Building Wealth

[MasterofLlamas]

I just won my first noble vicotry by a space as Stalin. I know most of you guys are a lot better than me, but this is a big victory to me, so please don't laugh

But one thing I noticed ever since the middle ages is that I had nearly all my cities building wealth to keep the economy running. If it matters, I was running a pretty even hybrid economy. But I don't think that had anything to do with it. Since I was Stalin, I decided I would focus on hammers rather than commerence, for flavour. That didn't mean I refused to lay down a single cottage (in fact I had one very good cottage/science city). In general I pretty needed to build wealth since the abundance of hammers created a lot of

Later I was able to free some of my best production cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nidaros (I axe-rushed the Vikings) to build space ship parts because the other cities got more production from factories and biology allowing them to work more tiles. All in all I know this is gonna be a habit I'm going to have to flatten if I'm gonna get as good as you guys

BTW, I know there is some info in there you probably don't need but since I finally beat noble I just feel I need to tell people! I'm sorry!

 

[Bandobras Took]

Congratulations!

And sometimes I like doing the Hammer/Wealth thing, too.

 

[mirthadir]

Congrats, there a times when it pays to hammer to keep the economy humming, most notably to pay for a war that is about to take you on strike. That being said, most likely you should look at improving your city specialization.

The best yield you can hope to hammer out of normal tiles is 1.5 per grassland farm/grassland mine pair. Running a science or merch spec gives you identical return up front and great people points as well. A better way to convert to cash is to build a wonder (preferably under OR, with a forge, with the correct resources, and maybe even be IND) and then fail to complete it first.

But there are times that is the only way to tide yourself over (earlier today I won lib by flipping to caste as Sal and running all my cities as pure scientists for 2 turns in order to snag lib. As you get better you will more readily see what is a truly temporary bridge and what is long term drag.

 

[henrebotha]

I don't really see how it is at all possible to get more cash from a Wealth-building production city than a proper commerce city. Grassland farm + grass hill mine = 4F3H. Grassland town + grassland town = 4F8C. Combine that with cash multipliers (from banks, markets, etc) and it becomes immediately obvious why it is far more efficient to make use of commerce cities instead of having only production cities and making them build wealth.

But yeah, building wealth is actually quite useful sometimes - I regularly find myself in the position where I don't want to build any more units or buildings in a given city. In a case like this, having a strong production city build wealth can easily yield enough GPT to push the science slider up a notch. This is obviously also useful in periods of teching - especially when trying to beat the other civs to a crucial tech *coughliberalismcough*.

Congratulations on your first win at a new difficulty level. It's a good feeling. I'm very close to my first Prince win and I'm nearly wetting myself with excitement.

 

[mirthadir]

I don't really see how it is at all possible to get more cash from a Wealth-building production city than a proper commerce city. Grassland farm + grass hill mine = 4F3H. Grassland town + grassland town = 4F8C. Combine that with cash multipliers (from banks, markets, etc) and it becomes immediately obvious why it is far more efficient to make use of commerce cities instead of having only production cities and making them build wealth.

But yeah, building wealth is actually quite useful sometimes - I regularly find myself in the position where I don't want to build any more units or buildings in a given city. In a case like this, having a strong production city build wealth can easily yield enough GPT to push the science slider up a notch. This is obviously also useful in periods of teching - especially when trying to beat the other civs to a crucial tech *coughliberalismcough*.

Congratulations on your first win at a new difficulty level. It's a good feeling. I'm very close to my first Prince win and I'm nearly wetting myself with excitement.

Building straight up wealth? No not possible. Using overflow from buildings, units,etc. Absolutely. I've always wondered if it is possible in multi-player games to repetively sabotage a Pro mate's walls in his IW/B cap so he can rebuilding them with mass overflow. I know you can get some insane overflow with wbs, workers (exp), and settlers (imp).

 

[CivCorpse]

Congrats on your first win. The first win at any level is always sweeeeeet.

 

[Skallagrimson]

My late game war machine tends to get so overpowered wise that I first start switching to marginally helpful buildings, and then finally Wealth, for cities apart from HE, and the Drafting City. I like my armies high quality and lean on numbers, miserly as I am with the unit maintenance, and I find it fun when that "low" power rating tempts some idiot AI into DoWing me late game, after which I flip back into unit production in all cities and absolutely obliterate every stack Monty or Shaka or whoever send to their early grave. Then I allow them peace for a token 100 gold or so, after I get my free XPs and they try to wipe away their WW. Wash-rinse-repeat to keep the crazies at bay, meanwhile put the XPs to use on the more serious wars like trying to break apart the runaway-tech empires.

 

[henrebotha]

Building straight up wealth? No not possible. Using overflow from buildings, units,etc. Absolutely. I've always wondered if it is possible in multi-player games to repetively sabotage a Pro mate's walls in his IW/B cap so he can rebuilding them with mass overflow. I know you can get some insane overflow with wbs, workers (exp), and settlers (imp).

Okay, but, wait, what? Yes okay cool you've got a mountain of overflow, but overflow doesn't get channelled into Wealth - it gets preserved for when you actually build something. How does overflow let you get ze $$$?

 

[michmbk]

Okay, but, wait, what? Yes okay cool you've got a mountain of overflow, but overflow doesn't get channelled into Wealth - it gets preserved for when you actually build something. How does overflow let you get ze $$$?

Protective walls trick - you can search for it on the forums, but you can also witness in action with a test, as I did. Take a pro leader, go into WB, give yourself masonry, BW, increase your capital size to say 6, and give yourself 5 workers and 5 forests around the capital. Then build a wall, chop the forests and when the forests are on their last chop, whip your population as well. Watch your gold before and after - you've just turned walls into a few hundred gold. I actually just did this in the Charlemagne game for about 250 gold - very useful.

Perhaps a bit of an exploit, but arguably anything built into the game that you can leverage to your advantage is an exploit too.

 

[henrebotha]

Protective walls trick - you can search for it on the forums, but you can also witness in action with a test, as I did. Take a pro leader, go into WB, give yourself masonry, BW, increase your capital size to say 6, and give yourself 5 workers and 5 forests around the capital. Then build a wall, chop the forests and when the forests are on their last chop, whip your population as well. Watch your gold before and after - you've just turned walls into a few hundred gold. I actually just did this in the Charlemagne game for about 250 gold - very useful.

Perhaps a bit of an exploit, but arguably anything built into the game that you can leverage to your advantage is an exploit too.

Oh, right. As my sig says, I only play Vanilla, so I tend to forget about things like excess overflow being turned into cash.

...man, I need BtS.