Hammer Overflow

I seem unable to figure this out, sorry, any help is appreciated.
Basically the question revolves around bonus hammers for specific unit or building production under certain circumstances and how the overflow is treated.

1. I notice that if I produce wealth or science (and presumably culture, too), any overflow I may have had from previous turns seems to be discounted. Is this correct? Or merely an oversimplification?

For simplicity's sake, let's say I have a city X producing 100 hammers after boni from forges, factories, and power.


2. In this city, I am currently producing, say, a Mech Infantry, which costs 200 hammers. Without overflow to begin with, I would finish producing this unit in 2 turns and have no overflow afterwards. If I had 10 hammer overflow from the previous turn, the MI would still take 2 turns to make, but would give me 10 hammer overflow I can use the next turn towards producing the building, unit, or project of my choice -- no matter what I build next turn, I would already have 10/xxx hammers in the pot. With the exception of culture, science or wealth (see question 1, above). Am I correct?

3. But what if this city also had a Military Academy in it -- which gives a 50% bonus for units.
Now I forget if this bonus is applied to base hammers or to total hammers. Maybe someone can fill me in. But I think I set up the example to work ok in either case.
In this case, the unit would also be done in 2 turns, but I would have more than 10 hammers left afterwards.
Here is my question, which is half of the main question of this thread:
Are those extra hammers, gained at least in part by virtue of me building a unit with a military academy, applicable in the same way as #2 above (i.e. to any unit or building)? Or do the "bonus for military academy"-hammers ONLY overflow if I build a military unit in a subsequent turn?

4. I think this question is similar, differing only in the fact that more bonus hammers can be got under other circumstances, this time global ones, not city-based.
Let's say I have a city Y which produces 80 hammers after boni for forges etc. I am building a temple, with no overflow. I hope for the sake of example that temples cost 80 hammers. Normally, I would finish the temple in 1 turn and have no overflow.
But let's say I am in Organized Religion and my State Religion is in City Y. Here, I get a 25% bonus for building that building (ah I love English). Now I will have some hammer overflow, since I will be producing more than 80 hammers that turn (I just dont know if it will be 80 + 25% = 100 hammers or the base hammer number + 25%). In any case, it will be 80 + x.
My question: Will the extra hammers, which only overflow because I was in Organized Religion,
a. be applicable next turn no matter what I build? (I mean: even if I do not build a building, but also, say, a unit?)
b. be applicable next turn no matter what I build if next turn I switch from Organized Religion to a different civic (for simplicity's sake, assume I have Christo Redemptor)?

In other words, the gist of my much too wordy thread, for which I apologize in advance, is this: Are hammer boni gleaned by (a) specific buildings which give boni only for specific types of productions or (b) civics which give boni only for specific types of productions "real" hammers or only useful for if they do not overflow and/or overflow for a similar type of production?

Thank you

Vale wrote an excellent artilcle about this found in the war academy here

Other than that, I'm not much help.

Overflow is basically reduced back to "base hammers," then added in with your natural base hammers for the next turn, and put back through any multipliers along with the natural base hammers. To illustrate, I'll tweak your MI example. You're producing 120 hpt after a total 100% bonus from forge, factory and power (60 natural base hammers). In two turns, you'll produce 240 hammers, giving you a 40 hammer gross overflow. This will be divided by 2 (1+100%), and on turn 3, you'll have 20 hammers in the pot. Those 20 will be added to turn 3's natural production, giving you 80 base hammers for the turn, which then get multiplied to give you 160 hammers that turn. You're correct that those 160 hammers will be applied to whatever you decide to build next turn (not sure how it works for culture/wealth/research). Say you build a 100-hammer executive next, the 60-hammer gross overflow would be reduced by the modifiers and added to your base hammers again, just like before.

The overflow is not stored in the "pot," but goes to the next turn's production. Similarly, the military academy's effect in #3 will be to increase the modifier that the gross overflow is divided by to get back to base overflow. In other words, it will just take back the hammers it gave that didn't go into the unit. The MA bonus is applied to base hammers, just like forges, etc. So if you build another unit, it will give its bonus back to those overflow hammers when they get "put through the modifier mill" on the next turn. To use the MI example I used above, your 60 base hammers become 150 hpt with the addition of a MA. You wind up with 100 gross overflow, which gets reduced to 40 (100/(1+150%)), then added to the 60 hammers produced on turn 3. For that turn, you have 100 base hammers. If you build a building, the modifiers will make that turn's production 200 hammers. If you build another unit, you'll gain 250 hammers that turn.

The same principle should apply to the OR bonus, though I haven't tested it. The OR bonus will be removed from your temple overflow, and you'll wind up with 16 (20/(1+25%)) hammers of overflow added as base hammers the next turn. These hammers are "clean," in that they don't have the OR bonus built into them (note that a proportional amount of base and bonus hammers go into the build, so even though the presence of OR is what allows the overflow, the 16 hammers aren't tainted by the OR bonus, so to speak). Since those 16 are base hammers, they are applicable to whatever you build next, even if you switch out of OR.

I may have restated what's in the article (can't read it at the office, but can read the forums... go figure), and may not have answered your question well, but hope this is helpful. You can figure out a lot by looking at the production breakdown in the city screen (hover over the hammer icon at the left of the production bar).

By the way, I've never really tested overflow with culture/wealth/research, but there's no reason it shouldn't behave the same way, subject to the rules natrual base hammers are subject to with those builds.

Solomwi's answer is correct, and the consequence is that there is no selective advantage to be gained by overflowing into or out of an advantaged build (e.g. Walls with Stone, Libraries when Creative, etc). A few additional points: overflow cannot be greater than the cost of the thing you've just finished -- if you put 200 hammers into a warrior, you'll only get 15 overflow hammers (and I believe the rest are converted into gold, though now I'm not sure how bonuses e.g. forge or military academy affect that conversion). And, while building Wealth, Culture, etc, any overflow you started with is deferred but not lost. It will be applied to your first non-Wealth/Culture/Gold build. This is sometimes useful if you have a lot of overflow that you'd like to put into a Wonder, but the requisite technology is a turn or two away. Build Wealth in the meantime, and you can save that overflow until you're ready to use it. The same thing happens if you chop forests during Wealth/etc.

Thank you very much. Those are indeed excellent replies, and to be quite honest, I found them more illuminating than that linked article (which is poorly named and more of a short "strategy" aimed at gleaning gold from overflow in special situations). I suggest you (both) formulate an article and post it there, since this thread will probably not get stickied anywhere, but I found that very useful.

I particularly liked the metaphor of "clean" hammers, solomwi, and this is my follow-up question, induced by lilnev's judgement that there is "no selective advantage" to overflowing from an advantaged build:

If the hammer overflow I obtain because of an advantaged build is "clean" and "untainted", because they get translated into "base hammers", then why do you say that there is no selective advantage to doing that? Maybe it's the word "selective" I do not really understand. Could you clear me up?

Thank you very much

onomastikon said:

Thank you very much. Those are indeed excellent replies, and to be quite honest, I found them more illuminating than that linked article (which is poorly named and more of a short "strategy" aimed at gleaning gold from overflow in special situations). I suggest you (both) formulate an article and post it there, since this thread will probably not get stickied anywhere, but I found that very useful.

I particularly liked the metaphor of "clean" hammers, solomwi, and this is my follow-up question, induced by lilnev's judgement that there is "no selective advantage" to overflowing from an advantaged build:

If the hammer overflow I obtain because of an advantaged build is "clean" and "untainted", because they get translated into "base hammers", then why do you say that there is no selective advantage to doing that? Maybe it's the word "selective" I do not really understand. Could you clear me up?

Thank you very much

Click to expand...

What lilnev means is that the clean overflow means that you get the same boost from overflow no matter what you build next. In other words, there's no advantage to be gained by selecting a different build that would result in bonus hammers. Of course, the new build may result in the clean overflow hammers being put through another multiplier, but no matter what you build, the overflow from the last build is going to contribute a given number of base hammers, which doesn't change based on the build. Good idea on the article.

lilnev said:

And, while building Wealth, Culture, etc, any overflow you started with is deferred but not lost. It will be applied to your first non-Wealth/Culture/Gold build. This is sometimes useful if you have a lot of overflow that you'd like to put into a Wonder, but the requisite technology is a turn or two away. Build Wealth in the meantime, and you can save that overflow until you're ready to use it. The same thing happens if you chop forests during Wealth/etc.

Click to expand...

That is very useful info that I did not realize, and could often have made use of. Thanks!!!

lilnev said:

A few additional points: overflow cannot be greater than the cost of the thing you've just finished -- if you put 200 hammers into a warrior, you'll only get 15 overflow hammers (and I believe the rest are converted into gold, though now I'm not sure how bonuses e.g. forge or military academy affect that conversion).

Click to expand...

Now THIS is worth knowing! So now say you make enough hammers that two things with different costs would each be done in 1 turn, and you have no preference for which of the two are made. It's worth considering how much overflow you would lose out on when choosing the cheaper build over the more expensive one. If the cheaper build is less than half of your hammers for that turn (ignoring modifiers, to make the example less confusing), then the cheaper build is losing you overflow that could go well into something else the turn after!

The sort of overflow micro that killed me in Civ3 isn't QUITE dead, in that case....

IIRC there is a funny exploit/overflow-trick for the true µ-manager. This involves whipping population which gives directly applied to the current item in the building queue. Here the multipliers affect the at the very moment when you press the button (in contrast to the "volatile" from chopping where the multipliers need to be present at the end of the turn). So whipping for a great amount of overflow and getting rid of the multipliers afterwards gives you much more "clean" overflow for the next item.

Example:

• Build a Castle in your Bureaucracy Capital (+50%) with Stone (+100%) and a Forge (+25%) under Organized Religion (+25%) until one turn of completion, so that it has something like 99/100 .
• Whip away one pop (30 base at normal speed), the +200% multipliers will give you 189/100 in your Castle.
• Trade your Stone away (or self-pillage) and switch out of Bureaucracy and Organized Religion (best with spiritual leader).
• Hope for a Hurricane to destroy your Forge ().

After <End Turn> the overflow gets calculated back to clean but only the +25% from the Forge will reduce it from 90 back to 83 (not sure how rounding works here). So the next turn you should have a nice amount of clean overflow which you can "park" (decay-free!) while building wealth/research until you switch back to Bur+OR, get your Stone back and build Angkor Wat so your one pop goes from 30 --> 83 overflow --> 249 !

Can't test myself if it still works as I'm away from Civ so no guarantee!

(I think that article which was mentioned above featured something like DanF's trick here.)

But to wrap up the points made above, can I ask this one final question on the term "clean"?
Am I understanding you correctly, lilnev and solomwi, that (at least in the examples given above), in the shortest possible words, you are saying "yes" to my question 4?
In other words: The (additional, bonus) hammers I get from producing a building in organized religion (and, IIUC, from producing a unit with an academy) will be "clean" in the overflow -- merely under a different modifier (if applicable)?

Thank you.

onomastikon said:

(I think that article which was mentioned above featured something like DanF's trick here.)

Click to expand...

Well Vale's great article demonstrates how to exploit the conversion of base hammers (chopped forests, whipped population) into gold using high multipliers, because the gold does not get "clean" during the overflow downscaling calculation at the end of the turn.
The above trick demonstrates how to exploit the conversion of whipped population (=^=food) into clean overflow hammers using high multipliers by removing those multipliers after the whipping so that they cannot influence the overflow downscaling calculation at the end of the turn.

Yes to #4, but you will have x/1.25 hammers available, rather than x.

Overflow is a crazy thing in Civilization. Mastering it will grant you numerous advantages. I managed to build the Great Library in one turn on a Marathon game the turn I discovered Literature with a whip on a Temple (Spiritual) with one turn left and some post-Maths chopping. I think I had 688 Hammers/turn after multipliers. I was Gandhi, so no +50% Industrial bonus.

I did have about 1700 hammers to put into Hagia Sophia, but I discounted that decision. The overflow would have been gargantuan, but I would rather have the Great Library than that wonder. I do not appear to possess screenshots though, so it will remain an anecdote. Very nifty little trick, though, because building Wealth/Research/Culture keeps your universal hammers in stasis. I guess this would answer your first question.

BTS 3.17 with Solver's patch, by the way.

Jerrymander said:

Overflow is a crazy thing in Civilization. Mastering it will grant you numerous advantages. I managed to build the Great Library in one turn on a Marathon game the turn I discovered Literature with a whip on a Temple (Spiritual) with one turn left and some post-Maths chopping. I think I had 688 Hammers/turn after multipliers. I was Gandhi, so no +50% Industrial bonus.
...

BTS 3.17 with Solver's patch, by the way.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure how this is done. It seems that from what I've read elsewhere here that the maximum number of hammers saved for the next build can't be greater than the cost of the previous build (Temple in this case is 80).

I've always wondered this but could never have put the question together as completely as the OP. Thanks for asking, and thanks for the answers.

Hello, this is a slightly different question then the original one that was asked.

It is simply this, if I have enough hammers to produce a given unit/building/etc. in x number of turns, why is it that at certain times in the game (seems random to me) that it says the item being produced will take y* turns to produce.

y = some number of turns more than x.

My current situation is this, one of my cities is producing a total of 46 hammers and I wish to produce either a Knight or Treb to assist in my war effort.** The Knight takes 90 hammers and the Treb takes 80 hammers. The problem is that it says I can complete the Knight or the Treb in 3 turns. That doesn't make sense to me. Now, I can under stand that I might be missing something basic about the game so it is possible that I might not really have 46 prod units for use, but I don't understand how at the very least I can't make and 80 hammer unit in 2 turns if I am producing 92 hammers a turn. Please, any info clarification would help.

** Oh and I have another question about the war I am in too. I was at like a +9 favor with a foreign power on the same continent with the only -1 being the fact that our borders were "sparking tension." So, why did the comp up and declare war on me!?

Is this a glitch or is it just part of the leader/civ traits I am not grasping?

The setting were normal, ie no random leader personalities and the leader was Kublai Khan of the Mongols.

Thanks again,

Lharrs

Re Production: Hammer overflow is displayed in the current production. So if you have regular production of 30 and overflow of 16 from the previous build, you'd build knights or catapults in 3 turns.

*

Re Diplomacy: AIs have a percentage chance depending on your diplomatic standings to declare war on you IF the power ratio doesn't favour you too much.

Some AIs will not declare war on you if pleased; for some independent war declarations and being bribed by another AI have different thresholds.
for example, Catherine will not declare war on you under her own initiative when on Friendly but might accept an offer to declare war on you from other civs she is pleased with. To be totally safe, you need to be Friendly with her AND nobody else can be Pleased or better.

Kublai Khan can declare war and accept invitations to declare war on civs he is Pleased with; to be safe from him you need to get him to Friendly or have enough of an army to scare him off.

It's all about the overflow from previous production, which gives you more hammers in the first turn. So, assuming you have a Forge, with a base production of 25 and 12 overflow your first turn will yield (25+12) +25% = 46.25 hammers, which gets rounded to the 46 you mention. This leaves another 34 for the treb or 44 for the knight, but in the second turn you'll get just the base 25 hammers and will need another turn to finish either unit. There will be overflow in either case. Only if your base production is from 34 to 43 would you get the treb in 2 turns or the knight in 3.
Hold the mouse pointer over the "46" to see how that is attained.

Lharrs said:

Hello, this is a slightly different question then the original one that was asked.

It is simply this, if I have enough hammers to produce a given unit/building/etc. in x number of turns, why is it that at certain times in the game (seems random to me) that it says the item being produced will take y* turns to produce.

y = some number of turns more than x.

My current situation is this, one of my cities is producing a total of 46 hammers and I wish to produce either a Knight or Treb to assist in my war effort.** The Knight takes 90 hammers and the Treb takes 80 hammers. The problem is that it says I can complete the Knight or the Treb in 3 turns. That doesn't make sense to me. Now, I can under stand that I might be missing something basic about the game so it is possible that I might not really have 46 prod units for use, but I don't understand how at the very least I can't make and 80 hammer unit in 2 turns if I am producing 92 hammers a turn. Please, any info clarification would help.

** Oh and I have another question about the war I am in too. I was at like a +9 favor with a foreign power on the same continent with the only -1 being the fact that our borders were "sparking tension." So, why did the comp up and declare war on me!?

Is this a glitch or is it just part of the leader/civ traits I am not grasping?

The setting were normal, ie no random leader personalities and the leader was Kublai Khan of the Mongols.

Thanks again,

Lharrs

Click to expand...

This happens often, it's simply that when calculating number of build turns, the city manager doesn't take into account overflow hammers until the next turn when they've actually been overflowed. You should notice that the next turn when you look at the time left to finish the unit, it will say 1 turn, instead of 2.

Does this mean that I could chop 4 post-mathS forests with my city on wealth whilst researchin CoL and use 80 'stored' hammers to build a courthouse in 1 turn as soon as I have gained the tech

(By the way, I'm aware the last comment was 2 years ago!!!! LOL)

Lewis