Money Does Grow on Trees: How to Convert Forests into Lots and Lots of Gold

What if you are actually trying to get a wonder and you fail? You invest a ton of early hammers into the mids and get beaten by one turn, if fail gold is nerfed, then you are essentially screwed. I could see it for national wonders maybe, where you are not competing against anyone to get there first. But regular wonders? Sheesh
 
Don't worry your pretty little head, cbucks. No one is going to nerf fail gold. If anyone thinks they will see another official patch for this game, well quite frankly, they are smoking rocks. On the other hand, this discussion is hardly all for naught.
 
if fail gold is nerfed, then you are essentially screwed.

But all the amateurs who are touting their horns will be so happy...
 
Have you ever tried to rushbuy.... any chance?
The only thing this line of argument shows is that it's a bad idea to chop a forest to get money with this trick so that you can use the gold to rush buy in the same city. (ignoring Kremlin, of course)

If I were snarky, I would use the same (irrelevant) line of reasoning and ask you if you've ever tried building wealth before, if you've ever put a quarry on a marble tile when you didn't have a use for resource, or if you've ever worked a grassland gems tile instead of a grassland horse. (each conversion is worse than trading 1 hammer for 2.75 gold)

(of course, I am snarky, so I said it. :))

1 :hammers: to 2.75 :gold: is an extremely favorable ratio for the situation where you need to convert :hammers: to :gold:. Of course one would expect it's not so useful if you're in a situation where you need to convert :gold: into :hammers:. But surprisingly, it's only slightly inefficient -- and might actually be a good move to chop for super fail gold to rush buy in another city. (Or even in the same city if you have the Kremlin!)
 
What if you are actually trying to get a wonder and you fail? You invest a ton of early hammers into the mids and get beaten by one turn, if fail gold is nerfed, then you are essentially screwed. I could see it for national wonders maybe, where you are not competing against anyone to get there first. But regular wonders? Sheesh
Yes; that's actually the point. The supposition is that the strategy aspect of the game degenerates somewhat if failing a wonder is actually a pleasing outcome. (and that it's a poorly designed mechanic if people are building wonders specifically for the consolation prize without actually having any interest in the wonder)

There's a sliding scale on what the consolation prize can be, of course.
 
.....

Not the mechanic is poorly designed, it's just that most of the wonders are fckn useless, in fact so useless that the "consolation prize" is much more useful. I fail to see in which case the "consolation prize" for Pyramids, GLH or GreatLib is better than the wonder itself.

The only thing this line of argument shows is that it's a bad idea to chop a forest to get money with this trick so that you can use the gold to rush buy in the same city. (ignoring Kremlin, of course)

If I were snarky, I would use the same (irrelevant) line of reasoning and ask you if you've ever tried building wealth before, if you've ever put a quarry on a marble tile when you didn't have a use for resource, or if you've ever worked a grassland gems tile instead of a grassland horse. (each conversion is worse than trading 1 hammer for 2.75 gold)

(of course, I am snarky, so I said it. )

1 to 2.75 is an extremely favorable ratio for the situation where you need to convert to . Of course one would expect it's not so useful if you're in a situation where you need to convert into . But surprisingly, it's only slightly inefficient -- and might actually be a good move to chop for super fail gold to rush buy in another city. (Or even in the same city if you have the Kremlin!)

You are refering to rushbuying as if it was available by the time you are generating the most failgold. But guess what?
Think i made my point clear enough.

If you rely on failgold for the midgame, in 95% of the games you'll use it to either tech fast or to upgrade troops, not to rushbuy.

And, as it got mentioned on the other page, i'll say it again:

well now, that's a silly thing to say. When you need commerce, commerce becomes better. When you need hammers, hammers become better. It's not some sort of 3:1 ratio.

Gold - is - not - commerce. Don't mix those two up, even if you didn't meant to do so: be strict. If you went out for failgold in all of your cities and have no infrastructure, chances are high that you will still tech slower than someone who set his empire up for research and has the improvements for that.
 
That 3:1 is the most directly comparable, but since you brought it up, look at how much :commerce:, :hammers:, and/or :food: an additional settler or worker gets you. I'll bet no matter how you value the three, workers and settlers are more valuable than that gold. Same argument applies for using the forests to build units to some extent. The only exception really is: your economy will crash if you don't get the gold NOW.
 
You are refering to rushbuying as if it was available by the time you are generating the most failgold. But guess what?
I'm not sure why you're replying to me -- Obsolete's the one who tried to compare the fail-gold conversion rate to rush buying.
 
That 3:1 is the most directly comparable, but since you brought it up, look at how much :commerce:, :hammers:, and/or :food: an additional settler or worker gets you. I'll bet no matter how you value the three, workers and settlers are more valuable than that gold. Same argument applies for using the forests to build units to some extent. The only exception really is: your economy will crash if you don't get the gold NOW.

At Marathon/Huge, I NEED GOLD NOW OR I CRASH happens pretty regularly.

You can't just sit on six cities. You need 10 or more.

At those settings the amount of expansion you can do is directly related to the amount of gold you can generate. Other factors like getting blocked in, or not having enough hammers, are generally not applicable.
 
I would NOT rush-buy with gold. EVER. I would NOT trade 3 gold for 1 hammer. It's horribly inefficient.

(a) With Kremlin, it becomes an excellent deal.
(b) It's even worthwhile sometimes without Kremlin. If you don't want a wonder (where rushbuy costs more) or a project (where you can't rushbuy), mature towns are as efficient or more so than ever other (non-resource) tile in the game for production*, except State Property + Caste System workshops. SP + Caste isn't always a reasonable option late-game - Emancipation or Free Market can end up being better choices. The problem is getting the towns, because it takes a lot more to get a town then to get a workshop.

*If you have to work farms to feed your mines/workshops. If you have abundant surplus food, mines and Caste System or SP workshops become a bit stronger, and non-Caste non-SP workshops are comparable to towns.
 
I'm not sure why you're replying to me -- Obsolete's the one who tried to compare the fail-gold conversion rate to rush buying.

Erm... not exactly sure where you get that from. He compared the worthiness of gold towards hammers, not the failgold conversion rate towards rushbuying. He just brought rushbuying into the discussion to provide an practical example everyone can look up and try out for himself. And all that because MarigoldRan stated that the "conversion rate for 1 hammer = 2.75 gold" for failgold IF you have all the multipliers. And that brings us back to your post.

I'd still like to see a game where you actually turn forest into gold at the best conversion rate in order to rushbuy something with it. Imo, that's theoretical nonsense and will rarely if ever happen in a "real" game. Just too many factors too consider in order to make it work, and even then you're most likely better of turning that forest into hammers directly.
 
the reason to get fail gold is, in experience, to fund research. It could be to convert useless hammers (a northern forest) into useful gold for rushbuying/upgrading elsewhere, of course.

I should mention that I almost never actually rush buy anything, but that's a consequence of my playing style...
 
Not the mechanic is poorly designed, it's just that most of the wonders are fckn useless, in fact so useless that the "consolation prize" is much more useful.

Haha, it depends on who the player is. I've had the odd person on the GENERAL area of the forum lecturing me on how over-powered Zeus & Pizza-Chicken area. Apparently they are so over-powered, that after building these wonders, they were able to take it to the next level, and just romp over everyone.

????

I couldn't find the merrits to that one without being called an elitist, so what do I know...
 
Haha, it depends on who the player is. I've had the odd person on the GENERAL area of the forum lecturing me on how over-powered Zeus & Pizza-Chicken area. Apparently they are so over-powered, that after building these wonders, they were able to take it to the next level, and just romp over everyone.

????

I couldn't find the merrits to that one without being called an elitist, so what do I know...

Maybe they were talking about multiplayer? Only reason I can come up with.
 
At Marathon/Huge, I NEED GOLD NOW OR I CRASH happens pretty regularly.

You can't just sit on six cities. You need 10 or more.

At those settings the amount of expansion you can do is directly related to the amount of gold you can generate. Other factors like getting blocked in, or not having enough hammers, are generally not applicable.

I play Huge Marathon and I don't generally run into strike zone land. This is especially true at the stage of the game where you're talking about.

I would NOT rush-buy with gold. EVER. I would NOT trade 3 gold for 1 hammer. It's horribly inefficient.

Imho, the problem with rush-buying isn't its efficiency. After all, rush-buying lets you have something much sooner than slow building for non-hammer intensive, well established cities. No, the problem is how it hurts your research very severely.
 
It's not strike land. But it's like 20-40% research with 5-7 cities, which is pretty bad.

Normally this is where I kill someone with elephants or Horse Archers.

Which, btw, dumps your economy into the drain. This can however be avoided with 3k of fail-gold thanks to the Temple of Artemis. In the Mehmed game, in the downtime before HBR, my cities had nothing better to do so I was like, "let's get some fail-gold." It meant I could whip heavily, kill Bismark with HAs AND run 100% research.

Are you playing at Diety?
 
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