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solo
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Lowell, MA USA
Jan 2001 time: 05:28
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War4ever,
Sorry in the delay responding to your questions, as I was away for the holidays. It seems SCG has provided good answers to them anyways, but I do have a few more comments:
1) A city's wildcards almost always appear, since they have to be placed in the middle position of their respective lists whenever they do not appear on either list due to their natural supply and demand. The only exception is when a wildcard happens to have the right supply or demand quotient to make it appear in the middle position of the other wildcard's list. Then if the other wildcard is expressed as a wildcard, it will cover up the first one. This is kind of subtle, and it might to be clearer to explain with an example:
Suppose a city has a supply wildcard of coal and a demand wildcard of gems. First supply and demand quotients are calculated for all commodities and the three highest on the supply and demand side are put on their lists. Suppose they are as follows for this city:
Supply Hides, Beads, Silver
Demand Wine, Coal, Copper
In this case the natural demand for coal (which is also the supply wildcard), was high enough to put it on the demand list, but wildcards are applied last to get the final list seen by players in the game. Since coal does appear already, it will not function as a wildcard, so the supply list is not changed. However, gems does not appear on either list, so it must be used in its function as the demand wildcard, and ends up covering coal in the middle position of the demand list. The final lists are:
Supply Hides, Beads, Silver
Demand Wine, Gems, Copper
From this example you can see that the chances of a wildcard not appearing somewhere on its city's lists are very slim.
2) Much of the time the wildcarding of a commodity is just about the only way to get it to appear on supply or demand lists, so I find it desirable to have them as part of the game, although sometimes they may cover up the supply or demand of a commodity I would prefer to trade. In these cases, there is usually something that can be done to manipulate the position of non-wildcard commodities in order to get them to appear from underneath the wildcard. City growth and terraforming come to mind, or the various techniques used to implement or disable the dye-copper bug.
3) The most useful feature about wildcards is that since they are based on map coordinates, you get to pick the ones you want for the cities that you found. This is the best way for establishing supply for a commodity rarely in supply and demand for another that is not often in demand. There is also a very recognizable pattern for each kind of wildcard, so that it's usually only necessary to calculate the set of wildcards for one location, since the wildcards for nearby tiles can be determined by their relative position. When I have a chance, I plan to post copies of the wildcard "maps" I use to locate desirable city sites.
I suppose one way to limit the use of wildcards in a city is to pick a site having the same commodity as the supply and demand wildcard. This will usually result in a supply list untainted by the city's wildcards, since demand takes precedence over supply when the deciding where to put the wildcard.
That's about it for now on wildcards.
I also have an answer to the question on commodity bonus multipliers, which are:
2 for hides, salt, wool, beads, copper, dye
5/2 for cloth, coal, wine, silver
3 for silk, spice, gems, gold
7/2 for oil
4 or uranium
Last edited by solo on 28-05-2003 at 00:11
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solo
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Lowell, MA USA
Jan 2001 time: 05:28
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Rah,
Your welcome. I noticed you are moderating RoN. I've bought a copy and recommend it. It looks to be especially well suited to MPers such as yourself.
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