[BNW] Abusing Piety production overflow

[vadalaz]

Piety opener doubles your production towards shrines and temples. One way to capitalize on this bonus is to micromanage building shrines and temples to get them almost finished, e.g. put 39 out of 40 hammers (standard speed) into a shrine, then lock all your production tiles and get a lot of hammer overflow for the next item in your build queue.

What's more interesting is that once a city hits 40 hammers per turn, you can sell your shrine, build it on the same turn and not lose any hammers since you get 40 overflow. In fact, you GAIN hammers if your city production is over 40 hammers. Let's say your city is at 60 hammers per turn. You sell the shrine, build it at 120 hpt and get 80 overflow towards whatever you actually want to build vs 60 hammers you'd get normally with one turn of production. You also get 10 gold from selling the shrine, and you don't even lose any faith because the game processes production first. You can do this every other turn, so it's a pretty good boost to your production and gold.

 

[Manpanzee]

I remember seeing a post once where someone claimed that Piety opener was actually the best social policy due to this trick. I'm not sure if it's quite that good, but for whatever reason it feels a bit too exploitative to me. Selling, building, and re-selling a building every turn definitely seems like something that would have gotten patched out if Firaxis had given BNW some more post-release patch attention. Of course, I have no problem abusing the AI for every drop of gold they have, so I'm not sure why this seems too far to me. I guess everyone's got a line.

 

[vadalaz]

I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure how powerful it is in-game, but on paper it doesn't seem game-breaking. It takes pretty long for expos to reach 40+ production, and by the time they do the game ends too quickly for this trick to matter. But let's assume you can do it in the capital for 50 turns and average 60 hammers per turn. You get 10 gold and 20 production per shrine, and you do it every other turn since you need to actually put the overflow hammers somewhere, because overflow hammers don't stack. This nets 250 gold and 500 production... One CS gold gift and a research lab worth of hammers. It's probably better than it sounds because of snowballing though.

One other application I can think of is to sell the shrines 2 turns before you reach an important tech (like Printing Press for LToP), put 39/40 hammers into the shrine next turn, then finally maximize overflow to shave 2 turns off the building/wonder/unit that gets unlocked with the tech. You don't necessarily win any production this way, since you could've been building something else for 2 turns, but some wonders and buildings and units are so good that it's probably worth considering doing this. You could probably even shave 1-2 turns off Apollo or SS parts in an Order SV like this.