which comes at the price of both 1
and +0.50% epidemic chance (and this at a time when the "price arc" of 
is perhaps at its highest, in the medieval era; rivalling industrial but with no national projects as options to offset this), its static effects are almost certainly a net negative, the investment and opportunity costs of choosing it against anything else notwithstanding. The additional craftsman slot and one marginal /craftsman are almost never going to outcompete mines, lumbermills, watermills, or even unimproved forested hills in its own era (indeed, one would need to be an industrious leader and running craft guilds even to be on par with typical alternatives, and that from a strict standpoint without consideration for the economic costs associated with investing in the building and the premium paid in reducing the cap and sustaining more frequent epidemics). I can see a flimsy use case for severe fringe examples where virtually no "from the land" is to be had, but that would mean no rivers for watermills (which admittedly come just slightly later, but are still basically contemporary), or forests or hills, and that kind of land is both rare and undesirable to settle or conquer. bonus of strategic minerals themselves, with mines being the bedrock ( 
) until a slight breach is opened in the "high medieval" with lumbermills (unlocked alongside this building, which it directly competes against rather underwhelmingly) and watermills just slightly later; marginally effective and sometimes preferable alternatives to strict mining, but ultimately only offering flexibility rather than something which supersedes the old paradigm. Still, though, the workshop is unlocked by the same technology that offers an improvement which the vast majority of the time will be more effective with no built-in malus, so what is the thought behind this? I know that Leonardo's Workshop was one of the original Civ1 wonders (and even remains a nice option in RI), but outside of examples from these north Italian cities which the wonder represents, I don't really see what they model or imitate beyond the native one has from their city square or unimproved land already, since "cottage manufacture" is already what city production has to be imagined as in its lowest form in this game in the first place.
Only in the marginal situation where you prefer buying most of your units with gold anyway - then buying a bunch before an upgrade tech arrives and then upgrading might be a better use of gold if the production difference between upgraded and non-upgraded units is big enough. For instance, in a line infantry to rifleman case, buying a new rifleman is 145 * 4 = 580, while buying a fusilier then upgrading it is 125 * 4 + 20 * 2 + 10 = 550. While it is a net positive, I'd hardly call this ~5% difference an "abuse".
I'd say that while it's fair for a certain situation, that's an overly narrow view. In my experience, a city in medieval era is more likely to hit a "hard cap" throughIt's fairly inconsequential and peripheral, but the workshop seems like a particularly undesirable build in all but very rare circumstances. It's not a particularly expensive building for its time, but yielding only 1
rather than a "soft cap" through . A city that hit a cap would be looking to maximise its production, and might not actually have enough purely production tiles to work. This, combined with the civic that buffs craftsmen that arrives with the same tech, makes craftsmen as a production source a viable option for the first time. The equilibrium is of course shifted further for an Industrious leader, and even further later on with Protectionism. Also note that your +1 calculation is only true for an established city. Any new city would not have a warehouse. is the limiting factor - which may be true in some cases, but far from universal. But you are correct in that it is far from an automatic build. That said, and acknowledging your caveat of not asking for a buff, its utility did always feel a bit too marginal to me (along with the later manufactury), especially given that, as you correctly point out, it does come with a malus. I will revisit it, with a special emphasis on AI evaluation (as AI does tend to undervalue buildings that come with maluses).You are arguiing how useful and powerful cash rushing is. I agree that it useful and seems scaled correctly compared to production with hammers which is still a bit cheaper. What I am saying is that production gained through upgrading a unit is twice as cheap, twice as powerful.That was buffed intentionally in response to removing hurrying production from "whipping" under the slavery civic, if I recall correctly. Rushing production with gold is now both available earlier, debuting with serfdom rather than the base game's universal suffrage (effectively RI's democracy), and available through more than just one avenue. Ironically enough, hurrying production through whipping wasn't removed originally from a realism standpoint (when it is rather unrealistic, and glaringly so if we weight the importance of realism relative to the strategic weight of certain mechanics, where at a high level of play whipping in vanilla was essentially mandatory), but because the AI did a poor job of managing it relative to the player. Removing it introduced a slew of rebalances, of which I believe this was one. Additionally, this being a mod about greater historical plausibility even within still highly abstracted mechanics, it does make a lot more sense to me that one could much more readily utilize hard cash to get something done quickly than they could via mass execution. Also, if you descale the production cost of spies like you talked about, you'll quickly find out how hard it is to keep or stockpile money in your coffers.
That would be using it in a fairly normal way. What I mean by abusing is delinking some strategic resources for one or two turns, building a bunch of very old units, linking the resources again and upgrading the ancient units to modern ones. Wouldn't that work?
I should point out that under default settings, that wouldn't be a viable exploit. Unlike vanilla, at any tech level there are irregular units that don't require any resources, so you won't have that much of a production cost difference (disconnecting your firearms won't drop you from infantry to archers, merely to conscripts - and while they are cheaper than infantry, the difference is not vast), and if the unit cost scaling is on, upgrading from irregulars is prohibitively expensive in most cases, due to their cost scaling difference - but even if it were turned off, you're never down to "very old units" even when you have no resources.
To encourage upgrading old units.
So, the upgrade path is such that you can't fall back to units from a different era, whatever kind of resources you may or may not have available. Right?
For the main infantry line, and to an extent for cavalry (you can't build any cavalry without horses up to a point, and then ). Heavy/light infantry simply doesn't have units that don't require resources, so if you don't have resources, you can't build those at all. I guess one could fall back to pre-gunpowder light/heavy infantry by resource manipulation, but the cost difference one would have is still around 2x max. Late-game mechanized units obviously require lots of different resources - no resources = no tanks, advanced planes or battleships (apparently WW1-era bombers don't require fuel, as I just saw, so that will be fixed
). Yeah maybe. Both of the cities have blast furnace though. Also, blast furnace gives +5% for coal/copper/iron - so +15% in total? I don't see how that could turn +4 hammers into +6 hammers.
Thanks for the feedback. I really don't like to abuse a game, and usually when I find options to abuse, then I try to change the rules a bit so that the option to abuse goes away. That is also based on my principle that an option to abuse means that the economical system/simulation is not fully logical. And I also don't want to have an option that the AI doesn't have. Sometimes, I restrict myself to not use an option, but usually I try to fix it with hard game rules.For the main infantry line, and to an extent for cavalry (you can't build any cavalry without horses up to a point, and then ). Heavy/light infantry simply doesn't have units that don't require resources, so if you don't have resources, you can't build those at all. I guess one could fall back to pre-gunpowder light/heavy infantry by resource manipulation, but the cost difference one would have is still around 2x max. Late-game mechanized units obviously require lots of different resources - no resources = no tanks, advanced planes or battleships (apparently WW1-era bombers don't require fuel, as I just saw, so that will be fixed
Come to think of it, no-resource technicals and small transport / coast guard boats could be added too...
It's already a mix of both. Many resources are production modifiers for units, not binary restrictions (for instance, prime timber isn't strictly required for shipbuilding, just makes it much easier). Also, there are ways of circumventing a lack of certain resources (such as the synthetic oil plant for the lack of oil resource) or substituting them (bronze and iron are interchangeable for many uses). But then again, no amount of money would have allowed Aztecs or Incas to have cavalry without access to horses.
It would increase the upgrade costs. I guess everyone would have less gold lying around. Nothing would break catastrophically, at least nothing I can imagine. Overall tech progress might be a bit slower, as more commerce would be siphoned into gold instead of research globally.
I'd say that while it's fair for a certain situation, that's an overly narrow view. In my experience, a city in medieval era is more likely to hit a "hard cap" through
more of a growth restriction than in the medieval era, generally speaking! With monarchy and a religion (especially if coupled with traditional custom), is actually rather abundant in my experience, and your baths being the only available boost to outside of resource variety (harder to come by earlier on when wide expansion is generally more unfeasible), makes reaching that harder to do if being mindful of not exceeding , because preserving forests as one player-controlled means of dealing with this reduces farm acreage and consequently an abundance of 
at this stage of the game. considerations when planning core cities I intend to eventually become major centers, and often try to preserve 4-6 forests in these key cities' BFCs (knowing how much efficiency per farm will explode later on to feed the craftsmen at this time, and that clearing the land for farms will result in a low early/mid industrial ceiling when lost from and death from epidemics offsets what is gained by more farming), but then again my preferred playstyle is also one of limited growth and somewhat tall development through midgame, with a strong preference for late war, post-industrialization. That could be the reason that my cap tends to be lower in the medieval era, where several players seem to prefer wide conquest (and thus, plenty of bonuses to rake in the ); I just find that era to be typically much more favorable to the defender in warfare (with cavalry dominating the field and 
penalties for the attacker giving defending cavalry pride of place in choosing the field of battle), so, while I have butchered through longbow castle cities pre-gunpowder when really compelled to (and even then, you're going to need some kind of special doctrine or situationally-specific UU), it's definitely not something I aim for in medieval, and classical expansion to this scale is most often economically impossible due to the weak 
infrastructure that is available then.So yes, while your assessment holds for some situations, it is far from universal, as it hinges on the premise that
It was also not related to cost scaling. Just that hammers cost 2 gold a piece when upgrading and 4 gold a piece when cash rushing.
