Failure Gold

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Constructing national wonders for fail gold seems kind of slow.

Excusing for the moment the whip and queue games you can play if you get close enough to finish, you can only construct a national wonder in one city at a time. Which maybe limits you to 50 or 60 turns building it. Which means your discounting the value of the gold by 25 turns (on average).

Looking through the list of wonders, I can maybe see it for the Hermitage - it's still reasonably early, no construction pre-requisites, there's a production modifier. I'm not sure you'd do it right away - if you are drafting rifles, what do you normally want to be producing? But it might work.

 

[JammerUno]

^If there's no direct need for the HE you can juggle it between your high hammer cities. No problems there. I play tons of games where I go from 2-3 warrior per city to rifles without any units produced in between, I feel no need to get the HE up before I start cranking out the siege.

 

[LuCiver]

Other advantage to Nat wonder failgold is that you get to chose when to cash it in.

 

[Rhaok]

Pretty sure building wealth does not gets OR bonus.

Rittmeyer is right. The 25% bonus from OR is only for buildings (including wonders?), not units, wealth, culture, projects?, etc.

 

[stopstopp]

You can, but only to an extent.

 

[MarcoPollo]

I've finally broken the new guy wonder addiction. Now I see the need to build so many more things that I find it hard to work in a wonder for fail gold. This is more pronounced with the national wonders. Sometimes I get so caught up in a plan that I forget about national wonders until much later.

So when do you work those in. How can you justify a wonder for fail gold when you can bust out some more settlers / workers / units?

Do you put whip overflow into the wonder or is this a terrible idea?

In Civ IV expanding too fast can lead to an economy crash. So not creating units or extra cities is often a preferable scenario. But what do you put your hammers into. You may not want to build units, or useless infrastructure, no wonder is appealing to invest a significant amount of terms to completion. But you can always use extra cash. If you can't build wealth or you have resources/traits that allow you to leverage failure gold, then use it.

One time my economy was really taxed after a military expansion against Monty. But the Pyramids weren't build yet. I was still mopping up monty but my slider was at 30% and monarchy was taking 20+ turns. So I decided to build pyramids (with stone) until the failgold came. Within 10 turns, I was almost finished the pyramids when they shut it down earning me around 450 gold. I cranked up my science slider, hit monarchy in 4 turns and never looked back.

Thank you failgold.

 

[Alki]

I've always considered this an exploit.

The deviousness of some people on here is really amazing, I would never have considered that but sounds like an exploit to me too.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Fail wealth is definitely not itself an exploit. It is fair compensation for not being the first Civ to complete a specific great wonder. For national wonders, fail wealth is fair compensation for changing one's mind on where to a build a specific national wonder.

It doesn't matter whether great wonders or national wonders are being build for fail wealth or not; both completing a wonder or getting fail wealth from it are legitimate goals.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[MegaLurker]

Building National Wonders for failgold isn't an "exploit." You are trading the opportunity cost of delaying the wonder for gold. It would have been extremely simple for Firaxis to have made it impossible to put any hammers (or, say, over X amount of hammers) into a National Wonder in more than one city. They didn't just leave it in the game by mistake.

 

[Izuul]

I've never considered any source of fail gold to be even remotely close to an exploit.

OTOH, one thing i always thought was a serious grey area was TMIT's article that was titled something to the extent of "Fleecing the AI for gold" in which he detailed a tactic that involved trading AI a large amount of GPT along with a resource followed by trading them other resources for that gold, then pillaging the original resource to cancel the GPT trade. The end result is trading the AI resources for GPT that they can no longer afford. Some people thought this was perfectly OK, but it strikes me as being a bit underhanded so I've never used it.

 

[blunderwonder]

I've never considered any source of fail gold to be even remotely close to an exploit.

OTOH, one thing i always thought was a serious grey area was TMIT's article that was titled something to the extent of "Fleecing the AI for gold" in which he detailed a tactic that involved trading AI a large amount of GPT along with a resource followed by trading them other resources for that gold, then pillaging the original resource to cancel the GPT trade. The end result is trading the AI resources for GPT that they can no longer afford. Some people thought this was perfectly OK, but it strikes me as being a bit underhanded so I've never used it.

I think its an exploit, but mostly because it requires reloading and doing it over and over again , there was also one where if the civ revolted that turn, it would be screwy, and theyd have like 1000+ gold for trade, even though they wouldnt normally be able to trade it to you..

I dont know if id consider it an exploit if your only goign to get an extra 2 or 3 gpt out of it, since it will cost you twice that to begin with anyway. I mean itll be 40 turns before you make up the losses, maybe longer.. and really how much are you hurting an ai depriving them of 3 or 4 gpt



As far as national wonder failgold, its not exploitative, but it doenst happen in my games very often.. Having to wait a long time for the gold is not always a sound plan. If you win the race to a tech and trade for 5x its value, its alot better than waiting around..

My point is if your at 20% slider and barely chugging along, its almost certain to be preferable to build wealth and tech, than to build failgold and hope you get it early enough, or to try and build he in all your barracks cities...

delaying stuff like NE is normally a no no anyway.

 

[elmurcis]

exploit than maybe also is possibility to ask gold from every atleast pleased AI every atleast 30 or 40? turns... With 17 AI and atleast 2/3 on pleased is steady source of gold time by time (if don't forget when asked, can get 500 at same time).. can work same good as fail gold just is more predictable All you need is just to place note on map when was last time you ask that...

 

[Izuul]

17 AI? My head would explode playing games like that.

 

[rah]

Fail wealth is definitely not itself an exploit. It is fair compensation for not being the first Civ to complete a specific great wonder. For national wonders, fail wealth is fair compensation for changing one's mind on where to a build a specific national wonder.

I'd go along with this thinking if it was just one city where you changed your mind, but when you do a single national in almost every city and then complete it, how could this not be considered an exploit.

Same thing with a great wonder. If you're only building it in one city, then the compensation makes sense, but in multiple cities, again exploit.

I don't see how anyone can claim different. Just my opinion of course.

 

[Kallikrates]

Depends what one means with "exploit". It is not a bug, but I don't like it. But I also dislike "building" wealth and science and they are officially in the game and I think slavery is considerably overpowered. The reason for me is that there should be some penalty for not getting a wonder, but also some consolation price. With combinations like IND + Stone etc. failgold is, however, often better than the wonder!
Apparently most players do not share the uncomfortable feeling, but note that there *was* a penalty for building wealth/science in vanilla (I do not remember if failgold worked exactly like in BtS), and there was no failgold in some of the earlier CIV games, so it is not the only or natural solution for dealing with failed wonders. I'd prefer a solution with a ca. 50% penalty when building wealth/gold and similarly with failed wonders.

 

[rah]

I don't think it was a bug either. The devs did want to have some consolation but I"m sure they never realized how it would be abused.

I also agree if there should be some consolation and some type of penalty so it can't be abused.
My favorite would be that when you removed it from the QUEUE it cashed you out with a big enough penalty so it wouldn't be so desirable to do.

IF it's just being built in one city, then a full payout would be OK. It could still be used to generate some gold but not totally abused.

 

[blunderwonder]

Theres no way building wonders for failgold is an exploit. The AI does the same thing, maybe it doesnt mean to, but thats hardly the point, there are AI's that will have 1000 gold in 2 or 3 turns from failed wonders, and at higher levels, they have masonry and quarries quickly, not to mention a crazy bonus on production itself, which snowballs with multipliers (i think, they dont get 200% bonus, they get 100%X100%, its their base production that goes up?)...

If it were just the human player getting it, it would be exploitative, but not so much otherwise, as for national wonders, like i said before you might think of it as an exploit, but its not a particularly good one anyway, delaying something like HE for 200 or 400 gold at the price of 100 or 200 hammers, is hardly a deal, you can make that up in units no problem, and delaying NE, is just as bad... AT best, your pulling an extra 400-600 gold, when you would of had 200-300 building wealth, and sooner, its hardly a game changing thing..

Just saying with NWs, the most your going to get out of HE and NE in a few cities, is an extra 600 gold or so, beyond that i dont think ive ever seen, theres too much other stuff to be built to be wasting time like that.


In any event, some games are difficult, and you may need a clever way to get cash if you had crappy land.

I watched an AZ video, where he was going to pillage a neighboors iron, so that he could sell them his lol.. I thought it was clever, but sort of exploitative the way the AI will trade for something he has, but doesnt have hooked up. Its hardly gamechanging to have an extra happy source and 9gpt, but it may be worth the spy anyway. After watching that, i always build at least 1 spy now, which i never bothered with before, if just to steal a minor tech around 400ad its worth the 40 hammers. Its something i may have thought of if i had spys laying around, and stuff to trade, its an intererting mechanic in the game nonetheless though.

 

[Izuul]

I've always considered an exploit to be using (or abusing) something in a manner that was never intended. The problem is that we do not know what was and was not intended by the development team. I think that's left open to personal interpretation which is why there are so many varying opinions on the issue. One could argue that since these things were never patched they must be acceptable, but given all of the other things that were never fixed, I'm not sure how valid that argument is.

Personally i feel that the AI was only intended to trade away surplus GPT for resources and circumventing this could cripple the AI economy and bolster the player's economy in a manner that was not intended. This is just my own opinion though, so i choose not to use such a tactic.

I don't feel the same way about fail gold. Perhaps this is an intended bonus for having access to a resource or playing an IND leader? Is that so far-fetched to believe? Just my personal opinion again, and clearly others disagree with me, but i think it's plausible that fail gold functions as intended.

 

[rah]

Theres no way building wonders for failgold is an exploit. The AI does the same thing,

Are you suggesting that the AI builds a national wonder in multiple cities intentionally just for the fail gold.?
Giving way too much credit to the devs.

And I have already stated, I have no problem if a wonder is built for fail gold as long as it's only built in ONE city. And yes, the AI does that to, but I'll bet there is no logic that said it's building the wonder just for fail gold. It's building the wonder because it wants the wonder.

If done in multiple cities, it's an exploit pure and simple.


That being said, I'm have no problem with using whatever exploit you want. It's no different then playing with events on or off. It's a personal preference that we make for our enjoyment of the game. But don't fool yourself into being convinced that the devs designed that specific feature in just for that purpose.


And yes, I don't know for sure what was intended, but I've been on a few CIV test dev teams so I have a little experience there.

 

[NihilZero]

The national wonder fail gold thing often involves some significant tradeoffs. For one thing, you can't build something you actually intend to finish - units, settlers or workers, or buildings. For another thing, you may need to finish something that is in fact rather useless - ie Moai. To make it worthwhile you need to lose turns of potential production and then finally build the thing. So it's really no big deal.

OTOH, I often put hammers into something I intend to build but cannot yet, but only if I would otherwise build wealth. For example, I'm building the Great Library in my GP farm. In another city, I'm building wealth. In this case switching from wealth the the NE is obvious if you have marble. You still want the NE ASAP, but I want to build the GL first cos I'm competing with AIs for that.

In those cases NW fail gold is win-win and involves no sacrifice (since you'd be building wealth anyway) but in many cases it's not so stellar. When do you really have the liberty to milk Moai fail-building to its full potential? The game moves too fast for that, most of the time, and there are more pressing things that need to be done. Maybe if you'd built units instead and attacked somebody you would have got all the fail gold cash and more from sacking cities.

World wonder fail gold is generally better, since you don't need to finish the thing to cash in. You can just sink some hammers into it whenever a city doesn't need something more pressing. But if you had to actually finish, say, the sistine chapel, would as many people bother with sistine fail gold? Probably not.

As for whether fail gold was intentional from a game design point of view, I sincerely doubt it, but its not exploitative because of the opportunity costs involved. Unlike that resource trading thing (which I don't quite understand the mechanics of) which is clearly rather game-breaking.