Sliders&Farmers&Bears, oh my

[Hermann the Lombard]

I guess these approach being newbie questions, but here goes:

1. I see people talking about "maximizing the sliders," but I find I tend to use "moderate" settings. How do you like to use the sliders at various times?

2. I tend to use farmers to get my pop up enough to fill the first ring, or sometimes to reach a trade good in the second ring. Is this "normal practice?"

3. I find I don't tend to use laborers much at all, so I assume I'm missing optimum use. Comments?

4. OK, I have a city with a population of 15 (6 slaves, 2 entertainers) and 253 food, but they're starving. Why? If I put 8 farmers to work (409 food), they are *still* starving. What's going on? (BTW, that game is using Cradle 1.2)

5. There's gotta be a better way: if I want to look at the health or force mix in a given square, I have to (A) click the square, (B) click the Units tab, and (C) press period. That's a lot of action for such a common function.

6. Speaking of filling the first ring, I've read that 6 pop will harvest the entire first ring, and that 7 pop havests 1/12 of the second ring...but in Cradle it seems I need 8 or 9 pop to start the second ring. What's the scoop?

Thanks for the help!

-- Hermann

[Martin Gühmann]

1. Of course maximizing the sliders, of course not in Cradle as the penalties for maximizing the in Cradle are too high to compensate the happiness loss by entertainers. In GoodMod it is still possible and a need as the AI will do it in GoodMod, too. That is another sollution to the same problem.

2. I don't know the city growth rate in Cradle I heard that it is low so that you have to engage some farmers.

3. Actual I don't use workers either, because I want to avoid pollution.

4. I guess that a building in your city was destroyed during an attack like the aqueduct, if such a population increasing building is destroyed and a city size is over the base maximum city size plus all the other city size increasing buildings your city will starve.

6. In Cradle the condition for the radius growth is higher than in the default game you need 9 pops to get a city with the second ring instead of 6.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
1. I see people talking about "maximizing the sliders," but I find I tend to use "moderate" settings. How do you like to use the sliders at various times?

Cradle is set up to make it very hard to max out the sliders. The reason is that the AI does not use that strategy, nor has anyone been able to figure out how to get the AI to use it. In the default game, it was easy to max them out and significantly cut the gap between the human and AI in the early game. If you want to max some setting in Cradle, you will have to pay for it somewhere else.

Leonidas put it very nicely in another thread 'There is nothing for free in Cradle' (or if there is, it does not come too easily).

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
2. I tend to use farmers to get my pop up enough to fill the first ring, or sometimes to reach a trade good in the second ring. Is this "normal practice?"

Farmers will always speed up growth, but at the cost of something else (production, commerce) It is interesing to note that in the initial founding of a city, they will grow quickly, even without farmers. And having a farmer in a city that has a lot of food tile improvements does not take advantage of those improvements.

I'm still tryng to figure out just how valuable farmers are in the early game, as there probably are different opinions on what is the best early game strategy.

Generally, if you follow the principle of city specialization, then you may want to have certain cities grow quickly, and farmers will help in that regard.

One other thing is that filling up the rings is important. Once you fill one up, then using a farmer may be the most efficient way to use your next few workers to quickly fill up the next ring.

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
3. I find I don't tend to use laborers much at all, so I assume I'm missing optimum use. Comments?

See above - same principle.

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
4. OK, I have a city with a population of 15 (6 slaves, 2 entertainers) and 253 food, but they're starving. Why? If I put 8 farmers to work (409 food), they are *still* starving. What's going on? (BTW, that game is using Cradle 1.2)

CTP2 uses certain buildings to move up to the next city cap size. What does happen is if a city is close to a cap size, the food production efficiency does go down, and once the cap is reached, you cannot move to the next cap until you have built the required building (food production growth is at zero at that point).

However, slaves can be used to boost a city beyond the cap, because slaves go to the nearest garrisonned city, despite the cap. The cap ends up being artificially exceeded. What I think is happening is that you get the 'starving city' info, and I do not know if there is a way to effectively gauge if your city, even if you use the extra workers as farmers, is actually starving. The food requirements for slaves is half of a worker, so placing a couple of workers as farmers, in theory, should keep them fed.

What is the exact requirement is may not be able to be reflected in the in-game info though - and this may have to be monitored if long term, a player ends up losing workers. This may be hard to monitor too because if a player is slaving, the new slaves may mask the fact that a city is actually losing workers due to starvation. And I believe that if a city is starving (or hit with a plague), workers are lost first.

What I do know is that until you add the required building to boost the cap, your population will not increase due to new workers.

Originally posted by Hermann the Lombard
6. Speaking of filling the first ring, I've read that 6 pop will harvest the entire first ring, and that 7 pop havests 1/12 of the second ring...but in Cradle it seems I need 8 or 9 pop to start the second ring. What's the scoop?

Whatever the number of tiles in a particular ring is the requirement to move to the next ring in Cradle.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Thanks, Martin. Thanks, Hex.

Originally posted by hexagonian


Cradle is set up to make it very hard to max out the sliders. If you want to max some setting in Cradle, you will have to pay for it somewhere else. Leonidas put it very nicely in another thread 'There is nothing for free in Cradle' (or if there is, it does not come too easily).

That makes excellent sense; maxing should not be a viable option. It should be a matter of tradeoffs, as so many things are in Cradle.

Originally posted by hexagonian
I'm still tryng to figure out just how valuable farmers are in the early game, as there probably are different opinions on what is the best early game strategy.

Anyone care to chime in with opinions about this? This could be a fruitful discussion along with the Succession Games (Oerdin has begun discussing strat in the Game V thread; a great idea to me). My first impression: new cities should spit out 2 or 3
defenders/explores, then use farmers to get to about size 6 before building a nomad. Of course about this time my cities always seem to get hit by slavers or plague or both, so I can't keep them at size 6 in the early game. I seem to end up leaving one farmer on duty for this reason, at least until I start needing an entertainer (or slider move).

Originally posted by hexagonian
Generally, if you follow the principle of city specialization, then you may want to have certain cities grow quickly, and farmers will help in that regard.

I'm familiar with city specialization from Civ2 and Civ3. In my limited CTP2 experience, specialization doesn't seem as viable--or at least not as powerful--in CTP2. This might be an improvement, though I was rather fond of the Super Science City in Civ2. I assume the principle here is that some cities focus on science buildings, others on cash, and others on production buildings/tile improvements.

Originally posted by hexagonian
However, slaves can be used to boost a city beyond the cap... What I think is happening is that you get the 'starving city' info, and I do not know if there is a way to effectively gauge if your city...is actually starving. ...this may have to be monitored if long term, a player ends up losing workers. This may be hard to monitor too because if a player is slaving, the new slaves may mask the fact that a city is actually losing workers due to starvation.

I haven't noticed pop/worker loss in that city, but I haven't been monitoring closely. I'll try to keep an eye on it in that particular ongoing game. I guess I "slaved" across the cap, but I may also have destroyed a required building when I captured the city.

Originally posted by hexagonian
Whatever the number of tiles in a particular ring is the requirement to move to the next ring in Cradle.

Is that also a requirement for 100% harvesting of a ring? It never made sense to me that 6 workers havested 100% of 8 tiles in CTP2.

-- Hermann

[Oerdin]

Most of my experience is with the none moded MP game so some of this may be worng for Cradle, however, specialists like trade good are almost never worth the effort. There are of course exceptions like the entertainer in unhappy cities (so that you don't have to move the slider for the whole civ just for one group of whiners) and facotry workers in your dedicated "production city" but over all the gains from using specialists are simply out weighted by the minuses.
I must admit I am something of a numbers player who sits around and mathmatically calculates the "best" way to situate a city or maximize your chances of winning a fight so other people may call my style of play boring. Still I noticed that obsolutely every top 25 ranked player in GL during its prime did the exact same thing so I figure there has to be something to it.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Oerdin wrote:

I must admit I am something of a numbers player who sits around and mathmatically calculates the "best" way to situate a city or maximize your chances of winning a fight so other people may call my style of play boring. Still I noticed that obsolutely every top 25 ranked player in GL during its prime did the exact same thing so I figure there has to be something to it.

*****

Well, even if I don't always want to play that way (unless I'm doing the equivalent of Civ2/3 OCC on Deity, where there is so little margin for error), it helps me to have those numbers--and debates about what is "best"--in the back of my mind when making decisions. So "thank you" for your ideas and your thoughtful explanations; that's a good part of why I'm here!

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I must admit I am something of a numbers player who sits around and mathmatically calculates the "best" way to situate a city or maximize your chances of winning a fight so other people may call my style of play boring.

I used to be like that too - then I got into modding, now I hardly play at all anymore

[hexagonian]

I ran a small test yesterday via cheat mode to measure whether it was worth it from a production standpoint to use a farmer to increase the size of a city, and then when the population has grown, to switch him back. The thinking was that because the city had the extra worker before the normal city, it may produce an item slightly faster.

2 cities - both at starting size 1
Terrain - plains on both

City 1 had the farmer/worker combination. I placed the farmer right off the bat, and switched him back when the city hit size 2

City 2 used the worker only.

Construction of a warrior unit in both.

End result was that City 2 beat City 1 by a turn.

This was only a short test, though I believe that in other situations, the same results would play out the same. (using different terrain, for example)

The question is whether a player, using the farmer/worker combination over a long period of time would eventually realize a result that would be better than using just workers. And there may be a situation where your city is placed on slow growth terrain (mountains, for example) where you need to use a farmer to coax out some pop. growth.

I would tend to agree with Oerdin though, that in cities that are specifically geared toward a certain purpose (production/science centers/merchant), it may be practical to use specialists. The best thing to do is make a numbers comparison by switching the workers out to specialists in a specific city as the situation warrants and see if the result is what you are looking for.

And it is possible to make the specialists worthwhile - all a player has to do is go into CRA_pop.txt and boost the benefit of a specialist. The trick is to not make them so powerful that they are all that you use, because the AI is not structured to handle that type of strategy at this time.

From a purely micromanagement standpoint, it would have been nice if CTP2 had retained the CTP1/civ2 system of placing workers on specific tiles (I do miss it in the early game), but actually, the more streamlined approach of CTP2 does have its benefits by cutting down some of the in-game tedium.

As for the trade caravans/trade goods, I believe that in Cradle, a player has to use them now. In the default game, trade only boosted your Rush Buy fund - none of the gold generated by trade goes to science. Peter's Unit Updater SLIC in Cradle now gives that fund a specific purpose, because a player needs that RB gold to keep his forces upgraded, because the AI does.

IMO, this code is one of the most important ones that has come out from the SLIC community!

[Hermann the Lombard]

Originally posted by hexagonian
I ran a small test yesterday via cheat mode to measure whether it was worth it from a production standpoint to use a farmer to increase the size of a city, and then when the population has grown, to switch him back. The thinking was that because the city had the extra worker before the normal city, it may produce an item slightly faster.

2 cities - both at starting size 1
Terrain - plains on both

City 1 had the farmer/worker combination. I placed the farmer right off the bat, and switched him back when the city hit size 2

City 2 used the worker only.

Construction of a warrior unit in both.

End result was that City 2 beat City 1 by a turn.

This was only a short test, though I believe that in other situations, the same results would play out the same. (using different terrain, for example)

The question is whether a player, using the farmer/worker combination over a long period of time would eventually realize a result that would be better than using just workers.

Well, if the only goal was producing the item faster, I think you're right. I didn't conduct the experiment, but that was my gut feeling, so I have been producing 2 or 3 defenders/explorers first, and then using farmers to boost the city size up to 5 or 6 (mostly filling the first ring) while building a nomad. My theory is that the extra gold and science makes this worthwhile.

So if I really want to test, I'll have to see (A) how many units I produce and (B) how fast I get a tech and (C) how much gold I accumulate. I think I'll wait until *after* I ship the succession game to Oerdin!

In Civ2 there was a big incentive to spit out settlers when the population was at 3, because it was cheaper (in food) to regen the lost pop at that level. Big cities took so much more food to regen the population. That doesn't appear to be the case here.

[Dale]

Sure city 2 may beat city 1 by one turn building a warrior, but look at the long-term. City 1 is producing more food (to compensate the lack of shields). So city 1 will grow faster than city 2. When city 1 gets to 5 pop, city 1 may be 3. What happens then? Which city is still producing that warrior faster? Be an interesting test to play out.


Me personally, I prefer to use farmers in the beggining to get more food because it makes my cities bigger, faster. I just see the offshoot as being able to use more resources. IE using the example above: city 1 at 5 pop is using more of the city-rings resources than city 2 at 3 pop. Once I hit 7 pop (1st worker of 2nd city-ring), I stop the excess farmers. This ups the PW output of the city and build a couple of farms to compensate.

My thoughts.