The fact about hurry production cost (a bug?)

Woebearer said:

I did some experiments on poprushing and was coming up with some very strange results.

I had results from 30, 45, and even 60! hammers per population killed. In one instance I decided to test the difference between city populations and a pop of 5 (sacing 2 population for University) was giving me 60 hammers and every other pop (including 4) gave me 90 hammers?!?

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Read this line I wrote and what others have posted:

"The total hammers generated is always remaining hammer required round up to the nearest 30 hammers. So, it is always more profitable to have the remaining hammers as just a little above a multiple of 30 so you get the extra overflow hammers. So, in the above case, it would be optimal to hurry at say when there is 121-134 hammers remaining in order to get 150 hammers out of one pop."

To elaborate, if one pop is suppose to give you 45 hammers. But you have only 20 hammers left to complete the production, then you will get only 30 hammers. But on the other hand if you have 32 hammers left to complete the production, then you will actually get 60 hammers. The actual hammer gain is always round up to the nearest 30 hammers base on the remaining hammers to complete the production.

The manner in which it is done seems like it should be changed to one of these two methods

Method 1: (most similar to current model)

Remaining cost (in hammers) x Modifiers (Wonders, Just stared, Kremlin, special bonuses, etc.)= Modified Cost

Population units Sacrificed=[Modified Cost/(Population value for speed level*)+1] round down

*20,30,45,90

Overflow=(Population units Sacrificed) x (Population value for speed level*)-Modified Cost

which would preserve the 'bonus effects' and keep it similar to cash rushing. BUT also maintain a constant 'value' for population units.

Method 2:
Would be make Slavery like Chop rushing, hitting the 'Slavery Rush' button would ALWAYS eliminate exactly say 1/10 of the city's population (rounding up), adding about 4, 6, 9 or 18 turns of unhappiness and 20, 30, 45, or 90 to base production for each population eliminated.

The 'just started' and Wonder effects would be eliminated, but if you could only sacrifice one population per turn, they wouldn't be necessary. (because a large project or one that was just started wouldn't be possible to 1 turn rush, and the unhappiness would be higher as well, since it would be per pop sacrificed, not per rush.)

The Kremlin also wouldn't have an effect then, unless it added some additional bonus (perhaps it could give make whipping unhappiness fade faster, or allow more production from each whip).

I personally favor this method since it makes population rushing more like chop rushing, which seems like a more reasonable model.

predacon said:

1> The base hurry coefficient is determined by the sum of all "+xx% production" factors

EXCEPT forges, factories, power and ironworks.

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Hey, I just noticed that, in 1.52, the Forge does reduce the cost for gold rushing. This seems like a bug....

DaviddesJ said:

Hey, I just noticed that, in 1.52, the Forge does reduce the cost for gold rushing. This seems like a bug....

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Of the production-enhancing buildings is it only the forge that does it? If not, why does it seem like a bug?

PieceOfMind said:

Of the production-enhancing buildings is it only the forge that does it? If not, why does it seem like a bug?

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Just because it seems wrong to let players produce gold with their cottages, get a gold bonus for their financial buildings, then convert the gold into production, and get a second bonus for their production buildings. This makes towns with Universal Suffrage way more powerful for production than doing actual production. Even without the Kremlin.

Maybe it's not a "bug", just a bad design decision.

I see your point DaviddesJ. I just always assumed it would be unfair to do the opposite - that is negate all bonsues when pop/gold rushing. If the production bonuses were not used when rushing, esp. pop rushing, I would see little point in ever doing it. I don't know what to think.

I figure you think that for a wealthy nation gold rushing is overpowered when these produciton modifiers are included? I could understand then and would probably agree that gold rushing in particular should not have these produciton modifiers, but the modifiers should be applied for pop rushing. What do you think?

PieceOfMind said:

If the production bonuses were not used when rushing, esp. pop rushing, I would see little point in ever doing it.

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I think most people use Slavery early in the game, when they wouldn't have Forges anyway, much less Factories and Power Plants. It's certainly useful in those early stages, and the question of whether to apply the multipliers is irrelevant, because you don't have any.

I figure you think that for a wealthy nation gold rushing is overpowered when these produciton modifiers are included? I could understand then and would probably agree that gold rushing in particular should not have these produciton modifiers, but the modifiers should be applied for pop rushing. What do you think?

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I don't care much either way about pop rushing. But using the multipliers for gold rushing is too strong. A town will produce 7 commerce/turn, and 1 hammer/turn. With Grocer, Market, and Bank, that's 14 gold/turn. Converting 14 gold/turn to hammers at 3:1 gives 4.7 hammers/turn, plus the 1 hammer/turn from the town itself, makes 5.7 hammers/turn. That's way more production output from a town tile than you can normally get from any production improvement.

And, if you have Kremlin, then you get the effect of 10.4 hammers/turn per tile! In the middle to late game, why build anything the normal way, at all?

You also don't need to build Forges, Factories, and Power Plants everywhere. You can just build them in selected cities, pump out gold from all of your cities, and channel it into production in the selected few that have the production bonuses.

PieceOfMind said:

If the production bonuses were not used when rushing, esp. pop rushing, I would see little point in ever doing it.

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I should have been clearer. I use slave rushing a lot in the early game too. But in a city that has significant production multipliers (probably at least 50% eg. forge and Organised Religion) it would seem pointless to pop rush if the production multipliers were not used. Of course in cities without any production modifiers it is still useful to use pop rushing.

DaviddesJ said:

And, if you have Kremlin, then you get the effect of 10.4 hammers/turn per tile! In the middle to late game, why build anything the normal way, at all?

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I agree. Production multipliers affecting gold rushes seems unbalanced when you put it that way esp. with the Kremlin.
It sounds like a good basis for a strategy in the mid to late game - a way to reward the player who builds up wealth and establishes a high gold income. Especially since factories are so expensive it would be nice to only have to build factories in a few cities. Maybe this is considered exploitive though.

DaviddesJ said:

I don't care much either way about pop rushing. But using the multipliers for gold rushing is too strong. A town will produce 7 commerce/turn, and 1 hammer/turn. With Grocer, Market, and Bank, that's 14 gold/turn. Converting 14 gold/turn to hammers at 3:1 gives 4.7 hammers/turn, plus the 1 hammer/turn from the town itself, makes 5.7 hammers/turn. That's way more production output from a town tile than you can normally get from any production improvement.

And, if you have Kremlin, then you get the effect of 10.4 hammers/turn per tile! In the middle to late game, why build anything the normal way, at all?

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Since you corrected my figure earlier, so I am correcting yours too. The Kremlin does not work on that one production which is not bought. So, the hammers your get should be 4.7*2 + 1 = 9.4 rather than 5.7*2 = 10.4 hammers.

Qitai said:

Since you corrected my figure earlier, so I am correcting yours too. The Kremlin does not work on that one production which is not bought. So, the hammers your get should be 4.7*2 + 1 = 9.4 rather than 5.7*2 = 10.4 hammers.

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Nope, 4.7*2 + 1 = 10.4.

DaviddesJ said:

Nope, 4.7*2 + 1 = 10.4.

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opps again

I was reading over this thread and thought I’d do some experimenting myself. I wound up deriving the formulas for all of the values involved in rushing production. Most of these have been hinted at in other posts, but I thought I'd post my findings. Feel free to try any of these formulas out in-game and let me know if they produce an incorrect result. I'd like to fix them if that's the case.

First I’ll explain my variable names:

H – Total hammers remaining in production
S – Game speed multipler – 0.66... = quick, 1.0 = normal, 1.5 = epic, 3.0 = marathon

Bonuses:
B – Sum of all production bonuses (eg. 0.5 if you have a forge and Organized Religion is applicable)
K – Kremlin Modifier – 0.5 for Kremlin, 1.0 otherwise

Penalties:
W – The wonder modifier – 2.0 for a world wonder, 1.5 for national wonder, 1.0 for everything else
Z – Zero Hammers modifier – 1.5 if this is the first turn of production

Now, the formula for the modified cost of whatever it is you’re rushing ([…] denotes the “floor” operation)

C = [ H / ( 1+B) * K * W * Z ]

Basically, you just multiply everything together, divide by 1+B, and then take the floor.

Now, if you want to convert that cost into a population or gold quantity you simply use one of the two simple formulas below.

Pop Rush:
P = [ C / ( 30 * S) + 1 ]

Gold Rush:
G = 3 * C

Also, a formula for the number of hammers of overflow you can expect (‘%’ represent the modulo operation)

O = ( 30 – (H % 30) ) % 30

And then, if you really want to know your total output per population point, you need to use one last formula (can’t really reduce it any more because of all the flooring and modulos that took place):

PP = (H + O) / P

The ramifications of all of this have already been hinted at in this thread and others. Namely:

• You don’t want to rush when the number of hammers remaining is a multiple of 30.

• There are additional jump points on other games speeds where your hammers per pop point can change considerably (on epic, no bonuses, 44 hammers remaining requires 1 pop and nets 60 hammers, 45 hammers remaining requires 2 pop and nets the same 60 hammers. That’s a whole second pop point resulting in no additional hammers.)

• You can significantly reduce the rush cost (in population or gold) through city buildings and the Kremlin.

• The Kremlin is the equivalent of a forge, factory, and power in every city (for rushing purposes).

• With the Kremlin and simply another 50% city bonus (or just a total city bonus of 200%), you can buy 1 hammer for 1 gold.

• Others, but it’s late and my mind is cloudy… I want to say something along the lines of “In the late-middle-thru-end game, hammers might be next to useless, or, at best, very inefficient”. But, then again, most of my games are over by the time I get grenadiers and cavalry

So basically with US+Free Speech, Towns are better than...anything. (3 commerce for a tile is equal to 1 hammer for a tile even before Banks, etc.)
and a US,FS Town gives 1 hammer+7 commerce=3 1/3 hammers equivalent

I guess the exception would be Projects (of course) Wonders without Kremlin and/or Banks

I guess too it's a good reason to never build more than a few production cities and make almost every other city a commerce city.
In the late game, wealth is power.

Were it not for gold magnifying structures such as banks, markets, and so forth, food would actually be the most numerically efficient means of production, through pop-rushing (just barely).

For argument's sake, let's look at a size 8 city that happens to have the Kremlin, the Heroic Epic, and the Globe Theater to remove the issue of unhappiness (which is the real stumbling block for pop-rushing).

If we take the absolute best production improvements imaginable, let's say we get 4 hammers from each citizen and they exactly cover their food cost. That's 32 hammers. Multiply that by the Heroic Epic and you're looking at 64 hammers of total production when building military units.

Now, let's say we cottage the place up. We're looking at 1 hammer and somewhere around 8 commerce per tile, best case (averaging out financial bonuses, river bonuses, etc). The hammers get multiplied by the heroic epic, so that's 16. The gold multiplier for this city, with the Kremlin effect and everything is .75 (3 / 2 for kremlin / 2 for heroic epic), so 8 commerce nets (8 / .75 = ) 10.67 hammers. This makes for a grand total of (8 * 10.67 = ) 85.33 hammers from commerce. Add that to the traditional hammers and we get 101.33 total production out of the commerce city.

Now for the food city, we'll assume biology, so you're netting 2 food per tile. We're at 8 population, and we'll assume a granary and epic speed, so we need 27 food to grow a point of population. The population hammer multiplier for this city is 4 (2 for kremlin * 2 for heroic epic) so each citizen is going to be worth around (45 * 4 = ) 180 when sacrificed. The value in hammers of each point of food is (180 / 27 = ) 6.67. We're gathering a total of 16 extra food resulting in a grand total of 106.67 production; slightly more than our commerce city (which also took many a turn to grow its cottages).

This all becomes a fairly moot point, though, when you start factoring in commerce improving buildings. With only a bank, we multiply the commerce we were getting by 1.5. Re-running the numbers, our commerce city now produces the equivalent of (8 * 1.5 / .75 * 8 + 16 = ) 144 production. That's more than twice as much as the "production" city (which had the most optimistic improvements of the three). Plus there's no unhappiness downside that needs to be ameliorated. All it takes is the proper choice of civics and planning well ahead of time.

With every multiplier imaginable (banks, kremlin, factories, power, ironworks, etc...) 1 hammer can be turned into 4 (+300% bonus) hammers toward production. 1 commerce can be turned into a little over 5 hammers (1/3 base GpH * 2 for kremlin * 4 for production bonus * 2 for commerce bonus) toward production. Even if we use a more realistic production bonus of 100%, we're still looking at 2 from hammers and 2.67 from commerce. If we scale the commerce bonus in the city to +50% then both 1 commerce or 1 hammer is roughly equal to 4 production points. But, which do you typically find is easier to generate, 1 commerce or 1 hammer?

Without the Kremlin, the numbers look more reasonable (2 commerce ~= 1 hammer). But that's still a little excessive as mines (or workshops) produce 3 hammers, where towns produce 1 hammer as well as ~8 commerce. As such, I think two things probably should happen. The Kremlin should be modified some (maybe divide total cost by 1.5 instead) and generic production multiplying structures should not apply to rush cost (maybe something like organized religion or access to a special resource still would apply). That should make hammers more valuable in the late-game.

malekithe said:

Were it not for gold magnifying structures such as banks, markets, and so forth, food would actually be the most numerically efficient means of production, through pop-rushing (just barely).

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Not really. Because you're also not taking into account that you can produce gold in many cities, and use it to rush in a few (which have the appropriate production improvements). While you can only use food to pop rush in the same city with the food production.

As such, I think two things probably should happen. The Kremlin should be modified some (maybe divide total cost by 1.5 instead) and generic production multiplying structures should not apply to rush cost (maybe something like organized religion or access to a special resource still would apply). That should make hammers more valuable in the late-game.

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I entirely agree on both points. I am not optimistic, though.

DaviddesJ said:

But using the multipliers for gold rushing is too strong. A town will produce 7 commerce/turn, and 1 hammer/turn. With Grocer, Market, and Bank, that's 14 gold/turn. Converting 14 gold/turn to hammers at 3:1 gives 4.7 hammers/turn, plus the 1 hammer/turn from the town itself, makes 5.7 hammers/turn. That's way more production output from a town tile than you can normally get from any production improvement.

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For that matter, a Mine+RR+Forge+Factory+Power (or Workshop w/StProp) only produces 6 hammers/turn (above the tile base production), which is not much more than the Town produces without any hammer multipliers. Add a Forge to the Town city (which you might potentially want for happiness anyway), applying it only to the Town's actual hammer, and the Town produces 5.95 hammers/turn, while the Mine still produces 6.

So applying the multipliers to gold rushing (and, for that matter, the Kremlin) isn't even the problem - it just makes a bad situation even worse. Even without those cash-rushing is almost as efficient as hammer-building. And when you consider the ability of cash-rushing to be converted into research or culture, and moved freely around your empire, it's clearly superior.

Which leads me to the conclusion that even modifying the Kremlin and removing modifiers from cash-rushing won't do the job. Towns+US would still be the most efficient way to build things. Balancing this will require something on the order of removing modifiers from cash-rushing AND doubling the cost to cash-rush. Unless you consider the development time of towns enough to compensate, anyway.

Democracy cottage spam is a very effective production strategy in real life, so it makes sense that it's the dominant strategy in Civ4.

Balancing gameplay should trump realism.

I must agree with the last few posters that gold rushing is far overpowered. It should be a less efficient method of building even with the Kremlin wonder because it so much more flexible. You can rush the production in any spot in your empire at will. This allows you to rush the culture production of a city or the crucial military unit that is needed or rush that happiness building that is needed to keep the whole population working in a city. It even allows you to win Great Wonder races. If it is more efficient than the normal way of building stuff by using hammers, then hammers become obsolete and a whole section of the game becomes obsolete.

It can be very easily fixed by making the costs of rushing a lot higher than they are now, but I would like to see it fixed in the original game. Of course, I will mod this in my own game, but I would still like to see it fixed in a patch. It can't be true that the only efficient way to build stuff is by gold rushing. That would obsolete hammer production and all the civics in the government section that don't allow gold rushing in the late game. It also shows that all the civics that improve cottage output are far more interesting than the other ones. That's very bad for a game that tries to have multiple strategies to win the game.

Also, since upgrading units costs 3 times the difference in shield cost + 25, it means that it is often a lot more efficient to rush build a new unit than upgrade an old unit. The production bonuses from buildings don't effect upgrading costs like they effect the costs of rushing. Something that seems unbalanced to me too.

To balance the upgrading costs, each shield would have to cost something like 10 gold and the bonus from the Kremlin should only be 25%.
(Calculation: A town produces 7 gold which is enhanced to 14 gold by the grocer, bank and marketplace buildings. 14 gold is equal to 1.4 shields. Plus the 1 shield from a town equal 2.4 shields. Thats less than the production from a workshop used under State property or a mine or a lumbermill. With the Kremlin improvement the 'production' value of the town becomes 1.4 *1.25 + 1 = 2.75. Still a little less than the production from a mine, lumbermill or workshop under state property.)

The chance that someone from Firaxis will look through this thread and see the unbalance is actually pretty small. It would be a lot better if the lack of balance between hammer production and gold rushing were reported in the bug report forum (sub forum of the general discussion forum). If the problems were completely explained in a clear way then the chances that someone from Firaxis would pick it up would be much better. Note that the guys from Firaxis haven't read this whole thread, so it should be explained in detail in a bug report.


DavidedJ, you were the first to post this imbalance in this thread. Are you willing to post a bug report about this?