VoiceOfUnreason
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Messages
- 3,663
A brief introduction to the information that is available about city commerce and production.
The domestic advisor offers a digest summary of your cities, with the ability to sort each column in ascending or descending order with a mouse click.
We begin by investigating the commerce in Thebes - which is the capital of a civ using the Bureaucracy civic.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
So 69 base commerce: +20 from trade routes, +8 from the palace, +41 from worked tiles (5 bags is +25 and +16 loose coins). The civic gives a 50% multiplier, and like all fractional math floor rounding is used; therefore 69/2 = 34 and the total commerce is 69+34 = 103. So that checks.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
29 base production: 25 hammers from the worked tiles, 4 hammers from the specialists. The forge gives a 25% bonus, added to the 50% from civics, for 21 bonus production (again, we lose on the rounding); 29+21=50. Lovely.
Let's check that this works in Memphis.
No palace, of course. 17 coins in trade, 31 on the worked tiles. = 48. Aces.
Whoops! Where did the 28 production, reported by the domestic advisor, go? It's hidden by the production bonus, of course. 23 hammers from the tiles and a 25% bonus from the buildings equals 28. So the domestic advisor is trying to show a sort of non specific production level - giving you a way to compare the production of two cities without having to worry about the specifics of what they are building right now. That's good.
Sidebar: there's one type of decision you might make where this isn't the information that you want: your capital doesn't have to be your capital forever. You can invest 160 hammers elsewhere to build the palace, and move that production bonus to another city. The domestic advisor isn't giving you the right information to make that decision - you'll have to compare the cities by hand to justify that optimization.
On the whole, though, both production and commerce are pretty straight forward.
Production: Add your production tiles, and the production generated by specialists (your base production), add your production bonuses, multiply those two numbers together. And don't get fooled when there is carry over
from a previous build.
Commerce: None of the specialists generate commerce (some generate gold, though - don't confuse the two), so you only have to worry about your commerce tiles, the palace, and your trade routes to get base commerce.
Krikkitone started a good discussion of trade routes, so I refer you there for the math.
But there is one area that caught my eye. Harbors have a bonus multiplier for trade routes. Where does that come in? The useful answer is that the trade routes that appear on the city screen already include that multiplier.
This picture is from one of my small seaports in the same game. I had held off on building the harbor because I didn't need the health yet, and the traderoutes were so small. But for our purposes, it is sufficient to compare this picture to the same information after I use the worldbuilder to add a harbor.
The commerce value of the routes to San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone up, reflecting that 50% bonus. Also note that two of the routes changed: I don't know what's up with that - I really expected to see Houston at +3 and Thebes at +1.
The important news here is that the trade route report includes the harbor bonus, in exactly the same way that the report of tile yield includes the effects of civics, The Colossus, and the Financial trait.
Total commerce is (trade route yield + tile yield + palace yield) * bonus. That's the number reported by the domestic advisor, and that is the number that goes into the slider, generating beakers, culture, and coin.
The pattern for calculating beakers is essentially the same as calculating production. All of the beaker sources are added (at Thebes, I've got 9 beakers courtesy of my three specialists and the Representation Civic), all of the science modifiers are added (that 10% is from Free Religion), those two numbers are multiplied together, and we lose any extra to rounding.
For culture, the calculation is precisely the same - the only significant difference is that buildings are often a source of culture, but they are handled as just another source - like specialists.
For gold, the calculation is slightly different.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
The report shows 103 commerce * 20% = 21 gold, but that's just a lie. 103*20% is 20.6, which in the civ world rounds down. This number is really total commerce - (commerce beakers - commerce culture). In this example, 103 - 82 beakers is 21 gold. So we aren't losing any commerce.
Aside from that, the rules are the same: add to this the gold from other city sources (that building is a religious shrine), apply the multipliers.
The Financial Advisor presents a view of your civ as a whole. The research and tax contributions of each city are added (you can confirm that the research listed here matches the sum of the research reported by the Domestic Advisor). You can see that the gold you generate through resource trading with other civs is handled seperately.
Notice that the research listed here does not represent how quickly you are actually making progress on your next technology. There's yet another set of modifiers for that. Requies provides the details.
There's one additional monkey wrench in this entire mess: with the appropriate techs, you can build wealth, research, and culture directly. How does that work?
So hammers are converted to gold, which is treated as a point source (just like specialists), and goes through the multipliers. But look carefully at the number of hammers: that's the base production of this city, not the total production: all of the production bonuses just got wasted, because no hammers went through the production system.
The domestic advisor offers a digest summary of your cities, with the ability to sort each column in ascending or descending order with a mouse click.
We begin by investigating the commerce in Thebes - which is the capital of a civ using the Bureaucracy civic.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
So 69 base commerce: +20 from trade routes, +8 from the palace, +41 from worked tiles (5 bags is +25 and +16 loose coins). The civic gives a 50% multiplier, and like all fractional math floor rounding is used; therefore 69/2 = 34 and the total commerce is 69+34 = 103. So that checks.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
29 base production: 25 hammers from the worked tiles, 4 hammers from the specialists. The forge gives a 25% bonus, added to the 50% from civics, for 21 bonus production (again, we lose on the rounding); 29+21=50. Lovely.
Let's check that this works in Memphis.
No palace, of course. 17 coins in trade, 31 on the worked tiles. = 48. Aces.
Whoops! Where did the 28 production, reported by the domestic advisor, go? It's hidden by the production bonus, of course. 23 hammers from the tiles and a 25% bonus from the buildings equals 28. So the domestic advisor is trying to show a sort of non specific production level - giving you a way to compare the production of two cities without having to worry about the specifics of what they are building right now. That's good.
Sidebar: there's one type of decision you might make where this isn't the information that you want: your capital doesn't have to be your capital forever. You can invest 160 hammers elsewhere to build the palace, and move that production bonus to another city. The domestic advisor isn't giving you the right information to make that decision - you'll have to compare the cities by hand to justify that optimization.
On the whole, though, both production and commerce are pretty straight forward.
Production: Add your production tiles, and the production generated by specialists (your base production), add your production bonuses, multiply those two numbers together. And don't get fooled when there is carry over
from a previous build.
Commerce: None of the specialists generate commerce (some generate gold, though - don't confuse the two), so you only have to worry about your commerce tiles, the palace, and your trade routes to get base commerce.
Krikkitone started a good discussion of trade routes, so I refer you there for the math.
But there is one area that caught my eye. Harbors have a bonus multiplier for trade routes. Where does that come in? The useful answer is that the trade routes that appear on the city screen already include that multiplier.
This picture is from one of my small seaports in the same game. I had held off on building the harbor because I didn't need the health yet, and the traderoutes were so small. But for our purposes, it is sufficient to compare this picture to the same information after I use the worldbuilder to add a harbor.
The commerce value of the routes to San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone up, reflecting that 50% bonus. Also note that two of the routes changed: I don't know what's up with that - I really expected to see Houston at +3 and Thebes at +1.
The important news here is that the trade route report includes the harbor bonus, in exactly the same way that the report of tile yield includes the effects of civics, The Colossus, and the Financial trait.
Total commerce is (trade route yield + tile yield + palace yield) * bonus. That's the number reported by the domestic advisor, and that is the number that goes into the slider, generating beakers, culture, and coin.
The pattern for calculating beakers is essentially the same as calculating production. All of the beaker sources are added (at Thebes, I've got 9 beakers courtesy of my three specialists and the Representation Civic), all of the science modifiers are added (that 10% is from Free Religion), those two numbers are multiplied together, and we lose any extra to rounding.
For culture, the calculation is precisely the same - the only significant difference is that buildings are often a source of culture, but they are handled as just another source - like specialists.
For gold, the calculation is slightly different.
The white box shows roughly where I'm hovering the mouse to get the detailed popup
The report shows 103 commerce * 20% = 21 gold, but that's just a lie. 103*20% is 20.6, which in the civ world rounds down. This number is really total commerce - (commerce beakers - commerce culture). In this example, 103 - 82 beakers is 21 gold. So we aren't losing any commerce.
Aside from that, the rules are the same: add to this the gold from other city sources (that building is a religious shrine), apply the multipliers.
The Financial Advisor presents a view of your civ as a whole. The research and tax contributions of each city are added (you can confirm that the research listed here matches the sum of the research reported by the Domestic Advisor). You can see that the gold you generate through resource trading with other civs is handled seperately.
Notice that the research listed here does not represent how quickly you are actually making progress on your next technology. There's yet another set of modifiers for that. Requies provides the details.
There's one additional monkey wrench in this entire mess: with the appropriate techs, you can build wealth, research, and culture directly. How does that work?
So hammers are converted to gold, which is treated as a point source (just like specialists), and goes through the multipliers. But look carefully at the number of hammers: that's the base production of this city, not the total production: all of the production bonuses just got wasted, because no hammers went through the production system.
No one commented on this fab article...until now. 
Nice work VoU.
