"Building" Culture, Science and Wealth

[Simna]

Hej!

I usually keep on building improvements (and units) in my cities, but then there are the option to "build" Culture, Science and Wealth. When should I do that?

Lev väl.
Simna

 

[Julian Delphiki]

Few examples, when you need culture (border dispute), science (racing for a religion, liberalism etc) or gold (you're horrible broke after a war etc) or don't have any need to build units or buildings.

 

[magicalsushi]

A quick note about doing this when a city has run out of other useful things to build...

Quite often, you'll want to generate extra science. However, the best way to do this is sometimes to build gold, not science! If your science rate is less than 100%, and your cities have bigger science multipliers (from libraries, free religion, monasteries, etc) than gold multipliers (markets etc), then you will gain more beakers by building gold and using it to raise the science rate (or perhaps to prolong the period where you can afford to run at a deficit). Science and gold which is generated by being "built" does not get the multipliers added, so it's better to lose the multipliers on the gold than on the science, assuming the science multipliers are higher (in my games, this is almost always the case).

Don't do this if you're confident you can already run 100% science for the forseeable future. It ought to work in reverse if your gold multipliers are higher than your science multipliers, although for me this is rare. Note that when I talk about multipliers, I mean the average for your empire as a whole, NOT just for the city that is going to be building gold/science.

 

[LlamaCat]

it's good to run wealth in most of your cities if you are nearing the end of a game and just don't have enough turns left to justify future value of any new buildings in the city (you factor in how many turns it will take to finish the building against how many turns are left). Also it really cuts down on micromanagement and gives you lots of money to spend on some last-minute espionage missions or unit upgrades or rush buying. If you are a few parts away from space ship or a few cities away from conquest, etc. these are the kinds of late-game situations

 

[noto]

You guys are forgetting an important aspect of this. If you are playing a very militant game (like, if you're Rome) and you are following a hammer strategy - then most of your cities are going to be high production cities, with a lot of workshops and watermills. This synergizes with State Property and Caste System, allowing your cities to pump out military units. Now, instead of building cottages and trade cities, you can simply build a ton of hammer cities and a few specialist cities. When not at war you can make your hammer cities produce science. I know, I know, on a per city basis it won't compete with a trade city, but if you are twice the size of your next rival, you will stay ahead in tech. Also, it frees you to use the luxury slider and put it however high you want it, generating 15 extra happy faces to deal with emancipation (so that you can keep running CS). I recently played a game as Rome, with Julius Ceasar and did just that. I had a few specialist cities, with CS, and combined with the forum I had a lot of GPs, but most of my cities (about 35 or so) were production cities. I wiped my enemies off the standard Terra map quickly and I was surprised that I kept up in tech for the whole game, actually gaining a tech lead towards the very end.