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J Bytheway
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England
Jul 2001
time: 05:15
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The "avoidance of construction change penalty" bug (Which is not especially helpful in actuality, since you still save money by buying a building and switching to a unit or wonder even if you do recieve the 25% production penalty. It needs to be about 75% to be effective) is a consequence of the bad way in which the queue was handled, and there is another consequence, of which you may not be aware - if you insert a wonder into the front of the queue when the thing there is already started (or possibly not even then) then your opponents will recieve no notification that you have begun construction, because the wonder is already started by inheriting the construction put into the previous first entry in the queue. Similarly, if you insert a conventional construction in front of a wonder, they will not be informed that you stopped. I think mostly you play no wonders, though, so this is not relevant.
More pertinently, note that, you can buy things more cheaply by buying the cheapest thing available, then switching to the next cheapest, and buying that, and so forth.
For example, say I want a leviathan (the most expensive unit there is). I could buy it straight off, which costs 54000.
Or, I could use the well know buy-and-switch cheat with the fusion plant, which costs 20000 (which is a pretty good buy).
But, the best possible way is to buy the following improvements in turn, cheating to switch each time:
Temple (540)
City wall (180)
Publishing house (168)
Marketplace (162)
Coliseum (485)
Bank (97)
University (262)
City clock (315)
Factory (486)
Hospital (247)
Computer centre (159)
Cathedral (77)
Airport (25)
Bio memory chip (332)
Television (213)
Micro defense (571)
Security monitor (562)
Robotic plant (555)
SDI (550)
Nuclear plant (545)
Rail launcher (541)
Aqua-filter (2500)
Fusion plant (2400)
Leviathan (finished)
If my arithmetic is right all that adds up to a meagre 11972. By taking small steps, we utilise the fact that nearly finished buildings are cheaper to buy, and so cut the price in half once more. This was a trick I used in Civ2 all the time, but I only just realised that it's applicable in CTP. By combining your trick & mine, we cut the price of the leviathan nearly in FIVE (actually 4.5)! That's right - I have a whole stack of NINE leviathans while you (if you don't cheat) have only TWO for the same money! Who's going to win?
Of course, to use this optimally you need an empty city, but they're not hard to come by - just build a city on the front line and it will churn out a leviathan every turn for just 12000 odd gold. Naturally, if your city misses a few of the steps, it matters little, so you can afford to build a city walls and/or force field if you need the defense.
The last two steps are fairly inefficient, and if we stop at the nuclear plant we can switch to a swarm or fusion tank (which normally cost 31500, or 11000 with buy nuclear plant & switch) and get them for a song - 6531. Thats 4.8 times cheaper than they should cost if the queue code had been properly written.
In general this tactic will get you units for one fifth to one quarter of their straight-off cost, and a bit more than half the price of using the simple trick which is well known.
And, what's more, it doesn't stop at units - you can do it with wonders too, if you buy the whole list above, then the Star Ladder (for 11666), the Global E-Bank (for 19368) and the Gaia Controller (or the Egalitarian act, Sensorium, National Shield or Wormhole Sensor) (for 29760), you've got the most expensive wonder for 72766, 2.7 times cheaper than the 200000 it should cost. And you could interchange the wonders listed above for whatever happens to be available at the time, there are whole groups which all cost the same. Of course, this is much less efficient since the gaps between the costs of the wonders are larger than between the improvements.
It would have been a good idea to restrict the costs of all the improvements to a few discrete values, which would make this method much less efficient.
Hope I haven't started a whole shift in tactics with this post, but the method is so awkward to use (it takes quite a while) it's going to annoy people in internet games especially if anyone uses it frequently. Of course, the 'Save/Load Queue' option is tailor-made for this, and saves you the bother of working out what to do each time around. You could get pretty quick if your computer is decent and you practice.
John
Last edited by J Bytheway on 02-08-2001 at 02:23
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02-08-2001 02:17
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