No Event (Building) Challenge

[xivarmy]

So I've been thinking this through for a bit since GE5 came out, and I'm going to start it up soon.

Core Restriction: No playing events.
Core Goal: Progress the city (eventually to space ages if I don't lose interest first) using only always-on features, particularly taking advantage of GE to the extent it's possible.

---

Motivation:

I personally feel that GE5 is best designed for a new city - that starting from the lower boosts in iron age can more organically allow you to tackle it using "natural" means with a variety of strategies and incrementally improve as you progress through the ages (as opposed to *boom* 300% boosted first fight that you have to use your stats that until now have been nigh-useless!).

While I do complete GE5 every week on two worlds currently, one is only by negotiation, and will remain as such for the foreseeable future. And the other is using advanced troops to not care about the boosts needed to fight it.

I have some interest in a world that would be motivated to fight what I can of it, but that's at odds with other objectives on my existing worlds. I feel it'd be easiest to take this approach to it with a new world from the start. "No events" is intended to increase my reliance on GE to make the city progress rather than have event-play dominate progression anyways, as well as avoid being an additional time-suck when events do come along. I feel this will give me a more interesting/challenging world as well.

---

Other Restrictions I'll be placing on myself to keep in the spirit of what's motivating me:

Advanced Troops: No. I already know they're a complete solution to GE5 and have no interest in converting the challenge to "how can I get to indy or PE with advanced troops again asap? and then just sit there"

Quest Looping/More-than-fair-for-me Trading/Buying Goods with FP or Diamonds: No. Trying to avoid shenanigans to get around the good demands of GE and just-negotiate-it. But don't want to restrict the negotiation itself as the cost should keep that an interesting option to push my limits occasionally. Torn a little on quest-looping as it's usually a big part of my world-starts, but I think I'd rather not spend the time it entails anyways purely from a "fun" perspective. Will slow down how long before I can GE4 substantially probably as I won't get a strong base of BA goods in the week or two i'm there. The trade restriction will also serve as my GB-restriction - if i can trade at rates I consider fair-or-worse (read: would normally happily take the opposite trade) all the way up to build a building early, more power to me. But most likely I'll usually be waiting til I'm the age of the building.

Antique Dealer: Leaning towards only allowing myself purchase of things I can find somewhere else outside of events (i.e. buildings in daily challenge could be considered valid). Many of the event/AD exclusives seem likely to turn the city into "about the same as one of my regular cities, just got there slower and with more steps" - and I don't really want to stalk the AD anyways.

---

Things I'm not currently planning to restrict:

Settlements: 1 main prize each, and optionally slow accumulation of additional little prizes seems fine. Should not kill my motivation to GE.

Daily Challenge: Prizes are sufficiently dated to just provide additional potential flavor rather than a dominant path to progress the city.

Guild Battlegrounds: I'll only be using it lightly anyways. I won't be getting into any serious GBG guilds for quite some time even if I wanted to (i don't )

PvP Arena: Not strong enough to worry about restricting.

Diamond Use: I'll stick to light usage based on if I feel it'll improve my enjoyment of the world. Primarily some of the early diamond expansions, maybe the odd last-blueprint, possibly a little bit of a quick-start on certain settlements, and of course an extra turn if i need it to negotiate. The world should eventually be diamond-positive anyways, though I'm not going to track that too closely.

---

My initial strategy with this in mind will be:

1) Bronze Age: Get to Iron Age ASAP. Since I'm not quest-looping there's little motivation to stay in Bronze a second longer than I need to. I may allow myself a single day of autojoin-autoaiding to try and get some progress on initial GB prints.
2) Iron Age: Unlock settlements ASAP. Might primarily stick to fighting in GE for the first while, as past experience has been trading for significant amounts of bronze age goods is a non-starter in old worlds and I'm not going to have built much of a stockpile of them - but I'll do what I can and if I can get through 4 will try to fight some of 5 which starts at quite low boost levels in Iron. Use GE & Settlements to build up "some" iron age goods production/stockpile. Move to Early Middle Age once my iron age production feels sufficient for at least difficulty 4 in EMA thereby relieving myself of the previous-era-goods burden.
3) Early Middle Ages: From here on out, moving up will be motivated by some mixture of feeling ready, running out of space, or wanting some other perk from an age ahead (a GB, a new settlement, more favorable troops, whatever). Played by ear.

I'm starting this up on Noarsil, because "No Event Noarsil" sounds fun

 

[Just An Observer]

Going all GB's strikes me as an interesting challenge. When I tire of being a powergamer, this looks like an alternative.

 

[xivarmy]

Going all GB's strikes me as an interesting challenge. When I tire of being a powergamer, this looks like an alternative.

All GBs has never really caught my interest. I'm very much a function over form type of player - and wasting space on buildings I don't even want doesn't seem particularly fun to me. But to each their own

It's similar to how Tinytown has never really struck me as something I'd want to do - you're basically just taking away space to do "interesting" things and relying on the most busted stuff to keep moving forward anyways.

The parts of the game I typically like to take away from myself by adding personal restrictions are for instance the arc-fuelled GB frenzy. It's boring, repetitive, and so powerful it can overwhelm other decisions - so I like to see what I can do without it (at least for a while - still no Arc on Dilmund, but it will be coming soon I think as I've hit FE there now). Whereas challenges that limit space intentionally instead tend to lean harder into it (well I don't have much space so I best be using the most busted mechanics in what I do).

 

[qaccy]

This sounds like a better version of an idea I kick around in my head sometimes: See how far I can get/how long it takes for me to advance through the ages using only buildings from the build menu and GBs. Your version also includes permanent features like GE and settlements, which in a lot of ways makes more sense (especially the main settlement buildings), although some of the thinking behind my idea was a desire to have a city that actually looks like the age it's in, which kinda fades away over time as more and more of the city is filled with special buildings that look the same in every age.

 

[xivarmy]

This sounds like a better version of an idea I kick around in my head sometimes: See how far I can get/how long it takes for me to advance through the ages using only buildings from the build menu and GBs. Your version also includes permanent features like GE and settlements, which in a lot of ways makes more sense (especially the main settlement buildings), although some of the thinking behind my idea was a desire to have a city that actually looks like the age it's in, which kinda fades away over time as more and more of the city is filled with special buildings that look the same in every age.

I've actually kicked about doing the "only build menu" idea before as well (including sometimes without any GBs). But usually upon further reflection of what the gameplay would be it doesn't quite grab me as much as the concept does. My motivation usually being along the lines of a rebuttal to someone proclaiming the necessity of X, Y, Z where my position is "yes they're very good, but no they're not necessary".

I have started an expedition-focused city once before (Yorkton when GE4 was new) - though at that time I didn't feel any need to add restrictions to make myself expedition-focused. I just declared I was going to do GE4 every week and make my city around those buildings - and for a while I did But these days event stuff would overshadow it too quickly if I included it. You often walk out of an event with 3 or so big powerful buildings these days. But yea, there's a good chance that this too will not look that different from age to age; just expedition-themed.

I think you could fairly safely add settlements though to your concept to keep the city looking appropriate for the age. For much the same reason I included it here, that it simply will not proliferate that quickly to take over an entire city. Just give you back a bit of the power you're missing. I think the challenging point in terms of interest is coming up with a motivation to keep upgrading that regular city stuff. With GBs included you're likely to eventually find yourself in a position where you don't need too much for population, happiness, or supplies... so the buildings would almost just be decorative. Coins at least could drive things to some extent as surrogate-FP-producers.

 

[Just An Observer]

All GBs has never really caught my interest. I'm very much a function over form type of player - and wasting space on buildings I don't even want doesn't seem particularly fun to me. But to each their own

It's similar to how Tinytown has never really struck me as something I'd want to do - you're basically just taking away space to do "interesting" things and relying on the most busted stuff to keep moving forward anyways.

The parts of the game I typically like to take away from myself by adding personal restrictions are for instance the arc-fuelled GB frenzy. It's boring, repetitive, and so powerful it can overwhelm other decisions - so I like to see what I can do without it (at least for a while - still no Arc on Dilmund, but it will be coming soon I think as I've hit FE there now). Whereas challenges that limit space intentionally instead tend to lean harder into it (well I don't have much space so I best be using the most busted mechanics in what I do).

I am a genuine powergamer. Going all GB is a fun thing to try out when I get tired of beating everyone silly!

Function over form until then.

 

[xivarmy]

So I was thinking through the dilemma of where to get population from since Terrace Farms are going to be my workhorse and they do need a significant amount of population.

- Regular Houses
- Tribal Squares
- Something from Daily Challenge
- Great Buildings

Daily Challenge got ruled out very quickly - nothing as good as a regular house there.

Regular Houses vs Tribal Squares are pretty much a wash - spend a lot more space on population with the tribal squares, but the goods they produce approximately makes up for it when terrace farms are the payload (not when the smaller regular goods buildings of early ages are, but I have to see how well i'll be able to trade my boosted goods for the others of an age these days).

Which brings me to great buildings:

Population​	Normal Efficiency​	Babel​	Capitol​	Habitat​	Innovation Tower​
Iron Age​	14.6​	4​	1​	1​	1​
Early Middle Age​	22.2​	6​	1​	1​	1​
High Middle Age​	31.2​	7​	1​	1​	1​
Progressive Era​	90.6​	21​	3​	1​	1​
Oceanic Future​	288.9​	104​	11​	8​	8​
Space Age Mars​	473.3​	126​	30​	16​	16​
Space Age Jupiter​	610.4​	137​	46​	25​	25​

It seems all population buildings do eventually catch up to regular houses in existing ages (even Babel (note: based on projected values partially - so if it stops accelerating it'd be somewhat higher to meet the efficiency of a house)! Though that would be one pricy babel to masquerade as a SAJM house!), as they accelerate how much pop per level with each level. So it seems likely that I'll use babel early at least (not sure if i'll keep it very far past PE when it no longer also makes particularly useful goods) - and that I'll be levelling an inno tower for sure eventually. Habitat and Capitol I will have to decide on when I get more of a sense of my longterm population needs as the only reason to level them would be for the pop.

Having noted this I wondered if my memory of happiness GBs never reaching useful amounts was skewed... But it turns out unlike population, happiness *decelerates* with additional levels... So yea, they do get dated (but a bit slower than I remember)

Happiness​	GE Deco Efficiency​	Colosseum​	Hagia Sophia​	Notre Dame​	Frauenkirche of Dresden​	Alcatraz​	Space Needle​	Atomium​	Lotus Temple​	Gaea Statue​
Iron Age​	58​	18​	9​	8​	7​	8​	9​	6​	5​	1​
Early Middle Age​	63​	21​	9​	9​	8​	9​	9​	7​	6​	1​
High Middle Age​	70​	25​	10​	10​	8​	10​	10​	7​	6​	1​
Progressive Era​	110​	63​	24​	22​	16​	21​	23​	11​	9​	4​
Oceanic Future​	278​	Never​	150​	135​	97​	131​	125​	67​	48​	14​
Space Age Mars​	532​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	175​	51​
Space Age Jupiter​	673​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	Never​	81​

Given that by the time I would've been considering level 60+ buildings I was in OF, that could explain why I just flat out ruled them out. These numbers are assuming the GE deco is polished - so demanding twice that efficiency from GBs. If you wanted to be more pessimistic and say they're not all polished it'd help some. But still don't think building a GB for happiness alone makes any sense.