Courthouses and the organized trait

[Sero Sed Serio]

I have been having a hard time finding too much solid information on courthouses via the search engine or the war academy. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but I figured that if I couldn't search "courthouses" and find something pretty immediately than maybe it's time for another discussion? Though I could've sworn there was one a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I was hoping for a bit more information on courthouses and why they're considered a priority for large empires. Often times, if the civ isn't organized, I will not make courthouses a priority outside of very distant or large cities (8+ish maintenance). This is because I only ever see the minimal benefit of reducing my maintenance from 12 to 6 or 6 to 3 or what-have you. Granted, over the course of 10 cities that adds up, but it's still a drop in the bucket by the time I get around to it and I'm usually more concerned with producing units or buildings that improve gold or science output.

The cost of courthouses simply feels monstrous. What are the added benefits beyond this reduction of maintenance? Does it also reduce the costs of civics? Truth be told, I often play financial leaders and cottage everything so, once again, courthouses really feel like a drop in the bucket that cost a LOT of hammers.

Does the organized trait affect the cost of civics as well? How much so? The advertised 50%? Are the costs of civics figured into the maintenance cost of cities, or the other way around?

 

[Genv [FP]]

Organized reduces the cost of running civis, not city maintenaince.

Courthouses cut city maintenance in half. If you're playing at noble ( which is the middlepoint ) and above, you need courthouses.


Imagine you have 15 cities.. 6 of those cities is making 6 gold per turn, but also taking in 9 gold In maintenance fees. You see now where courthouses come in handy.

If courthouses take too long to build Start using slavery. Don't make up some humanitarian excuse. Most newbies think slavery is useless, and this is a big mistake

 

[Ibian]

On the other hand, a lot of people are vastly overrating slavery.

As far as im concerned, slavery is something that is useful until i can make 2 hammer workshops (MC+CS). At that point slow building most things besides granaries and maybe the occasional library in particularly food heavy cities becomes better if you care about commerce.

 

[Iranon]

Courthouses are quite expensive. If your economy is doing just fine, multiplier buildings like libraries and markets might very well be a better investment.

However, you might neglect commerce and specialists in favour of production: expansion (building settlers, workers and at least a granary in new cities), getting infrastructure up and amassing an army can be more important than maintaining a decent cash flow/tech rate - on high levels they usually are.
Under those circumstances, courthouses still do their thing while commerce-multipliers do next to nothing.

Organised means half civic maintenance. Rounding issues aside, all-medium civics would cost you roughly 2 per city and 0.5 per citizen. Halving that means you save 4+ gold for every decent-sized city, quite attractive really.

 

[King Jason]

Look at it this way, a Market and grocer increase gold for a city by 25% each. A bank by 50% each. If your gold has ever been within the same realm as your maintanence costs at the time you've built any of the above buildings, there's the same amount of merrit in building a courthouse too. Especially with markets and grocers.

Random, simple example;

You have a city making 6 gold, and it has 6 maintenance. So it breaks even. Building a market gives +25% gold for a whopping 7.5 Vs 6. The courthouse cuts the maintenance in half making it 6 Vs 3. So effectively, in this particular example, a courthouse would give you double the effect of a market. Happiness bonus and spy points of the respective buildings not included, naturally.

If you don't see the merrit, don't bother then. I'd assume you're playing fine enough without them. Though, if you're bothering to build markets, I'd reconsider the value of courthouses in respect to what you're actually gaining from the markets. Your cities need to be generating gold for markets/grocers/banks to be effective. For a Courthouse, they don't need to generate any gold and you'll still be able to save. So for cottage spam, it'd also depend on where you like to keep your slider and how mature your cottages are.

 

[oyzar]

I seldom build courthouses if not organized... In cities with high commerce multiplier buildings are obviously just better. Don't forget to factor in the ep points when you figure out if they are worth it or not though...

 

[Joshua368]

If you aren't seeing the point of courthouses you probably aren't expanding enough. The more cities you have the more the average cost of each city will rise... once a city's maitenance is in the 6 - 8 gold area a courthouse starts looking very attractive, expecially since it'll keep rising as I keep expanding.

Unless of course you're on a low enough difficulty level where maitenance costs are almost a non-issue.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

On the other hand, a lot of people are vastly overrating slavery.

As far as im concerned, slavery is something that is useful until i can make 2 hammer workshops (MC+CS). At that point slow building most things besides granaries and maybe the occasional library in particularly food heavy cities becomes better if you care about commerce.

IIRC, it takes a long time for a 1F 2H tile to be more efficient than a whip...if you're going to do that why not just save the plains forests and work those?!

The loss in commerce hurts somewhat, but the hammers are usually better to have earlier on, as they tend to net you cities that are up to speed faster and faster settling of additional sites. I'm more than happy to trade cottage turns now for the ability to work 20+ additional cottages (or by then towns) down the road. This *does* come into play whipping courthouses, as you'll need to pay for that expansion somehow.

Whipping a library for 2 pop usually implies better research in both the short and long term also. You can run the math if you want but I'm pretty sure that the impact from a library whipped sooner (assuming the city regrows at least 1 of the 2 pop somewhat fast, which is valid if you're going to whip because otherwise you wouldn't) will net you more total beakers in most cases!

And of course there's whipping units - this is only about efficiency if the city is hammer-poor, however there's something to be said about getting those 10 axes a couple turns sooner...although I'll still not whip away grassland mines and power resources normally. If a city has enough hills to work all those then it isn't a commerce city then though, and is probably specialized specifically for units.

 

[Artichoker]

Does the organized trait affect the cost of civics as well? How much so? The advertised 50%? Are the costs of civics figured into the maintenance cost of cities, or the other way around?

Yes, it does...you get a 50% discount on civics costs!

The maintenance costs of civics are separate from city maintenance.


Look at it this way, civics costs come in 4 categories: None, Low, Medium, and High. Even if you run no special civics, you're paying Low civics costs for getting no special benefit. But this is approximately half of High civics cost. So having Organized lets you run a High-cost civic, at the actual cost of a Low-cost one!

 

[Ibian]

IIRC, it takes a long time for a 1F 2H tile to be more efficient than a whip...if you're going to do that why not just save the plains forests and work those?!

Thats what i do, of course, but sometimes you get stuck with flatlands or the odd desert hill.

1f/2h tiles are worth working from roughly size 7 and up if the choice is between whipping a cottage and switching a cottage to it while you build stuff, as long as we are talking purely hammer and commerce efficiency. My science cities dont build troops so this is valid for me. By the time you got both CS and MC you should have enough troops in place to deal with barbs so there is less urgency for making units right now.

My production order goes something like this: Start with slavery, switch to caste system when i get that and MC and build workshops in the cities that need hammers (and speed up GP production at the same time), do a little jig when i get guilds, and finally switch to US when i have some towns in my core cities. Whatever remains to be built will be taken care of quickly, partly by way of gold if it matters that much, and then it will supply a nice steady trickle of additional troops with the option to buy an army in a matter of 10 turns should the need arise.

The loss in commerce hurts somewhat, but the hammers are usually better to have earlier on, as they tend to net you cities that are up to speed faster and faster settling of additional sites. I'm more than happy to trade cottage turns now for the ability to work 20+ additional cottages (or by then towns) down the road. This *does* come into play whipping courthouses, as you'll need to pay for that expansion somehow.

Again, talking efficiency for the individual city here. Effectiveness on an empire level is an entirely seperate issue.

Whipping a library for 2 pop usually implies better research in both the short and long term also. You can run the math if you want but I'm pretty sure that the impact from a library whipped sooner (assuming the city regrows at least 1 of the 2 pop somewhat fast, which is valid if you're going to whip because otherwise you wouldn't) will net you more total beakers in most cases!

Havent worked out the math for this and i dont care to. I mainly whip libraries if i want the specialists or if i need the culture (which can sometimes happen in my troop factory, for example).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Interesting. IMO one of my problems is that I switch to caste to farm out my GPs too late - if I bulbed sooner I could probably keep up in techs by trading things like philosophy and education on immortal even with otherwise grievous overexpansion, and that would make my vulnerability time as a cottage player much shorter, even if I'm axe rushing until a couple 100's AD.

I'll take a look at how it feels to swap between forests and cottages in commerce cities so that I can power the GP farm better. By then I've generally used slavery to REX the cities out so this discussion may actually allow me to improve my civic swap timing. LOL I want to try it RIGHT NOW, but I don't get out of work/class til 9PM .

 

[Ibian]

Yah bulbing and brokering is pretty awesome. In my last (early abandoned as usual) game i expanded to 7 cities with room for 3-4 more early on, i had negative income at 0% science and i was the most backwards civ in the world. Then i teched aesthetics and bulbed philo, traded them around to my 2 neighbors and suddenly i was ahead of them.

One problem i have noticed tho, it can be hard to get prophets if i dont manage to get both henge and oracle. Maybe ill play the next round as hatty to get around this little problem.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You'll bulb Philo if you have alpha + math with a scientist also. I've found even on Immortal the AIs seem to like delaying that tech for whatever reason, which means if I can get my hands on either Aesthetics or CoL (and even without oracle, I get Confuc. on some maps because when you're REXing 8 cities in the BC's, you'll be needing it.....!), I can usually trade one of them for those, which means if I bulbed Philo quick enough it would REALLY accelerate when I get techs. CE is weak in the early game only pretty much and if that GP farm is worth 2-4 bulbs after the academy that would turn my game...perhaps this is exactly what the players who win immortal easily are doing - going caste earlier than me to get the GP's going to patchwork an otherwise weak early economy and vault them forward. Hmm...

I usually don't try for prophets unless I'm going for the AP nonsense I do sometimes, although having multiple religions makes it easier (temple it up, which doesn't hurt either), and of course so would egypt!

 

[SnowlyWhite]

well, 1st of all, there are 2 things:

city maintenance, which the ch halves;
civic maintenance, which only organized can influence(by halving it, as per description).

City maintenance, you can see it when browsing the city; civic one, you can see it in F2 report(mind you, in halving the maintenance, organized has no effect on pacifism - the civic is no maintenance, and your trait doesn't influence the additional gold you pay for additional troops).

2nd - CoL.

The tech per se is usually very nice:

- opens caste;
- if you didn't go the beaten path of aesthetics - lit which is so used on high levels, opens up the possibility to bulb philo(if you went aest - lit, you can bulb it post drama too);
- opens up research for CS instead of taking the longer route via feudalism(which costs double then col);
- due to it's odd placing in the tech tree, it's fairly late researched by the ais, so can make up a nice filling fodder if you part research abit in mc, currency, calendar, construction(supposing you have 4 ais you know);

3. the building gives you 2ep, one spy slot(which you'll learn to hate very very fast since the ai is so prone to add that spy spec.) and halves city maintenance.

With org, it's a no brainer - 2 pop. whip means you whip at 4.

Without, if you take into account the alternatives, which at that time is the market hammer wise, normally it fares above it in almost any scenario(at least on immortal/deity). If you city costs 6 maintenance, which consequently would save 3 from ch, the city would have to make 12g(not commerce) in order for a market to break even. If your slider is somewhere generic ~40%(assuming you're still backfilling at that time and so on), your city would have to make 20 commerce for a market to break even. And in late bc/early ad, there are very few cities doing that(maybe a 4 dies city or something like that). Also, the market gives you happiness from: fur - hardly a given, you might be on the continent without fur, whales - nowhere near, needs optics, also rare and might not be on your continent, ivory - if you don't have it yourself, usually the ai will trade it for you at prohibitive price and silk - which ok, it's fairly common. So the happy bonus usually ain't grand either - can easily be equalized by the 2 free ep the ch gives you.

The other possible alternatives, non equal hammer wise, would be:

a temple - a 3 whip building for 1 happy face, 1 priest slot, 1 culture, hardly something to write home about, at least till angkor wat.
maybe a harbor - again a 3 people whip building which sometimes might be better, sometimes not, however it requires coastal and it ain't like all your cities are coastal anyway. In a glh scenario, obviously harbor > ch.
a monastery - 2 people whip, 10% sci, 2 culture - sometimes might be better in case of cultural war for a tile, but sometimes might not. Without need for culture I'd rate ch over monastery.

troops - well, if you build troops, you don't build infrastructure, so the point is moot...

 

[Feyaria]

As caste system and courthouses come with the same tech, courthouses should be whipped in each city before switching to caste.

I never use workshops before guilds, except for island cities with something like 2 grassland and 18 water tiles.

The great thing of the organized trait is, that you can whip couthouses for 2 pop.

Inflation is also a factor to look at when comparing multiplier buildings and maintaince costs.

You have a city making 6 gold, and it has 6 maintenance. So it breaks even. Building a market gives +25% gold for a whopping 7.5 Vs 6. The courthouse cuts the maintenance in half making it 6 Vs 3.

With 30% inflation this example gets to:
market: 7,5 vs 7,8
courthouse: 6 vs 3,9
Even with a market this city can't pay for itself!

Courthouses and the +50% civic cost from organized get better the longer the game runs (because of rising inflation).

 

[Ibian]

I usually don't try for prophets unless I'm going for the AP nonsense I do sometimes, although having multiple religions makes it easier (temple it up, which doesn't hurt either), and of course so would egypt!

With a faltering economy the gold you get for settling them can easily be worth at least as much as settling a scientist. I also like to bulb divine right, because the more religions i got the easier it will be to switch out of HR, it makes excellent trade bait for whatever messed up reason, and with enough cities the minaret can be awesome.

 

[Genv [FP]]

Who the hell bulbs DR? I think 85% of players just ignore it..

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Who the hell bulbs DR? I think 85% of players just ignore it..

No...it's pretty good if you get it before the AI does...If you know 4+ AIs it can backfill so many medieval techs it isn't funny.

I have a hard time bulbing prophets with a shrine as the alternative, but still.

 

[Genv [FP]]

Wow, you mean AI's will actually buy this tech? Isn't it more of an exploit then..?

 

[Ibian]

Not only that, i tend to get really good deals for it.