down whatever goodies the city state would have given you as a result of being friends/allies with the extra influence. The great merchant one shot seems to give a bigger return early on than the scientist and the improvement is worse. So it feels like planting them is almost always wrong. Only if there are no city states to run to? Or maybe if you have a game plan that revolves around your cash on hand solely at the end of the game? So if you're going for a big surprise diplomatic victory play and want to just horde cash all game? Ok, I can see that as being a real thing. Holding onto them seems just wrong, since the gain from waiting (50 gold per era) feels like it's probably not worth delaying the city state influence. Unless you're about to tech up into a new era, anyway. (Merchants of Venice actually give double the one shot bonus but the same planting bonus, so it _really_ seems like cashing them in with the one shot has to be right.)
The great engineer apparently doesn't automatically rush a given item. Instead he grants 300 + 30 per citizen in the city. In practice that might as well be an instant buy if the city is of reasonable size. You don't get the building/wonder/nuke until the next turn though. The planting ability is an improvement worth 4 or 5 hammers. There aren't nearly as many things that multiply hammers as there are light bulbs which makes this compare unfavourably to the scientist already. And then there's the downside of building a wonder slowly... You don't get it at all! Wonders are unique and if you're not first you're out. That said, hammers over time are also very powerful and if you're planning on pumping out a lot of units then maybe you really want 4 hammers over 2 food? I donno, I now feel like rushing a wonder that's potentially under contention is just awesome.
Great writer is one that I've been looking at closer and decided in my game today to use the one shot over the 'plant' for the first time. Like the great scientist he gives 8 times your culture per turn as his one shot ability. If you plant him you don't get an improvement, instead you get a great work that needs to go in an appropriate slot in your city and is worth 2 culture and 2 tourism per turn. It turns out 8 times your culture per turn is a pretty big number and is just going to dwarf 2 per turn for anything resembling a reasonably amount of time. If you're trying for a cultural victory then you probably need the tourism (it's not like you have many other sources of it) but otherwise using the one shot here seems like it has to be right. And you should probably save it up until it will give you a new policy? Or maybe if you're planning on rushing a specific policy that's deep in a tree you should wait? Or if you haven't unlocked the tree at all? Some of the ideology stuff is pretty great, maybe there's a good plan around saving up a bunch of great writers and blowing them all after building your 3 factories.
Great musician has the same plant ability but the work goes into a different building. It wasn't clear but it sounds like the one shot is 10 times your tourism to the targeted Civ. If you're trying for a cultural victory and one Civ has a significantly higher culture threshold to break through then I'm sure using the one shots here makes sense. Otherwise I guess you might as well plant them for the 2 culture? Frankly I'm not sure getting a great musician is even worth doing unless you want the cultural victory.
Great artist has the same plant ability with the work again going in a different building. The one shot is to start a golden age. Golden ages are awesome and unless you want the tourism for a cultural victory it feels like the golden age has to be good? It's 20% culture and production with a gold bonus of some kind for 8 turns I think? So it's actually only 1.6 times your culture per turn as a one shot which is a lot worse than the 8 times of the great writer. But it also gives gold and production so that's really good. So again, if you don't want tourism... And even if you do, you can use archaeologists to fill the same slots.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Civ V Tidbits
I finally ran into Robb in one of our asynch multiplayer games and I sent him a declaration of friendship request. He ignored it because he's mean. I saw it was still pending when my turn came back around so I bugged him about it on Skype. He wanted to know what it meant and I didn't have a good answer other than I wanted to be friends. I'm Venice and can't build settlers so we have nothing to get into a conflict over anyway so we might as well be friends, right? Snuggles then chimed in and asked what it would actually do. We didn't know so we did some internet searching to try to find out. Pretty much everything we found was related to AI diplomacy so other than allowing research agreements it doesn't seem to do anything in multiplayer.
As part of my searching I somehow ended up in a thread on some message board where people were posting about being good at multiplayer Civ V and were posting links to games that were streamed as evidence to back up how good they were. I watch streams of games all the time... So I figured I'd check out one of these Civ V games and see what was up. I picked one at random and put it up on the tv while doing web surfing yesterday.
The first thing I noticed, completely unrelated to Civ, is how bland a game stream is without commentary. Six and a half hours of some guy playing Civ V without saying anything about what he's doing or why is pretty tame. I definitely spent more time not paying attention than I do even watching something like Feasel grind monsters for 6 hours in Dragon Warrior 1. Something to keep in mind if I ever get streaming myself... Talking is important for entertainment.
The big strategy thing I picked up doesn't apply to the games I'm playing. This game was played live, and they had it set up so even at war the game was playing simultaneously. (I gave up on playing life pretty quickly because our games forced the games to be turned based when players were at war... I wonder if that was just a setting we missed or something added in an expansion we couldn't use because people didn't own them.) The key to winning seemed to be unit micro more than anything else. A unit will die to 3 ranged attacks... If you move it out after the other guy clicks 2 ranged attacks and before he gets to the 3rd that's great for you. If your guy dies instead it's terrible. So it felt like you needed a smaller army to win a fight as long as you were good with it. Oh, and they were using all level ups on the 50 health heal instead of on abilities. Using that in real time seems really strong!
There were a couple things the guy did that were interesting. I don't know why he did them, because he wasn't talking, but they seemed like things to think about. The first was the way he used trade routes. He didn't send a single one to another player. He sent a couple to nearby city states that wouldn't need to go through anything but his own borders but mostly he used them between his own cities to deliver food and resources. I'd never really done this since I always seem to desperately need the gold from external trade routes but the numbers seemed really big. And something I didn't realize until recently is calling it a trade route is a real misnomer. You don't ship off some of your food. You stay the same. You magically generate food out of thin air and send it to your other city. This guy founded a second city early (he built scout, scout, settler I think) right beside his capital. Like, 4 squares away. He had both cities build granaries, and caravans, and ship food to each other. The cities got silly big in a real hurry! He stuck on 2 cities until he built the national college wonder then plopped down 2 more cities and altered the trade routes to feed food to those cities and they very quickly built up in size.
You do lose a bunch of gold using these trade routes over external trade routes... Or at least you would if those trade routes would actually work. Against the AI I can reasonably expect the trade routes to survive as long as I get rid of nearby barbarians. Against other players? Why is Robb going to let Dave and I each score up 5 gold per turn when he can click a button and scoop up 100 gold for himself? Presumably that would make us both mad and we'd try to kill him? But it's a lot easier to believe that a human could make an opportunistic grab for plunder money that an AI would ignore. (This is a real concern for me in one of our games since I'm Venice and get double trade routes but no extra cities... I can't trade with myself!)
The next interesting thing he did was he had preset plans for what he was going to do. He built a bunch of composite bowmen and hid them around one of his cities. Then he raced to machinery while saving up gold and instantly upgraded 5 of them the turn he got it and set off on a direct course for an enemy capital. He should have taken it but he screwed up his micro badly and didn't leave himself a way to actually walk into a city at 0 hp. It really reminded me of watching StarCraft 2 more than a strategy game since it looked a lot like a timing push set up to get blink and a few stalkers or a bunch of marines with stim or something like that.
Later on he did the same thing with artillery, only this time he set it up by saving up several great scientists and the last turn of his national university wonder to time out getting 3 or 4 techs in one turn. He blew right up to artillery in the blink of an eye and went back for the city he failed to get earlier. This time being able to attack from 3 squares away was enough to blow his opponent out. And then he blew everyone else out because his 5 cities just built units for every turn for the rest of the game.
Saving up great scientists to maximize every last lightbulb from them is not something I'd considered doing before. Build a land improvement or just use them right now were my options. But I guess storing up a bunch to get a specific crucial tech is important? Or maybe it's mostly important for the surprise factor? I imagine people who play a lot understand what tech % lines up with an artillery rush so if no one is near that number you have nothing to worry about. But when you get 4 techs in one or two turns your number is going to really spike!
Another interesting thing was the way he abused city states. And not in the sense of getting allies with powerful effects or going down the patronage tree... No, he was stealing things from them. He camped an early spearman beside a city state, waited for it to spawn a worker, and then stole it. Immediately went to peace. The city state was mad, of course, but it wasn't coming to kill him and he was up an early worker. He got another worker the same way, so he had 3 workers working on his 2 cities but only actually built one of them. Later on he was stealing money from the city state by bulling them. I've never bullied a city state, so I had to go look up the mechanics. It seems you pretty much need to be #1 on soldiers in the game, or near the top of the list anyway, and have a large army around the city state. But if you do then they'll give you 250 gold every 10 turns. That seems pretty hot, especially if you're using your trade routes all internally.
At one point he took the honour policy for a free great general. That seemed weird since he had 3 in his army already. But then he started aggressively stealing land and defending his artillery by building a steady stream of the defensive buildings. Seemed pretty strong!
Oh, and I got an answer to my question of what good is a declaration of friendship... It isn't. The early rush with the crossbowmen? It was on someone the streamer had a declaration of friendship with. And the target was _really_ bitter about it, too. So what does a declaration of friendship actually mean? I guess it depends on the players. Just like in the game Diplomacy...
As part of my searching I somehow ended up in a thread on some message board where people were posting about being good at multiplayer Civ V and were posting links to games that were streamed as evidence to back up how good they were. I watch streams of games all the time... So I figured I'd check out one of these Civ V games and see what was up. I picked one at random and put it up on the tv while doing web surfing yesterday.
The first thing I noticed, completely unrelated to Civ, is how bland a game stream is without commentary. Six and a half hours of some guy playing Civ V without saying anything about what he's doing or why is pretty tame. I definitely spent more time not paying attention than I do even watching something like Feasel grind monsters for 6 hours in Dragon Warrior 1. Something to keep in mind if I ever get streaming myself... Talking is important for entertainment.
The big strategy thing I picked up doesn't apply to the games I'm playing. This game was played live, and they had it set up so even at war the game was playing simultaneously. (I gave up on playing life pretty quickly because our games forced the games to be turned based when players were at war... I wonder if that was just a setting we missed or something added in an expansion we couldn't use because people didn't own them.) The key to winning seemed to be unit micro more than anything else. A unit will die to 3 ranged attacks... If you move it out after the other guy clicks 2 ranged attacks and before he gets to the 3rd that's great for you. If your guy dies instead it's terrible. So it felt like you needed a smaller army to win a fight as long as you were good with it. Oh, and they were using all level ups on the 50 health heal instead of on abilities. Using that in real time seems really strong!
There were a couple things the guy did that were interesting. I don't know why he did them, because he wasn't talking, but they seemed like things to think about. The first was the way he used trade routes. He didn't send a single one to another player. He sent a couple to nearby city states that wouldn't need to go through anything but his own borders but mostly he used them between his own cities to deliver food and resources. I'd never really done this since I always seem to desperately need the gold from external trade routes but the numbers seemed really big. And something I didn't realize until recently is calling it a trade route is a real misnomer. You don't ship off some of your food. You stay the same. You magically generate food out of thin air and send it to your other city. This guy founded a second city early (he built scout, scout, settler I think) right beside his capital. Like, 4 squares away. He had both cities build granaries, and caravans, and ship food to each other. The cities got silly big in a real hurry! He stuck on 2 cities until he built the national college wonder then plopped down 2 more cities and altered the trade routes to feed food to those cities and they very quickly built up in size.
You do lose a bunch of gold using these trade routes over external trade routes... Or at least you would if those trade routes would actually work. Against the AI I can reasonably expect the trade routes to survive as long as I get rid of nearby barbarians. Against other players? Why is Robb going to let Dave and I each score up 5 gold per turn when he can click a button and scoop up 100 gold for himself? Presumably that would make us both mad and we'd try to kill him? But it's a lot easier to believe that a human could make an opportunistic grab for plunder money that an AI would ignore. (This is a real concern for me in one of our games since I'm Venice and get double trade routes but no extra cities... I can't trade with myself!)
The next interesting thing he did was he had preset plans for what he was going to do. He built a bunch of composite bowmen and hid them around one of his cities. Then he raced to machinery while saving up gold and instantly upgraded 5 of them the turn he got it and set off on a direct course for an enemy capital. He should have taken it but he screwed up his micro badly and didn't leave himself a way to actually walk into a city at 0 hp. It really reminded me of watching StarCraft 2 more than a strategy game since it looked a lot like a timing push set up to get blink and a few stalkers or a bunch of marines with stim or something like that.
Later on he did the same thing with artillery, only this time he set it up by saving up several great scientists and the last turn of his national university wonder to time out getting 3 or 4 techs in one turn. He blew right up to artillery in the blink of an eye and went back for the city he failed to get earlier. This time being able to attack from 3 squares away was enough to blow his opponent out. And then he blew everyone else out because his 5 cities just built units for every turn for the rest of the game.
Saving up great scientists to maximize every last lightbulb from them is not something I'd considered doing before. Build a land improvement or just use them right now were my options. But I guess storing up a bunch to get a specific crucial tech is important? Or maybe it's mostly important for the surprise factor? I imagine people who play a lot understand what tech % lines up with an artillery rush so if no one is near that number you have nothing to worry about. But when you get 4 techs in one or two turns your number is going to really spike!
Another interesting thing was the way he abused city states. And not in the sense of getting allies with powerful effects or going down the patronage tree... No, he was stealing things from them. He camped an early spearman beside a city state, waited for it to spawn a worker, and then stole it. Immediately went to peace. The city state was mad, of course, but it wasn't coming to kill him and he was up an early worker. He got another worker the same way, so he had 3 workers working on his 2 cities but only actually built one of them. Later on he was stealing money from the city state by bulling them. I've never bullied a city state, so I had to go look up the mechanics. It seems you pretty much need to be #1 on soldiers in the game, or near the top of the list anyway, and have a large army around the city state. But if you do then they'll give you 250 gold every 10 turns. That seems pretty hot, especially if you're using your trade routes all internally.
At one point he took the honour policy for a free great general. That seemed weird since he had 3 in his army already. But then he started aggressively stealing land and defending his artillery by building a steady stream of the defensive buildings. Seemed pretty strong!
Oh, and I got an answer to my question of what good is a declaration of friendship... It isn't. The early rush with the crossbowmen? It was on someone the streamer had a declaration of friendship with. And the target was _really_ bitter about it, too. So what does a declaration of friendship actually mean? I guess it depends on the players. Just like in the game Diplomacy...
Monday, May 19, 2014
Asynch Civ V: Success?
It's been a little over two weeks since we started trying out the Giant Multiplayer Robot website and client to try playing turn based games of Civ V. I wasn't sure how it was going to work out with the playing one turn every so often and needing to run an extra client and all that jazz. It turns out to actually be pretty smooth. For the most part the client handles absolutely everything for you. Assuming you run it in the background it'll pop up a notification when it's your turn in a game. It has an easy thing to click on that both downloads the save file and opens Civ V for you. You do need to go into the multiplayer menu and load the save file but it's easily named so you know which one to open. Take your turn, hit save, and the client detects that you saved a new game. It closes Civ V for you and prompts you to upload the new save to the website. Then it goes and notifies the next person. Super easy!
It's got some other neat stuff going on, too. You can set a password on the website that it will auto-include in the save files for you so that only you can play your turns. It encrypts the password on other people's turns so they couldn't easily hack it open to get at your password in their file. (I suspect if they had the file for your turn they totally could, but the site won't give them that.)
The site lets you play 2 games at a time for free but it's been working so well at least 3 of us paid them $5 to upgrade our accounts and now we can play up to 5 games at a time! ($10 gets you 10 games and $15 gets you infinite games.) I'm only in 3 games right now though, so if new people wanted to give it a shot I totally have room for another game!
To give an idea of how fast things are moving I'm in 3 games right now. One of them is a 4 player game with 224 turns submitted so far. That means we're on turn 57 by now which is actually a pretty good pace. We'll be done by the end of summer most likely if we keep this up! It's also on 'quick' settings which speeds things up, and several times all 4 players have been online at the same time and able to get a turn played in less than half an hour.
The second game is a 7 player game including two people who have limited availability on weekends. It's been running for 11 days with 43 turns submitted. At this rate the game will probably go on for another 2 years. 7 players may be too many, normal speed may be too long, foregoing weekends may be a mistake. But it's still fun when the game pops up!
The third game is a 6 player game that's been up for 4 days and already had 60 turns submitted. So it's already ahead of the 2nd game in terms of game turns completed with 10 instead of 6. Even still, at this pace it'll probably take until October to get done.
So these things aren't fast by any stretch of the imagination. I do also have no real idea when a multiplayer game is going to end. Will we be able to keep preventing victories and drag it out to the time limit? Will someone get bitter and collude to spite someone else? At this point I'll be happy to meet another player in one of these games!
The discussions around the game have been pretty interesting, too. I've learned a lot more about Civ V in the last two weeks than at any time in the past. Good times!
It's got some other neat stuff going on, too. You can set a password on the website that it will auto-include in the save files for you so that only you can play your turns. It encrypts the password on other people's turns so they couldn't easily hack it open to get at your password in their file. (I suspect if they had the file for your turn they totally could, but the site won't give them that.)
The site lets you play 2 games at a time for free but it's been working so well at least 3 of us paid them $5 to upgrade our accounts and now we can play up to 5 games at a time! ($10 gets you 10 games and $15 gets you infinite games.) I'm only in 3 games right now though, so if new people wanted to give it a shot I totally have room for another game!
To give an idea of how fast things are moving I'm in 3 games right now. One of them is a 4 player game with 224 turns submitted so far. That means we're on turn 57 by now which is actually a pretty good pace. We'll be done by the end of summer most likely if we keep this up! It's also on 'quick' settings which speeds things up, and several times all 4 players have been online at the same time and able to get a turn played in less than half an hour.
The second game is a 7 player game including two people who have limited availability on weekends. It's been running for 11 days with 43 turns submitted. At this rate the game will probably go on for another 2 years. 7 players may be too many, normal speed may be too long, foregoing weekends may be a mistake. But it's still fun when the game pops up!
The third game is a 6 player game that's been up for 4 days and already had 60 turns submitted. So it's already ahead of the 2nd game in terms of game turns completed with 10 instead of 6. Even still, at this pace it'll probably take until October to get done.
So these things aren't fast by any stretch of the imagination. I do also have no real idea when a multiplayer game is going to end. Will we be able to keep preventing victories and drag it out to the time limit? Will someone get bitter and collude to spite someone else? At this point I'll be happy to meet another player in one of these games!
The discussions around the game have been pretty interesting, too. I've learned a lot more about Civ V in the last two weeks than at any time in the past. Good times!
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Civ V: Tradition Follow-Up
I was playing some single play Civ V while watching a FFVIII speedrun this afternoon when I got to select a new policy. I didn't have tradition yet in that game and I had 8 cities in various stages of advancement so I figured it was a fine time to test to see if I could figure out what exactly the tradition policy does in terms of border growth rate. I saved in case it ended up being as bad as my searching yesterday indicated it was going to be...
The first thing I noticed while writing down the 'next cost' for each of my cities was how wildly they varied. I tried counting all of the adjacent spaces that were under my control but couldn't really find any rhyme or reason to it. Several of my cities bought land and a full half of my cities were obtained by conquest. Other cities in the area were burned to the ground. So it's possible that some of the squares were obtained by cities that no longer exist or something, and it's possible bought squares are treated differently than earned squares. So when it comes to finding out exactly what is going on... No dice!
But when I went back and tracked how the costs changed when I gained tradition it was obvious that while I don't know exactly what is going on, I do know something significant is going on.
One of the cities (a capital I conquered) managed to knock 71% off of the cost of the next square! My own recently settled small city 'only' saved 38%. Most were saving in the 65% range. When the game says signficant it isn't lying!
So the secondary benefit of tradition is actually a real thing. Assuming expanding your borders is a thing you care about, it's a really insane boost. The question then is how much do you care about expanding your borders? Getting a few expansions fast tends to be pretty clutch because often I settle 'near' resources I want but not right beside them. The AI is pretty good about bee-lining towards those, though. After a city has a few really good squares to work it really doesn't need any more unless you're making your cities really, really big. (And if you're making your cities really big you probably need the rest of the tradition tree anyway.) I like expanding my borders against the AI because it keeps them off your land. I like expanding my borders when I'm settling near other people because squares I control are squares they don't control. But in the game where I did this test I went on a warpath early and I don't think I care that I don't own ALL of the land around my cities. I burned all the other cities nearby to the ground so no one owns it. Expanding your borders is actually also a downside if you're trying to farm barbarians for culture with the honour policy since encampments disappear if they get inside your borders.
In my current game I kept tradition because I didn't really want to reload, the 3 culture in my capital isn't nothing, and I just like seeing big borders. But I feel like it wasn't really needed. I still haven't needed to choose a 4th policy in my main multiplayer game so I haven't been put to that choice yet... Is expanding my borders fast against humans I've yet to meet a thing I actually care about?
The first thing I noticed while writing down the 'next cost' for each of my cities was how wildly they varied. I tried counting all of the adjacent spaces that were under my control but couldn't really find any rhyme or reason to it. Several of my cities bought land and a full half of my cities were obtained by conquest. Other cities in the area were burned to the ground. So it's possible that some of the squares were obtained by cities that no longer exist or something, and it's possible bought squares are treated differently than earned squares. So when it comes to finding out exactly what is going on... No dice!
But when I went back and tracked how the costs changed when I gained tradition it was obvious that while I don't know exactly what is going on, I do know something significant is going on.
| Squares Previously 'Earned' | Next Cost | Next Cost w/ Tradition |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | 190 | 60 |
| 9 | 105 | 40 |
| 5 | 120 | 45 |
| 4 | 40 | 25 |
| 16 | 260 | 75 |
| 14 | 120 | 45 |
| 13 | 85 | 40 |
| 5 | 70 | 35 |
One of the cities (a capital I conquered) managed to knock 71% off of the cost of the next square! My own recently settled small city 'only' saved 38%. Most were saving in the 65% range. When the game says signficant it isn't lying!
So the secondary benefit of tradition is actually a real thing. Assuming expanding your borders is a thing you care about, it's a really insane boost. The question then is how much do you care about expanding your borders? Getting a few expansions fast tends to be pretty clutch because often I settle 'near' resources I want but not right beside them. The AI is pretty good about bee-lining towards those, though. After a city has a few really good squares to work it really doesn't need any more unless you're making your cities really, really big. (And if you're making your cities really big you probably need the rest of the tradition tree anyway.) I like expanding my borders against the AI because it keeps them off your land. I like expanding my borders when I'm settling near other people because squares I control are squares they don't control. But in the game where I did this test I went on a warpath early and I don't think I care that I don't own ALL of the land around my cities. I burned all the other cities nearby to the ground so no one owns it. Expanding your borders is actually also a downside if you're trying to farm barbarians for culture with the honour policy since encampments disappear if they get inside your borders.
In my current game I kept tradition because I didn't really want to reload, the 3 culture in my capital isn't nothing, and I just like seeing big borders. But I feel like it wasn't really needed. I still haven't needed to choose a 4th policy in my main multiplayer game so I haven't been put to that choice yet... Is expanding my borders fast against humans I've yet to meet a thing I actually care about?
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