Prebuilt troops.

[Footen]

Anyone else ever built axemen or horsemen early on, halting construction at 1-2 turns until completion and starting another production to save on upkeep costs, then some turns before war you complete them all? I just tried it and it worked rather nice on a marathon game.

 

[Harry Haller]

Don't some of the shields that you have invested "decay" over time while you are building something else?

 

[Footen]

Hmm, I don´t think so and hope not. But I do know that you can only prebuild one of each type of unit.

 

[suspendinlight]

I think they are supposed to decay, though I'm not sure what the rate is. It doesn't seem particularly fast, but I think I have noticed decay. I think this also happens with techs you start researching and then stop.

 

[Shadzy19]

I use this a lot when im still using any of the religion civics before making the switch to theocracy , for instance a city without state religion will build all diffrend kind of units up to 1 turn then when you switch to theocracy you can build all the units in 1 turn / eitch and they all get 2 promotions.
Same goes after a war when i recover and build some economy up , some cities will be done faster and use this trick again.

 

[MrCynical]

I have definitely noticed hammers decaying away, but it does seem very slow. Maybe even only 1 per turn.

 

[obsolete]

Working on a tech, or sheilds then abandoning will eventualy wither away. So no, I don't like this kind of strategy.

If you abandon a tech then come back later on you may find yourself in for a nasty surprise if you waited too long.

 

[Footen]

Yes, I did some testing and it wasn´t as great as it seemed. Can only be used to save minor amounts of gold.

 

[Shadzy19]

The decay is rather small if you plan on changing back within 10-15 turns max , the gold for upkeep is minimal but a second upgrade is more important.

 

[KerThud]

What if you switch production back and forth between, say, a swordsman and an axeman so that there are very few turns where no production is added to the builds?

 

[Smirk]

It seems to be ten turns until you start to see time decay, this however unfortunately seems to be the case from normal to marathon. So its particularily painful in marathon where everything takes much longer to build.

You can keep it alive if you switch back to it every ten turns for at least one turn. I've done this in a game where the tech rate was so slow that the only build was a wonder which I didn't want to start so early. So what I did was build towards it while I had nothing else to build and then switch back to it every ten turns when I was building other things.



I've also seemed to notice that decay kicks in on some other levels, either based on total hammers in the quene or total projects, or both. Meaning if you have two things in the quene you are switching between and then get an engineer and rush a third item you will see a loss on the other two items. It could be that with one other item its 10 turns till decay, but if you have two items it could be 5 turns before they decay. This is just a guess and it sounds broken so I hope this isn't the case.