Often I find myself on a continent with one or two other AIs and we share a religion so I end up blocking them and trying to expand like a madman. Lately I have been building research to currency then wealth to 100% slider as I expanded, I am just wondering if this is optimal as opposed to some other strategy I am not aware of. Can someone give me input on this?

Also endgame in my workshopped cities when they are not building spaceship parts (assuming im not going domination) I end up building wealth for slider increases, once again is this optimal?

Generally speaking it is optimal if you have built all needed buildings, don't need more troops and want more cash or research. Only representation specialists or matured cottages produce more wealth/research per tile/citizen than mines/workshops.

If you are going to do it for more than 20 turns, cottages are better.

Dave whats the math on that if you don't mind me asking?

The value of a hammer is generally 1.5 that of commerce or gold.

So you are "wasting" about .5 hammers. Meaning, those hammers you use on research could generally have been more valuable. But if you don't have any buildings or units you want to build(if a bank, grocer, etc. v would give a very low return in that city), it is decent, or if you are rushing towards a tech.

For example, rush to assembly line, because you want infantry don't want to build more riflemen (which you'd have to upgrade).

Or, rush education, so you can get universities and oxford up sooner.


Building gold with universal suffrage, to rush important buildings in production-low cities can also be a very good strategy, much more so with the Kremlin.

Building wealth/research is affected by hammer and hammer multipliers only. The only time you'd do this normally is in hammer cities when you don't have other things to build (take advantage of your multipliers elsewhere by applying that gold to other cities) or when you're desperate and it's that or strike.

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-bump

Building :gold: or :science: is inefficient mid game. Your :commerce: gets libs, academies, mons, and maybe even obs or unis (Oxford) odding it upward. :hammers: take just the forge until you get factories and power online. Likewise in terms of tiles, the :commerce: boosts come sooner - rivers at turn 0, lib (with civics) and PP for towns. For :hammers: you are looking at CoL (with civic), guilds, RP, Chemistry, steam power, railroad and communism (civics).

Now from factories to labs the multipliers flip; power, forge and factory are better than forge, uni, and obs, particularly if you can leverage 3GD. and you have plenty of nice things to increase hammerage.

The major exception here is if you have something like a B cap powering most of your :commerce: with more science multipliers than gold (i.e. lib, uni, obs, academy, oxford vs grocer/market); in that case you might be further ahead to "inefficiently" hammer out :gold: in non-cap cities so you can crank up the slider for the cap and its many multipliers.

All of this, of course, goes out the window for short term tactical considerations.

I mostly build wealth when:

a) Junk cities that don't have anything they could build in a decent timeframe that would benefit me enough to make it a good idea.

b) Cities waiting a turn or two for a tech/trade etc that will enable something I'm going to switch the build to in any case unless there are other builds that are important enough to put some hammers into right away and then queue up.

c) I'm making a push for lib or other important tech that I need to get fast lest it will be mostly useless.

you know what, if we can get currency earlier, build wealth in our cities, then IMP would be ownsome. (it's already strong though.)

Anyone bulbed currency here? how?

Sometimes I'll build wealth to make sure I reach a technology that grants a specialist/technology to the first discoverer if I have reason to believe (espionage) that somebody will beat me to it if I don't... and I value hammers at double that of research/gold/espionage.

Endgame it makes more sense, as building a building won't necessarily give you the same return before the game ends. 98% of the time a city has something better to build, though.

Bulb currency? Most likely from an early temple of artemis or great lighthouse. I did it once a long time ago when my economy was in serious trouble. A lot of civs were willing to trade gold for cheap techs like priesthood. Normally I try to get currency early and don't like to bulb that early, though.