Armchair Civ
Monday, October 16, 2006
Firing up the factory
10 turns (800 AD - 1000 AD)
So just a few notes on starting my turns... I cancelled the Globe Theatre in Damascus. We absolutely need to have this in Medina. We are already maximized our growth in Medina due to happiness constraints. This means that we're starting to get angry citizens who take up food but aren't productive at all. For the GP farm, we need to get BIG, meaning no unhappiness in Medina is a very good thing. Also, I cancelled the obelisk in Najran. Why? Obelisks are good early game because they are a cheap way to generate culture in order to get your borders to expand. Later in the game, they do close to nothing, as temples give 3x the culture and are pretty cheap as well. The only places we'd want to build obelisks now are our three main culture cities (since we need three cities with 50000 culture to get a cultural victory). Every other city we have can completely ignore culture. It does close to nothing for us in those cities. The only culture related building that we really need in the outside cities are temples, because you need three temples of one religion to build the heavy hitter religious building that gives +50% to culture in a city (they all have different names, you can look in the instructions to see what they're called). By similar reasoning, I cancelled the monastery in Mycenian. Though the +10% to science from the monastery is nice, I changed to a temple. You'll noticed that we have unhappiness there, and the temple gives us another happiness point.
Also, another note. Because all our cities can now use specialists, it's important to semi micromanage the cities now. This is due to the computer autoassigning worked tiles after growth. The computer will often work specialists in a city when you don't want them. For example, Mycenian was working two artists when I loaded up the game. This does not help us at all. Mycenian is not one of the cities we are trying to build culture in. Additionally, working artists there will not help us to generate Great People, since Medina and Mecca (unfortunately) are doing that. I'm not real enthused about the rate of GP generation in Mecca right now, as it's ahead of Medina right now in GP points. This means that our third GP in a row may not be an artist. That isn't optimal for us. I'm torn about possibly switching to caste system at this point. This would allow us to run more than two artists in Medina, but it would also mean the Globe Theatre gets built slower. Medina is a key city right now. It's a fine act between balancing Great Artist generation, gettin the Globe Theatre built for the future, and utilizing the gold tiles to really help our research rate. Focusing on any one of those choices compromises the other two.
Things that happened during my turns. We learned Music, but we weren't first. That means we didnt' get the Great Artist. Not good news, but it isn't the end of the world. I started researching Divine Right. We can still get Islam, but it's important that we use our Great Prophet to speed up research. If you put the cursor over the research bar at the top of the screen, you can see how many beakers we need to learn that tech. For Divine Right we need about 1700 beakers. Our Great Prophet can be used to give us 1100 beakers towards it. That means, that when we have accumulated 600 beakers total for Divine Right, you should use the Great Prophet who is sitting in Mecca to gain the extra 1100 and learn it. This will be happening during your next set of turns. I did a little tech trading, but wasn't too trigger happy. I got Currency, because the extra trade routes can really help our economy. Noticed how I didn't trade for Construction, Calender, or Feudalism. We just don't need those right now. Construction let's us improve travel over rivers (not too pressing of an issue right now), build war elephants (offensive unit that doesn't fit our strategy and we can't even build anyway because of our lack of ivory), build catapults (offensive unit), or build colosseums (no culture bonus, we don't really care). Calender lets us build plantations, but we don't have any resources that require that. Feudalism is very expensive and only really allows us to build longbows. The plan for defensive units should be to build macemen once we learn Machinery and Civil Service.
Here's something good that happened during my turns. I decided to switch to Caste System in order to get Medina to generate the Great Artist before Mecca would generate us a random GP. Look here.
This shows how much our top three culture cities are generating a turn. Don't worry about the total cutlure for now, just note that we are very far away from winning with 50000 culture in each. Damascus is only generating 20 culture per turn, compared to 53 and 30 for Mecca and Medina. I'm going to choose to join our Great Artist with Damascus. What this does is give us 3 extra gold per turn there as well as +14 culture per turn. That's big. Later in the game, we will use the Great Artists to create a great work, but for now, early in the game, it is better for them to join the cities. Sorry if that doesn't make any sense right now, but it'll be clearer as we make more and more Great Artists.
Here are some things we should take care of within the next few turns. As stated above, use the Great Prophet to learn Divine Right when we get to 600 or so beakers. Damascus should be building nothing but culture buildings such as temples and monasteries right now. Hold off on the Hindu Mandir and any of the other +50% culture buildings for now. Those are expensive and require some planning since we can only build a limited number of those (due to the three temple requirement). Like you mentioned before, we should be building cottages on all grassland or flood plain tiles not in Medina. You should be getting a Great Person on your turn from Mecca. If it's a Great Prophet or Great Engineer, save it. If it's a Great Scientist, go ahead and build a science academy in Mecca (our best science city) with it. Perhaps we can miraculously get a Great Artist out of Medina before Mecca makes a GP. Speaking of Medina...
Here's the Great Person farm in action. Currently employing 5 artists, giving us a 15 Great Person points (GPP) per turn there. The National Epic itself gives us 1 GPP. That gives us a base rate of 16 GPP. But you'll note that the fact that we're philosophical gives us +100% birth rate and the National Epic gives us +100% birth rate for an additional +200% birth rate total. In the end, we're getting +48 GPP per turn in Medina. It will get even better if we can scrounge up some additional health (we are at the health limit of 15/15 right now) and use the pacifism civic (even more % bonus). Notice how in Medina I'm working all farm tiles and a single production tile. That one production tile is needed to help create the Globe Theatre. Be on the look out for opportunites to trade resources with Victoria for her health resources (banana, sugar). We may have to trade happiness resources to her, but this is ok for now. If you'll remember, we are using the hereditary rule civic. This allows us to increase happiness in cities by adding troops stationed there. If Medina or any other city ever gets unhappy (has the small red angry face next to it on the main screen), just build a military unit and move it there. Just make sure to manage Medina well so that it is always 1. Working only farms and that one production tile, and 2. working as many artist specialists up to the point where the city is still growing (not "stagnant").
So just a few notes on starting my turns... I cancelled the Globe Theatre in Damascus. We absolutely need to have this in Medina. We are already maximized our growth in Medina due to happiness constraints. This means that we're starting to get angry citizens who take up food but aren't productive at all. For the GP farm, we need to get BIG, meaning no unhappiness in Medina is a very good thing. Also, I cancelled the obelisk in Najran. Why? Obelisks are good early game because they are a cheap way to generate culture in order to get your borders to expand. Later in the game, they do close to nothing, as temples give 3x the culture and are pretty cheap as well. The only places we'd want to build obelisks now are our three main culture cities (since we need three cities with 50000 culture to get a cultural victory). Every other city we have can completely ignore culture. It does close to nothing for us in those cities. The only culture related building that we really need in the outside cities are temples, because you need three temples of one religion to build the heavy hitter religious building that gives +50% to culture in a city (they all have different names, you can look in the instructions to see what they're called). By similar reasoning, I cancelled the monastery in Mycenian. Though the +10% to science from the monastery is nice, I changed to a temple. You'll noticed that we have unhappiness there, and the temple gives us another happiness point.
Also, another note. Because all our cities can now use specialists, it's important to semi micromanage the cities now. This is due to the computer autoassigning worked tiles after growth. The computer will often work specialists in a city when you don't want them. For example, Mycenian was working two artists when I loaded up the game. This does not help us at all. Mycenian is not one of the cities we are trying to build culture in. Additionally, working artists there will not help us to generate Great People, since Medina and Mecca (unfortunately) are doing that. I'm not real enthused about the rate of GP generation in Mecca right now, as it's ahead of Medina right now in GP points. This means that our third GP in a row may not be an artist. That isn't optimal for us. I'm torn about possibly switching to caste system at this point. This would allow us to run more than two artists in Medina, but it would also mean the Globe Theatre gets built slower. Medina is a key city right now. It's a fine act between balancing Great Artist generation, gettin the Globe Theatre built for the future, and utilizing the gold tiles to really help our research rate. Focusing on any one of those choices compromises the other two.
Things that happened during my turns. We learned Music, but we weren't first. That means we didnt' get the Great Artist. Not good news, but it isn't the end of the world. I started researching Divine Right. We can still get Islam, but it's important that we use our Great Prophet to speed up research. If you put the cursor over the research bar at the top of the screen, you can see how many beakers we need to learn that tech. For Divine Right we need about 1700 beakers. Our Great Prophet can be used to give us 1100 beakers towards it. That means, that when we have accumulated 600 beakers total for Divine Right, you should use the Great Prophet who is sitting in Mecca to gain the extra 1100 and learn it. This will be happening during your next set of turns. I did a little tech trading, but wasn't too trigger happy. I got Currency, because the extra trade routes can really help our economy. Noticed how I didn't trade for Construction, Calender, or Feudalism. We just don't need those right now. Construction let's us improve travel over rivers (not too pressing of an issue right now), build war elephants (offensive unit that doesn't fit our strategy and we can't even build anyway because of our lack of ivory), build catapults (offensive unit), or build colosseums (no culture bonus, we don't really care). Calender lets us build plantations, but we don't have any resources that require that. Feudalism is very expensive and only really allows us to build longbows. The plan for defensive units should be to build macemen once we learn Machinery and Civil Service.
Here's something good that happened during my turns. I decided to switch to Caste System in order to get Medina to generate the Great Artist before Mecca would generate us a random GP. Look here.
This shows how much our top three culture cities are generating a turn. Don't worry about the total cutlure for now, just note that we are very far away from winning with 50000 culture in each. Damascus is only generating 20 culture per turn, compared to 53 and 30 for Mecca and Medina. I'm going to choose to join our Great Artist with Damascus. What this does is give us 3 extra gold per turn there as well as +14 culture per turn. That's big. Later in the game, we will use the Great Artists to create a great work, but for now, early in the game, it is better for them to join the cities. Sorry if that doesn't make any sense right now, but it'll be clearer as we make more and more Great Artists.
Here are some things we should take care of within the next few turns. As stated above, use the Great Prophet to learn Divine Right when we get to 600 or so beakers. Damascus should be building nothing but culture buildings such as temples and monasteries right now. Hold off on the Hindu Mandir and any of the other +50% culture buildings for now. Those are expensive and require some planning since we can only build a limited number of those (due to the three temple requirement). Like you mentioned before, we should be building cottages on all grassland or flood plain tiles not in Medina. You should be getting a Great Person on your turn from Mecca. If it's a Great Prophet or Great Engineer, save it. If it's a Great Scientist, go ahead and build a science academy in Mecca (our best science city) with it. Perhaps we can miraculously get a Great Artist out of Medina before Mecca makes a GP. Speaking of Medina...
Here's the Great Person farm in action. Currently employing 5 artists, giving us a 15 Great Person points (GPP) per turn there. The National Epic itself gives us 1 GPP. That gives us a base rate of 16 GPP. But you'll note that the fact that we're philosophical gives us +100% birth rate and the National Epic gives us +100% birth rate for an additional +200% birth rate total. In the end, we're getting +48 GPP per turn in Medina. It will get even better if we can scrounge up some additional health (we are at the health limit of 15/15 right now) and use the pacifism civic (even more % bonus). Notice how in Medina I'm working all farm tiles and a single production tile. That one production tile is needed to help create the Globe Theatre. Be on the look out for opportunites to trade resources with Victoria for her health resources (banana, sugar). We may have to trade happiness resources to her, but this is ok for now. If you'll remember, we are using the hereditary rule civic. This allows us to increase happiness in cities by adding troops stationed there. If Medina or any other city ever gets unhappy (has the small red angry face next to it on the main screen), just build a military unit and move it there. Just make sure to manage Medina well so that it is always 1. Working only farms and that one production tile, and 2. working as many artist specialists up to the point where the city is still growing (not "stagnant").
