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Gearing yourself to go wide is important for domination victory simply because it, well, requires you to have more cities. You're taking over territory, so you'll eventually have many more cities than the usual 3-4 by default.
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Oct 5, 2013 17:44
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Gort posted:I don't really see the benefit of playing "wide". Sure, if you see enough good city sites and if each of those new cities will get you a new unique luxury and if you have enough happiness to expand without gimping the growth of the cities you already own and if it won't cause you to get into wars for expanding too quickly and if it won't delay your building of National Wonders like the National College which are worth more than any new city to your empire then yes, it's probably worth going Liberty and playing wide. I play on Standard map sizes, so things might be different in Large and Huge maps, but I just don't see that expanding beyond four or sometimes five good cities is worth it. Before the science penalty it was technically better to place a city no matter what the terrain was like. Now your cities have to be capable of actually contributing to your science so you can't just fill every available spot with cities. I don't think I ever build more than around 10 cities since the expansion, although I normally end up with way more than that in puppets. e: I should say that going wide early also used to be really good since expansion was a self-perpetuating chain in G&K. You settle directly on a luxury, sell that luxury, have a worker hook up another and then buy a settler - repeat.
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Oct 5, 2013 17:58
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The new artifact great writings are bugged, they act as if they are filled based on the amount of art slots you have rather than the amount of writing slots. I was about the fill every possible great work slot one could have in my Venice game.
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Oct 5, 2013 19:01
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How can you tell if a spot is good for science?
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Oct 5, 2013 20:32
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uPen posted:Before the science penalty it was technically better to place a city no matter what the terrain was like. Now your cities have to be capable of actually contributing to your science so you can't just fill every available spot with cities. I don't think I ever build more than around 10 cities since the expansion, although I normally end up with way more than that in puppets. I feel like wide could be better balanced by making the science penalty additive rather than multiplicative. It would be a pretty minor change, though. Your cities now do have to be capable of contributing science but beyond a certain point really early on your cities will be incapable of making up the science penalty they carry with them. It's extremely limiting and pretty much settling cities past that is a bad thing almost 100% of the time. Especially if you plan on conquering some additional territory at some point, since puppets contribute to that. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 20:38
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redreader posted:How can you tell if a spot is good for science? As far as I know there are only a few terrains that actually matter for science. Jungles give science with a University, and if your city is close to a mountain you can build an Observatory for a science bonus. I think there are 1 or 2 natural wonders that give science, as well as the Academies that can be founded by Great Scientists of course.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:38
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The city has to be adjacent to the mountain, not just near it. Beyond that and jungles, the best science cities are the best food cities. Population is science. Don't worry about production, you can always ship in hammers and buy the science buildings. Ideally when you're setting up for big science, you want to mega feed those key cities, shipping them food and making sure they're always working as much food as possible. Even do this with your capital. If it means it produces really poorly at first, then so be it. It can grow into production. Trying to be balanced at first just results in your cities not being as large and effective as they could be in the more important late game.
Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 5, 2013 |
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Oct 5, 2013 20:43
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redreader posted:How can you tell if a spot is good for science? Growth potential and great scientist generation. If you can put the next to a mountain you can plop down a observatory for a flat +50% beaker production. If you can place it next to a river or fresh water lake, you can place down a garden for a bonus to great person generation.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:45
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Mystic_Shadow posted:As far as I know there are only a few terrains that actually matter for science. Jungles give science with a University, and if your city is close to a mountain you can build an Observatory for a science bonus. I think there are 1 or 2 natural wonders that give science, as well as the Academies that can be founded by Great Scientists of course. I had a Morocco game with three cities, all beside mountains, all in deep jungle. I was getting close to a science victory in the early 20th century, when Sweden declared war on me and sent in their whole army. I must've missed that bit of WW2 where Caroleans fought against XCOM Squads and Modern Armour. It was nice to win a spaceship victory before 1969, though. Also, coal is great if you take Order: one of the T2 policies makes your factories give the city +25% science.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:47
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Thanks for your replies, everyone.Ulvirich posted:If you can place it next to a river or fresh water lake, you can place down a garden for a bonus to great person generation. ... I had no idea that rivers/lakes were needed for gardens. drat.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:58
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redreader posted:... I had no idea that rivers/lakes were needed for gardens. drat. The Hanging Gardens do not require one, so you can sneak one into a non-freshwater city if you can build it.
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Oct 5, 2013 20:59
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Haha, good luck doing that in the midgame!Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I feel like wide could be better balanced by making the science penalty additive rather than multiplicative. It would be a pretty minor change, though. Your cities now do have to be capable of contributing science but beyond a certain point really early on your cities will be incapable of making up the science penalty they carry with them. It's extremely limiting and pretty much settling cities past that is a bad thing almost 100% of the time. Especially if you plan on conquering some additional territory at some point, since puppets contribute to that. I'm pretty sure the science penalty is already additive. But really, I think the issue of getting science while going wide is that it's actually rather slow. To get a point of science, you need a point of population. If you're wide, the first half dozen population points are pretty easy to get. It's after that which is the worry. To really grow, the majority of your citizens need to be working farms all contributing food surpluses (and remember, a grass farm is actually +1 food, not 3 food, because that citizen itself will eat -2 food. And then there are the multiplier effects of science buildings. Libraries make your citizens contribute 1.5b each, universities make them 2b each. Wide empires are going to lack per-city production in the short-term, meaning they will be much slower putting up science buildings. So to compete with a tall empire, a wide empire will need significantly more population. And yes, while wide empires are going to have access to more raw happiness (to compensate for per-city unhappiness), they're not going to have that much more. Strategic resources tend to cluster, so there's no guarantee that you'll get to seize or trade for them. Not to mention that going tall doesn't preclude you from most of these happiness options either, so again a wide empire won't outcompete a tall empire that strongly on population. Plus, if a wide empire wants to compete with a tall empire for population, they will have to work food tiles, which means they won't be able to get their science infrastructure up as easily. The end result is a tall empire will have a much better science:population:happiness ratio, further exacerbated by per-city science penalty. And then there are BNW trade routes, that yet again favour tall empires. Trade routes don't scale for your number of cities, you will always ever have 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 trade routes as you tech through the early-mid game. Food routes are incredibly powerful, giving an instant +4/+7, which is far stronger than what any single farm can ever achieve. So again, this supports investing your happiness into going tall. In addition, gold routes don't scale to number of cities, meaning the science building maintenance again discourages going wide.
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Oct 6, 2013 00:44
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Just had Persia snipe Hanging Gardens out from under me with 3 turns to go and Global Politics says he went all Piety.
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Oct 6, 2013 00:59
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It doesn't show up if they've opened the tree but not taken any policies from it yet. Bit of an oversight.
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Oct 6, 2013 01:11
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Fledgling Gulps posted:It doesn't show up if they've opened the tree but not taken any policies from it yet. Bit of an oversight. Yeah, if there's one thing the patch needs to fix it'd be that.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:08
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The city has to be adjacent to the mountain, not just near it. Beyond that and jungles, the best science cities are the best food cities. Population is science. Don't worry about production, you can always ship in hammers and buy the science buildings. Ideally when you're setting up for big science, you want to mega feed those key cities, shipping them food and making sure they're always working as much food as possible. Even do this with your capital. If it means it produces really poorly at first, then so be it. It can grow into production. Trying to be balanced at first just results in your cities not being as large and effective as they could be in the more important late game. Food is crucial early on. Doing anything other than maximizing your food output in the early game is taking a loan from an exploitative creditor. A city that focuses on food will eventually outproduce a city that focuses on production.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:38
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Chamale posted:Food is crucial early on. Doing anything other than maximizing your food output in the early game is taking a loan from an exploitative creditor. A city that focuses on food will eventually outproduce a city that focuses on production. Kind of one of the reasons I don't like the city management stuff as much as in IV. Feels like there's only one real way to develop a city: Grow the gently caress out of it. Anything else is suboptimal. In IV, cities grew a LOT faster but you had more caps on how effective they could be, and you were regularly using slavery or drafting to reduce population or just outright stopping their growth. Cities could be effective at much lower population levels and they had a lot more versatility. It wasn't necessarily bigger = better. Exception is when you're just planting down a junk city for resources/strategic reasons. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Oct 6, 2013 |
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Oct 6, 2013 02:42
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I... honestly did not expect my request for advice on going wide to return a debate on 'is going wide even a great idea anymore'. France used to be a good 'wide civ', I remember that much, but now they don't really have that, instead focusing on theming bonuses... uhm, can anybody actually give me a primer on what those are? There's nothing that really tells you in the game.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:50
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Kind of one of the reasons I don't like the city management stuff as much as in IV. Feels like there's only one real way to develop a city: Grow the gently caress out of it. Anything else is suboptimal. In IV, cities grew a LOT faster but you had more caps on how effective they could be, and you were regularly using slavery or drafting to reduce population or just outright stopping their growth. Cities could be effective at much lower population levels and they had a lot more versatility. It wasn't necessarily bigger = better. Yeah, absolutely this. There's an excruiatingly long period of time where I really don't care about what each new citizen does, they simply contribute +1/+2 food and +1/+1.5/+2 science each, and nothing really dynamic happens. Civ4 forced constant decisions between going wide or tall, and a real competition for land. There were alot more decisions to be made in Civ4. Will I put them onto a zero food surplus cottage tile, in hopes of growing the cottage into more commerce? Will I put them onto a +1 food surplus farm tile and accelerate my growth onto more tiles? Will I cap growth and put them onto a hammer tile to build towards some piece of infrastructure, or even a specialist slot so to pump out a great person? Or will I kill the citizen and use it to whip out a worker or a settler to expand the number of useful citizens in my entire empire? All these decisions are informed by a constantly shifting happy cap, that you could even dynamically alter by clever allocation of monarchy and military police. Civ5 has a tendency to smooth out the decisions and not only do you make fewer of them, but each one makes a much smaller impact on your empire.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:56
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Cleretic posted:France used to be a good 'wide civ', I remember that much, but now they don't really have that, instead focusing on theming bonuses... uhm, can anybody actually give me a primer on what those are? There's nothing that really tells you in the game.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:58
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How do you guys recommend using trade routes? Whenever I am able to set up a trade route, the option of increasing food/production or making money always seemed like a no-brainer: take the money stupid. Like I could understand sending food/production to a newly-formed city, but sending food or production to your capital always seemed dicey. Like if I send a food caravan to the capital and I see no negligible improvement and go "wait should I be sending more trade routes home?" And you could coordinate your trade routes with your production of wonders, but that just seems like too much work: you can't really time your research progress with trade routes all that effectively (or maybe I'm not spergy enough). TLDR: Teach me how to trade
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Oct 6, 2013 03:21
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Maybe send a food route to your early city or two, just to kick them off the ground, but after that, I like to have maybe half my routes going to my capital. Having a large capital early on incredibly powerful. Not only does it give a good science:population ratio (your capital will have an early library and national college, meaning each population point gives 2.25b), but it also gives a good population:unhappiness ratio (because with Monarchy, each population costs 0.5 unhappiness. Plus, having a large size means you can work alot of mines for alot of production to build some powerful mid-game wonders. Late game, I'll send production routes to my capital. Gold has been heavily nerfed over time. Since the dominant strategy is tall, rushbuying with gold is less valuable than it used to be because most cities will have enough production to take care of its essential infrastucture. Plus, the Big Ben wonder requires you to take a social policy in Commerce (which could be put into rationalism or your ideologies instead). City state gold:influence ratio has been nerfed, and the new quest system means its much easier to become an ally while spending hardly anything on gold gifts. So gold is less valuable than it used to be. In summary, food routes to your capital are extremely poweful, and you should abuse them heavily if you want to do well.
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Oct 6, 2013 03:30
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For starters: trade by ocean is doubly effective than trade by land. This includes non-money stuff. So if your capital and another city are on the coast you can set up an oceanic trade route between them, and if one side has a granary it can send fully 8 points of food (that is a LOT) to the other. You can have the capital stimulate the growth of your new cities, which is helpful in the extreme if you're trying to develop fast. You don't have to ship food back to the capital if you don't want to, but it's most useful if you're trying to build tall. You can also ship production back to the main city if you want it to build stuff faster, and if you get two or three of these routes set up you can vastly increase the production hammers in the target city. What's this good for? You can build a Wonder in the time it would take to build a Monument, that's what it's good for. Of course, you still need a few trade routes open for trading with other nations, but hey... Also, always build market and banks. They don't just increase base money but make it more profitable when you have a trade route, and I believe at least one structure (the East India Trading Company) makes it more profitable when other countries send their own trade routes to you. Resource diversity is another key to profitability. It's where most of the moolah comes from. A city that has more luxury and strategic resources (and even some non-luxury resources like fish and rocks) will generate a ton more money for you than a piddly nothing-city, and that goes double if its target city also has more different resources. So to get the most out of these, try to build the Caravanassary and Harbor because they greatly extend the reach of your trade routes (and make them give you more base money) so you can reach more profitable targets in the distance. If you want to max out your trade profitability go Commerce and Exploration. Commerce makes all your land trade routes more profitable, and Exploration makes all your sea trade routes more profitable.
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Oct 6, 2013 03:33
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Yeah it's a situation of "Option A (money) is always good, Option B (Food/production) is sometimes really good". If you're trying to do something like build a key wonder, and it's in a place where production might not be very high it makes sense to boost that city with hammers or food. Something like building petra is a good example. I mean you can burn a great engineer but sometimes that's not an option.
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Oct 6, 2013 03:33
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Anything that gets short-turn gain instead of long-term gain is just robbing your future self, and a bad idea unless the investment pays off. I start burning Great Engineers and Great Scientists when they can give me more utility from their one-shot ability than all the gains from their gradual ability, based on the number of turns I expect the game to last. I used to constantly borrow money from every nation so that I'd be paying over 100 gold per turn to other nations, with an infrastructure that dwarfed everyone else. The changes to gold trading made this strategy harder to pull off, but if I get a Declaration of Friendship from a rich civ I can still use that plan.
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Oct 6, 2013 03:51
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On immortal and above it's a bit different for engineers since you're getting a wonder you most likely wouldn't be able to get otherwise - even with the extra production from a manufactory. So you weigh the benefits of more production vs a wonder and the hammers it takes to build it, and often times it'll be the wonder.
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Oct 6, 2013 05:12
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GeckoMissingo posted:On immortal and above it's a bit different for engineers since you're getting a wonder you most likely wouldn't be able to get otherwise - even with the extra production from a manufactory. So you weigh the benefits of more production vs a wonder and the hammers it takes to build it, and often times it'll be the wonder. Right, that's a good example of an investment that pays off over time.
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Oct 6, 2013 05:37
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This is all really informative. I tend to do OK on my Prince difficult wimpy games, but I never EVER am capable of a science victory before like 2012. Is food really that important? For example, I want to crank out some key wonders in the early game, so I tend to go all for production, and my capital doesn't get huge until mid-late game. I never focus on food because I look at that production list and see it say "25 turns for Library", but if I focus production its "4 turns", so I always go for four turns. I build workshops first, and aqueducts if I have time in new cities too. Do I want to get my capital to like 20+ pop? Is science really that important that you should delay some wonders or buildings or even units in order to get an extra 4 beakers?
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Oct 6, 2013 05:52
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Jastiger posted:This is all really informative. I tend to do OK on my Prince difficult wimpy games, but I never EVER am capable of a science victory before like 2012. Is food really that important? For example, I want to crank out some key wonders in the early game, so I tend to go all for production, and my capital doesn't get huge until mid-late game. I never focus on food because I look at that production list and see it say "25 turns for Library", but if I focus production its "4 turns", so I always go for four turns. I build workshops first, and aqueducts if I have time in new cities too. Yes. Because it's not an extra 4 beakers, it's an extra 100 beakers per turn or more. Food is extremely important. Wonders aren't even a little bit important. Wonders are traps specifically for this reason. My most recent science victory was on turn 297 in the 1800s and I made some big mistakes in that. There are very few wonders worth sacrificing growth for. Hanging Gardens, because it ultimately provides more growth in the long run. The Colossus or Petra, because their extra trade routes can give growth and have other good benefits (especially petra). Great Library sometimes but only on early difficulties. If you're going for a culture victory, many of the culture wonders are worth it. You will generally tech slowest when going for that victory because you'll be focusing on producing wonders more. The wonder that gives you loads of free missionaries is good if you're going for a dominant religion. Anything else: highly situational at most. Great Engineers rush build most of my wonders because it's just not worth slowing down growth for most of them.
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Oct 6, 2013 05:59
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Yes. Because it's not an extra 4 beakers, it's an extra 100 beakers per turn or more. Food is extremely important. Wonders aren't even a little bit important. Wonders are traps specifically for this reason. My most recent science victory was on turn 297 in the 1800s and I made some big mistakes in that. There are very few wonders worth sacrificing growth for. Hanging Gardens, because it ultimately provides more growth in the long run. The Colossus or Petra, because their extra trade routes can give growth and have other good benefits (especially petra). Great Library sometimes but only on early difficulties. If you're going for a culture victory, many of the culture wonders are worth it. You will generally tech slowest when going for that victory because you'll be focusing on producing wonders more. The wonder that gives you loads of free missionaries is good if you're going for a dominant religion. Anything else: highly situational at most. Great Engineers rush build most of my wonders because it's just not worth slowing down growth for most of them. Ok 100 beakers? I thought it was 2b per person with Universities? How does it boost that much? How in the HELL do you get to that high of a science score in the 1800s? I've been #1 in science in some of my games, kicking total rear end, and I've never been that fast! Do you skip half the tree?
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Oct 6, 2013 06:02
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Jastiger posted:Do I want to get my capital to like 20+ pop? You'd like to get it quite a bit higher than 20, especially if your games are going past the year 2000. Here's a screenshot I took during a game I played this week:  And I'm sure several of the players in the thread could have done a lot better with it. The difference in population when you focus on food is really quite large.
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Oct 6, 2013 06:10
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Jastiger posted:Ok 100 beakers? I thought it was 2b per person with Universities? How does it boost that much? There's the percentage buffs to science from buildings and policies. Also you can't skip very much of the tech tree to win a science victory. All the spaceship parts are pretty high up there.
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Oct 6, 2013 06:10
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On a big map with a lot of city-states, you can get a good chunk of science from the policy that gives you a percentage of their output.
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Oct 6, 2013 06:15
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Jastiger posted:Ok 100 beakers? I thought it was 2b per person with Universities? How does it boost that much? No, you need to do almost the entire tree to win a science victory. With the national college and free thought, it's 5b per person. If you're lucky to have an observatory, that's 6b per person. That's over 100 beakers per turn with 17 extra pop. I mean, from the sounds of things you don't often break 20 population, when you should probably be ending games at least 30-35 population in your capital. That number also only counts raw population science. More population and more food also means more specialists, which gives even more science, especially with secularism. More scientist specialists means more great scientists which means more academies. More population means more jungle tiles to work if you're by a jungle. These factors can give a ton of science. Here's a screenshot of that turn 297 science victory. The shot is on turn 248 because that was the start of my last session. This city was hard to grow because there were no grasslands in sight. There are no natural science advantages in this city, I just got all of this through growth. It would grow at least 6 more times before the end of the game. Food is by far the most important yield in the game because of this. I should note that it's important to grow when doing more than just science victories, as science helps all victory types. You need to keep up to date or have an advantage on military, and need to get the good economic techs for diplomatic victories, and need to beat the AI to some wonders for the cultural victories.
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Oct 6, 2013 06:19
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Wow 900 science. I only had that much on a Korea map with an observatory and a ton of Great Scientists...not bad. I'll try that strategy for sure next game. I'm hesitant to start one though because I don't want the patch to drop and then my game not work properly:(
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Oct 6, 2013 06:26
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I think I ended with something like 1200? I forget. Anyways, this is really the only viable strategy on Emperor or above. You can sometimes get away with trying to get an early conquest victory on small pangaeas but aside from that if you're playing on a higher difficulty, you're pretty much pigeonholed into going for growth. I really should start saving my games just before victory. I always end up with saves that are like 50 turns prior to victory. I have a feeling that science victories are going to be slowed down a bit by the research agreement change, though. Getting lots of research agreements really helps to get a victory prior to turn 300. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Oct 6, 2013 |
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Oct 6, 2013 06:29
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Not bad about sums that up, yeah. You can go much higher. This is pretty much the journey that every deity level player travels: breaking wonder build habits, and eventually embracing early game growth. People used to poo poo a brick when they'd watch MaddJinn's LP videos and he'd build a farm on top of a hill next to a river but well... [e]Man that looks like such a crappy start, surprised you didn't reroll. Err wait 3 wheat fields nevermind. Rascyc fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Oct 6, 2013 |
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Oct 6, 2013 06:32
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Yeah, the wheat definitely saved that start. Without them I would have just floundered there. Still not amazing growth potential but I somehow got a big surplus going. None of my other cities were much better off. Plains as far as the eye can see. With a healthy dose of desert and tundra.
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Oct 6, 2013 06:51
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I think I ended with something like 1200? I forget. Anyways, this is really the only viable strategy on Emperor or above. You can sometimes get away with trying to get an early conquest victory on small pangaeas but aside from that if you're playing on a higher difficulty, you're pretty much pigeonholed into going for growth. I always save after I've won the game, sometimes I'll play around with an already-finished game and see what happens if I become an international pariah. I also have never restarted a game of Civ V, I just take the start given to me. Start position is somewhat overrated because early growth is important, but the game has a lot of slingshot mechanisms to keep you in the game.
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Oct 6, 2013 07:04
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So I'm thinking of going for a OCC game, and I'm torn between Venice and Ethiopia. What's the best OCC civ and does anyone have any tips?
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Oct 6, 2013 09:11
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