Changes in Warlords/BTS to building Wealth and their impact on the value of buildings

[mycophobia]

It's my contention that the changes made to building Wealth in Warlords, carried on through to BTS, nerfed buildings to some degree. From what I've been able to read from forum posts more contemporary to the release of each expansion, the fact that people opted more often to exploit Failgold than build Wealth may have factored into the changes.

For those not familiar, Vanilla handles building Wealth (and Research and Culture) like so: For every turn Wealth is the current build for a city, 50% of its hammers before any production multipliers from Forges and such get added into your city's total Gold yield along with whatever you get from Merchants and Shrines and whatever commerce it may convert from the slider, which is then of course run through Gold multipliers like Markets and Grocers. The rest of the hammers disappear.

In Warlords/BTS, 100% of your hammers after production multipliers are dumped directly into your coffers, bypassing any modification from any multipliers on Gold you're acquiring through other means.

So let's look at a case in both setups. Let's say there's a city that gets 20 base hammers and has a Forge, for 25 total net hammers. This city can build a Bank in 8 turns. Let's assume we're running 0% Gold on the sliders and our city isn't producing any Gold through other means for now.

Vanilla city spends 25 turns building Wealth: (25 turns) * (10 Gold from building Wealth) = 250 Gold earned.

Vanilla city spends 8 turns building a Bank and then 17 turns building Wealth: (17 turns) * (10 Gold from building Wealth) * (1.5 Bank multiplier) = 255 Gold earned.

Warlords/BTS city spends 25 turns building Wealth: (25 turns) * (25 Hammers after Forge) = 625 Gold earned.

Warlords/BTS city spends 8 turns building a Bank and then 17 turns building Wealth: (17 turns) * (25 Hammers after Forge) = 425 Gold earned. Obviously the Bank isn't doing anything here so it's just a net loss.

Now let's assume we're in Caste and we run 2 Merchants the entire time:

Vanilla city runs 2 Merchants and builds Wealth for 25 turns: (25 turns) * (16 Gold from Wealth Hammers and Merchants) = 400 Gold earned.

Vanilla city runs 2 Merchants for 25 turns, builds a Bank, and then builds Wealth for 17 turns: ((8 turns) * (6 Gold from Merchants)) + ((17 turns) * (16 Gold from Wealth Hammers and Merchants) * (1.5 Bank multiplier)) = 456 Gold earned.

Warlords/BTS 25 turns no Bank build: (as no Bank case above) + (25 turns * 6 Gold from Merchants) = 775 Gold earned.

Warlords/BTS 25 turns with Bank build: (as Bank case above) + (8 turns * 6 Gold from Merchants) + (17 turns * 6 Gold from Merchants * 1.5 Bank multiplier) = 626 Gold earned.

Long story short, it takes 25 turns for the Vanilla cases of Wealth+no Merchants, Bank+Wealth+no Merchants, Wealth+2 Merchants, and Bank+Wealth+2 Merchants to become successively worth more than the last, though none of them match the Warlords/BTS output of just building Wealth for 25 turns even without Merchants.

If we just look at the latter two cases, it takes only 19 turns for the Vanilla city to come out ahead when hiring the two merchants, building a Bank and then building Wealth (304 Gold vs. 312). It takes 75 turns in Warlords/BTS for Bank+Wealth+2 merchants to eke a mere 1 Gold over just building Wealth and hiring two merchants.

So what's my takeaway from this? I don't know, actually! It's just something that's bugged me for a while and today I decided to sit down and do the math. Obviously Failgold would become a more attractive hammer sink as that gets you a similar return on your investment as building Wealth in the expansions, but if we take that out of consideration in one way or another, would stuff like Markets, Grocers and Banks (and for that matter, Observatories, Universities and so on) be so highly situational? Would they instead be a necessary prerequisite for building Wealth?

I guess my curiosity is in this: High level Civ 4 play didn't really come into its own until long after BTS came out, so it's difficult to ascertain what kind of impact not having this extremely powerful Wealth build available would have on it. I welcome your thoughts on this! Thank you for reading my extremely boring post.

 

[a pen-dragon]

Note: In the following whenever I am talking about an average I mean the average over commerce, not cities. The average over commerce is the average modifier one gets in the entire empire. This is equivalent to the average over all cities with city commerce as weight.

First, I do not think that observatories and universities are that situational. If you have the tech to build them and plan to go beyond rifling and are not currently building units for a war they are a good build.

Also note that a market is weaker than a bank. Granted, it does provide some happiness, but only if having the correct resources. All these resources are happiness resources, so a market mostly provides happiness in scenarios where there is sufficient happiness.

Second lets recap why we build wealth at all. The reason is not to get money, but instead to maximize total science. Since most buildings do not help and building wealth/science is so strong, we do one of these. Because commerce modifiers do not apply it is better to produce the yield where the average modifier across the entire empire is lower, since that allows moving the slider to a regime where the yield output is larger, due to larger modifiers.

Now how would building wealth or science be chosen in the vanilla setup?

Again what we want to do is maximize science. Since modifiers do count we will broadly be wanting to build science in cities with high science modifiers and wealth in cities with high gold modifiers. This promotes city specialization. Basically cities with low commerce but high production should build gold modifier buildings.

When deciding if an individual city should build wealth or science I think one should consider the local gold/science modifiers in relation to the average ones. Whichever ratio (local modifier+1)/(average modifier+1) is larger should be the yield to build. The +1 is to avoid shenanigans due to multiplication and division by zero. I did not prove this and am in no mood to do so currently.

IMHO failgold becoming more attractive is solely due to the 50% cut in the beginning and not the change in which modifiers are applied. This is the thing that makes building a yield much weaker in vanilla. This effectively makes happiness and health buildings slightly better, due to them opening up more raw , but IMHO not sufficiently to change much. Production buildings also get slightly worse, especially forges. Gold (and to a lesser degree science) modifier buildings obviously become stronger. If you still plan to do a cuir rush grocers, banks, unis and observatories still do not enter the game, and you might want maybe a few markets, but that's it.

 

[Core Imposter]

Wealth building is one of the things that exclude from play, or mostly.
I limit wealth to no more than 10% of my cities (allowing the first city of each set of 10).
Nor do I intentionally chase failgold. Moderator Action: Snip - removed sentence which we consider trolling here --NZ