Civ choice for the "builder"

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

On Regent level, I found that the English + land with rivers = tech lead in the ancient era... I wonder if this holds up on Monarch or higher... combine those scouts with the commercial trait, set a high tech level (for most techs) and I found it quite easy to outpace all the civs in terms of techs, even with lots of other expansionists in the mix...

[MysteryMan]

Hey, if you dislike the Expantionist trait, dont' sweat it, you're in good company. The only time it is worth taking is on Large/Huge maps (which for me are impractical as my comp is about as high-tech as today's toaster oven).
On the Tiny/Small settings, it is a pure waste as you take a slot that could be filled with something useful (like, I don't know, industrious) and basically piss it away on an 'advantage' that will be gone by 0AD at the latest.
That being said, I must admit that often the AI civs that piss me off the most are the Expansionist ones. I have been playing around with strategies to manipulate AI civs so they will fight each other and not me. In my last game, I deliberately left a gap in my lines that let the Iraquios expand to my south and the Americans expand to the north. When they met in the middle, there was a BIG boom! When the dust settled, my 'peaceful builder civ' had the largest army on the continent. I could have wiped out the Iraquious more easily, but I eliminated the Americans first (IMHO they are by FAR the worst neighbor of the two). By the time I was done with them, I had gotten so powerful that everyone was afraid of me. No more wars were necessary that game.

[Arrian]

Expansionist can be powerful even on standard maps, because you will most likely meet your neighbors before they meet each other (the thing that screws that up is other expansionists. ). That can really help with initial trading. Add in free techs from huts and maybe a settler, and the trait has done its job.

In the end, I still prefer other traits, but Exp isn't as bad as I used to think it was.

-Arrian

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I want one of you pros to try the English out - the whole early tech lead thing - just try cranking the tech slider all the way up (without running a deficit) and see what kinda results you get.

[MysteryMan]

I have been playing the last few games of mine as the Aztecs (inspired by a post I read somewhere here) and IMHO the Jag Warrior basically gives the Aztecs the expantionist attribute for free. Maybe the goodie huts are a little less good (although barbarians are just walking experience, waiting to be harvested) but the Jag sure is a lot better than a scout.
However, the aztecs tend to start near expantionist races, so they lose most of the exploration advantage, but hey, they're not only not at a disadvantage, but if an AI civ comes across my undefended city with a scout, big deal. If I come across an undefended city with a Jag, I will take it. Plus they get milataristic and religious, whereas any expantionist civ will only have one trait to stack against that.
Anyways, just my $.02.

[Arrian]

The Aztecs do have an advantage in getting more huts and meeting people faster. However, there are two problems:

1) no expansionist bonus when popping the huts
2) it does take a minimum of 4 turns to build that first Jag. Meanwhile, an expansionist civ has moved their original scout and built another.

There is a third problem with the Aztecs: somebody might just randomly attack one of your Jags... and lose. I've had that happen and it SUCKED. Things were going great right up to the point where some dumbass hit my regular Jag (on mountain) with an elite warrior and lost, triggering my GA in like 1500bc. I was PISSED.

I picked the Aztecs for that game because of the same thing you thought of: "hey, I can basically get the expansionist bonus w/o being stuck with the trait for the rest of the game! Plus, Jags are great for running around and busting up barb camps for 25g each!" But it turns out there is a risk you run.

Plus, I can count the number of times I've seen an undefended AI city on one hand.

Yahweh - I've played the English several times. My team in the PTWDemogameII is playing them right now.

I can tell you that, given time, the English can be solid. Being commercial, they get a valueable tech to trade early on, and a leg up on the race to Republic. But the lack of any building discounts, plus slow workers means they are pretty slow to get going. You need to really concentrate on parlaying any early advantages you get from the exp. trait into something more lasting.

-Arrian

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I think a lot of folks around here would throw in their lot with the Aztecs, Mystery Man. Maybe not for a builder civ, however, but as the #1 best civ otherwise.

Course, I'm not so sure... didn't score so well in a poll not too long ago... but most folks savor a good swarm o' Jaguars now and then...

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Yeah, but what about the early tech? Didja try cranking the tech slider all the way up? I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work so hot on higher difficulty levels, but I'm still curious.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Yahweh Sabaoth
I want one of you pros to try the English out - the whole early tech lead thing - just try cranking the tech slider all the way up (without running a deficit) and see what kinda results you get.

YS I am not sure what you are looking for here! It motivated me to play English (yuck) on a large map at Emperor, so I may not forgive you (map is too big to suit me). I do not really try to have an early tech lead as I will tend to have the research at 10% for the first two tiers of tech and wait for the last ones to up it to what ever I can stand, read no or little defict.
If you are playing on Regent, then you can get out in front and stay there from the start. At Monarch, it is more a case of start location and interest. That is, I some times will hold the lead at Monarch from the start and some times not till the next age.
At Emperor with an expansion civ, I will likely have lots of the early techs, but may fall back a bit and just stay in contact with the tech leaders.
I am not familar with this map size, so I am sort of feeling my way.
I am doing Rep and have just traded all my techs that they did not have , so we are even. I will soon fall behind due to the switch in governents. I suspect I will have contacts first as I have many gallies out and the AI seems to only have one that it is using to ferry a spear and settler.
I am also trying camps for the first time, so who knows what will happen.

[peterfharris]

Originally posted by Arrian

Plus, I can count the number of times I've seen an undefended AI city on one hand.

Yahweh - I've played the English several times. My team in the PTWDemogameII is playing them right now.

I can tell you that, given time, the English can be solid. Being commercial....

-Arrian

I can count the number of undefended AI cities I have seen on one finger.

The English are great for Regent Level games. The expansionist trait gets on off to a good start, goody huts etc

The commercial starts off useless (zero value in 4000 BC) but just keeps getting better. Early development is harder with the English (god I miss industrious and religious) but you keep going from strength to strength. If you get out of the Ancient Age with a decent empire you just go from strength to strength. The problem is getting out of the Ancient Age with a decent empire, no problem at Regent but becomes a serious problem at higher levels.

The English are OK at Monarch but if I try an Emperor game I prefer Egypt or the Babs because it will take me longer to lose with them.

[vmxa1]

They are failry decent in this map (emperor). I went into anarchy to switch to Rep with tech all even. No wars, no settler bops as the map is too large.

[peterfharris]

Originally posted by vmxa1
They are failry decent in this map (emperor). I went into anarchy to switch to Rep with tech all even. No wars, no settler bops as the map is too large.

Umh, you are doing rather better at Emperor than I do. Maybe with a more practice and more adherence to sound strategy I could make the English work for me at higher levels too.

So it wasn't you that was responsible for the Americans and Germans going downhill?

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Vmxa1: Did you try cranking the tech value (research) all the way up, as high as it can go without running a deficit, during the exploration/REX phase? I assume this technique would be relatively worthless without plenty of rivers, or high-trade squares, to found your cities near... but it works wonders, combined with scouting, on Regent. I know Regent is for weaklings and slime, but I sort of assume that, aside from greater threat and more potent scouting on behalf of the AI, the basic principle would be the same on higher difficultly levels.

Obviously, leaving tech at 10% is solid for many strategies, but the whole point of the strategy I was suggesting - JUST for experimentation, mind you, I don't presume that I know this game as well as you - was to crank the tech slider all the way UP (to 80% or 90%, say) and letting the enhanced trade of rivers do some of the research work for you - coupled with roads and lots of scouts, of course.

I'll try it again on Monarch someday. Probably not for a while though. I just played as the Romans and French and need to get away from Commercial for awhile.

[vmxa1]

YS during the early part of the game, increasing the slider would have done nothing, but waste gold. I increased research rate as soon as it had an impact. Well more or less, I mean I did not increase it if going from 10 to 50 did nothing. I did not check if going to 90 or 100 would go anything. Often I needed to have some spent on lux. That would vary from 10-30%, mostly at 10% to keep the citizens in line. I only now have started to get markets and cath.
Remember that at Regent you research at 100% effectivness and at Emperor it is 80%. IOW it cost more to research.

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Oh, I didn't realize that. In my idiocy, I thought that it was a matter of the AI having an advantage, not the player having a disadvantage. Time to me to reread my manual I reckon.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by peterfharris


Umh, you are doing rather better at Emperor than I do. Maybe with a more practice and more adherence to sound strategy I could make the English work for me at higher levels too.

So it wasn't you that was responsible for the Americans and Germans going downhill?

Try using some sort of semi tight city layout with a few camps.
Get a settler pump going and crank out troops in the camps. I had to build a worker every so often to keep the unhappy citizens in check in the camps and even a settler once in awhile. This gave me enough workers to do all the road and tile improvements with those lazy non-industrious people.
In fact I am thinking of stopping as I look out and see all the land I have now and will soon have and contemplate all the effort I will have to go to RR it. I knew I should not have pick a large map, ugh.

No I did not have anything to do with the Americans as they are on another contient. I had no impact on the Germans either as I have not even build a city that prevents them from getting land.
They were always behind in tech and probably had poor start location.
I only had two uprisings of barbs and they were very easy to handle. A sword and a few horses was enough in conjunction with the lay of the land (read hills). It was funny, I had a new city with one spear right next to one uprising and they never attacked it. It was on a hill and they wanted no part of it. They jump one lone warrior from Spain and he just kept killing them.

I now have all units upgraded to Med Inf and Pikes, plus horsemen so barbs are not a concern.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by vmxa1
YS during the early part of the game, increasing the slider would have done nothing, but waste gold.

Not sure what you mean by this. If the satement is to be taken literally, it's false.

The only time you concretely waste Beakers is when you overflow the amount required to research a tech (for instance, you're producing 20 per turn and have already complete 190 of 200).

Even if your research does not appear to proceed any faster when you put Science to 100% in the first few turns of the game, you will (in most cases) get that first tech faster if you do. Here's an example:

You produce 1 Beaker per turn at 50% Science.
You produce 3 Beakers per turn at 100% Science.
You research Alphabet, which costs (say) 150 Beakers.

150/1 = 150 turns to research Alphabet at 50% Science. The game rules decree that it will only take 40 turns, however.

150/3 = 50 turns at 100% Science. Again, the game rules step in and reduce this to 40 turns.

So apparently no matter what you do with the slider, you can only research Alphabet in 40 turns.

But now let's say you put the slider at 100% Science, 10 turns go by and your city grows in size. Now you're producing (say) 5 Beakers per turn instead of 3. Then:

3*10 = 30 accumulated Beakers so far
150 - 30 = 120 remaining Beakers for Alphabet
120/5 = 24 turns to research Alphabet

If you add this 24 turns to the 10 turns that have already passed, you see that your total time to research Alphabet has been reduced by 6 turns (from 40 to 34)!

Like I've said before, if you're really interested in these things, think of research in terms of Beakers instead of turns. This will help you make the right decisions relative to what you want to accomplish.


Dominae

[vmxa1]

Dom I did not say anything about wasting beakers, I said gold.
I also said that I was only looking at the rate up to around 50% and that if you were to go to 100% that would be different.

[vmxa1]

In the example it is +8 at 27 turns. Yes we know about beakers, but we really only want to know how soon.
So at 100% I do not get the break through any sooner, but I do lose out on the extra gold.
So all I was saying is until you get to the point where you can have a reasonable impact, I will stay at the most effective rate.
This may change if I am in a big need of a given tech.
As a non-expansion civ, I may be forced to go to max research to get pottery for instance. Since this was an expansion civ, I know I will get many of the low level techs from huts on this map as it is large.
Once I got to where rate was cutting down the time required significantly, then I moved the slider up. How far is depending on many things, but in this game 50-60% was about right. Lef me to do 10% luxs and put some cash awway for the upgrades.

[vmxa1]

Of course the beaker part is valid, but will not have much impact in this setting as the city is going to be a settler pump and will often be very small in pop. Probably bounce from 2-5 range through the ancient times.
All in all, you can get to the break through faster, but not fast enough to matter for this civ until you get most of the early techs. Between huts and contacts, you do not need to spend on researching. Like I said, if this was a std map and a non-expansion civ, I would do things differently. But that was not YS's question.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by vmxa1
So all I was saying is until you get to the point where you can have a reasonable impact, I will stay at the most effective rate.

If you're going to micromanage the Science slider, might I suggest the following heuristic (from alexman):

Always put your Science at 100% (or as high as possible) when you want to research a tech yourself. Then, when within 1-2 turns of completion, decrease as much as possible while retaining the same time to completion.

Obviously a thorough analysis of a particular situation may show that this is not optimal (it's a heuristic, after all). But in general, in the early-game when your pop is going up/down and tile improvements are being completed, this method works rather well (i.e. it will always get you to within 2-3 Gold of waste).


Dominae

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I should note that when I used this technique, on wussy level (Regent) with stunning success, I got the first entire tier (I believe) of techs, plus Mysticism and, uh, Iron Working I believe (maybe HR or Writing) from scouting... the rest of the techs I got by founding ~10 cities, almost all on rivers, and cranking my tech ALL the way up (short of running a deficit).

So, at first, my tech rate was at a reasonable, or low, level, and I raised it to research Writing, Map Making, Mathematics, etc. - the "second & third wave" of techs.

It was the quickest I've ever gotten ahead in tech, although I also cranked the tech rate all the way playing as several other commercial civs (Spain, India and others) and achieved much the same results, though certainly less dramatic than with those English scouts.

Once again, I'm not stipulating that this is a very effective strategy overall... I just wanted to throw it out there to see what you pros think. I'll probably give it a shot (as the Hittites I guess) on Monarch level myself eventually.

[Arrian]

If I start an expensive tech, like Writing, when I have 1-2 cities, I will research it at 40-turn pace (10%) and rake in the gold.

Part way through, I may check to see if I can make a serious dent in the time to completion by cranking up the slider, if my pop has grown significantly.

-Arrian

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Dominae


If you're going to micromanage the Science slider, might I suggest the following heuristic (from alexman):

Always put your Science at 100% (or as high as possible) when you want to research a tech yourself. Then, when within 1-2 turns of completion, decrease as much as possible while retaining the same time to completion.

Dominae

This is what I would do with a std map or a non-expansion civ. Maybe it is a good plan for even that setting, the caveat is where you mention "if you're going to micromanage".
I was not doing that, I was staying at 10% until I had many of the techs from huts and trades.
Then I went to the highest level I could without doing into a defict or at least only a small one.
My thinking was that I did not really expect to finish researching a given tech before I make the switch to the higher rate. I probably should have used 0%, until then. I think it made no difference or very little to the gold saved.

[Dominae]

Arrian, switching from a 40-turn pace half way through is inefficient. If you really want that tech fast, you're better off researching it full speed; if you can wait, you waste Gold changing your mind and speeding up research halfway through.

vmxa1, I'm relatively certain what we're discussing applies to all maps sizes. If you have reason to believe techs will be "accessible" (say, playing a Huge map as Expansionist, or on Deity), then there's no point in even doing a 40-turn pace. Or, if you think you have a chance to research a tech before any other AI but it could be close, you're better off going 100% until the last few turns. Finally, if you're reasonably confident that you a tech will not be accessible and there's very little chance an AI will beat you to it, the 40-turn gambit is the right choice. I'm trying to figure out why one of these three alternatives does not fit your test game.

By the way, the heuristic I mentioned actually reduces micromanagement. Trying to find the right slider setting to get a tech in a certain number of turns is very difficult when your pop goes up and down (as it does in the early-game). So, you might as well just put it at a max value until the last couple of turns, and get that little extra Gold by adjusting the sliders then.


Dominae

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Dominae

vmxa1, I'm relatively certain what we're discussing applies to all maps sizes. If you have reason to believe techs will be "accessible" (say, playing a Huge map as Expansionist, or on Deity), then there's no point in even doing a 40-turn pace. Then again, if you think you have a chance to get a tech before any other AI but it could be close, you're better off going 100% until the last few turns. Finally, if you're reasonably confident that you a tech will not be accessible and there's very little chance an AI will beat you to it, the 40-turn gambit is the right choice. I'm trying to figure out why one of these three alternatives does not fit your test game.

By the way, the heuristic I mentioned actually reduces micromanagement. Trying to find the right slider setting to get a tech in a certain number of turns is very difficult when your pop goes up and down (as it does in the early-game). So, you might as well just put it at a max value until the last couple of turns, and get that little extra Gold by adjusting the sliders then.


Dominae

I think the first one does fit and is the one I was comtemplating. I went with the 10% as a lame compromise. I did not want to keep checking to see if there was any increased value between 0 and 10, so I just left it at 10. You know I have been known to be lazy some times or rather most times. I was not very interested in the research part, I was interested in the function of the camps.

I think I may take that heuristic tactic next time around as that idea of not dealing with it as much does appeal to me.

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Dominae
Arrian, switching from a 40-turn pace half way through is inefficient. If you really want that tech fast, you're better off researching it full speed; if you can wait, you waste Gold changing your mind and speeding up research halfway through.

Dominae, I am not sure I follow. How is gold wasted?

Do you mean time is wasted?

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
Dominae, I am not sure I follow. How is gold wasted?

Do you mean time is wasted?

Yes, sorry, you waste time.

Of course, time = money, and this is as true in Civ3 as it is in real life.


Dominae

[Theseus]

Weeeeell, I like having some gold around too.

That's an interesting question that I don;t remember grappling with:

When do you WANT 40 turn research?

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
When do you WANT 40 turn research?

1. When you're planning to play the tech trading game. That is, when you're not able/interested in getting a tech lead, but just planning to be as prosperous as possible.

2. When it would take you over ~25 turns to research the tech at maximum Science.

3. When you're reasonably confident that an AI will not beat you to the tech. The whole idea here is that you're gambling that the one tech you pick for a 40-turn pace will net you a bunch of other techs when traded around. You are thus able to make a lot of money but still keep up in the tech race. If another AI gets that tech first, its trade value is far lower and you may not be able to get back into the race.


Dominae