Energy is less useful than you might think

[alpaca]

Compared to Civ5, where you had to pay money to upgrade your units, and city state diplomacy that provided additional yields, the only things you can do with gold in BE is to buy buildings/units and trade it with the AI.

This allows you to very easily establish an exchange rate for energy vs production and science. For production, in the early game rush buying will be worth something like 4 / , for colonists it's more like 3.5, with the added benefit of not impeding city growth. On average, I think we could establish 3 as a reasonable exchange rate when we consider that energy has the additional benefits of being global and storable (which is rather funny seeing as we have pretty large problems in that regard in the real world).

For science, the value the AI places on science compared to energy seems to be 2.55 / if I read the XML values correctly, although I'm unsure how much you have to pay the AI for their science. If we apply transitive properties, a hammer is worth about as much as one science, perhaps a little more. On the other hand, science is your primary objective, which is worth a little extra. Overall, I will rank it as 3 gold per science.

Food is more difficult to establish a good evaluation, as it depends on city size. For large cities, the size of the food bin increases so quickly that it probably doesn't make any sense to invest into food once you reach city size 10 or so. You also need 2 food just to feed a pop. As a rule of thumb, I would rank food at maybe 1.5 /, perhaps 2 in the early game and maybe even less than 1 once your cities are more mature.

Culture is also difficult to rank, and its value also decreases as the game goes on. It's also harder to get than the other yields as it is mostly found on buildings. I would rank it as approximately equal to hammers or science, so 3/

Health is a little bit of an oddball as its value depends on how close to any thresholds you are and whether the city can actually use the local health. A lot of the time, it's totally worthless. At other times, we can maybe rank it at 20% of a citizen's total yield (which is 9), which would put it at about 2/health. This is, at least, close to my intuitive evaluation.

If you agree with this, barring some basic food supply or a food-specialized city for trade route shenanigans, you will usually want to work mines before other basic improvements (unless you have tech upgrades). Generators still seem usually more useful than unupgraded farms. As we all know, titanium is positively sick. A titanium hill will provide 6 as well as the strategic resource. Using my exchange rates, this is equivalent to about 18 , more if you consider that you can sell each titanium to the AI for an equivalent of about 1.5 per turn

It also means thorium reactors (≈5 or 6 depending on which quest you choose) are rather bad compared to recyclers (usually something like ≈9 + the worker speed bonus), labs (≈9 or 6 and expedition upgrade, which is probably inferior), or OER (≈9 and cheaper to build and your main source of culture in the early game). The alien preserve is actually a little better than I expected at ≈10. The vivarium and clinic or Pharmalab are also pretty bad at ≈6 or ≈7, respectively, but as I said, your evaluation of health may depend.

Academies seem a pretty good deal, turning a profit of 7, while manufactories are pretty bad at 3. For terrascapes, it depends on the base tile. Compared to grass, they still provide 6. All of these become better if you have their respective virtues, with a slight advantage for the terrascapes, but they also take twice as long to build and can cost serious amounts of energy. Biowells are also rather bad at 3 (if you can use the health at all). All things considered, academies seem king, which is also my intuitive impression.

For satellites, well, it depends more on what is on your tech path. I wouldn't go out of my way to get solar collectors, they are weaker than you might think at, perhaps, 10 (the 20% bonus is difficult to estimate, I put it at 6 plus 4 tiles worked). On the other hand, they don't require strategic resources, so they're probably fine since you can spam them. Fabricators are really good, but might be too far away from your tech path if you don't have supremacy. Weather controllers are reasonable. Holomatrices are great if you can get them early enough, but they do need floatstone, which is relatively rare.

Summary:

1 ≈ 3
1 ≈ 3
1 ≈ 3
1 ≈ 1.5
1 health ≈ 2

 

[Bandobras Took]

That's one way of looking at it; I tend to look at it more in terms of purpose. I use energy to pay maintenance on units, troops, and tile improvements. From that perspective, Energy is only useful to keep your other stuff functioning. However, the relative value vs other yields doesn't matter, because energy is the only thing that can do this.

 

[alpaca]

That's one way of looking at it; I tend to look at it more in terms of purpose. I use energy to pay maintenance on units, troops, and tile improvements. From that perspective, Energy is only useful to keep your other stuff functioning. However, the relative value vs other yields doesn't matter, because energy is the only thing that can do this.

Well, yes. But I see it as a given that you have enough energy to pay for maintenance, which should almost always be the case except for the very early game given the high incidental yield of international trade (used mainly for science) and river tiles. But once you reach that bare minimum below which energy is worth a lot more, I think it makes sense to think about how to evaluate it if you want to decide what to build next.

If everything else fails, you can at least convert science to gold by selling it to the AI if you have a cooperation agreement. If the numbers are right, building an academy and selling two science should provide 3 energy (5 minus maintenance) plus one science - so an academy would still be a lot better than a generator.

 

[Soffacet]

Well, yes. But I see it as a given that you have enough energy to pay for maintenance, which should almost always be the case except for the very early game given the high incidental yield of international trade (used mainly for science) and river tiles. But once you reach that bare minimum below which energy is worth a lot more, I think it makes sense to think about how to evaluate it if you want to decide what to build next.

If everything else fails, you can at least convert science to gold by selling it to the AI if you have a cooperation agreement. If the numbers are right, building an academy and selling two science should provide 3 energy (5 minus maintenance) plus one science - so an academy would still be a lot better than a generator.

An un-upgraded generator. Vanilla farms and generators are both fairly horrid in the grand scheme of things, but that makes sense as they are available right away and can be built almost anywhere. But they both get a lot better with upgrades. By your metrics, Farm is 1.5/4/7/10/11.5 with Vanilla, Vertical Farming, Industrial Ecology, Artificial Evolution, Ectogenesis Pod, cumulatively. Generator is 2/3/4/7/10/12 with Vanilla, Organics, Augmentation, Biometallurgy, Planetary Engineering, Xenomalleum. Academy is 7/10/16 with Vanilla, Photogenics, Learning Centers. But having Learning Centers by a reasonable turn requires Knowledge as 2nd tree, after the standard Prosperity 5. Mines are weird, they start off strong but never get much better (6 vanila, 7 with Biometallurgy). Also remember that the hill base yield is just 1 in BE.

Health and Trade Routes are huge, non-negligible factors in this exercise, and I think people will struggle to quantify those things for quite some time. But this was a good effort and a good post.

 

[Strategist83]

Little surprise in the conclusions drawn here. Also, they still don't change your overall strategy. Yes, you should work Mines rather than Generators if possible - same as Civ V, and same as all former iterations of the game, nothing new here. Yes, Thorium Reactors are 'kinda bad' - especially compared to early-game buildings like the Recycler; all early building having a *much* better cost-efficiency than anything afterwards (LEV Plant comes late game, takes 100 turn just to pay for itself and consumes Floatstone) - but you should still build Thorium Reactors fairly early and not skip them in favor of something else, because they're fairly inexpensive (also, their building quest is really good with the option for the +2 Energy yield, meaning they cover your energy expenses very well and free you up to not work Generators and stuff).

In general, optimal city build orders are almost universally based simply on their production cost. Even if you want to create a powerhouse military output city it still gets the Thorium Reactor early. Maybe you want to build something like the Growlab with the fungus bonus slightly earlier if it has access to multiple fungi but as you pointed out early building like the Laboratory have far greater efficiency.

For all the early building quests (Recycler, Trade Depot, etc) pick the production bonus over the energy bonus because production is indeed better. Some energy is still needed for rushbuys and emergencies, however, so you don't want to completely ignore it, especially not in those particular cases where it can produced the most efficiently (Thorium Reactor being prime example).

Trade routes are of course the ultimate troll in these equations with how absurdly powerful Firaxis in their infinite wisdom made them. It is because of these and to some degree the sheer efficiency of the very early buildings coupled with the almost total absence of multiplier buildings that best strategy becomes settling lots of cities and ignoring/avoiding the late-game buildings that take 100+ turns to pay for themselves. By far the best thing to be building for established cities are more trade units for the new ones.

 

[aguliondew]

If that is how you rate the yields in terms of energy the tile improvements looks something like this with MAX upgrades.

Max upgrade (base yield)
Manufactory: 5production 1 science -2 health = 14 (5)
Farm: 3food 1 science 1energy = 8.5 (1.5)
Generator: 5energy 1 production = 8 (2)
Academy: 5 science 1 culture =18 (9)
Biowell: 2food 1 health -2 energy = 3
Terrascape: 3food 3production 3 culture -6energy = 16.5 (9)

With the knowledge virtues culture is worth a lot more 15%=science and 30%=energy. So culture is worth 4.5 energy when you go knowledge. Then again it is just theory crafting energy values of yields and does not take into account what your city/civ needs at the time.

 

[alpaca]

If that is how you rate the yields in terms of energy the tile improvements looks something like this with MAX upgrades.

Max upgrade (base yield)
Manufactory: 5production 1 science -2 health = 14 (5)
Farm: 3food 1 science 1energy = 8.5 (1.5)
Generator: 5energy 1 production = 8 (2)
Academy: 5 science 1 culture =18 (9)
Biowell: 2food 1 health -2 energy = 3
Terrascape: 3food 3production 3 culture -6energy = 16.5 (9)

With the knowledge virtues culture is worth a lot more 15%=science and 30%=energy. So culture is worth 4.5 energy when you go knowledge. Then again it is just theory crafting energy values of yields and does not take into account what your city/civ needs at the time.

4.5? Maybe 3.75 (3 + 0.3 + 0.15*3). Interesting point, though. The question is whether the additional +0.75 gold per culture is worth taking two virtues. Of course, getting the free tech at the end is also interesting and that alone makes each virtue worth perhaps 200 science (assuming a tech cost of 3000).

I'm not sure if fully upgraded yields should be compared, since which you get depends more on which research can be reasonably done. It's perhaps more interesting to compare the marginal gain of a research to its tech cost. Of course, that would require placing a value on affinity points, but they should be benchmarkable against science (which is your main source of affinity).

 

[tommynt]

Max upgrade (base yield)
Manufactory: 5production 1 science -2 health = 14 (5)
Farm: 3food 1 science 1energy = 8.5 (1.5)
Generator: 5energy 1 production = 8 (2)
Academy: 5 science 1 culture =18 (9)
Biowell: 2food 1 health -2 energy = 3
Terrascape: 3food 3production 3 culture -6energy = 16.5 (9)

With the knowledge virtues culture is worth a lot more 15%=science and 30%=energy. So culture is worth 4.5 energy when you go knowledge. Then again it is just theory crafting energy values of yields and does not take into account what your city/civ needs at the time.

at least with farms u got something wrong, there is a +1 production tec, isnt there?
And then biowells .. with health giving Bonus to science and % bonuses to everything this equation is totaly wrong.

Also Rating Food just as half as useful as production seems VERY weired (i.e. wrong) to me. Considering one hardly needs production as early buildings are done with Caravans and later ones are only marginaly good. While Food = Pop = everything.

 

[Unconquered Sun]

at least with farms u got something wrong, there is a +1 production tec, isnt there?
And then biowells .. with health giving Bonus to science and % bonuses to everything this equation is totaly wrong.

Also Rating Food just as half as useful as production seems VERY weired (i.e. wrong) to me. Considering one hardly needs production as early buildings are done with Caravans and later ones are only marginaly good. While Food = Pop = everything.

It's not fundamentally wrong, only somewhat off. There's also circumstantial fluidity to it.

I rate Food almost as high as Production, and higher in newfounded cities.

 

[Soffacet]

at least with farms u got something wrong, there is a +1 production tec, isnt there?
And then biowells .. with health giving Bonus to science and % bonuses to everything this equation is totaly wrong.

Also Rating Food just as half as useful as production seems VERY weired (i.e. wrong) to me. Considering one hardly needs production as early buildings are done with Caravans and later ones are only marginaly good. While Food = Pop = everything.

I noticed the farm yield was off, too. They get +1 hammer from Industrial Ecology, so that would be a total of 11.5 under the OP's metric.

Food is still important but a bit less so than in CiV. There are so many flat yield buildings that you can have a very productive city with very few citizens. Assuming sufficient worker spam, citizens are the bottleneck on how many Academies you can work. But that doesn't come into play until later in the game.

I've been pondering that it might be a good idea to sandbag early food generation and wait for Nanopasture/Biosphere/etc. Maybe grab Nanotechnology with Institute. Then turn on AgriDev for a few turns to explode. Use the extra generators/mines to build an army and conquer a neighbor while you wait. Cities grow to about 7-12 pretty easily with just trade routes and no farms, but then stall out.

 

[hbar]

Energy is the only resource you can bank. It's the least efficient (as OP points out), but the most versitile. You can't save up 3000 hammers to have in your back pocket in case of a surprise DOW.

Energy allows tricks like rushbuying 7 battlesuits the turn you get access to them, or rushing your first Institute to get access to the quest earler. Energy allows you total control over border expansion, which not only gets you the resources you want before the other guy nabs them, but also acts as a wall against foreign explorers and settlers. Energy is a panic button for when a siege worm shows up at your fence-less city. Energy allows you to postpone the cautious approach until it's actually needed, allowing you to focus on the more efficient options until you know what you need.

Energy is working exactly as designed. It's a generalist yield that can be converted to whatever you want, whenever you want. If it were on par with the other yields, there would never be a reason to get anything but.

 

[Empedocles]

I value energy at about 1/2 a hammer, since it is more versatile and hammers are easy to get from trade routes. That makes a lot of the quests that offer 1 gold + no maintenance or 1 hammer a pretty even choice. I usually cost production or food on early buildings, but gold on the later ones. I like to go industry, so saving up 10k gold to get the +100 gpt and rush buy a late game army is high on my priorities.

 

[alpaca]

at least with farms u got something wrong, there is a +1 production tec, isnt there?
And then biowells .. with health giving Bonus to science and % bonuses to everything this equation is totaly wrong.

Also Rating Food just as half as useful as production seems VERY weired (i.e. wrong) to me. Considering one hardly needs production as early buildings are done with Caravans and later ones are only marginaly good. While Food = Pop = everything.

The primary reason why I rank food so low is that it needs to be converted into other, more relevant yields by pop growth. Since the food bin grows so quickly in BE, this is a pretty inefficient thing to do. Also keep in mind that the numbers I gave are only very rough estimates that are certainly not always true. In small cities, I rank food as almost equal to production. On the other hand, if my city has more than size 10 or so, food is more of an incidental yield for me because it will take forever to grow another pop. I'd also like to mention that you need two food for a citizen. I've literally never run into the issue of not having anything to build. YMMV - which value would you assign to food?

 

[cord]

One reason food is weaker in this game as opposed to Civ5 is due to how terrible specialists are in BE. Outside of my crazy 40+ pop cities, I've never found a reason to ever use them (though I go tall in every BE game I've played). By the time you unlock the buildings that give them, you can already make far better tile improvements instead.

This is on top of the other high-pop city changes, like the city connection formula, or the lack of % boost buildings, or early-aqueduct equivalents. Or the fact that trade routes are ridiculously OP - why grow a city when a new one gives 3 more trade routes? One good inner trade route gives enough food for a city to grow to sufficient size to work any improved tiles.

I would say that production is entirely dependent on science, though. You want a ton early game (for explorers, colonists and whatnot), but once you've established some cities, science is more important (until you have too much stuff to build). I've always put science ahead of above production overall.

 

[Martin Alvito]

While I like the idea of conversion factors as a heuristic for judging production/AI trading decisions, it's extremely important to be careful in how you apply it. Production decisions should always be judged upon the reinvestment yields, and not solely on the rough equivalence of the resource.

To take an obvious example of this principle at work: in the early game you would never trade 20 energy per turn for 7-8 beakers per turn. That 20 energy can be turned (via loans) into a Colonist, which permits establishing two more trade routes. So long as trade routes have such high yields and health is a minimally binding constraint, you're always going to want that Colonist over the research. You'll delay getting those beakers, but you'll more than offset the cost over the long haul. Since expansion is an exponential function (one productive base quickly becomes three, becomes nine, etc.) but the research penalties from expansion scale linearly (though on a constant which eventually becomes large), it takes quite a while for the research penalties to outweigh the prospective benefits from horizontal growth.

For the more mathematically inclined, what I'm saying is this: you always want to judge the current value of a production factor on its marginal productivity, and not on its linear equivalence with other production factors. Since energy -> Colonist is by far the most productive thing you can do for a very long time, it follows that you want to turn early resources into energy and not the reverse even if the heuristic suggests otherwise. Other examples exist due to the quest system; the quicker you get the first Ultrasonic Fence up, the quicker you can go for broke on trade caravans that earn maximum revenue and science by crossing the globe.

One reason food is weaker in this game as opposed to Civ5 is due to how terrible specialists are in BE. Outside of my crazy 40+ pop cities, I've never found a reason to ever use them (though I go tall in every BE game I've played). By the time you unlock the buildings that give them, you can already make far better tile improvements instead.

This is an extremely good observation - the lack of GPP significantly devalues specialists, and therefore having more population than needed to work the dirt. However, it's also an incomplete explanation of why food is weak. It ignores two other major causes - external trade routes cover for a lot of missing pop points, so maximizing empire population isn't paramount, and the power of trade routes (both as a food source and as energy/research) strongly favors horizontal expansion over vertical.

While Food = Pop = everything.

That was true in the later releases of CiV vanilla into the expansions, but the later releases also strongly favored vertical growth. Food was very much NOT what you wanted to maximize in early vanilla releases. Smaller cities -> smaller food boxes -> optimum city size is reached rapidly. This heavily devalues food.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Note that for trade routes to be powerful differece of base food/hammer needs to be there. So you want some cities to have lot of food and hammer production, as they will contribute to internal trade bonus.

 

[Durak]

Note that for trade routes to be powerful differece of base food/hammer needs to be there. So you want some cities to have lot of food and hammer production, as they will contribute to internal trade bonus.

In my opinion this is very much underestimated in the current conversion rates. I almost always use as much internal trade routes as possible, especially early in the game. So 1 extra food in a city, may translate into 1 extra food for three or four other cities as well through trade routes.

So my usual strategy is to go farm spam, and go for ectogenesis pod (which is overpowered imo). I never build generators.

 

[Roxlimn]

The thing that's the most valuable is the thing you don't have enough of.

That's kind of a truism, but it's also true to the intent of the thread.

Essentially, I value enough Energy to be able to rush-buy units and Trade Vessels when I need to. Generally, this means a stockpile of about 2000-3000 Energy. Any less than that and I appreciate having more.

1 Energy is not equal to 1 Hammer. It's not equal to 3 Hammers. It's Energy. It has different properties and uses. You use it for things that require Energy (like funding Academy spam). You can't use Hammers for that (or only at a 1:4 conversion rate, anyway).

As for food - food is the most important, basic resource. It's the reason why TRs are so strong. Every pop point in every city comes from food, so you can always use food, especially moveable food.

Does it make sense to invest in food past size 10?

I'd say it depends on the placement of the city and its function. If it's on flatland and you have a Lascom satellite on it with Firaxite and percent science boosters, then it makes sense to boost the pop with Farms. If it's on a River and you're spamming Solar Collectors, Generators.

If you agree with this, barring some basic food supply or a food-specialized city for trade route shenanigans, you will usually want to work mines before other basic improvements (unless you have tech upgrades). Generators still seem usually more useful than unupgraded farms. As we all know, titanium is positively sick. A titanium hill will provide 6 as well as the strategic resource. Using my exchange rates, this is equivalent to about 18 , more if you consider that you can sell each titanium to the AI for an equivalent of about 1.5 per turn.

I actually almost never build mines at all unless it's on a power tile. I almost never put citizens on a plain mine hill (3 production). I generally will have a city that's got a lot of power tiles for hammers. It works mines. It sends its 3 TRs to boost hammers everywhere else.

It also means thorium reactors (≈5 or 6 depending on which quest you choose) are rather bad compared to recyclers (usually something like ≈9 + the worker speed bonus), labs (≈9 or 6 and expedition upgrade, which is probably inferior), or OER (≈9 and cheaper to build and your main source of culture in the early game). The alien preserve is actually a little better than I expected at ≈10. The vivarium and clinic or Pharmalab are also pretty bad at ≈6 or ≈7, respectively, but as I said, your evaluation of health may depend.

I build either Farms on the tiles and Thorium Reactors to make up the Energy shortfall, or Generators on the tiles. Thorium Reactors are great for when you need surplus energy badly.

Vivariums are great for growing cities in Desert locations.

Clinics and Pharmlabs depends on whether you can make the next Health breakpoint. If you can, the percent boost civ-wide makes it entirely worth it. Otherwise, no.

Academies seem a pretty good deal, turning a profit of 7, while manufactories are pretty bad at 3. For terrascapes, it depends on the base tile. Compared to grass, they still provide 6. All of these become better if you have their respective virtues, with a slight advantage for the terrascapes, but they also take twice as long to build and can cost serious amounts of energy. Biowells are also rather bad at 3 (if you can use the health at all). All things considered, academies seem king, which is also my intuitive impression.

Academies are pretty bad unboosted because they do nothing that can't be done by a Science Specialist, and they cost more to maintain, and they require the tile, and the worker time. If you just want the science output, get Scientist Specialists. Faster. More cost-efficient.

Institute and Gene Smelter are great buildings that come around the time you typically can build Academies. Use those.

Academies really come into their own with the Knowledge Virtue boost. 5 per citizen is pretty hard to beat. Manufacturies can also be improved to be 5 hammers per tile - only one less than a Titanium hill, and with the base tile output underneath. Of course, the base tile output just offsets the 2 energy maintenance.

Where Manufacturies get sick is when you use them to shoot a Production City's output sky-high, allowing you to build Wonders lickety-split and boosting internal trade to boot. You can't move around titanium to concentrate production, but you can build Manufacturies anywhere - all you need is a little Health.

 

[Empedocles]

Manufactories can be very good for boosting internal trade routes. A few manufactories in your core cities can be enough boost trade routes from +7/+2 hammers to +8/+3 hammers, which with industry rounds up to +10/+5. That means 2-3 manufactories can net you +3 production for each internal trade route with that city, which can often mean every city in your empire.

 

[Wabango]

Although there can be some debate on the actual numbers of value, the conversion principle itself is an excellent way to look at things. With energy being lackluster compared to previous iterations of Civilization, and internal trade-routes being more powerful than in Civ BNW, the conversions are specially crucial. Great post, will definitely impact my game-play.