All Civ 4 BTS buildings ranked and explained - Henrik

[pigswill]

Regarding markets its also a consideration that in the late game fur, ivory and whale all become obsolete (combustion, indus, plastics) so they only give +1 happy for wine.

 

[sampsa]

Also, I've been baffled at the Monument tier position.

Well, it's not like it's a great building and has a very short window, but on the instances you (need to) build it, it is very useful. It's relatively high on my list even if I build 1 monument per game on average, because many other buildings make no real impact in the game.

 

[Fippy]

CHA monuments i would prolly even rate A tier.

 

[6K Man]

Dang that seems like a high maintenance threshold for a courthouse

About 12. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Building wealth can be more efficient a lot of the time. And there are always other factors like whipping off unhappy people into a courthouse, Organized trait, map size and number of cities. And if you're playing with Corporations, Courthouses are more or less mandatory IMO.

 

[mycophobia]

The wording in the posts you refer to may have lacked in precision.
The answer is : no. If you're building whatever, including wealth/science/culture, only hammer multipliers are taken into account (and wealth does not count as Buildings for Org Rel bonuses .)

I'm talking about Vanilla. Like, Vanilla Vanilla, no expansions. It seems to me like it does just add half your base hammers to your base wealth/science/culture as if you were pulling it from commerce yield, after which market/library/whatever bonuses apply, forges and stuff don't affect it.

 

[sampsa]

Maybe it would not be a horrible way to balance the game to cut build wealth/research to 50% and do the same to fail gold. However, it not only makes buildings somewhat better, but also makes things like rivers, cottages, FIN way better.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Failgold : should not exist.
For National Wonders, plan better.
For World Wonders, spy better. Maybe add a "failed wonder" building to the city? +3 unhappiness, 1 free engineer specialist.

Build wealth/research/culture (why can't you build espionnage by the way?): this is one of the limitations of the "build queue" design. Your city must build something, all the time, and at some point you simply run out of useful stuff to build. Replacing the "build queue" design should probably have been one of the things the designers of CivNext should have focussed on.
Good old MOO "reserve building" was a nice idea, but here it would just postpone the issue: at some point, all of your cities run out of useful stuff yo build, so back to square one... Still would probably be the best alternative to wealth/research.

 

[Fippy]

High level play (i can only speak for deity) would be so so boring without failgold.
"spy better" is no option, at all. You can never put enuf espio into AIs to know who builds which wonder.

This would only result in 2 traits getting even stronger: PHI & FIN
(cos they are reliable big boosts)
..and IND being pretty bad.

And someone might get lucky with getting a wonder, while another player (on a map used for friendly competition etc) has an AI randomly start that wonder much earlier..
and gets nothing.

Failgold perfectly balances "more cities, more cottages, more bulbs" vs trying something like Pyras.
Teching masonry & settling a bad long-term city with stone.
We wouldn't try that anymore if we can be left very empty-handed.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Sorry for the confusion, by "spy" I don't mean using the espionnage system.
I mean stuff we're already doing: do they have a good coastal production city (ie, can I delay the GLH)? Do they have Nationalism + Marble? That kind of stuff... Plus why not a spy unit in their city building the wonder in case of an actual race.

Failgold is an example of a complete design failure: it was meant to answer the complaint of people who felt frustrated being left empty-handed after a failed wonder race.
... and it turned into a core system exploited for high level strategies, supplanting what was meant to be the core system. Intentionnally failing wonders is not how you're supposed to keep your economy afloat.
I suppose you could turn this around and call it a great design success: players have found an unintended way to use the system to develop new strategies and take the game further.

But I know my remark was kinda off-topic.
Sampsa was talking about tweaking the actual system, I'm talking about changing it. So... not the same subject, really.

This would only result in 2 traits getting even stronger: PHI & FIN
(cos they are reliable big boosts)
..and IND being pretty bad.

That's with the current system.
Industrious could be changed to adapt along. Make industrious the only way to get failgold, make building a wonder provide GE points when industrious, etc...

 

[antimony]

I think it's great that WastinTime's legendary BC space game was possible with clever usage of the game's more quirky rules, and left such a strong impression on people, but you cannot take that particular strategy out of the context. The context was a HoF start using the absolutely unbalanced quechua rush on marathon speed. Failgold is not the unbalanced part of this.

 

[Fippy]

Imo failgold isn't a core system.
(antimony just posted something too )

Even if i get ~1k for failgolding let's say Moai,
it's still "only" like a Great Merchant mission.

I see failgold as another "clever option" but it's rarely part of a main strategy.
There's only 1 tech line where it can really shine: Aest & Literature.
In Isolation that can be really good. Or you might wait forever until somebody builds Parthenon etc. and your finally arrives..
which is fun

 

[Thrasybulos]

We're basically talking past each other.

My bad, shouldn't have gone off on a tangent. Let's not hijack this any further.

 

[Fippy]

No worries..any activity is good here

 

[civac]

The failgold system is a great way to alleviate the issues with losing wonder races. (In older games you could switch from one world wonder to another without cost. Failgold is better by a lot.)

Now national wonders are a different matter. The argument they should not grant fail gold is much stronger for them. It's also quite reasonable to demand a world wonder can only generate failgold in one city.

 

[6K Man]

Failgold is an example of a complete design failure: it was meant to answer the complaint of people who felt frustrated being left empty-handed after a failed wonder race.

The failgold system is a great way to alleviate the issues with losing wonder races. (In older games you could switch from one world wonder to another without cost. Failgold is better by a lot.)

Do we actually know these things, though?

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Dang that seems like a high maintenance threshold for a courthouse

Courthouses are mostly for colonial maintenance.

///

There are technologies that improve the base yield of tile improvements. For example, guilds increases the production yield of workshops. Biology increases the food yield of farms.

One option is to "build wealth" or "build research" to reach those technologies sooner.

The payoff period for city improvements have to be short enough to help you reach those technologies sooner.

 

[mycophobia]

Maybe it would not be a horrible way to balance the game to cut build wealth/research to 50% and do the same to fail gold. However, it not only makes buildings somewhat better, but also makes things like rivers, cottages, FIN way better.

I feel like the more significant component of the difference in building wealth/research/culture in Vanilla is that the wealth/research/culture bonuses apply to the base hammers instead of the production bonus of forges, etc. Likely that shakes out to mean you'd run research more than wealth since you're more likely to have a library than a market but it probably makes the lesser built buildings at least a little more attractive, wouldn't it? Observatories, universities, etc

 

[prloko]

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.

But that's only because people choose to play running science high. I can run long periods of expansion because of markets. Again, the hammer argument is a red herring, because library's while 60% of the hammers of a market, are Super expensive when considering the era you build them. If you only build libraries when you have access to build markets, it's a different story, but most people build them early at the cost of hammers when they are not as abundant without chopping trees.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Do we actually know these things, though?

No, we don't.
I never had a private chat with Soren where he told me that, and while it may have been publicly stated by the team, I don't remember it and neither am I going to scour the web for a trace of that.

But Occam's razor.
I do remember many people expressing frustration at failed wonder races, and Failgold was introduced in Civ4.
Seems a tad more likely that it was designed for that purpose, than "hey let's make most Wonders a waste of hammers, but deliberately failing to build them a nice alternative to building Wealth, because of course most of the building options we're putting into the game are just newbie traps."

Soren's good, but not psychic-level good. I doubt the current meta is something that was planned all along.

But you're right, I don't know that.

 

[mycophobia]

I think we can safely say we do indeed know that fail gold was intended to compensate for failing to build a wonder, to make it jive with Civ 4's new system of retaining hammers on individual builds and not allowing the player to transfer them to other builds. I don't think we need strong justification for this assertion lol. The design of it allowing for exploitation just slipped past the otherwise apparently very thorough testing.

On a slightly related topic I read some old Sullla posts on RB that related that Slavery was originally basically useless and only took on its current form very late in the development cycle, which could explain why it's so dominating; not enough time to mess around with it. It was intended to get some early game production potential out of high-food low-hammer cities so you don't spend 45 turns building a library or whatever, and for emergency purposes of course, but in buffing it to those ends so last-minute it ended up being the most significant part of the "meta". You can't catch everything.