All Civ 4 BTS buildings ranked and explained - Henrik

[Lennier]

The problems with a citadel are that they require you to build walls and they either obsolete quickly or you have to delay free market/economics and forgo their benefits to get extra CR3 siege instead of CR2 siege.

 

[sampsa]

Free market will not get you more cities.

 

[antimony]

Sure but with Barracks + a XP civic you get CR2 out of the gate. Citadels are quite expensive at 100 hammer cost. If no Stone, I honestly may not build it in many cities.

Not a bad building. If C tier is average, it definitely adds something so it's B tier. However OP said it's S tier and I don't see that at all.

It's a bit worse than 100 hammers because you also need the walls, which you wouldn't build otherwise (so 150 total). But if you have stone (which is not that uncommon, and it's cheaper to trade for than horses or iron for example) it's 75 production total for the benefits of 5 XP to siege, 1 trade route (always good and will help keep up with war costs), and marginal benefits to culture and espionage that won't amount to much most games, but it's there. I don't think is S (because in many Spain games you may not use it) but definitely A.

To put it another way, standard Castles (and Notre Dame) are not a bad investment if you have stone, they just come at a wrong point in the tech tree because if you tech Engi you're going to war and not buiding your empire. Citadel fixes that mismatch by giving a massive benefit to exactly the units you teched Engi for.

 

[antimony]

Also the UB tier list is a bit strange because some of those buildings end up in lower tiers than the standard version of the building even if they are a strict upgrade, so presumably the two tier lists are not meant to be compared to each other. Even then there is no way I would rate Madrassa under Hammam unless the metric is "how much an improvement they are over the standard version".

 

[dankok8]

It's a bit worse than 100 hammers because you also need the walls, which you wouldn't build otherwise (so 150 total). But if you have stone (which is not that uncommon, and it's cheaper to trade for than horses or iron for example) it's 75 production total for the benefits of 5 XP to siege, 1 trade route (always good and will help keep up with war costs), and marginal benefits to culture and espionage that won't amount to much most games, but it's there. I don't think is S (because in many Spain games you may not use it) but definitely A.

To put it another way, standard Castles (and Notre Dame) are not a bad investment if you have stone, they just come at a wrong point in the tech tree because if you tech Engi you're going to war and not buiding your empire. Citadel fixes that mismatch by giving a massive benefit to exactly the units you teched Engi for.

Good point on requiring Walls as well which I forgot to mention. Yea it's a big hammer investment.

Massive benefit I think is stretching it. It's one extra promotion (CR3) that you get out of the gate that you couldn't otherwise. The way I see it, for 150 hammers you spent on Walls/Castle you can build almost 2 extra Trebs. Even with one fewer promotion, I'm not sure getting the Citadel first is worth it that often. It probably is in your capital and maybe one more good production city because those cities will build a lot of units. With Stone the tradeoff gets better for sure. Or if playing unrestricted leader as Pro.

 

[sampsa]

The way I see it, for 150 hammers you spent on Walls/Castle you can build almost 2 extra Trebs.

This. It's so easy to overvalue xp. It depends what kind of war you are fighting.

 

[drewisfat]

You'd see more potential in castles if you were open to espionage, which actually works best with engineering attacks.
I wouldn't consider it without stone/pro but that's fairly common and means you shouldn't really assume full price for walls/castles.

Only reason I don't think citadel is the best UB is it's on the worst possible leader for it, akin to Qs with Huayna.

 

[sampsa]

You'd see more potential in castles if you were open to espionage, which actually works best with engineering attacks.

An espionage tutorial/guide would be good content for your YouTube-channel!