All Civ 4 BTS buildings ranked and explained - Henrik

[sampsa]

I generally don't build W/S/C a lot or run the sliders at 100% because it just seems like extremely unhistorical and gimmicky.

Such statements never made any sense to me. What about the million other things in a turn-based strategy game that make no sense? Losing your armies to animals, them taking hundreds of years to be produced, hundreds of years to move and so on, even on the beloved marathon setting. It's not a history simulation, no more than chess is a war simulation. Why is building wealth or science unhistorical? An empire can put it's efforts into making more moneys, neh?

You didn't answer to

Some of it just doesn't interest me, so mechanical

What does this mean? Give an example of something that you consider mechanical and something you don't consider mechanical.

 

[antimony]

Getting back to buildings. If you aren't sure when or if you can fight a war because of self-limiting rules like I use, then buildings are going to be built even if you aren't going culture.

Building a cathedral is very expensive (especially if you don't have the needed temples already) and then it provides a 50% bonus to city culture. That said, if the city is not outputting a lot of culture, then it's 50% of not much; and if it is, then how is it losing a culture border fight? Outside of a culture victory, usually you need culture "up to a point" after which it gives no further benefits. And once you pass a culture threshold, your city starts producing 20 more culture per tile in the inner rings which mean you're likely to hold on to them. That thread explains this: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/whether-to-build-monuments.685686/page-2. Very important is that the city that reaches its culture treshold faster is advantaged in culture fights due to that hidden +20 per tile in the inner rings.

In most cases you don't need more than 10 or 100 culture (normal speed, scale accordingly for marathon), and then further culture doesn't help it work more tiles, so it's better to run temporary things that get to that culture (build culture, or run artist specialists) as fast as possible, than buildings that would give more culture but slower.

I generally don't build W/S/C a lot or run the sliders at 100% because it just seems like extremely unhistorical and gimmicky.

If you refuse to build wealth/research/culture, then it is a trivial statement that you would build more buildings, since the only other option is units, and those would be a drain on your economy if overbuilt. It is also removing an interesting strategic decision from the game (e.g. are you better off building research now or building a university for more research in the long run?), although a similar strategic choice still exists with regards to specialists if you have a city with lots of food (e.g. run scientists or whip a university, losing those specialists for a couple turns?)

As for the historical aspect, there are still tech prerequisites to build wealth/research/culture. Conceptually you can imagine these are temporary initiatives the city takes, vs. permanent large-scale infrastructure that the buildings represent.

 

[antimony]

Another thing: I think a lot of people on this forum (me definitely included) enjoy the micromanagement aspect of the game and trying to get efficiencies on things like: worker actions, production overflow, putting the slider at 0% after writing to get the maximum benefit when the libraries are built and give +25% science, etc. But even if you're not willing to do that level of micromanagement, the more "macro" strategy discussion should still be relevant.

I mean the "building wealth to keep research slider at 100%" is gimmicky and a quirk in how the game works, but it's not a huge difference over building research if you have a good economy already. Begging the AI for 1 gold to get 10 turns of peace is gimmicky, but it's not really something you "need" to do unless you're playing deity.

 

[Core Imposter]

Such statements never made any sense to me. What about the million other things in a turn-based strategy game that make no sense? Losing your armies to animals, them taking hundreds of years to be produced, hundreds of years to move and so on, even on the beloved marathon setting. It's not a history simulation, no more than chess is a war simulation. Why is building wealth or science unhistorical? An empire can put it's efforts into making more moneys, neh?

You didn't answer to: What does this mean? Give an example of something that you consider mechanical and something you don't consider mechanical.

I feel like I am being cross examined.

 

[Core Imposter]

When I play competitively, I am precise. When I play for relaxation, I do not want precision to dispel immersion. I am not in the rover rush business anymore.

‘Abort, Retry, Fail?’ was the phrase some wormdog scrawled
next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when
the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds
on the huge organic comp systems, we’d remind them: if you see
this message, always choose ‘Retry.’

 

[Core Imposter]

 

[Core Imposter]

There antimony, can you see what I do to the inner ring?

 

[sampsa]

I feel like I am being cross examined.

Then maybe you should consider stopping saying things you cannot back up or even explain. Now I have no idea what you meant by unhistorical, gimmicky or mechanical. Maybe they were key words you just heard some bozo say and was just parroting them. I'll leave you alone, np.

 

[Fippy]

Looks like that didn't go well..
meta vs "casual" rarely does.

 

[antimony]

When I play competitively, I am precise. When I play for relaxation, I do not want precision to dispel immersion. I am not in the rover rush business anymore.

‘Abort, Retry, Fail?’ was the phrase some wormdog scrawled
next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when
the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds
on the huge organic comp systems, we’d remind them: if you see
this message, always choose ‘Retry.’

Maybe it's worth retracing your messages in this thread. First you claimed this list was based on military victories and that you would build a lot more when not going for domination or conquest, or limited war. Now at the end it turns out your evaluation is based on a highly specific set of rules, aesthetic preferences (not building wealth) and some domestic diplomacy that you are imagining, which again, it's great to RP, but your whole exercise in this thread feels like a bait and switch. Also, advice based on your highly specific and personal rules is even less general and applicable to other players than advice based on meta strategies or default settings in the game

 

[ArchGhost]

I dont understand why people hate on markets so much.

high hammer cost, the happiness is too conditional and not really needed -- immediately or later on in hammer economy -- especially for 150h for typically 1-2 happy faces, doesn't work on build wealth, increase to yield is dependent on the slider setting, merchant slots mean nothing with access to Caste, and so on.

biggest hit to them is just nothing they add is really a priority from the market itself being the source at the stage of the game it comes around. HR covers happiness in a pinch at as little as 15h per happy face. Caste is just around the corner for Merchants, if you want them, or something like the GLH may have already gotten you one on some maps. Again, they don't work with Build Wealth which is unlocked by the same tech. The effect the market even has is diminished by running your slider at anything other than 0%, at a point where you are finally likely to stop practicing binary research for the first time. They aren't cheapened by anything like CRE and they come later for greater price with a worse GP slot compared to libraries.

And then later on (hammer economy/factories) the happiness they add is worth even less while the health on something like a Grocer, Harbor, or even the lowly Aqueduct is more attractive than the 150h Market. Barracks in Nationalism is a better deal for additional happiness and pairs with the low-cost civics train (Nationhood+Caste+SP+Pacifism) or as part of a drafting campaign even before hammer economy. And the hammer boosters (forge, factory, power, State Property) have you covered when your mature cities build wealth.

I rarely build them at all, and even then only in space or modern war games where I let the cities idle and build infrastructure for awhile after all the hammer boosters are in place and I'm prepping for the push to Tanks or space techs after.

how cheap would a market have to become in order to transform it into a usually-good building that you'd want to whip/chop in most commerce cities? if it cost 90 like libs would you build it? or would it have to be cheaper?

90h would be okay, but it still wouldn't be competitive with Library unless it still had something more....like a basic +1 happy, or some small amount of static gold generation without the food cost of running a specialist. Libraries are so good precisely because of the access to Scientist specialists, which produce MUCH more valuable GPPs than merchants and even their raw beakers are stronger than the same amount of raw gold that early...and because they come even earlier at Writing on top of that.

 

[prloko]

"... The effect the market even has is diminished by running your slider at anything other than 0%, at a point where you are finally likely to stop practicing binary..."

While I get when people say 0% or binary, there really is no such thing in mechanics and this I believe is the biggest confusion in understanding the mechanics that prevent players from becoming good. And once this understanding kicked in for me, helped me to grow suer fast on difficultly levels. Because their is eventually four choices in BTS ( not binary), there really isn't three sliders. It's really not science slider, etc, but three allocations(four in actuality) of the "currency" slider. This seems like a "well of course" kind of comment, but it's not so obvious to casual players. There is no 0% , but what is meant is 0 beaker/0 espionage/0 culture/100% gold. You don't have to put markets in every city, just your currency powerhouses. When you run 100% gold you are adding that extra gold, and when you run 100% beaker, you can run large deficits and the extra gold makes extra breakers you wouldn't have had without the markets. The 150 hammer vs 90 for market vs library is a red herring argument. Libriaries come in the early game and are quite expensive for when they come available where city maturity is low and your chopping a few trees to build.markets come when you have a few financial cities where 150 hammers aren't that expensive. I can whip two trebuchets in another sacrifice city if I need units. I'm not saying that what everyone does is wrong because you prove not building markets works, what I'm saying is building a few markets where appropriate rather than willy nilly imposing a personal ban, works for me.

 

[antimony]

It's not about binary vs. non binary research, but about what your average slider gold rate is over many turns. If on average you run 25% gold and 75% science on the slider, then the library's bonus applies 3 times as often as the market's as long as we're considering the sources of commerce (rather than sources of raw gold like a shrine). So for example, on a city with 48 base commerce, library bonus science is 9 and market bonus gold is only 3 per turn, and market is 5/3 the cost of lib, so library starts generating a profit in 1/5 the time than market does. This is quite a difference and gets worse if you maintain a higher average slider rate.

But also to reply to the person above saying merchants are worse than scientists, this is not always the case. If you have libraries in all important commerce cities, 1000 gold from a trade mission is worth about 1500 final beakers of research, because it gets multiplied by 1.25 by the libraries and then the beakers applied to the tech are most often 1.2x the beakers generated by the slider because of the prereq bonus. BUT the payoff is long term whereas the GS bulb is immediate, and that's more important at high difficulties when you can gain a momentum advantage, trade a good tech, etc.

 

[mycophobia]

This makes me wonder if that's why they set wealth/research/culture to 50% hammers initially, in Vanilla. To make it more attractive to build stuff like markets instead of throwing half your hammers away

 

[elmurcis]

Some middle ground might have been where they kept 50% "base" efficiency but giving Market/Bank +25% each for Wealth "efficiency" on top.

 

[antimony]

That's almost how it was on Vanilla. 50% hammer conversion, but then all science / gold / culture modifiers apply, instead of production modifiers applying in warlords or BtS.

 

[mycophobia]

I didn't know about getting the commerce bonuses on those builds instead of hammer bonuses. That would seem to suggest building a market is kind of a prerequisite to building wealth in Vanilla?

 

[Luke1195]

I just figured out you can list the buildings by number built in the Statistics screen... in my current game, I've built Libraries and Barracks the most, so I'd put them in S tier.

 

[6K Man]

Granary - every city, or virtually every city
Forge - almost all cities
Lighthouse - where 2 or more lakes/seafood exist
Courthouses - any city with more than about 12 maintenance
Levee where more than 5 rivered tiles
Barracks in most production cities
1-4 Stables

Limited everything else.

 

[mycophobia]

Dang that seems like a high maintenance threshold for a courthouse