I dunno. I have never built the Stable because I felt that I would never build enough units to justify the eternal maintenance costs of Stables, but I do build Horsemen for upgrading into Knights at a substantially later time than when I get HBR. I don't use Horsemen a lot.
Druin said:
Furthermore, it is much easier to acquire and gpt than it is to acquire more in Civ V because you can sell excess lux resources to other civs and trading posts may be spammed on ANY available tiles while mines / lumber mills require specific circumstances. Also, resource tiles, on average, give much more than .
All of this adds up to a fairly strong bias for rushbuying over actual production in Civ V!
I would not say that it is a fairly strong bias. Certainly, if all your cities had bad production, and you're pulling in gold from spamming Trading Posts, then you are biased towards rushbuying, but this was due to a previous decision to prioritize stockpiling gold over getting hammer production.
A large city with a fairly sizable number of hammers could pound out a University in maybe 10 turns with a low net hammer production of 20 (including Workshop +4-ish). In contrast, the University itself, if bought, would cost 780, which could constitute 8 turns of empire-wide gold production.
Better hammer cities should be able to build the Uni in less turns. The Uni is 200 hammers, so the disadvantage is a factor of 3.4x.
You could save up for the rush buy, but every gold you save to rush buildings is gold that isn't going to research treaties, tile purchase, and maintenance of buildings.
The math is only greatly in favor of buying at the higher difficulty settings where the AI gives you hundreds of gold for essentially nothing, or when your cities are so hammer poor that the disadvantage factor isn't large enough to offset the time factor.
In your example, you have three cities with equal amounts of hammer and gold. In the time it takes to accrue the gold to buy the Uni, you could have just built the Uni faster, and still have the gold to show for your troubles.
The only way this is in favor is if the time to build the Uni is prohibitive, and you can stockpile enough gold beforehand without giving up opportunities to use it profitably.