Playing with Portugal?

[Athenaeum]

I have a question about Portugal.

On the Civ5 wiki, it says that you can obtain an arbitrage profit (of at least 70 gold) with Portugal, if you have adopted the Commerce policy "Mercantilism", and you have the Big Ben, by purchasing a Nau and using the cargo unload feature, then deleting the unit.

I tried this out, and the most gold I could gain from this venture was 250 gold, if I went to the other side of the world (you get more gold the farther away from your capital you are). Whereas it cost around 260 gold to purchase the Nau.


Has anybody ever been able to do this before? To get purchasing costs so low that you can purchase a Nau, and use the Cargo ability to make a profit and then delete the unit?

Is there anything else I can do that I'm not thinking of to further lower the unit purchasing costs so I could do this? I thought it would be kinda neat.

 

[joncnunn]

Can be map speed and/or map size dependent. Or alternatively a patch changed either gold given or it's rush cost.

In either case, note that the "70" gold didn't even count its share of unit maintenance, if the ship was cash built near the capital the maintenance cost could eat that up entirely. So it only really works if you also own a city half way around the world from your capital.

 

[Athenaeum]

Can be map speed and/or map size dependent. Or alternatively a patch changed either gold given or it's rush cost.

In either case, note that the "70" gold didn't even count its share of unit maintenance, if the ship was cash built near the capital the maintenance cost could eat that up entirely. So it only really works if you also own a city half way around the world from your capital.

Not necessarily. The point is that you do the cargo unload thing on somebody else's coast. You don't need to have a city way across the world. But even considering that, distance from capital increases gold collection, but not very significantly.

You can look this up on the civilization wiki. IT says that 70 gold would be a minimum profit from this. But I guess it was either patched up or they changed something. Either way it doesn't work for me.

 

[Crus8r]

The tier 1 Autocracy policy Mobilization would be another way to reduce the cost of rush-buying a Nau... I also suspect that map size and speed have an effect on the payoff...

Crus8r

 

[Redaxe]

The tier 1 Autocracy policy Mobilization would be another way to reduce the cost of rush-buying a Nau... I also suspect that map size and speed have an effect on the payoff...

Crus8r

By the time you get to Autocracy Nau's will probably be obsolete. I don't think the free gold from Nau's was intended to be a major source of income.

Rather see it as a way of offsetting some of the cost of exploration with caravels. Essentially its a way of making a large navy a bit more affordable & rewarding exploration.
That said the bonus is possibly a little weak, if they gave you 10-15 free influence with a Citystate when you sell Exotic goods that would probably make Portugal a more mid-tier civ. Right now they are probably a lower tier civ.

Even if you could get the 70 gold it is hardly worth it. You would be better to keep your Nau's then open Freedom and pick Arsenal of Democracy and gift them to CityStates for a total of 20 influence.

That said the gold bonus isn't bad. Nau's can make up a significant part of your military strength in the mid-game and the free gold can be used to upgrade other units or to buy a factory.

 

[ThorHammerz]

Has anybody ever been able to do this before? To get purchasing costs so low that you can purchase a Nau, and use the Cargo ability to make a profit and then delete the unit?

As the Redaxe has stated, the purpose of the Nau is not to "turn a profit" (although it would seem so at first glance - don't be deceived, companies IRL use this trick all the time to scam you into deals that are not worth your money - think anything along the lines of "sign into this deal/contract/lease and get X money back!"), but rather to recuperate part of its overall lifetime cost.

If you have the policies and/or the wonders (um, Autocracy/Industrialization-tech-wonder with a Renaissance Era unit?) that reduces its costs to the point of making the gold/production -> gold tradeoff anywhere near even, you are either extremely behind in naval tech, or your ships have sat there for so long, that their maintenance costs have already far exceeded what you are getting in the lump sum of gold.

 

[Crus8r]

If you have the policies and/or the wonders (um, Autocracy/Industrialization-tech-wonder with a Renaissance Era unit?) that reduces its costs to the point of making the gold/production -> gold tradeoff anywhere near even, you are either extremely behind in naval tech, or your ships have sat there for so long, that their maintenance costs have already far exceeded what you are getting in the lump sum of gold.

Not neccessarily...consider that the Nau is not obsoleted until Steam Power...which requires Scientific Theory, Industrialization, AND Rifling techs, and that many players get into Ideology via Radio BEFORE getting Industrialization...also, the cost reduction from Autocracy is more than twice that of Big Ben. I could definitely see a situation such as that postulated by Joncnunn, where you found/annex a city on the other side of the world, and rush-buy Nau to make a (small) quick profit...while building up a navy.

Personally, I like to gift caravels to allied city states that are not too far from a coastal city of an AI I'm at war with...I pound down the walls with my frigates, and the city state will eventually send the caravel around... (In my experience, city states tend to keep other naval units quite close to home, but will send caravels all over, so unless they are very close, its much easier to get them to help by gifting caravels) Good for taking down an opponent without incurring warmonger...

Please note that I fully agree with both Redaxe and ThorHammerz that the primary purpose of the Nau is NOT to 'make big money quick!', but I do think it could work if you wanted to go that way...

Crus8r

 

[ThorHammerz]

Are they now? I stand corrected then.

 

[Redaxe]

Fair enough so you could use autocracy however I still think Freedom & Arsenal of Democracy would be a better use for your spare Nau's. Consider that it usually costs 250 gold to gain 15 influence with a CityState. With AoD you're getting about 300 gold worth of free influence over a CityState when you donate a unit - not bad at all.

 

[Athenaeum]

By the time you get to Autocracy Nau's will probably be obsolete. I don't think the free gold from Nau's was intended to be a major source of income.

Rather see it as a way of offsetting some of the cost of exploration with caravels. Essentially its a way of making a large navy a bit more affordable & rewarding exploration.
That said the bonus is possibly a little weak, if they gave you 10-15 free influence with a Citystate when you sell Exotic goods that would probably make Portugal a more mid-tier civ. Right now they are probably a lower tier civ.

Even if you could get the 70 gold it is hardly worth it. You would be better to keep your Nau's then open Freedom and pick Arsenal of Democracy and gift them to CityStates for a total of 20 influence.

That said the gold bonus isn't bad. Nau's can make up a significant part of your military strength in the mid-game and the free gold can be used to upgrade other units or to buy a factory.

Two things:

1) What you said about picking arsenal of democracy, poses a good idea. You could make Nau's, use them for gold and influence at the same time.

2) Why would you consider Portugal a low-tier civilization? I understand that their bonus is kind of measly. But I think their Feitora thing is pretty OP. Imagine how much extra happiness you can gain from that.

 

[Crus8r]

Oh, I quite agree that Arsenal of Democracy is a GREAT use for extra units...when I go Freedom. I would actually rate AoD as even better than Redaxe: by the time I'm gifting caravels (Nau), the influence for 250g is usually 10, so I'd say its worth 500g a pop in influence. I don't usually get more than the opener for Patronage, though, which might explain the difference if Redaxe normally gets the policy that increases influence from gold.

But I frequently gift units to allied city states when I'm Autocracy as well...not so much for the influence, but to get them to help take down opponents. I've notice that many players are amazed that city states can take cities, but I don't think I've played a game in the last year or more where I didn't arrange for city states to administer the coup de gras to at least a couple cities and save me some warmonger heat...and if the cities in question were coastal, there's a good chance it was caravels that did it. I think its because the caravel is classifed by the game as an exploration unit, but I've noticed that city states will send their caravels much farther from home than most of their units, and if they find an enemy coastal city, they're pretty aggressive about attacking it. If you've had a frigate or two pounding down the defenses, that will usually do the trick. Its certainly not 100%, and takes some patience, but it frequently works.

Crus8r

PS re Feitora: it sounds cool and all, but seriously, in most games I've played, it seems like all the city states only have 3 or 4 different luxes among them, especially the coastal ones.

 

[Athenaeum]

Hehe yeah. One time I had a file with China where I conquered the whole world, but kept one civ's capital alive just so I could do a little experiment. I kept gifting GDR's to my city-state ally and it eventually conquered the other city-states in the area, so I had an ally that was a city-state empire lol.

 

[Doktor Vic Tim]

Just don't forget to delay steam power or else you'll be stuck with Ironclads.

 

[shaglio]

Not necessarily. The point is that you do the cargo unload thing on somebody else's coast. You don't need to have a city way across the world. But even considering that, distance from capital increases gold collection, but not very significantly.

You can look this up on the civilization wiki. IT says that 70 gold would be a minimum profit from this. But I guess it was either patched up or they changed something. Either way it doesn't work for me.

I think his point was that, if you buy a Nau in your capital and it takes, say, 20 turns to get to the other side of the world (for max profit), then you're paying for 20 turns of unit maintenance. At, hypothetically again, 4 gold maintenance per turn, you'd be spending 80 gold to generate a 70 gold return on investment. Thus buying the Nau in a city that's already on the other side of the world, would reduce the # of turns you'd be paying for unit maintenance until you could sail the Nua to it's selling destination.

 

[reddishrecue]

Hehe yeah. One time I had a file with China where I conquered the whole world, but kept one civ's capital alive just so I could do a little experiment. I kept gifting GDR's to my city-state ally and it eventually conquered the other city-states in the area, so I had an ally that was a city-state empire lol.

Sometimes you have to be really careful with these strategies because city states can destroy civilizations that have been left over by another dominant civilization that took their capital.