Do you use custom houses?

[chadxo]

I usually build custom houses in all coastal cities. I was told by someone that they're not worth building due to their high costs. Do most people build or forgo them?
Thank you!

 

[Gumbolt]

Not really tried them. You would need a big base on your trade routes. Also lots of them.

 

[hexem3117]

I almost never build them, but in my current game I have because I'm alone on a smallish continent. Once all the multipliers add up and you have large cities, they can be fairly useful. Typically they're not in my opinion.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

The vast majority of the time they have a higher maintenance than there yield.

 

[Ataxerxes]

The vast majority of the time they have a higher maintenance than there yield.

Maintenance? Do you mean hammer cost? Building maintenance was in CivIII. They're a sometimes build, depending on trade routes and map type.

 

[ColossusXXIII]

utterly useless on a pangea

 

[Nick Carpathia]

Only useful if you have large coastal commerce cities with high commerce multipliers and good intercontinental trade partners. Examples are a coastal cottaged bureaucracy/oxford supercapital.

 

[ABCDPuppies]

Typically I think they're not worth building unless you have a lot of multipliers in that city. +100% foreign TR yield sound great and all when you're at the point of having 4+ routes per coastal city worth 6+ commerce; but bear in mind that, as usual, the multiplier only applies to the *base* TR value, and thus will probably only net you 1, maybe 2 additional commerce per foreign trade route.

That is still kind of nifty, to be sure, if you've got nothing else to build. But given that the hammer cost is kind of high, there are probably better investments you could make, unless the city in question is primarily focused on producing beakers or gold.

 

[Clam Spammer]

I've heard that if you build customs houses away from your Bureau/Oxford capital, it can actually decrease your research, by reassigning the best trade routes to cities with CH's.

utterly useless on a pangea

The overseas trade bonus is a multiplier, not part of the base rate, so they're actually just as effective on Pangaea as on island maps.

 

[Higher Game]

They're very good for cities that just touch enough water for the connection, but not too much to be weighed down by marginal tiles. Cities with 10+ water tiles just aren't going to have enough commerce to be worthwhile. Bordering just 5 or so tiles almost always call for a customs house if they have enough food to cottage spam.

 

[coanda]

Under normal conditions, they're one of the worst return-on-investment buildings in the game (there was a thread a while ago when people actually studied this quantitatively in somewhat appalling depth). I generally ignore custom houses.

However... with lots of trade routes, they can be worth building. When trading with large, distant foreign cities they can be worth building. They're usually worth building in a Bureaucracy capital and often worth building in an Oxford + academy city even without Bureaucracy.

 

[Riflin'Joe]

For me, the biggest problem with customhouses is their timing. I just always have more important things to build at that stage of the game.

I haven't really tried Joao out yet. Maybe the feitoria might be worthwhile?

 

[Nick Carpathia]

The initial timing of Custom Houses is pretty bad, I often have zero foreign trade routes when I research Free Market. Plus, the base trade route value is often far too low, your populations are too low. They're better later in the late game, when you can bang them out quickly with factories, but even then their return on investment is low enough that you're better off building 1.5 cavalries or simply building wealth.

 

[Nirvana90]

For me, the biggest problem with customhouses is their timing. I just always have more important things to build at that stage of the game.

I haven't really tried Joao out yet. Maybe the feitoria might be worthwhile?

ya, the Feitoria's are really the best option when it comes to custom houses in my opinion. I know a few people who play a lot of archipelago maps, and they actually make respectable bank after you beef up most of the coastal cities. personally though, i'm sort of a spam builder; i usually end up having almost every building you can have in all of my cities by 1920-50.

 

[diegovelasco45]

Building wealth is a lot better than building custom houses. The exception being the portuguese and a specialized in wealth (wall street) city that has access to the coast.

 

[JammerUno]

Building wealth doesn't pass through modifiers, neither does building research. At an average TR yield of 1.5 cpt, and 4 TR with FM and corporation, you're looking at 6 bpt modified to 9 bpt or gpt. That's a ROI of 20 turns, not the best, but not the worst either, and that's assuming only 50% modifiers. But yeah, it's not impressive. Then you get the added TR from the UN and flight later on. At 6 TR and a modified 12.5 cpt, they become worthwile fast.

Then there's bureau, oxford (if that city is coastal), and academies. Your capital will get better TRs, around 2 cpt. With 4 TR that's 8 cpt added pre-mods. 12 after bureau, 36 after the sci mods, for a 5 turn ROI. If you get another 2 TR, that goes up to 54 bpt, or a 3 turn ROI.

So yeah, I build them, just not in every city. Less if I'm not in FM, more if I am. The math on these is so easy there's no reason not to look into it, so do it, then decide.

 

[Nick Carpathia]

ya, the Feitoria's are really the best option when it comes to custom houses in my opinion. I know a few people who play a lot of archipelago maps, and they actually make respectable bank after you beef up most of the coastal cities. personally though, i'm sort of a spam builder; i usually end up having almost every building you can have in all of my cities by 1920-50.

Your games are lasting to the 1900s, and your game still isn't decided? Your rivals don't inhabit irradiated wastelands? Your tanks aren't sweeping through all in your path? You're not finishing your SS Engines? You're not bored yet?

I know how easy it is to queue up a bazillion buildings in your high hammer cities, but trust me, you'll do things better if you discriminate on what buildings you can afford to build without slowing down your victory condition.

 

[Mec AntiKythera]

Your games are lasting to the 1900s, and your game still isn't decided? Your rivals don't inhabit irradiated wastelands? Your tanks aren't sweeping through all in your path? You're not finishing your SS Engines? You're not bored yet?

Not to answer for somebody else, but as far as I'm concerned, no, no, no, no, and no!! Why would I be bored if I love the game?

On topic, help me out here. As a Warlords player who has never seen a Customs House, why is it more effective in a commerce city? Do commerce cities automatically get the most valuable trade routes assigned to them?

 

[Higher Game]

I might be one of the few people who thinks the custom house comes at a great time to build, the renaissance era when the AI has cuirassiers, but rifles are still a fair bit away. Peacefully building universities and observatories is great, and there is often room for a customs house on top, if the mercantilism rush doesn't get too bad.

If you manage to win economics first, perhaps picking it from liberalism, the trade mission can help you run 100% science for quite a while, and you won't care much for grocers and banks, but you don't have rifles yet to stop the AI mount fetish. Voila: the time to build the customs house to fuel the new science buildings.

If getting economics first isn't viable, it loses most of its appeal. Maybe all of it.

The feitoria is by far one of the most under-appreciated unique buildings in the game. It can take a coastal city from maybe 40ish commerce to a much more respectable 50+, making coastal commerce cities much more viable when they would otherwise be best suited as mini-mill hammer houses. It can affect playing style in a way most buildings can't.

 

[awilder]

By the time you are thinking about building a customs house, you cannot expect much more out of it later than when it actually gets built. This makes it (relatively) easy to decide:


Example:
Say you will get 6/turn from it when it's built and it takes 5 turns to build it. Let's also say you have library+observatory+university+laboratory=100% beaker bonus. Assuming you run 100% beaker slider it will benefit you 12 bpt starting in 5 turns. So in 20 turns it will break even with just running research the whole time, since building it took 180 hammers away from running research (ignore overflow).

Ask yourself: will the game go much longer than 20 more turns? Do I need the beakers from running research NOW? (say for a key military tech) If the answers are Yes and No, then you build it.

I hope this illustrates why custom houses (like everything in civ IV) are not always worth it.