Gold > Hammers

[Volapyk]

In short this is about how your can get more production from a single coin than a single hammer. By making use of how bonuses stack in Civ 5 we can heavily reduce the cost of rush buying stuff in our cities, with the interesting note that units ends up costing less gold than hammers.

In all it's simplicity what you need is the SP in Commerce that reduces cost by 25%, the Big Ben wonder for another 25% and the SP in Autocracy for a further 33% for units only.

While testing this out I stumbled across some interesting numbers. The gold a unit or building cost, is not proportionate with the number of hammers. Most units costs around ~300% gold compared to hammers, some are cheaper, interestingly enough the Nuclear Missile is only ~250% gold to hammers, while the most expensive would be the work boat which has almost 700% gold to hammers ratio on it. Buildings also vary greatly, while most cost around 500% gold, some are way cheaper, most worth noting is probably the Colosseum which only cost 400%.

Anyhow, with the 2 SP and the Big Ben wonder, we sadly don't get a 88% reduction for units, but what we get is still far from bad.

Lets look at 2 things, a Granary a Giant Death Robot. With a base cost of 100 hammers and 1000 hammers respectively these 2 items are easy to calculate from meaning I don't have to go get a calculator

Start cost for a Granary is 500 gold and the GDR is 2270, meaning 500% for the building and 227% for the unit.

With Mercantilism (the commerce policy), the price falls to 370 and 1700, meaning we are now at 370% and 170% which matches the 25% less we expected.

With the Big Ben wonder, the price is 250 and 1130, or 250% and 113%. Which is almost the 50% discount we wanted, an interesting note is that the price is always dividable by 10, so instead of 1135 the price gets lowered to 1130.

Finally with Militarism (the Autocracy policy), we get the GDR down to a whooping 760 gold for 1000 hammers, or only 76%. A total discount of ~66%. Buying units instead of building them suddenly becomes, if only Wealth converted 100% production to gold instead of 25% .

In conclusion, seeing as how units are cheaper buying rather than building we can suddenly have gold focused cities become heavy production worthy, and you don't even have to build the units there, meaning you need less cities with +exp buildings to produce a large army extremely fast.

Also worth noting is that it is a lot easier to get compared to in with the base 2 extra from a trading post, 1 extra from river side from the start (production wont hit this one before you get a Hydro Plant). Only down side is that you can get a lot more % bonus to your production than you can for your gold.

 

[biohazard72]

I'm starting to rethink the mine improvement on hills after crashing my economy in the last few games. 2 gold vs. 1 production is pretty debatable as to which is better, especially with Big Ben and Commerce policies as you note.

I'll probably trade post every hill not in my capital's radius next game, to see if I can stay positive for longer.

 

[Monthar]

Very good info. However, your math is slightly off here.

Anyhow, with the 2 SP and the Big Ben wonder, we sadly don't get a 88% reduction for units, but what we get is still far from bad.

25+25+33 = 83

Even though producing gold only converts 25% of the hammers to gold, doesn't that gold get included in the base, ie. before multipliers? So 20 hammers = 5 gold. If we figure in the multipliers from market (25%), bank (25%) and stock exchange (33%), that comes to 5 *1.83 = 9.15 which would round to 9. Thus 9/20 = 45% of hammers converted to gold if you have all 3 multiplying buildings built.

Since this relies on a policy in Commerce, the capitol gets another +25% gold multiplier. This makes the capitol's gold multiplication 25+25+25+33 = 108%. So that same 5 gold from building wealth becomes10.4. Rounded to 10 and you get 50% of hammers converted.

This all means, that if you have those low hammer high gold cities set to building wealth, you'd be able to afford to buy even more units.

I believe this is why building wealth only converts 25% of the hammers. If it converted 100%, with the gold multipliers you'd effectively be getting 83% more production by building wealth. Thus it'd always be better to build wealth than to build the unit/building.

 

[bryanw1995]

plus gold can be used to start wars, buy peace, trade agreements, RA, CS bribing, etc etc etc. only hammer cities should be wonder-builders, spaceship part builders, or cities that just have a very high hammer potential.

 

[skallben]

I'm starting to rethink the mine improvement on hills after crashing my economy in the last few games. 2 gold vs. 1 production is pretty debatable as to which is better, especially with Big Ben and Commerce policies as you note.

I'll probably trade post every hill not in my capital's radius next game, to see if I can stay positive for longer.

I hardly ever mine hills unless they got a resource. Exception would be cities that I designate as heavy production hubs. Even so, I rather farm riverside hills. IMO, lumber mill cities are better for production as they get a boost with steam power. I used to have the same problem where my economy crashed after industrialization, I think railroad+factory and increasing upkeep cost is the culprit here.

 

[Bibor]

the TLDR version:
GDR:
A city with 140 for a land-based unit (realistic that late game): 7 turns to complete. That's a 108 per turn value even with all your bonuses for rush-buying. Your trade posts would need to produce 59 raw to match that (59 or 60 equals 30 trade posts, no less).

In comparison, you'd need only 18 mines (or lumbermills) to reach this level of production.

Even if you scale down production and gold output to a more "common" city, the ratio still remains the same: 1.6:1

***

Only down side is that you can get a lot more % bonus to your production than you can for your gold.

The only one?

Gold multipliers: 25% + 25% + 33% for a total of 83%
Land unit multipliers: 15% + 20% + 50% + 50% +15% for a total of 150%
Naval unit multipliers: 20% + 50% + 50% + 15% for a total of 135%
Building multipliers: 25% + 50% + 50% +15% for a total of 140%
Wonder multipliers: 25% + 50% + 50% +15 % for a total of 140%

Hill tradepost: 2 2 with all multipliers is:
3.66 and 4.8 (for a building, so average) for a total yield of 8.46

Hill mine is 3 with all multipliers is 7.2

Trade posts might be okay for a "balanced economy" city, but the core cities have very few TPs in my games. Gold doesn't build stuff as fast as hammers can, no matter what your calculations show.

University: 780 or 200
Temple: 580 or 120
Seaport: 650 or 140
etc.

If you add Statue of Liberty, Communism, Merchant Navy and many other multipliers to production that can be found in the game, production gets even stronger.

 

[Monthar]

Bibor, that's all well and good for your production heavy cities. However, a lot of cities can't get anywhere near as much production. These are typically the large grassland cities that are going to be your commerce cities anyway. I believe the whole point of this thread is to show how, even those commerce cities can effectively boost the output of the production cities even further. After all, those production cities are where you'd have things like the barracks, armory and heroic epic. Thus if you can build a unit every 5 turns and buy a unit every 5 turns in that came city, then you've effectively doubled its production output with your commerce cities' gold output.

I'm certain this wasn't about completely replacing hammers with gold, as that would be a bit crazy. This is about supplementing not replacing.

 

[Deussu]

I'm actually wondering when it comes cheaper to buy a swordsman and upgrade it to a longswordman than actually just buying a longswordman straight away. Given that the gold costs for units is only vaguely tied to the hammer cost, it's really hard to estimate this without the numbers at hand.

 

[RealHuhn]

Sorry for the mild thread necro (half a month) but in my opinion rushbuying units has a lot of potential.

I remember in Civ IV, there was a similar beeline with a few great merchants and mass upgrading to riflemen or whatever (can't remember ^^).
The general idea was to research an important military tech first and then instabuy or instawhip a huge army instead of waiting for the slow production.

In Civ V production is even slower and it's easier to get huge amounts of money and that's why I don't understand why rushbuying isn't a well developed strategy on these forums. Maybe because the AI is horrible at combat and optimization isn't needed?

Anyway, thanks to the OP for the information about those discounts and how they stack with each other.
I know that Autocracy + Militarism are only available in late game, especially because the "new" tech tree doesn't allow the biology slingshot.

But you can get Big Ben + Mercantilism quite early and therefore the 50% discount. Great merchants are quite easy to get as well because markets and banks have three specialist slots.

So let's develope a strategy.

Which units do we want to rushbuy and how do we get there? Riflemen, longswords, musketmen?
Do we build markets/banks before universities?
Do we focus on getting great merchants?
Do we spam trade posts or just a transition from production to trade posts at some point?
Which policies?
Which leader?
How do we get an engineer for Big Ben? Maybe Stonehenge?
ICS with Arabia, +1 *gold* per trade route and more ressources for trade? Rome for fast markets and banks? France for more culture and rushbuying musketeers (which should be very cheap)?
A few big cities with ghandi and focus on growth? Persia for +2 happiness per bank and advanced golden ages?

So much potential ^^