A Few "Not To" for Building Addicts.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Medieval Era

Banks

50% boost to wealth (reminder: not commerce). Also a pre-requisite for Wall Street.

If you've got a shrine in a city, a bank will likely be a good investment. Beyond that, the use of banks is going to depend a whole lot on how you arrange your economy as a whole.

If you are trying to run with the science slider maxed out, then commerce driven banks become less and less useful. In addition, there are a lot of revenue sources that the bank can't help you with (trades, pillaging, trade missions).

On the other hand, if you are running with the science slider disabled, then banks are a lovely present. This is also true in a city running merchant specialists.

As a rule, though - my own style of play makes it difficult to find useful places to build the last three banks I need for Wall Street.

Castles

Lovely defense, except against gun powder units which are right around the corner. And a culture point! So that leaves an extra trade route as the sole upside - and that bit goes away when you hit economics.

If I've got stone, I might build one in my big traderoute city (coastal, high pop, Temple of Artemis), but I'm not taking it very seriously - it still requires walls, which are basically worthless.

Cathedrals

+2 happy for state religion, +1 for incense, and a couple priest slots. Each of the religions has its own doubler, to reduce the construction cost.

The fact that there's a quota of temples required to build these makes them self throttling. One or two get dropped into your largest cities to goose the happy, and then you are done with them.

Two important special cases to consider: if you are farminng Great Prophets, the two slots are going to be valuble.

If you are playing for a cultural victory, cathedrals are huge, because of the 50% boost to base culture. In a cultural game, you'll typically build one for each religion in each of your legendary cities, if you can arrange it.

Grocer

25% wealth boost, two merchant slots, and a health multiplier for all of the luxury foods (bananas, spice, sugar, wines). Pre-requisite for a supermarket.

You can, generally, go a long while without health being an issue, so Grocers aren't as urgent as Markets; not by a long shot. Again, a few in your largest cities, especially those which are land locked, and then let it go.

There ought to be some sensible guideline for how much gold per turn justifies building one of these things, but I don't have a good number to offer.

 

[svv]

Also on Cathedrals, they provide a big culture boost, so they are helpful on border cities where you are trying to take over your neighbor's cities by culture, or are at least trying to defend your city's fat cross by having enough culture.

 

[cabert]

VoU
I totally agree with most of your opinions about buildings.
Just 2 differences:
- monasteries are cheaper than theatres, so they make the best "just conquered" build IMHO. It's usually the first thing I build in a border city (missionaries follow my army ).
- markets (same for grocers) may not be paying for themselves on a "regular" basis, but they may save you life in a few situations. Those situations are what futurehermit outlines in his signature : "land is power". They only get build in core cities, and they may not give a single gold coin on 90% of the turns. But when you switch to 100% gold for a few turns, they give you the power .
What am I talking about? I'm talking about 3 moments :
1) - massive military upkeep + large expenses from expansion
2) - selective upgrading (CR3 grenadiers are the most famous abusive form of upgrade)
3) - Universal Suffrage powered army.

1) I generally can't whip courthouses in newly conquered cities fast enough to prevent the bleeding. But I can build/whip the markets in my core cities beforehand
2) I'm not a big army fan. I like stacks of 10 or so units. So I need good units. This is done by a few 100% gold turns. 50% less with markets and grocers in my best commerce cities. I don't include banks there because I often don't have banking when i need this gold
3) This may come late, so happiness and health may already be issues, but with pyramids, it may come a lot earlier. I have an example but cannot give it out yet (GotM rules). catapults, maces and even cavalries are cheap to $rush . A few (or if going for the win, not so few) turns of 100% gold will give you an army. A 50% bigger army with markets and grocers.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

- monasteries are cheaper than theatres

Interesting: my copy of Civ4BuildingInfos.xml says Theatre.iCost = 50, Monastery.iCost 60. Did you mean to suggest that they are a better bargain?

If that approach is more fun for you, go for it. When I'm going a conquering, I normally find that I'm building axes at 35 or disposapults at 40 rather than missionaries. Maybe I need to learn to fight smarter.

Meditation comes before Drama more often than not, but if you are warring pre-theatre is cultural blowback really so critical? And of course monasteries do nothing to address home sickness and war wearies. Horses for courses.

markets (same for grocers) may not be paying for themselves on a "regular" basis, but they may save you life in a few situations.

Yeah, they may. Then again, they may not, and are you sure the payoff is there?

Example. Let's suppose that the cities which have the 50% boost generate 80% of your commerce. This means that, when you direct your commerce to gold, you are getting a 40% boost, overall. In other words, you've reduced the delay in your research from 14 turns to 10.

How many turns per game do you turn off research like this, after the multipliers are in place?

There must be a decent way to convert the hammer cost into gold that is reasonable (buyrushing is 3x, building wealth with a forge is 1.25x, hiring a merchant is a 3g/2p alternative to hiring an engineer, and of course the costs are totally messed up if you whip the buildings in question, since you can't whip the equivalent in wealth.

Binary Science, I think I should have addressed, though.

 

[cabert]

^^
binary science is useless in warlords (except for those who like to have money lying in the coffins. I don't), and I never was convinved even in vanilla that it was worth the effort.

strange, that I always saw monasteries as cheaper.
Must lack sleep on a regular basis
I often whip both theatre and monastery on the first turn after revolt (i don't like people dying unhappy, better to die for my culture ) and really had the impression that it was easier to whip the monastery.
It's probably because I put the monastery on the queue before the revolt ends...
Nice catch anyway I'll edit it out of my previous post.

About the 100% gold turns, it's very game dependant.
In domination run, it may be 1/3 of the game...divided in the 3 moments I mentioned earlier.
I know that there are other ways out of the money hole like building more workers = building cottages faster, but I favour the use of gold/gem/ silver mines in the begining. I get a better result (IMHO, no hard numbers here) with a size 4 city working 2 food resources and 2 "specials" like gems and a market, than with a size 6 city working the same + 2 cottages. The happiness bonus is making the difference for me.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I know that there are other ways out of the money hole like building more workers = building cottages faster, but I favour the use of gold/gem/ silver mines in the begining. I get a better result (IMHO, no hard numbers here) with a size 4 city working 2 food resources and 2 "specials" like gems and a market, than with a size 6 city working the same + 2 cottages. The happiness bonus is making the difference for me.

Last night's bad beat story: I'm trying to get in shape for Epic 12, having taken most of the summer off because my openings in epic play have, to put it as delicately as possible, sucked. So for the holiday weekend I dropped Warlords in, decided to fire up a Fractal Map, and went to work.

The random leaderator gives me Cyrus to play with, so I dutifully fire up a second scout, and start running around. Whaddaya know, an isolated start is revealed quickly enough, so I zoom out a bit and start mentally dotmapping. But something seems to be missing....

It finally hits me: luxury resources. I've got one silver mine up in the tundra, and whales (joy) just north of a desert peninsula (both with seafood, but only one each, of course).

Immortals are really sweet for this situation: 100% versus axes, 50% versus archers, a sentry promotion not too far away, and enough movement to back each other up while spreading out quite thin.

I didn't connect the iron and copper (Coppertino == another complete crap location) for 5000 years.

In 1150 or thereabouts the caravels start appearing; I grab Astronomy, upgrade to galleyons, and set out around the world. Who do I find almost at my doorstep? Saladin the Yorkshireman:

Silver in the tundra? You were lucky! We used to dream of silver in the tundra. All we got are these whales, and we won't get to optics until you shake us down for 50 gold a few hundred years from now.​

 

[lilnev]

^^
I often whip both theatre and monastery on the first turn after revolt (i don't like people dying unhappy, better to die for my culture ) and really had the impression that it was easier to whip the monastery.
It's probably because I put the monastery on the queue before the revolt ends...

The turn you come out of revolt, the city loses a size and adds hammers to whatever's at the top of the build queue. Often that's just one hammer (from the city tile) because all your citizens are unhappy, but having one hammer invested means you get full value for whipping it. Anything you whip with zero hammers invested costs 50% more (1 pop = 20 hammers instead of 30). Therefore, if you're going to whip multiple things in a single turn, you should have the most expensive one at the top of the queue. Note that you can rearrange them after whipping, so it doesn't have to be the first one actually built.

peace,
lilnev