(January 14th, 2018, 17:44)JR4 Wrote: EDIT: I`m interested in hearing your thought on SPI. I agree that we didn`t use it very well.
about Spi. I think this trait is misunderstood by a lot of people, so I'm gonna redescribe the Spi trait bonus by decomposing it into pieces:
1.) the bonus on temples (generally small enough to almost ignore completely, but can be noteworthy if you get the AP, especially very early)
2.) the free turn of no anarchy when switching into slavery in the early game
3.) being able to switch into new civics as soon as you can get them
4.) the flexibility of switching into special civics whenever you please
5.) getting extra bonuses from your civics
The first four items are what the "naive" interpretation of what Spi is all about, and pretty much what you guys did. However, I'd say thisis maybe 25% of the total power of the trait. A lot of the power of the trait comes from #5.
So what the hell does "extra bonuses from civics" mean? Let me give you a simplified, situational example. First, think of a time in the game when both slavery and caste seemed roughly equally appealing/useful to you (a hint here is that you probably weren't sure if you should switch from one to the other). Next, imagine a generic 10 turn window around this time. Now imagine that you play these 10 turns in slavery, and you feel like you play them pretty optimally at least as far the whip goes. Call this game A. You can think of this as having gained 100% of the bonus of slavery.
Next imagine that you replay these 10 turns, but now you're in caste. Here, for game B, you got 100% of the bonus from Caste. With me so far? Finally, you replay these 10 turns as game C, now spendint 5T in slavery and 5T in caste. Naively, you'd think that you got 50% of the bonus from slavery that you got the first time around (since you only spent 5 instead of 10 turns in it) and 50% of the bonus that you got from caste the second time around, right? However, if you're playing optimally, this is very wrong!
To start with, consider what's actually going on with slavery. First, note that in game C you actually have access to it for 6T out of the 10, not 5, because you can still use it on the turn when you switch into caste. (note: serfdom, nationhood, and US are like this too) Secondly, consider that any city that you whipped only during the 6T where game A and game C overlap can be considered to have gotten 100% of the use of slavery for this window. Third, note that there's many situations where once can force a whip to be inside the 6T window instead of outside of it for just minor efficiency loss. Finally, there's nothing that's stopping you from juggling queues to "pre-build" stuff to the whip-efficient point outside of the slavery run so that it can be whipped more efficiently inside of it. So, overall, and on average, we can probably get somewhere between 80% - 90% of the benefit of slavery we got in game A in the smaller window we have it in game C.
Now consider caste. On the one hand, the ability to run as many specialists as one wishes seems natural to running the civic only half the time - starve and run extra specialists when in the civic, and then work farms when not. On the other hand, the bonus to workshops seems like something you either have, or you don't. That's not fully true though, although it's more complicated to explain. At any rate, we can probably get 60%-70% of the benefit of caste we got in game B during our 5T window in game C.
So, add that up, and we get:
game A: 100% benefit of slavery
game B: 100% benefit of caste
game C: 80-90% benefit of slavery plus 60-70% of caste.
Assuming that slavery and caste have roughly equal value to us in this 10T window, then we can say that our civ in game C was running a civic that was 50% better than either caste or slavery.
At any rate, slavery/caste is one of the best known pairs like this, and one of the easiest to explain. And of course, this is a particularly ideal case - slavery and caste won't always be equally useful. But, at any rate, there's stuff like this for basically every single civic pair possible, and the more civics you have to work with the more bonus benefits you can squeeze out. (that's a big reason that IMHO it's generally important to get OR ASAP when you have a Spi leader - you guys got this civic ultra late)
Spi also requires lots of planning and creativity to get anything out of it at all, and is fairly vulnerable to both "over-planning" and "over-leveraging". You can be so absorbed with micromanging your shit internally that a lobbed curveball that you'd otherwise have no trouble seeing and reacting to will completely blindside you and knock you out cold.
(January 23rd, 2018, 14:45)Boldly Going Nowhere Wrote: I wouldn't suggest getting into precisely a 5 turn cycle of changes. You don't want to be completely predictable to your opponents. If I was planning an attack I'd anticipate your next swap and then set up timing to coincide with that civic change. Mix it up a bit, but generally speaking you have to use the free civic swaps to maximize the benefit. I don't necessarily think you have to whip every city all 6 turns to maximize your benefit. Your cities can only refill the granary and shed happiness penalties so fast (excluding Aztecs because SAs are OP in RtR and SPI makes them even more powerful). Get the Vassalage/Theocracy bonus on all of your units within the 5t window. You can save hammers in the queue and finish the units in consecutive turns in Theocracy during that civic's time. Save gold while building your units and run 100% science while in Free Religion for the +10% beaker bonus. Add Bureaucracy bonus if this helps pure research rates.
But wait, there's more! Finish improving tiles faster by using worker micro to maximum efficiency. You can get the Serfdom bonus on more tiles than just those you finish improving within 5 turns. The +50% tile improvement rate is locked in after every worker action. So if it takes 7t to farm a flood plain, you need 4 turns in Serfdom (1.5 x4) + 1 turn out of Serfdom to hit 7 worker turn actions to complete the job. Presto! You've saved two full worker turns. So just count up actions for every tile and see how many turns you can save. A worker turn or two saved here or there while your civ is aggressively regrowing from a 6t whipping spree and not working caste workshops may not be game-breaking, but it illustrates that SPI has further reaching effects than you would anticipate at first glance. Much further. Really, the limit to SPI is how much you can stomach endless micro planning.
Sure is nice of a bunch of vets to have an in-depth discussion about the trait I just based my leader pick on. Gonna keep these here for future reference.
(January 23rd, 2018, 14:45)Boldly Going Nowhere Wrote: I still don't know if it's better than PRO granaries. Probably not. Some things are just simple and good.
I guess I'm going to find out how they go together
I just got back from a Bruce Cockburn concert that was absolutely spectacular. So I'm going use this space to remind myself in writing to use Bruce Cockburn songs as the city-naming theme for the next game of civ.
So I decided to keep Russia for a few reasons, none of them particularly great. Mainly, I don't want to risk getting a civ i really don't want next round. Russia is adequate, so let's go with it.
Starting techs are AH and Mining, which seem pretty good for this start. Cossacks are great, providing I can survive to that era and be on par with my neighbors. The Research Institute is much much better as an University replacement than as a Lab replacement. But it is something of a win-more building. It's not something that I'm going to be building all over the place no matter what like the Terrace or Ikhanda or Sac Altar. But if I do end up wanting to get Oxford, and being secure enough to do so, then the free scientists will of course be appreciated.
So, overall, I can't say I have a particularly great combo here, although I do have Pro, the absolute best trait in RtR.
(January 31st, 2018, 16:03)RefSteel Wrote: All the picks are in! The final lineup:
1) dtay - Genghis Khan (Agg/Imp) of Celtia
2) superdeath - Churchill (Cha/Pro) of the Native Americans
3) Mr. Cairo - Saladin (Pro/Spi) of Russia
4) B4ndit - Zara Yaqob (Cre/Org) of Sumeria
5) Rusten - Cyrus (Cha/Imp) of Arabia
6) Donovan Zoi - Pacal (Exp/Fin) of Maya
7) Gavagai - Mehmed (Exp/Org) of Egypt
8) Shallow Old Human Tourist - Augustus (Imp/Ind) of Persia
9) GermanJoey - Charlemagne (Imp/Pro) of Mongolia
10) Dreylin - Roosevelt (Ind/Org) of the Vikings
11) OT4E and Chumchu - Qin Shi Huang (Ind/Pro) of Carthage
12) Dark Savant - Joao (Exp/Imp) of Byzantium
13) 2metraninja - Napoleon (Cha/Org) of the Aztecs
14) Mackoti - Suleiman (Imp/Phi) of France
15) The Black Sword - Pericles (Cre/Phi) of Zulu
16) AdrienIer - Mao (Exp/Pro) of Mali
17) Pindicator - Hammurabi (Agg/Org) of China
18) WilliamLP - Tokugawa (Agg/Pro) of Japan
19) Commodore - Kublai Khan (Cha/Cre) of Rome
20) naufrager - Julius Caesar (Imp/Org) of Germany
21) plako - Justinian (Imp/Spi) of Inca
22) elkad - Shaka (Agg/Exp) of Korea
23) spacetyrantxenu - Hatshepsut (Cre/Spi) of Greece
24) Boldly Going Nowhere - Boudica (Agg/Cha) of Khmer
25) Aretas - Ragnar (Agg/Fin) of Holy Rome
Please correct me if I somehow copy/pasted something wrong and have the wrong leader or civ for you here. I'll post the complete list of all the picks and rejections for each round when I have a chance to compile them all into a proper table.
I'll get back to this slowly over the next couple of weeks.
Hi, here's your MapCad-generated sandbox to help you plan your opening. You'll need to have RtR 2.0.8.4 installed. If something doesn't work as it should, let me know.
T1:
Only thing the scout revealed was a deer and no coast in sight.
I have a micro plan up to turn 26 when my settler pops out. I'll do more simming when i have explored more of the map.
The micro plan isn't necessarily the most efficient, but it is the fastest. It requires doing various things like working a forest tile for 1 turn after the worker, and spending a turn building a barracks to preserve the overflow from the first warrior while still growing, so I can start the settler right when I grow to 2 pop, and along with a chop complete it with no hammers to spare on T26.
"?" marks sites I'm only guessing at, since I don't know what else is there. The "a" and "b" are two potential schemes, they each get the caps cows right from founding, and while the "b" spots have some more long term potential, I'd rather go for the "a" spots since they both have additional food sources before their borders pop. Altogether though, this is a pretty desolate landscape up here, no rivers, a decent amount of forests, but few hills and a lot of plains. I'm more likely to settle to the South and West where things appear a bit wetter. There is some coast in the fog up to the North and East, but they look like lakes.
