[BTS] Forges?

[civac]

At 120 hammers, it takes a too long for that extra 25% to pay off early-mid game, when you're not working a lot of hammer tiles. Later once windmills are decent, or if you have a lot food-ok hammer tiles [brown cow, green metal], it could be useful. I have been underwhelmed by the times I built a forge and worked plains hills for wealth or research.

Until late game the advantage of forges in most cities is that they increase the value of your whips.

 

[Snowbird]

Forges are one of few things in Civ4 that I do not have strong opinion (except for half costed forges - these are great).

Some general thoughts...
Base hammers is not a factor in deciding, food surplus is more important for better whips and happiness. Well, again in some cottage cities I would not whip forges - the ones severely lacking health or if I run "half-city" (lots of green river but just one food source shared between two cottage cities). I guess that falls under not having real food surplus.

Cuirrasier rushes are also huge uncertainty for me. If you have good base (6+ cities with good food), forges could be nice to generate stronger longer lasting attack. If that is break out or die (3-4 decent cities with/without some filler) an earlier attack is probably better as I'd rather have couple more cities to whip than +25% on my poor core. Well again, smaller empire likely means faster teching and less of gap between getting MC and Cuirs rampage.

Cannon attack or naval invasion I would surely want forges as these need more blunt force than momentum, unless some mass drafting is in the plans.

 

[pi-r8]

in Lain's Frederick game, he waited until researching steel to slow-build start forges and barracks while running Caste and OR to make great merchants. then he switched to Slavery to whip some forges, and (because of trading issues) later switch to Theocracy to whip a catapult and a trebuchet in every city - all in about the span of 8 turns. [he also whipped the units, but didn't l et them finish until steel was ready]. he used 2 great merchants to upgrade them to level 2 cannons en-masse.

seems like the forge was useful for whipping those units rapidly - he had so-so land, so the forge made whipping units more efficient, which he needed because regrowth wasn't going to be that fast. he also wanted to get to grenadiers, so he didn't want to kill his tech rate by building units gradually or whipping away too many good tiles.

so that's i guess an instance of deferring the forge and barracks to instead pour it into beakers via building research and scientists, so that you can get a breakout unit (cannons) early, and then really launch your army fast because you have all that population stored up to turn into units.

He did a great job with the timing in that game. Lots of things going on at once.
-He wanted buddhism, since everyone else was buddhism, but they never spread it to him, so he used OR to build missionaries (and of course OR helps with making forges)
-He was waiting for some great merchants to be born and move into position, so no great hurry to finish researching steel (no need to build research)
-Let the cities grow for a while while slow building forges, to save up pop for later
-Immediately after finishing them, lots of heavy whipping so they would pay off quickly
-Lots of whipping, so the happiness was also immediately useful

 

[sampsa]

There's value in getting 4 pop whips down to 3 pop whips and 3 pop whips down to 2 pop whips. I also feel like the cuir example is exactly when it makes sense to build forges. I'm always twiddling my thumbs for a couple dozen turns while I work my way to the right techs. I can't build cuirs yet, so I don't need to build X cuirs before the forge pays itself off and is justified. The relevant opportunity cost is often building wealth, which I can't whip and gets a future boost from forges as well.

I def. want Forges in all cities that are not hopeless for unit production.
Sometimes a city lags behind and can better contribute by focusing on something else..but core cities get Forges for Cannons, Cuirs etc..no question.

So I'm saying you need to whip 16 pop in order to break even, but judging from these responses it must be wrong somehow. Eager to learn. I build wealth/research/failgold/HAs before I have the techs for cuirs. Forges perhaps in the best cities, but never thought it's a big deal either way.

 

[drewisfat]

I wasn't questioning the 16 pop math.

What I'm looking at is what I do with growing cities before I can build cuirs. If I don't whip anything, well my cities are going to go above happy cap and then stop growing. If this happens a few turns before I can build cuirs that's fine, but otherwise this is a waste of food growth and whip anger decay. A forge lets me put those hammers forward in the form of cheaper and more accessible cuirs later. The opportunity cost is like whatever that pop was working for a few turns, and a couple turns of building wealth. And then once I have the forge I'll get 25% more wealth creation anyways from there on out.

That doesn't necessary hold up if I'm *already* building units, because more units now can end the war quicker and save me units/cost in the long-term. So if I'm in constant war mode I'm probably not going to stop and build forges, but usually and especially in a cuir rush, I've got that peaceful build infrastructure midgame to get through and I always build forges then.

 

[AlmightyBureaucrat]

So I'm saying you need to whip 16 pop in order to break even, but judging from these responses it must be wrong somehow. Eager to learn. I build wealth/research/failgold/HAs before I have the techs for cuirs. Forges perhaps in the best cities, but never thought it's a big deal either way.

16 pop is correct if you ignore natural production, but that comes down if you have any strong tiles or you need to stagnate on mines for lack of happiness. I think of this less in terms of pop and more in terms of total . After building the Forge, you need to spend 600 to break even (480 of base + 120 bonus from Forge), which is ~6 cuirs/cannons (after the Forge is built). So it might be worth building the Forge if you build more than that out of a single city in a reasonable amount of time.

Now that calculation is only when Forges are competing with units for . And as drew mentions if you can at least partially build the forge before cuirs are available that improves the calculation significantly.

 

[sampsa]

Well, building HAs/elephants is also contributing towards unit production before access to cuir techs. So is running a golden age getting GMs out for upgrading. Maybe you like building a lot of farms and mines if your cities are growing too big and you don't have anything you want to put your into. Maybe you spent the GS I use on a golden age to an academy. Maybe you actually do whip for 16 pop in a cuir war.

What I'm saying is that the way my games go, forges don't play a big part in cuir strategies.

 

[drewisfat]

Maybe you actually do whip for 16 pop in a cuir war.

I'd say I do pretty consistently. That equates to 29 cuirs from a 6 city empire. In that no-cottage game I built just over 100 cataphracts.
I tend not to war early if I get enough space and I rarely use GMs to upgrade HAs, so those are likely the big disconnects.