New Specialists: Civil Engineers

[The Viceroy]

Im not sure if the AI does use it, but it would not be too difficult to organise if they wanted to. (just some additional calculations depending on what you wanted to acheive)

Its an interesting balance, because you find yourself wondering what is best, Police or CE's ?? In some cases you can get a nice increase from Police (assuming police stations are increasing their affect), but for some cities, they are simply no use at all, in that case the CE is a real bonus.

Where the CE problem would occur is if you found yourself at war with another distant civ (with no land link), and without the capacity to ship stuff across quickly, then building units in captured enemy cities is important .. and CE's are no use to you. Otherwise, I tend to build all my units in my major cities, and send them via railroad/road .. I guess much depends on the situation and tech level.

I use the CE's in combination with rush buy, its a good way of getting the price down in a few turns.

Im wondering, can you switch between a building and unit ?? I think you get a reduction in shields being carried across ??? (its a while since I bothered to try).. but just wondering if you could use the CE's to build up enough resources that even after the reduction, it's still more resource than would have been built up with 1 shield per turn ???? not sure if thats possible ..

[MyOlde]

Spell it out for the slow-witted old guy, will you?

If I turn an entertainer/taxman into a civil engineer, it will improve only my building of buildings (stock exchanges, hospitals)? (That's what the manual says, anyway.) Then, once the thing is built and there's no more to build, do you switch him back to taxman or scientist or citizen?

What I really don't get from the discussions above is why you irrigate rather than mine. Please explain.

[MrWhereItsAt]

I just tested this, and if you use CEs to build a building for a while then switch to a unit, the shields you gained from CEs disappear. Then as long as you change baack to a building before you finish the unit, you get the shields again. This happens even if you change to a unit and end the turn - it seems the game remembers the shields put into buildings with CEs. Thus you can't use CEs to speed units in this way.

MyOlde:

You are correct so far. I irrigate because, for cities with high waste it doesn't matter how many mines you ahve, you will still end up with only 1 or 2 useable shields after waste. These are the sort of cities you used CEs in. With irrigated, RRed grassland under any government except Despotism you get 4 food, which supports the citizen that works the square and another that you can turn itno a CE. Thus, the more irrigated tiles you have, the more CEs you can support. And when you have nothing that is worth it to build with the CEs, you have more people you can turn into scientists/taxmen too. Since people cost nothing (except maybe in pollution), the more population you ahve in corrupt cities the better, as each extra person is potentially an extra 2 gold or 3 beakers.

[MyOlde]

Ah, I get it. Thanks MrWhereItsAt. So you're only going to use these guys in the outlying cities where waste and corruption are higher, yes? Their shields replace the grassland shields you would normally mine in the better cities.

Thanks.

[The Viceroy]

MrWhereItsAt,

Thanks ..

Well, thats clever .. i have to hand it to them at Firaxis for thinking of that .. they must have a ce store and a general building store, and what you see on the screen is the combination of both stores, so the cheat would not work, because the ce store is no longer counted.

makes me wonder, if you rush buy, which store it would fill to get the result .. hmm .. either way, there is little gain in doing that anyway.

top marks for testing..

[realpolitic]

Originally posted by Dominae
By the way, the strategy of using Irrigation and Specialists in very corrupt cities is another reason why the Agricultural trait is too powerful. That extra Food sometimes allows for a whole other Specialist to be supported, not to mention the ability to turn Deserts into 3-Food tiles (with Railroads) which allows for even more.

I agree that agro is too powerful, but so much of the game is decided before Replaceable Parts, it's not that important.

This makes Railroads on Irragated squares more important, the 21nd citizen of a city can actually build city Improvements.

[CerberusIV]

I have recently gained Replaceable Parts in my current game and had a chance to try this out on a large scale. The game is effectively over but I am carrying on just to try out some of the new stuff.

The world map shows the Dutch in possession of the largest continent. Looking at the individual cities (48 in total - standard map) those in the core produce useable amounts of shields and have governors managing citizen moods. With 7 luxuries, marketplaces, Bach and Sistine they either work tiles or use specialists as taxmen.

The FP is not well placed and a city on the second ring out north of it was losing 15 shields out of 16 in Monarchy at one time!

The corrupt area is where it is impossible to get more than a few shields out of any city without a massive injection of gold to build factories (I have Hoover), courthouses and police stations.

LM is Leptis Magna, where 3 CE's can complete a colosseum in 15 turns whilst 2 scientists turn out 6 beakers per turn. This is possible in this particular size 11 city because the Dutch as an agricultural civ get 3 food from the surrounding desert tiles.

Turned over to a governor told to maximise production the citizens work mined hills and manage 3 shields to complete the same colosseum in 35 turns, and the city produces 1 beaker. No contest!

I tried a smaller town which could support 2 CE's, for an effective total of 5 shields. When a governor was put in the citizens worked mined tiles and produced 1 shield, with no CE's. So the AI probably can't use CE's either.

This makes filling in the terrible AI city placement with extra cities to produce a CxxC result where each city is allowed up to size 12 (no pollution) and can still finish improvements and contribute to research an effective strategy. It is certainly going to change how I play the later game.

[Gyromancer]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt


I'm not so sure building 12 size 1 cities is any better than 1 size 12 ciy. This is Civ3, so the effort expended building these cities amounts to a whole tonne of shields and lost pop points in settlers built, whereas you only lose the one pop point in founding the one large city. Moreover, a size 12 city will still allow you to set up as much as 12 Scientists or Taxmen for at least a few turns at a time, although 12 size 1 cities on decent terrain should allow you 1 specialist per city EVERY turn. You would need to weight the pop cost of 12 settlers vs 1 alongisde the gains of 12 taxmen/scientists per turn EVERY turn vs the need to switch to food production again every few turns with a large city.

Well, remember that you can actually trade 1 size 12 city with 13 tiles worked MAYBE half the time (the other half of the time you get 12 specialists) with say 3 cities, working those same 13 tiles by using a total of 10 assigned workers, each easily growing to size 6, leaving 8 specialists on all the time. There's no extra upkeep for aqueducts, cathedrals, or even temples and marketplaces, (assuming you have a good number of luxes) since you only need to keep the 3-4 workers per city happy. You also don't have to build a thing other than the initial settler and maybe some workers to feed it. Also, the 3 cities support the same number of units as the size 12 city (in republic)

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
If your city can grow and there are sea/coast tiles around, that harbour will allow you to at least keep your pop growing at a decent speed. Then with a larger pop you have more citizens to turn into taxmen/scientists, even if it is for a short time. The difference in a size 12 city thanks to a Harbour vs a size 6 city without is an extra 12gpt or 18bpt for at least 3-4 turns in 10.

That short time push is about the only reason I can see for making corrupt cities larger. Remeber though that when you push the city totally, it loses 2 food per pop. Since the harbored coast only provides 2 food, you are only breaking even with it. Growing a corrupt city larger using the harbor is, in the end only going to make it so that you can assign more specialists for a shorter time and have to wait longer between cycles. Over an entire cycle, your average number of specialists remains the same.

What really helps your average number of specialists is having surplus food tiles. My analysis goes as follows:

You get the free worker in the city tile, that's entirely surplus. For every tile you can work with more than 2 food, you get the excess as surplus. For every 2 surplus you get an extra specialist per turn. You can take it now or save it up (as your excess food accumulates) and use it later. It stands to reason that to maximize the average number of specialists, you need to maximize your surplus food. You can also use the surplus food to grow your cities a little, to make use of additional surplus food tiles. The limiting factors here are the following: You can't place cities next to each other, placing cities on grassland actually decreases the food that square would produce, while placing them on hills increases the food from that square.

[Gyromancer]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
I agree, Dom. A simpler corruption based on total cities in your empire would seem better than the Rank based scheme in Civ3.

Yeah but imagine how many more threads there'd be complaining about corruption.....

" I just conquered an opponent, and now all my cities are corrupt! I'm losing half the shields in my capital! This corruption thing is broken. Firaxis fix this bug!"


Their original model was that only the first so many cities would help you out, the remainder don't do anything (or little) for you (but don't reduce what you have). With the new specialists, they've toned that model down a bit. I'm not sure that making corruption worse is going to really fix the problem without causing more problems for the "casual civ player" that I keep hearing so much about....

This problem really isn't so big as a balance issue, since by the time you are really able to use the strategy, you are going to win anyway. And since the incremental increase in your output, over just using the specialists in one large city isn't really all that much. (50% at most)

We should be careful not to take a solution that puts out the fire in the kitchen by blowing up the dam 2 miles away.

Edit:

Actually I just remembered that back in Civ2 you couldn't use scientists and tax collectors in small cities. They could just bring this limit back.....

[Donegeal]

CE can be used for Small Wonders and Great Wonders!

[Vince278]

I'm getting surprisingly little use from the new specialists. Maybe I'm just used to the way I usually play (before we had them).

[MrWhereItsAt]

Do you have any super-corrupt 1spt cities? Pump up their pop and try out some CEs to get Granaries and things built faster.

Better still, if you find cities on the edge of the productive part of your civ, use CEs to speed completion of Courthouses and see what sort of gain you get - CEs get you that shields gain faster than you normally would, unless you rushed the CHs.