hurry bank in CE-games?

[Dooke]

I have a question about when to hurry banks, but first i'll give you a brief introduction to my gamestyle.

I just took up playing civ4 again a week ago, and for the time being i'm kicking my friends ass in 1v1 mirror standart wide continent games (with no rush prior to 0 AD). I play vanilla as Victoria (Exp, Fin), both players play settler.

My basic strategy is to chop settle the entire island as fast as possible, spam cottages and start building in the following order:

Granary
Market
Bank

One city doesnt do the above, but does Great Light House, The Colusal, and then Pyramides (which is still available due to it being 1v1).

when i start building banks i already got the pyramides done and can pay commerce for hurrying production. My question is how much commerce should a city put out before i buy it a bank? (since it's rather stupid to spend money on banks in cities with 4 commerce output)
Should i only buy banks in 35+ commerce city?
Or should i stop my research altogether and spambuy banks in all my cities, and then continue research when all banks are bought?



...on another note: What i'm basicly trying to obtain, is to be able to nuke my friend before 1000 AD. I can do it around 1200 AD, but since i've seen people on the HOF winning spacerace around 1000 AD i would say i should be able to get nukes around or before that time. Any thoughts/things you think i do wrong?

 

[Babibo]

Just a short note :
As far as I know, Banks increase money gold, not commerce commerce.
Since your science slider is usually above 50%, you'd better build libraries and universities instead of banks. (if I'm wrong, then it's possible to win at Immortal level without knowing that

Anyway, all cities should not have the same build queue, since you certainly want to specialize them into production cities, military cities, science cities, etc...

Back to your question about the money threshold to start building a bank : whenever you have nothing better to build. My threshold is around 20 Personnally, I don't like banks, so I start building them when I'm planning to build Wall Street, which means I'll need 6 of them.

 

[Dooke]

right.. money it is

Sure i need military, but other than that with cottages spammed all over the place, i would still say the 50% from a bank is way better that the 25% from a library, since it's 50% of something that grows both when the city's population grows AND when a the cottages turn into hamlet, village and towns...+ civics and printing press....it's just a lot of cash money hoes to get 50% more out of



As i see it there's two kinds of civ-players in the forum. There's the analytic science inspired type who tries to improve his game by math, calculations and models....and then there's the average Joe who thinks the best civ game is the one that emulates real life the most.

..reason i'm saying this is, i want to know if you base your post on objective measurements and analysis or if you're (like G W Bush) just using your gut-feeling to be the decider that decides stuff.

 

[oyzar]

On settler level you pay almost no maintainance costs making those banks rather useless... just get libraries and other science multipliers. at 70% research a library will give .7*0.25= 0.175 bonus while a bank will give .5*.3=0.15 bonus commerce per commerce. Even if you dont count for the fact that libraries are obviously cheaper if you are running 70% research or above you should be building libraries observatories etc not banks and markets etc... Get oracle for civil service and librarlism for physics and just nuke your pal to hell... It should be easy to get nukes around ad's on settler level. Pop as many settlers/workers as you can from huts spam cottages grow your cities and just tech as fast as possible...

 

[Dooke]

point taken, i'll give it a try later on tonight

 

[Jtownsend]

The problem with banks on a CE is that CEs typically run with a very high science slider which makes for a very low "money slider." (which is, of course, not visible, but is 100% minus your Sci/Cult/Espionage sliders.)

In my current game on noble for example I've been able to keep the Sci slider at 100% by selling parts of my tech lead to the entire field of AIs fairly efficiently; as a result banks would be quite a terrible investment for me since 0% of my cities' commerce is being turned into money, which is what Banks work with.

Obviously being able to run 100% most of the game is a product of the difficulty level and the fact that I'm running the wtfpwn economic leader, Elizabeth; but you'll never -want- to run a big money slider on CE, and that hurts banks as a "generic empire-wide improvement."

At low difficulties and on CE, heavily weighting your multiplier buildings towards science is a no-brainer; those techs have cash value to the AIs which can in turn finance more deficit-spending on research.