Early age strategy - Warehouse buildings

[Vincent_lacruz]

A little thred to discuss the strategy to adopt in the early game, concerning the four ageless warehouse buildings available. They are:
- Granary (+ Food on the tile; + Food from Farms, Pastures & Plantations)
- Fishing quay (+ Food; + Food on Fishing Boasts)
- Brickyard (+ Production; + Production on Clay Pits; Mines & Quarries)
- Saw pit (+ Production on Camps & Woodcutters; Warehouse Building)

On the preview videos, a good number of streamer tend to build those even though they don't seem to have that many corresponding tiles in their city. However that might be an error to do so, since those buildings are ageless, and therefore can't be overbuilt.

It is difficult yet to see wether the small food/production gained is worth the building cost. Of course it creates a district, so you might reach a jucy tile earlier (such as a ressource), but the long term gain seems rather low since it take a space that might have been better used later...

So the big question is: how many corresponding tiles do you need for the warehouse building to be efficient? Of course, the answer will be "it depends", but a few things are to be noted:
- Fishing quay is possibly the only warehouse building that is easy to weight, since water tiles can only host a low number of building.
- Fishing quay is the only early building you place on water. So it will often be build to bridge over a navigable river, so that you can put quarter on the other side.
- Ordinary tiles will often be overbuilt with urban quarters, so you have to keep that in mind when estimating the worth of the warehouse buildings. Keep in mind that quite a lot of buildings will have ressources adjacency, so those tiles will most likely be a perfect target for quarters....
- If the potential is low, it might be better to just build a few warriors/scouts while waiting for the correct technology (especially when you feel the granary potential is low, since it is the first warehouse building unlocked).

I think I will try several strategy at launch. But at game start it might be better to spend your production on scouts or warriors than a low potential warehouse building...

Your thoughts?

 

[Methos]

I think this will take several full play throughs to figure out. What I mean is, the warehouse builds are good and worth it IMO, but it's going to take knowledge of the full game to understand the best place to put the buildings down, so that they don't hurt your exploration and modern age city plans.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Warehouse bonuses seem very strong yeah, particularly because the buildings are ageless. So any bonus to those buildings persists, while non-Warehouse buildings will have to be overbuilt again. Building the warehouses in all of your core cities will help you kickstart the game at the beginning of the next Age.

 

[Krikkit1]

Warehouse bonuses seem very strong yeah, particularly because the buildings are ageless. So any bonus to those buildings persists, while non-Warehouse buildings will have to be overbuilt again. Building the warehouses in all of your core cities will help you kickstart the game at the beginning of the next Age.

The issue is those core cities will lose most of those warehouse bonuses as they pave over things with buildings and Wonders.

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

The issue is those core cities will lose most of those warehouse bonuses as they pave over things with buildings and Wonders.

The warehouse buildings might be a bad choice in you capital for that very reason... Except of course if you get 3-4 ressources of the same type, or if you plan to change the position at the start of the next age (because you prefer somewhere more open to the sea in exploration, for example), of course.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

Warehouse buildings are good in towns with corresponding specialization. Building them in your capital to grab some tiles early and then changing capitals on age transition seem to be a reasonable strategy.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Some things to consider here:
1. Cities, which don't have rural quarters are possible, but require towns to feed them. It's possible, but it's not the only strategy - you could have more cities mixing rural and urban districts
2. I don't have all adjacency bonuses, but it looks like some of them works good if mixing urban with rural districts
3. There are some multipliers for cities, and it's good to provide some base yields for them. I totally see production warehouses to be useful for industry cities
4. As others said, having early granary could help developing your city early and you could later move your capital, turning it into a town, but the strategy is questionable

So, yep, we need to play with this a bit

 

[CoconutTank]

I've been trying to be less prone to build warehouse buildings as of late, which has helped me a bit. In previous sessions, I would place them down without regard b/c I figured that having the warehouse bonuses pile in throughout the eras would always be worth the relatively low production costs. Nowadays though I try to first figure out what kind of improvements the settlement is actually working currently and can work in future turns, since I've run out of viable land tiles or blocked off good adjacency bonuses sometimes when those kinds of errors didn't need to happen.

The consequences so far is that I build Granaries a little less now (since I tend to deprioritize Farms), and I tend to put either a Saw Pit or a Brickyard in the city center if the city has more foresty tiles or more hilly tiles. I give similar scrutiny towards other warehouse buildings in later eras, though I may sometimes build them just to bridge to a tile of interest if I've no other buildings or districts to bridge with. It at least helps that those warehouse buildings have big enticing numbers that appear to account for their full warehouse bonuses (which doesn't seem to happen for warehouse buildings from previous eras sometimes). Why yes, +11 production from an Ironworks does sound pretty nice.

And yes, sometimes I'll build a few extra Warriors or Jaguar Slayers in Antiquity to avoid building warehouses.