Let's talk (Hammer) economy

Greetings, fellow Civ fanatics, I need your advice. I wish to discuss two related topics in this thread: one - a hammer economy, and two - a dedicated economy vs. a hybrid economy. But first, a little background discussion:

I studied the civic choices a while ago and I came to the conclusion that the Firaxis developers designed the game with three main strategy paths in mind: the specialist economy, the hammer economy, and the cottage economy.

The Cottage Economy strategy is to spam cottages ALL OVER practically EVERY TILE in EVERY city. You turtle until you research democracy. With printing press and liberalism you can now run free speech and each town gives you 7 commerce. With Universal Suffrage you will get a hammer per town as well. Throw in free market for an extra 6-10 commerce per city. This is the peacemonger strategy, allowing you to out-tech your rivals and go for the space win. You'll need good relations with at least a few civs to get the most out of your trade routes. You will have a really high GNP and lower production, but you can make up for that with the rush buying ability of US.

Cottage economy summary:

Early/Classic Game: with writing and currency

per food neutral tile: 4 commerce
mulitpliers: 25% beakers and gold

Mid/Enlightenment Game: with Liberalism, Guilds, Banking, Education, Astronomy, Printing Press, and Democracy

per food neutral tile: 7 commerce, 1 hammer
multipliers: 75% science, 100% gold (library, university, observatory, merchant, grocer, bank)

IMPORTANT NOTE: these numbers are effected by the luxury slider. If the slider is at 20%, 7 commerce becomes 7 - 1.4 = 5.6. However, this is somewhat mitigated by the extra commerce generated by free market.






Specialist Economy

This, in its purest form, would entail farming over almost everything and running as many specialists as possible. The best civics to run would be Representation and Caste System. Also, any civics that raise your happy/healthy caps would be good choices as well, such as nationalism (for free +2 happy) and evironmentalism.

Early/Classic Game: with writing and currency:

per specialist: 3 beakers or 3 gold or 1 hammer + 1 gold or 2 hammers or 4 esp points + 1 beaker. For the purposes of comparison, we'll say 3 gold. All specialists generate 3 GPP as well.

So per food neutral (irrigated grassland) tile: 1.5 gold and 1.5 GPPs
multipliers: 25% gold, 25% beakers

Late/Industrial Game: with education, guilds, banking, atronomy, biology, and constitution

1 specialist per food neutral tile

per tile: 3 gold + 3 beakers (or 6 beakers), and 3 GPPs.
Multipliers: 75% beakers, 100% gold


Hammer Economy:

Now this is the real reason I started this thread - to look at the viability of a hammer economy. What if you ran caste system and state property, and then workshopped all your land? Let's see how it compares

Late/Industrial Game: with assembly line, state property

per food neutral tile: 4 hammers
multipliers: 75% (with coal or oil) hammer multiplier, plus 10% for SP = 85%

Each tile would yield 7.4 hammers after being multiplied. If you converted that to beakers it still isn't quite as impressive as a 7 commerce tile being multiplied 75% ( for around 11.5 beakers).



Discussion

Alright, so my thinking was, would it be possible to create an empire full of nothing but hammer-heavy cities and would it be able to stand up to the other two economy types. The hammer economy could obviously out-produce the other two in war time, flooding the enemy with units. The hammer economy is thus a warmonger's economy and given that it uses State Property, would lend itself to creating a very large empire. Could it keep up in tech? Well, if a hammer heavy city were to "build" beakers it could produce around 7 beakers per food neutral tile. This is a bit behind the 11.5 per tile generated by a CE or 10.5 (6 * 1.75) per tile generated in a SE. Keep in mind that the CE number will be reduced by the luxury slider whereas the other two will not. It seems that on a per city basis the hammer economy could not generate quite as much tech as the other two, but that should be expected. The hammer empire is going to be huge and so it can keep up or even get a tech advantage due to having many more cities than the CE, for example.

Now, I have some questions. First of all, have any of you tried to use a hammer economy? At full steam it does seem impressive to me, but it takes a long time to get up and running - State Property comes very late, but then again so does democracy and biology. The problem, however, is that before State Property the hammer economy seems a lot less powerful, with each tile yielding as little as 2 hammers.

Also, am I just crazy for trying to make a completely dedicated economy? This is the second reason I started this thread. It seems that many people run a hybrid economy, with cottages, specialists, and hammer cities. This does make sense in a way, but the drawback to that is you cannot choose civics that will optimize any cities. Representation boosts specialists but does nothing for towns, and the opposite is true of Universal Suffrage. A hammer economy would probably benefit best from Police State. Free speech boosts your commerce cities, does nothing for other cities. State Property boosts your hammer cities but does nothing for other cities. Specialists would do better under mercantilism or evironmentalism, and commerce cities do better with free market.

So I can't figure out what Firaxis was trying to do. Were they really expecting us to have all 3 types of economic inputs in our economy with a mix of cottages, specialists and hammer cities, or did they want us to follow a "strategy path" ?? What have you found works best for you? How much do you mix it up?

Do hammers get multipliers before being turned into Beakers? I was under the impression that you didn't- 4 hammers is 4 beakers.

Hammers do not get commerce multipliers. Libraries, markets, etc do not effect hammer production of beakers or gold. Hammers do, however, get hammer multipliers, such as 25% for the forge or 50% for a factory with power. Thus 4 hammers in a forged, factoried, powered city would yield 4 * 1.75 = 7 hammers, or 7 beakers

Another boost to the hammer economy would be levees with steam power. If a decent number of your cities are on rivers this would be a huge boost. Also if you are playing as the dutch then water tiles would do the same.

How would you get around the problem with growth that workshops cause pre-State property. The thing with a CE is that if you have alot of grassland to cottage it is all food nutruel (SP?) On the other hand workshops cause -1 food.

The hammer economy does seem to have some big benefits however. First, As mentioned the ability to churn out huge numbers of units. Also you would be able to switch from gold/beakers/and culture quite easily. Another benefit would be the ability to wonderspam in all of your cities.

Yes, xxamonxx, that is something I am wondering myself - can the hammer economy work early in the game? Personally, I have not been able to do this. I have won games by cottage spamming and winning the space race, and I have won games with a specialist economy and winning the cultural victory. I did win one hammer economy game but that was with Julius Ceasar on a pangea map...doesn't really count. So i was hoping other people could help me out here and i wanted to see if anyone else had been able to make this work. I also want to know if most people mix their economy up into commerce cities, hammer cities, specialist cities, or if people do the dedicated economy approach.

a few comments

1) CE doesn't "turtle" pre-democracy

2) it's not that "obvious" hammer economy is the most productive. FE has the whip, and CE has USuff.

3) forge+factory+power = 100%

4) Levees are irrelevant to the evaluation of hammer economy. The evaluation of the three economies is mostly about preferred improvement: cottage, farm, workshop.

5) Hammer economy benefits from a GP farm the way CE does; hammer economy benefits from trade routes the way all three economies do.

Posted by Ibian on the Types of Economy thread:

Since im posting anyway, id just like to add the Hammer Economy, or HE. I was inspired by obsolete to give it a try, and it just works much better for me than any of the others. What you do is pretty much just build a lot of workshops. They give as many hammers as a railroaded hill when you got all the techs, plus one food.

Benefits: Better infrastructure, more wonders. Every single city can build anything it needs, you can get most of the wonders, and since all cities have a lot of hammers you can even spread them around so you dont get GA pollution. When you run out of things to build you can turn the hammers into beakers or gold. And of course it makes it very easy to build up a big army. A very versatile economy in other words.

Downsides:It will never rival a CE in pure beakers, but with the occasional war its possible to grab enough land to stay in the lead. Even hammers can keep you in the tech lead when you have more land than anyone else.

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While a hybrid economy will not fully benefit from any particular civic choice there is a large degree of flexibility available; albeit focusing while running a hybrid produces lesser results compared to the same focus while running pure you still get the benefits that the others provide (e.g., using SE to get beakers; you still get a significant amount of commerce and hammers from those cities not running specialists).

Re: hammer economy before state property; while not as clean you are basically working farms and mines (instead of specialists). However, I cannot image that spamming extra cities then chopping forests (counter productive) to get a forge up and running then strictly building wealth/research in each new city would be feasible. You would not have enough food to grow the city to get the extra food to assign the miners (workshops being food-negative makes the situation worse). The only real exception would be if you find yourself with many GP farm capable sites and decide to work 2 or so food sources and then all mines afterward until stagnation. That said, in a hybrid economy the hammer cities can be used to temporarily supplement your commerce output, especially if you over-expand during war and need to recover your economy.

I've quite often used something like this early in the game to produce beakers when I needed them (normally in the early AD years while researching the four C's or Civil Service if I'm relatively isolated). A couple of hammer-heavy cities are set to build research, which normally accounts for 40 beakers or so a turn; if a military need comes up, they can be switched immediately to that cause.

Immediate flexibility, and a couple of these cities can account for quite a lot of beakers. Not sure about the long-term viability of an economy built around this - mainly due to the either/or nature of production and research.

Seems to me a hammer economy is one you could switch into as you get the civics and techs that make workshops and watermills more effective. Until then run a specialist economy.

You can run obsolete's economy, but strictly speaking that's a HE/SSE hybrid where the hammer economy is used to support one mega wonderspam capitol that spits out lots of GPs, settles them, and runs most of its beakers off of that. Any civics you'd use for an SE will work well in an SSE with the added benefit of caste system giving +1/workshop. So the HE/SSE is basically SE on crack.

Running a pure HE is probably about as efficient as running a pure CE or a pure SE... that is, not at all. A pure CE won't have a GP farm. A pure SE requires that all your cities be food-rich. A pure HE economy is a production powerhouse that quickly gets left behind in tech.

AmazonQueen said:

Seems to me a hammer economy is one you could switch into as you get the civics and techs that make workshops and watermills more effective. Until then run a specialist economy.

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Agreed, this is what I often do in my games. Specialists become less important over time as well as the cap for each one is growing. I run a SE at the early stages of the game and switch the majority of my farms into workshops and watermills later on - state property is great. This works like a charm on high difficulty levels too, especially with warfare as state property keeps the maintenance of big empires low and you can run police state/nationhood without losing out on your cottage amplifiers.

At the time when you have SP workshops, everyone is running emancipation, so you'll have to be able to deal with the unhappiness to make this work. Sure you can use the culture slider to a point, but remember you'll need to run at almost, if not completely, 100% wealth just to be in the black.

I did win when i tried a pure hammer economy (space race), thanks to having friends nearby who could supply me with extra land, but it just wont work if you start isolated.

Also this was just a test run on noble, no idea how well it works higher up, but i suspect it would.

Its not really all that useful as a pure economy except when your goal is to kill off everyone. I usually go for space win (because i hate the war system, way the hell too much micromanagement), so i have switched away from this as my main econ by now.

At the time when you have SP workshops, everyone is running emancipation, so you'll have to be able to deal with the unhappiness to make this work. Sure you can use the culture slider to a point, but remember you'll need to run at almost, if not completely, 100% wealth just to be in the black.

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A HE very specifically doesnt care where any of the sliders are at. The culture slider is a perfect way to completely ignore both WW and emancipation - at the same time at that.

Money was not problem for me when i ran this because i settled most of my prophets.

A few comemnts about a hammer economy which I have never tried.

1) Tough to utilize until democracy and Communism.
2) Your city is not building anything while working hammers to beakers.
3) You need another type of economy to get yourself there
4) Needed civics: US (for rush buying), Bur (capital hammers), Caste, SP, Religion is irrelevent.
5) Need gold slider near 100% for rush buying.

Looks pretty tough to me but could work with a trade economy, or EE and a limited SE.

1) Tough to utilize until democracy and Communism.
2) Your city is not building anything while working hammers to beakers.
3) You need another type of economy to get yourself there
4) Needed civics: US (for rush buying), Bur (capital hammers), Caste, SP, Religion is irrelevent.
5) Need gold slider near 100% for rush buying.

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1: Not really. Build infrastructure, wipe out a neaby civ or 2, your there.

2: Only matters if you really like war.

3: Pobably not. Whoever you are fighting (you will be early on if this is going to work) cant tech if he wants to defend himself too. When you have your entire continent to yourself you can bunker down and start teching.

4: In general: All econs need a whole bunch of techs. More specifically: Buying stuff with gold in max hammer cities is a magnificent waste of good cash.

5: Er... why?

There is a slight problem with this: If you use your hammers to make them into beakers to tech... Where is the other stuff you need is coming from ? Units come to mind...

I see how the 'converstion' -> is used for the sake of comparsion with the other economies... there is still something off about this. I think you are comparing Apples to Oranges here...

OK, Maybe I am just dumb here.

Responses to my first 2 points are contradicting themselves. Only important if you like war, yet you take mature cities from an AI???

Just how do build the military if your cities are building beakers? You need at least a forge. Then the markets/grocers/anks for gold.

Perhaps I am missing something here, but if hammers go to beakers, how to get production for units and buildings?????

Refar said:

There is a slight problem with this: If you use your hammers to make them into beakers to tech... Where is the other stuff you need is coming from ? Units come to mind...

I see how the 'converstion' -> is used for the sake of comparsion with the other economies... there is still something off about this. I think you are comparing Apples to Oranges here...

Click to expand...

Thankyou! Yeah what he said!

Dunno what the confusion is about. Its not like you are locked into tech or building for a set amount of time. You build what you need when you need it.

The strength is in flexibility. You can build pure research, pure units, or whatever mix you want.

Actually, i would suggest just trying it if you havent, because frankly im confused what the confusion is about.