Bureaucracy - Optimize Capitol for Production or Commerce?

[mike p]

I'm probably in the minority because usually it seems like the consensus is to cottage your capitol with Bureaucracy, but since commerce gets added up empire wide, you can replace the 50% bonus commerce by building another commerce city.

On the other hand, you can't combine two different cities' hammers to increase production of a Wonder. Or, having a super science city sure looks pretty, but two good science cities can produce as much research. Two good production cities can build half of two wonders, when a high production capitol could win them both.

Obviously, you lose out a bit on multipliers like the Academy bonus, and later on, Oxford, by not building a super science city. Though since you're going to build at least six universities anyway, the hammer differential is pretty much zero. (In fact, it may be less overall to use several smaller cities since you won't need as many supporting buildings providing happiness and health, and you'll be whipping from a smaller base for faster regrowth, but that's a minor side issue) Also by the time Oxford comes along, Bureaucracy is seldom still a slam dunk civic anyway, in my experience.

So who has some quantitative reasoning to determine which approach is better? Answers such as 'It depends' or 'I do it this way, and it works' are nice and all, but not really helpful, unless you've tried it both ways enough to determine the difference.

 

[DaveMcW]

you can't combine two different cities' hammers to increase production of a Wonder.

Wonder GPP and settling those GPs in the capital is the main reason to make your capital hammer-heavy. It's not the optimal strategy in most cases, but it is a lot of fun.

 

[Foamy7]

Gotta love the "depends" answer. Bureaucracy is best used for commerce. Production cities can be founded all over the place, and until the late game, can be used to push out most units in a turn or three. Once you get into the late game, State Property is better to use IMHO.

But, if you have no other production city, it may be a good option. In this case, most players would likely move the capital to a better commerce site.

 

[Jet]

you lose out a bit on multipliers like the Academy bonus, and Oxford

who has some quantitative reasoning?

You do.

 

[mike p]

Gotta love the "depends" answer. Bureaucracy is best used for commerce. Production cities can be founded all over the place, and until the late game, can be used to push out most units in a turn or three. Once you get into the late game, State Property is better to use IMHO.

Commerce is more fungible than production though. Your entire empire's research goes towards your current tech. Only your best city's production goes towards that wonder, project, spaceship part, etc. So there are some production bottlenecks that don't apply to commerce since gold and research are each aggregated across your cities. When are those production bottlenecks severe enough to mean production becomes more important than commerce?

 

[cabert]

bureaucracy is early, and early on what stops your expansion is the unability to fund more cities.
thus commerce in a cottaged up capitol is great.

 

[Gliese 581]

I think you're underestimating the superscience capital. I certainly don't think it's true that 2 commerce cities can usually match a superscience capital. Also, I often stay in bur for a very very long time, with a properly set up superscience city and mostly production/specialist cities besides it can take a long time before free speech matches the science output, typically not until 35 turns after adopting emancipation.

 

[Lansky]

Pretty darn sure this is how it works but feel free to call me an idiot if I am wrong.
Bureaucracy adds 50% to *commerce* and hammers. The fact that it multiplies the base commerce and not research or whatever other slider is the main reason at least I prefer to have a commerce capital.

1 hammer + 50% = 1.5 hammers.
Bureaucracy is just another multiplier for them like a forge or factory. You can only affect base hammers so its nice but fundamentally like any other building bonus.

Affecting direct commerce though...
1 commerce + 50% = 1.5 commerce.
You then take the higher base commerce and add in your multipliers. So 1 commerce (assuming 100% sliders) is now 1.875 research after a library instead of 1.25. Not much but assume your capital has 20 base commerce (not absurd on the way to lib).

With a library
20 commerce + 50% = 30 ... 30 *1.25 (library) = 37.5 research.
20 commerce *1.25 = 25 research.
12.5 more beakers.

With an academy and a library
30 ... 30 * 1.75 = 52.5 research.
20 commerce * 1.75 = 35 research.
17.5 more beakers.

What the hell with a university on top of that!
30 * 2 = 60 research
20 * 2 = 40 reserach
20 more beakers.

Edit - Noticed the old wording was a bit obtuse. I prefer to look at the equation inversely. 66% is 2/3 or flipped is 3/2 i.e. the stated 50% increase over base. Either way the point is the same - every subsequent research multiplying building (or culture or gold or...) is made that much stronger. How many more mines can your city support this early?

In all likelihood over a 10% bonus to potential research over the empire when it becomes available if not much much more. Of course you can add in monasteries as well but who really builds those? On the other hand any decently hilly area with some food can crank out military in the early game very rapidly once the HE is down. Running heavier to gold than research does not change the base conclusion either you just have fewer (if any) gold multiplier buildings at this point in the game and as such the difference will be less drastic but no less amazing. Directly increasing commerce is very strong and not to be overlooked.


That said there are exceptions to just about any gameplay notion in civ and it depends. Your mileage may very

 

[Firenforget]

In my current Monarch game my capitol is being used primarly as a production city with Bureaucracy. Like you suggested I have 2 primary science citys and im not noticing any difference in my teching.

Do i usually use my capitol like this no, but i believe its a viable method. I must say Im loving the production im producing out of my capitol.

 

[DampRain]

You hammer it mainly if you want to do a WE/SSE, also doubles as a second mass unit production city.

Otherwise why would you want to cottage it? As lansky suggested math!
Lets compare 2 cottaged cities to one bureau capital.
Lets say, 75 base commerce for all cities (this is unreasonable, the capital is always likely to be more well developed + have more, 75 is a guess though).
So the 2 C give 150 base commerce, multipliers of lib + uni + 1 acad + 1 ox = 337 beakers (rounded down).
Super capital gives 75 base commerce * 1.5 = 112 (rounded down).
Multipliers Ox+lib+ uni +acad = 336

So 2 c is 1 beaker ahead due to rounding, but are the assumptions good?
The cities produce same base commerce assumption:
The 2 c's are as well developed in terms of cottage maturity<- Unlikely
Capital has palace adding extra commerce
Capital has higher happy cap
Capital gets better trade routes.
Capital "tends" to have better hammers to get infrastructure up faster (this is particular for oxford).
The effects described above could produce 20% more (my guess, if not more) commerce pending on too many variables .

So it looks like capital > 2 science cities. But wait there is more!

In 2 cities vs 1 city, it is always unfair, 1 city takes more space for starters . You could put the 2nd city to building wealth, letting you increase your slider, the bonus for the capital increases since it gets full advantage of multipliers compared to the city(s) without ox + acad. Although, thats more part of the HE - CE SSC conjoint.

Hmmm... this has been a very interesting analysis though , I've been meaning to do a free speech vs bureau comparison, so its a good start to that. I'm thinking though capital SSC tends to be better if you work around it to get the most out of those multipliers (getting slider to 100%), I'm guessing up to 50% more beakers (this needs more math proof, so take with pinch of salt), otherwise like you said 2 C could do as well, or only slightly worse pending situation.

Mind you do you really need to build those wonders? I find that sometimes they aren't even needed at all, since i conquer them . What difficulty do you play on? Also, I thought several smaller cities come with increased maintenance just because you have more of them . The hammer differential for 6 unis you mention will depend on your overall economical strat.

 

[mike p]

You hammer it mainly if you want to do a WE/SSE, also
The cities produce same base commerce assumption:
The 2 c's are as well developed in terms of cottage maturity<- Unlikely
Capital has palace adding extra commerce
Capital has higher happy cap
Capital gets better trade routes.
Capital "tends" to have better hammers to get infrastructure up faster (this is particular for oxford).
The effects described above could produce 20% more (my guess, if not more) commerce pending on too many variables .

Of course, the Palace commerce bonus and trade routes still get the +50% commerce bonus when the capitol is optimized for production (and it's then trivially easy to build the multiplier buildings). Likewise, commerce resources are still almost always going to get plantations/wineries etc no matter how you're optimizing the capitol. And the river commerce bonuses will also apply to both. Really the major difference is whether you build cottages or mines with enough supporting farms.

Hmmm... this has been a very interesting analysis though , I've been meaning to do a free speech vs bureau comparison, so its a good start to that. I'm thinking though capital SSC tends to be better if you work around it to get the most out of those multipliers (getting slider to 100%), I'm guessing up to 50% more beakers (this needs more math proof, so take with pinch of salt), otherwise like you said 2 C could do as well, or only slightly worse pending situation.

The topic was meant to stimulate some thinking, so that's good.

Mind you do you really need to build those wonders? I find that sometimes they aren't even needed at all, since i conquer them . What difficulty do you play on? Also, I thought several smaller cities come with increased maintenance just because you have more of them . The hammer differential for 6 unis you mention will depend on your overall economical strat.

I usually don't wonder spam, but I won an isolated start on Immortal last week with Frederick. My second city got stone, so I built Stonehenge and the GW nearly simultaneously, and then I kept spamming wonders in the capitol so the GW city never got around to producing a nearly useless Great Spy. So I kept the capitol as all production, all game, settling nearly all of my great people. (I think I built 1 Academy, and burned one artist for a Golden Age). But that was an extreme situation. Still it got me thinking as to when that sort of strategy was not just viable, but optimal.

 

[Crusher1]

From my experience a BC usually contributes much more than half of an empires research for a very long time.

 

[Iranon]

I agree with Lansky; the way bonuses stack make using Bureaucracy for commerce more attractive.

Let's consider an extreme case... +200% to production and gold from multiplies before Bureuacracy (i.e. the capital has Wall Street and the Ironworks), commerce going to 100% gold.
Bureaucracy still give us the same old +50% on each additional hammer... but it'll be the equivalent of a +150% gold multiplier for each additional* commerce.


* Keep in mind that it's not a total +150% multiplier if we also have non-commerce gold sources like shrines, corporation HQs or Merchants. This, however, does not affect the question of whether it'll do more for marginal hammer or commerce units.

 

[Lord Chambers]

I love a capital with two or three food sources, and the rest plains. Plains = capital optimized both for production and commerce, taking maximum advantage of bureaucracy. When the cottages are just on grassland you can't benefit from the +50% to hammers. Normally this is okay, since you get more food, grow faster, and work more tiles faster, but the capital exists for so long it frequently can grow to max size even while working plains cottages.

 

[oyzar]

The burrecracy commerce city can be potentially game breaking. The burrecracy production city is seldom very special... Multiplicative with all the modifiers, makes for really a lot of return in the end. Remember to build monastaries in your burrecracy capital, they give quite a lot of beakers.

 

[phillydilly]

Generally I try and offset the rest of my civ.
If I'm playing on a map with a ton of grassland and I have a bunch of commerce cities, then I'll make a production capital.
If I'm playing a map with a ton of hills, I probably have more production cities and I'll make the capital a commerce city.

 

[Shurdus]

*snip* Of course you can add in monasteries as well but who really builds those? *snip*

In the capital and your science cities monastaries can have a nice impact indeed. You may want to consider if you can find the spare hammer to build them, but if you can the returns are not too bad.

 

[oyzar]

Monastaries are about as good as observatories(better than universities for non-philo leaders), though of course they do go obsolete(but they also give other benefits). Not building one(or several) in your burrecracy capital could definatly be considered a mistake.

 

[Artichoker]

A combination of Grassland Farm + Grassland Hill provides 4F3H, not including bonuses from rivers. The Bureaucracy bonus provides a flat 1.5H (ignoring rounding effects) for these two tiles, regardless of what multiplier buildings exist in the capital.

On the other side of the coin, a pair of Grassland Cottages provide 4F + a variable amount of commerce, not including bonuses from rivers. There will be a mix of Cottages of varying maturity, but a reasonable approximation is to assume they are Villages, which provide 3C apiece. Under this assumption, a pair of Grassland Cottages provides 4F6C.

In almost all situations I would prefer the latter. Your mileage will vary depending on the level of your science slider. A high science slider means that you can exploit the effect of having an Academy in your capital, with Oxford University to follow possibly later.

Take, for example, a science slider level of 50%. In the above two-tile comparison, Bureaucracy provides a commerce bonus of 3C for a pair of Grassland Villages.
Looking at the period of development from Civil Service to Liberalism, a typical set of buildings in the capital would include the following:


Library
Monastery
Academy
Marketplace

After the commerce is allocated to gold and science, there will be 1.5C for gold and 1.5C for science, before multipliers. The above listed buildings will provide a 1.25 multiplier for gold and 1.85 multiplier for science. This results in a bonus of 1.875 for gold and 2.775 for science, for a pair of Grassland Villages.

Is 1.875 gold + 2.775 science stronger than 1.5 hammers? I would say yes, in almost all situations. An approximate hammer-to-gold conversion is 1 hammer: 2 gold (based on the amount of gold received when failing to build a wonder with a resource bonus). With this conversion factor, the 1.875 gold + 2.775 science from two Grassland Villages is worth 2.325 hammers.

Are there cases when you can compensate through specialized use of the production capital? Of course, but you are essentially fighting from behind, compared to the commerce capital. One example is to use a settled Great General in your capital, to increase the efficiency of military units. This can potentially magnify your bonus of 1.5 hammers to a greater amount, depending on how you choose your promotions. But the other guy simply uses his Great General to attach to some units, often resulting in a greater advantage. Another way to specialize is to use the production capital to build wonders. However, most of the good wonders are available in a window of time just before Bureaucracy becomes available. This means that the extra production you gain, taken in the context of wonder building, comes a bit too late in most cases.

 

[Indiansmoke]

Most of the times, at least in multiplayer, by the time you reach bureocracy your capital will be missing most building. Usually it only has a library an academy (if it does) maybe a forge and maybe a monastery...maybe even market if you go currency first but not usually.

So there are tons of buildings left to be built and there will be until the end of game as well as late game wonders which are important in a game with balanced opponents.

So can you afford to leave your capital without production? No usually...because if you can then it means that the game is won to a big degree anyway and none of these matter as you can do whatever you want.