Best/Worst UBs?

india's ub is great. best are altar and madrasa, worst are research institute and shoping mall

 

Agreed on Mall being bad I wouldn't care if it gave +100 hapiness and health at 1 shield cost. Game is over by that time. I vote for salon in the worst list. Please i want that observatory without that great Artist . But it might be handy in cultural victories.

Hammam is good and even Obselik if you capture a Holy city which you need to build a shrine. You just need to avoid calender till that Prophet pops up. And if you end up isoltaed with Ramesses you can use the obselik to generate Prophets with wich you can found christiany, Islam and run your way to cultural victory.

 

I have quite a few thoughts on UBs, but I’m only going to mention a couple. However they all depend on how you use them, I think they all can give a nice advantage if used properly. Both the Cothon and Mint play very strongly with the financial trait. I’ve recently been playing on monarch and when I see either of these two leaders show up I know he’s probably going to be running away with the tech lead pretty quick.

But I’ve noticed something about the Terrace that makes it much stronger than I originally thought, maybe so much that Firaxis is going to do something about it. Normally when you capture a city all of the culture producing buildings are automatically razed while the other buildings seem to have some chance of being razed or remaining (50%?, I haven’t done any tests). However the granary is one that has a chance at remaining. As I suspect happens with all UBs upon capture, they are converted to your own version of that building. I.E if you capture an Aztec city the sacrificial alter is converted back to a courthouse and if you’re Incan those granarys are converted to Terraces. BINGO! Has anybody else noticed this? In a recent game I wiped out Isabella and what to my delight to find I already had terraces producing not 2, but 4 culture in most of her cities (probably owing to how long ago they’d been build). Maybe this isn’t so strong that it would need to be nerfed, but giving how many turns it usually takes to build, or the cost of rushing some culture building to get things rolling again it was a very nice head start.

 

Also check out this thread, there are a lot of good ideas on it

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=192196

 

Wow! I'm going to have to exploit this some time. Thanks for the tip!

 

There are two definitions to best/worse UB: do you like the whole package, or do you like the bonus. If a building's not strong, then adding a big bonus on top of it won't make it much better. If it's an essential building, you'll build it even if the bonus is negligable.

I am assuming we are talking about the value of the bonus, in which case the worse UB bonus has to be the pagoda. 25% culture is pathetic, absolutely pathetic. I see no strategic use for it whatsoever.

 

Someone who loves cultural victories is probably going to jump to the defense of the pagoda

 

I'm not going to jump to the defense of the pagoda, specifically, and I really can't stand using culture for victory, it's too narrow. I'd just like to know why there is so much hatred for culture around here. Another thread is dogging on Great Artists. I'll even agree that +25% culture is pretty weak if the city's culture is weak to begin with. What I don't understand is why people put culture at the very end of the list almost without fail. Am I the only one who bothers to build theatres and cathedrals for the culture rather than the happiness? Or who doesn't get upset when I pop a GA? Why all the hate, people?

 

Because there's not much synergy with anything else. It doesn't get you more research (once you're past a city's fat cross, anyway), it doesn't really help militarily, and it doesn't help your economy (again, past the fat cross). Even if you're going for a cultural victory, with the way it works in CIV it only matters for your three metropolises.

The only thing culture does beyond the initial 10 for each city is expand your borders and slightly increase your score. But it's almost always going to grab you much more land by just building a new settler or going to war with whoever's on the other side of your borders.

There are some exceptions (as with anything, of course) -- if you're hellbent on avoiding war with a particular civ and there's a relatively new city near your borders, or if you're fighting culturally over an important resource.

 

pagoda is the taoist cathedral, nothing to do with a UB
The chinese UB is the pavillion, and half a cathedral for free is really huge for cultural wins.

 

Yeah, um, why did I type that? I know better, maybe I was just following sylvanllewelyn's lead, but I don't mean to pick on you either.

Well yeah, but you can't judge a UB very well by how many cities it really effects. Cothon... oh but it only effects your costal cities. Obelisk... yeah but you can only really get a prophet out of one city. Even the Dun really only shines as a UB in your military production centers. I could probably list some others, but I don't think its the best criteria to judge by.

I don't know about you but I think every game I play I have several cities whose fat cross is overlapping with other civs. Especially if I'm conquering a few cities and have the cultural borders of that or a third party's cultural border box in my new city. And I don't know but I think theaters/pavilions are buildings that people do put into large newly conquered cities.

Why am I defending the pavilion for heavens sake? I don't really know, I think it’s just a quick to say a UB has no value, etc. I'm just trying to point out things somebody may have missed.

 

I find myself in that situation often. Usually I chalk it up to the fact that something (unit, building, civ, trait, whatever) is getting torn to pieces and nobody's given any recognition to its strengths. It can be difficult to hold the fort against all the things everyone wants to complain about, but most things do have redeeming qualities. Even forts, but we don't need to get into that.

 

Salon is not too shabby. Playing as Napoleon and striving for a domination win, I am whipping Salons often as the first build in the larger cities I capture:

- I get an artist quickly for border expansion (better than a theatre or library) and an immediate boost to the science output of that city.
- I am running mercantilism and representation. The Salon gives me bonus science from the artist, plus lets me run a scientist immediately as my free specialist - both of which get +25% immediately.

Plus I get some extra artist GPP in my GP farm(s) - and artists are useful for domination wins.

 

Fast culture expansion is pretty helpful in domination wins - the Eiffel tower is fantastic for that. What is great is if your culture can keep pace with your conquests so that as cities pop out of anarchy, the culture from the earlier cities has caught up so that the new city has some tiles to work. It won't compete with the established culture of the next big city in the enemies interior, but by then you won't have to because you have captured that city too.

And strong culture is very helpful in defense. Apart from the bonuses to defense and the time which the enemy spends seiging you (which might give you enough time to bring reinforcements), the stronger your culture, the longer it takes for enemy troops to attack you. With weak culture they may be able to hit your cities in one turn from within their own territory.

 

I know, but your post was easier to quote
no offense meant