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Amazingly bad buildings?

my latest strategy is pretty simple...

horizontal growth to get strat resources (iron is absolutely critical since you will own the world with iron based units practically to modern age - longswords are THAT good), take nearest 1 CS (best for some maritime city as quest) + 1 nearest AI.
Stabilize happiness.
Take the rest of my continent.
Backfill to navigation. Find other continent. Own the rest.

Always just take some more, stabilize happy (courthouses, razing etc), take more, etc. etc. etc.

Today just finished such domination game with Ghandi...pulsing between +50 happiness - -14 hapiness in matter of turns ;-), but was fun.

Tomorrow I will try first serious attempt at King...
 
I like the system how it is because IMO it's good to have some "specialist" buildings that are more appropriate for particular goals/strats/situations rather than having the Civ IV-esque build every single building in every single city and get away with it approach. The system as is kind of encourages city specialization or supports specifics.

All production is kind of on the slow side, so it's not like the buildings you listed are anomolies in that regard.

Most of the buildings you list are useful depending on your strat or maybe even your city specialization.

Stable, castle, military base - I agree, not much point in ever building them.

Universities are worth it. Anything beyond that varies with your goals.

The others are handy depending on your goal or even city specializations.

Granary, watermill, windmill, and even workshop I rarely build anywhere except production cities (wonder or military).

The heavy culture buildings I rarely build at all unless I'm going cultural.

The heavy happy buildings I try to avoid building at all (theater, stadium) - too much maint.

Hospital/Medical Lab - only ever built hospital going for space race with a smallish high pop empire. Probably could for small cultural empires too if you can afford them.

Let me throw the courthouse in there. Takes forever to build, very high maintenance cost

It's sort of a conquest tax. Generally speaking, people don't enjoy being conquered. I'm sure you can find examples all over the world where people still resent what others did to their ancesters hundreds of years ago. You're paying to keep that resentment under control.

I do agree on most of these points though. I'm curious how the game would play without building any buildings but commerce..

There's a thread on it in the strategy forums (cash empire ignoring happiness).

I tend to specialize my cities - extent varies with empire size. A lot of cities just end up as generic economy cities that get monument, temple, library, university, and all the cash booster buildings - and rarely much more.
 
There is no reason to build a granary until you have every single CS on the map on your side. It gives a vastly better rate of return.

Favor costs 250 gold for 25, that's 10 gold for 1 turn of +1 food. Until you have 9 cities (capital gets 2 food so it is better conversion) the granary is more efficient on a cost per turn scale, though you must pay the hammers for it.

I think the real problem the game has is lack of early game production bonus'. It just doesn't feel like you can build things until you get the bottom half of the tech tree worked on. Communism also helps a lot :).
 
Is it really that bad to have cultural buildings that are only really useful if you want culture? Not everyone wins via domination you know...
 
Favor costs 250 gold for 25, that's 10 gold for 1 turn of +1 food. Until you have 9 cities (capital gets 2 food so it is better conversion) the granary is more efficient on a cost per turn scale, though you must pay the hammers for it.

That's leaving some things out.

1) You're not going to hang out at friendly, you'll hang out at allied. Once you've made the investment you'll get twice the food forever.

2) Once you reach the renaissance (which is really quick if you build the Great Library or make a Great Scientist you get an ADDITIONAL +1 food in all cities.

3) Patronage.
 
I like the system how it is because IMO it's good to have some "specialist" buildings that are more appropriate for particular goals/strats/situations rather than having the Civ IV-esque build every single building in every single city and get away with it approach. The system as is kind of encourages city specialization or supports specifics.

this is not true, since in CIV beginning at Monarch you had to really specialize your cities to get best results (or even manage to pull through).
The thing is...if you wanted to have every building in every city in CIV you probably could... and it was matter of your optimization to not have it.
In this edition of civilization there is not such choice. You certainly won't have enough hammers+gold to have everything everywhere so you're forced from beginning to build only few buildings.
 
Hospital/Medical Lab - only ever built hospital going for space race with a smallish high pop empire. Probably could for small cultural empires too if you can afford them.
Since the yield of all trade routes is dependant on the size of your capital, I think you should always build these there. Also get the social policy from tradition that gives your capital extra growth if you can afford it.
 
[*]Granary, Watermill
Large :hammers:, :commerce:/turn cost (with no leader traits to speed production), maritime city-states, slower population growth overall in V.

I once had a game in which there was only one maritime C-S, and it was on a different continent from my start position. In that case, these buildings were useful.

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[*]Castle, Military Base
Same :hammers:, :commerce:/turn as an average unit, yet low damage, cannot move, promote, create great generals, or be disbanded. A single city with all defensive buildings costs 1125:hammers: (more than the Taj Mahal) and 10:commerce:/turn. Might be useful if-when combat AI is improved.

I've built Castle on a high-difficulty level small-empire Cultural game. I don't see Military Base as ever being useful, but there are times when a bit of extra defense is nice.

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[*]University, Public School, Research Lab
Trade :commerce:/turn for :science:/turn

Trade small amount of :commerce:/turn for large amount of :science:/turn. Definitely.

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[*]Museum, Opera House, Broadcast Tower
Huge :commerce:/turn costs for anything but a cultural victory. Great artists less useful.

Meh. By the time you get to them, you have plenty of commerce. I wouldn't build them unless I was planning on going all the way to Broadcast Tower, but if you want late-game SPs, there really isn't any other option.

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[*]Windmill
Bonus so small and cost so high the break-even point is 1800:hammers:, 70 turns for even a highly-productive city in the era these become available. Meanwhile, you delayed production and are incurring maintenance.

Buy them and use them for wonders. And as you've said elsewhere, gold is cheap compared to hammers. In a high production city, it can be a good investment of gold.

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[*]Hospital, Medical Lab
Steep :hammers: cost makes purchase the only option for small cities, where the benefit would last longest. Then you're also hit with a large :commerce:/turn cost. In big cities (20+) growth is so slow that by the time Hospitals/Labs become available, you can only gain perhaps 1-2 extra points of population before the game ends, while incurring a massive maintenance hit.

Never actually built them, so I can't say for sure, but yeah: that sounds about right.

Since the yield of all trade routes is dependant on the size of your capital, I think you should always build these there. Also get the social policy from tradition that gives your capital extra growth if you can afford it.

Oddly enough, it actually doesn't depend on capital size. Trade route income is roughly 1.25*(non-capital city size).
 
neheh, big ben as a world wonder... scraping the bottom of the barrel there aren't we.
Ooh! A 50" lcd! surely that is a world wonder!


Anyway, try only making 2-3. you can get them to crazy pop levels and all those buildings make a lot of sense them. You can get on par with much larger civs whos cities do not permit growth due to unhappiness and where all those buildings are indeed silly because of the relatively low pop-per-city that results.

Of course this is completely unrealistic on anything but a small archipelago because on any other you'd get slaughtered, because more pop doesn't really mean more production necessarily (no workshops/watermills. Gee thanks a lot for the hugely expensive building that gives me a percentage increase on hammers when there are so little hammers native in the game. TRADESPOTS FTW)
 
I've seen quite a few reactions here that I can sympathize with.

Building an empire and in particular caring for your cities is not much fun anymore. I rarely find myself caring about any of them. Not that they are in danger of being taken from me, since the AI is so terrible it hasn't captured a single city yet.

In CIV4 you just had to spend time and care on your cities otherwise your research and army would soon fall behind to the rest. I loved how your surroundings at the start of your empire gave you incentive to go for specific buildings or techs. If you had fur for example you'd know you want a market quicker for the extra happiness. Buildings had more than 1 purpose, or at least had a potential bonus to make them really useful. If you build a theater, you'd get happiness and culture. A university or library also added a bit of culture beside the research bonus. Also their specialists were needed and useful.

I don't understand why they had to simplify this and give almost artificial effects to each building with a random maintenance costs to boot.

I loved in CIV4 how your city would progress through time... get a market and a library and your city is really getting somewhere, in that specific time period. Later you get grocer and much later a supermarket showing your city has grown into a modern city with the bonuses along it.

In CIV5 more often than not you just don't build buildings because of the costs, the production time or just because military is that much more easy to build an empire with.

Also starting a city in late game is close to useless. You can't quickly get the city productive by 4 hammer per turn tiles, corporations, religion and other bonuses. In modern age you should be able to quickly get cities up and running, just like we do in the real world on a daily basis.
 
Let me throw the courthouse in there. Takes forever to build, very high maintenance cost. The fact that you have to deal with the unhappiness for a long time. The fact that its often better to raze your enemies cities and rebuild your own just seems silly due to this building.

I agree this needs a rush buy ability. There is nothing more annoying that waiting up to 50 turns (filled with unhappiness) for a city to finally become loyal.

Rat
 
Best thing about Civ is you don't have to wait for the development team to address concerns about the game. I've done some small mod adjustments in my signature. If you feel you'd like to try a few changes, give it a shot, and can easily adjust the settings further to your own personal preference.
 
in last games I usually build only this buildings:

monument, mint where available, market, bank, library, colosseum depending on needs.

This is exactly my build order, however I throw in some light houses as I find those to be great for huge cities on the coast for the hammers...

I also like special buildings like Iroquois longhouse because they always start near forest so you're bound to get a ton of hammers from your main / 1st expand...

I usually like to buy building that sound great but are not good to build... Things like market / banks I usually buy since they give return on investment instantly although you'll almost never break even... However the hammers you can put into other things make up for that...

For my current game, I actually had my hammer city up to about 40 hammers with Iroquois... With that speed, most buildings made sense, but since it's so hammer focused, it didn't even make sense to sink into sure wins like market because I can build a couple of units for the extra 1 gold I get / turn from making that thing...

So building all these high end hammer buildings was less painful...

Same with my money city... The hammers were so low that I have to buy the bank / mint because it was not working out hammers wise... So even if they are worth it, it depends on town...

Overall I agree with most, the cost / reward is out of whack... No building = better than in most cases with building...
 
well I use rush buy a lot, since my strategy is basically TP everywhere, take a lot cities and win domination.

And since you can rush buy 1 building only once in few rounds and I typically after 1K AD have over 10 cities I have to use slow build. The typical routine is conquered city - courthouse, market, library, bank (I admit i don't raze enough!), after first 3 buildings I usually switch focus to gold, workers typically convert all tiles to TP . With rush buying monument (it's 190 gold after -25% from commerce SP and BB).

Colosseums are rush buyed when I am not that great in hapiness (it's tough to find city which doesnt have colosseum yet btw).
 
this is not true, since in CIV beginning at Monarch you had to really specialize your cities to get best results (or even manage to pull through).
The thing is...if you wanted to have every building in every city in CIV you probably could... and it was matter of your optimization to not have it.
In this edition of civilization there is not such choice. You certainly won't have enough hammers+gold to have everything everywhere so you're forced from beginning to build only few buildings.

I have to say, IMHO that’s one of the most insightful comments posted on this forum to date :)...and, IMHO, epitomises one of the key differences between Civ 4 and Civ 5.

In Civ 4, the combination of greater (especially early) hammer availability, lower hammer build costs and slavery (which enabled you to convert food to hammers) provided the means for you to construct a very large number of buildings in, or infrastructure for, your cities, if you wished. Moreover, a comparison of the hammer build costs versus the benefits provided by each building gave you a significant incentive to construct each building.

However, one of the pieces of genius in Civ 4 IMHO was that this attraction was a double edged sword. If you spent your time constructing buildings and neglected your military for instance, you’d end up getting DoW’d and seeing your empire crippled, if not being completely killed, by an AI who’d invested their hammers in military units instead. It’s why the difference between the good Civ 4 gamers and the great Civ 4 gamers (and I certainly wasn't in the latter category :lol:) was simply this: their ability to make the right decision to build the right thing (whether that be a building or a military unit) at the right time. To those who don’t believe me, take a look at the Civ 4 forum...and you’ll find that it’s littered with games in which people have built a whole host of wonders and / or other buildings, only to lose them all to an AI who DoW’d them because that gamer had built no military to speak of. They decided to build the wrong thing at the wrong time...and paid the price. The best gamers found a balance between constructing military units and buildings that saw them defeat such AI - and go on to win the game.

By way of contrast, the lack of (especially early) hammer availability, higher hammer build costs and the absence of slavery in Civ 5 means that it now takes much longer to build anything in this latest incarnation of Civ. If you want it quickly, there is now just one option: you buy it. That said, even if hammers or commerce were sufficiently plentiful to enable you to construct and / or buy every building in the game, the combination of building maintenance costs and smaller building benefits in Civ 5 seems to actively discourage you IMHO from building anything but a skeletal infrastructure in all your cities. Returning to the excellent point made by vranasm, this combination of Civ 5 features means that you are now being actively discouraged IMHO from even constructing a sufficient number of buildings to properly specialise your cities – even on the lowest game skill settings.

If anyone wants to disprove that last sentence by the way, please be my guest. :) I’d love to see a forum hosted game in which a civver constructs all of the buildings in each city appropriate to its specialisation, and yet still finds time to conquer the world. (Of course, the game would have to make an exception to allow the gamer to overcome the one instance in whch Civ 5 actually discourages city specialisation, meaning you’d be allowed (or maybe even required) to construct any pre-requisite buildings in all your cities to enable you to build the national wonders.) If someone could do that, I think they’d go a very long way to disproving the notion that Civ 5 is less complex than Civ 4. As it stands however, the imbalances in hammer availability, building hammer costs, lesser benefits provided by buildings, maintenance costs and so on, all seem to be conspiring IMHO to actively discourage the civver from building anything more than a skeletal infrastructure before waging war. As such, that element of genius I mentioned earlier in Civ 4 has, IMHO, been lost in Civ 5.

The key question of course is whether this different balance in Civ 5 is a deliberate design choice (designed to encourage a new generation of civvers), or a design flaw that needs rebalancing. On the assumption that's its the latter (or in the hope that someone out there with some programming skills feels the same way I do :)) may I close with a few suggestions that may help rebalance this particular area of Civ 5. Perhaps some mod builders, or even Firaxis, may care to implement some, none :D, or all of them in a future update or mod (assuming that slavery or another means of converting food to hammers is not re-introduced, say as a social policy):

(i) Consider adding another hammer back to mines
(ii) Bring watermills back as a hammer boosting tile improvement
(iii) Re-introduce windmills as a tile improvement, but make them boost hammers (instead of food as per Civ 4)
(iv) Consider tweaking the benefits and / or maintenance costs and / or hammer costs of buildings (and particularly wonders)

In the meantime, I really look forward to seeing someone host (or point me in the direction of) the forum game I mentioned, to showcase the ability to specialise cities in a Civ 5 world. :)
 
The worst has to be Taj Mahal. 100 turns for a wonder for 8 turns of golden age? Then, it has no real benefit other than culture (I think) after that?

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