Production cycle.

[Calavente]

I've got a strategical question on production.

Big Question : Is it useful to invest a SoK built in your Heroic-epic-city in said Heroic-epic-city ?

1) bases :
-when you have a forge (+25%) and are in the nationhood civic (+10% unit production) +another civic I forgot the name of (+10%unit production), you have thus a city, that when producing a unit have +45% if you have 20 initially, you'll invest 34 a turn in the unit.
-overflowing hammers are counted after the production modifiers are applied

2 )questions : what happens when you cut a forest nearby : e.g. 10hammers.
-does your unit advance with 34+10=44 hammers this turn ?
-does it advance with (20+10)*(100%+45%) = 49...

on the same level : what happens when a Soldier of Kilmorph rushbuild for a unit (IIRC, SoK rush is not limited to buildings) :
- does the unit gain (this turn) 34+45
- or does it gain (20+45)*145% = 94.25 = 94 hammers ?
meaning the SoK gained you in reality 60hammers.
In both case I'll use the second assumption : the hammers incoming are coming before the modifier acts.

ok, here is the trick.

3) everybody has an unit-production city with the Heroic Epic (+100% for militaric unit production).
-so this city produces units with a modifier of +145%
-so a 90 SoK, helped with +145%, needs a base of 37

A SoK, rush-building a unit in this city, provides 45 +145% =110.45 =110.

So if your "unit-prod city" produces 37 per turn :
-in order to build a unit that costs 180 (Tier III unit), your would need 2 turns : 90hammers produced per turn = 180 in 2turns, unit completed.
BUT with SoK :
-1st turn : build a SoK : 37hammers are producing 90 hammers = 1turn.
-2nd turn : build the 180 hammers unit + rushbuld the SoK : 90 from the turn + 110 from the SoK : you have The Tier III unit + 20 overflowing!

All that depends on the question : are the incoming hammers counted before the modifiers are applied or after ???

If they are counted after, there are no efficeint use of SoK. Only Use is strategical to help any city to develop (as means to transfer production from the unit-prod city(UPC) to another city) but you'll still lose in term of "efficiency" and "potential" : the UPC spent 2*37hammers to give 2 * 90 to another city : seems a gain, but in reality, you build 2 90 worth units, to give 90 to another city. In 2 turns you could have build a tier 3 unit instead of giving 90 to said city.

=> As you would have the same "potential loss" when rushbuilding for the UPC, it is NEVER efficient to use SoK in the UPC. It's only worth is strategical : saving some hammers beforehand in order to produce later some buildings/units that you cannot yet build.

If they are counted before, one can expect the aforementionned "happy" cycle to appear ! (I really can't remember which mechanism is the true one.)

 

[DaveGold]

I think the simplest answer to your complex question would be for you to try it. When you consume your unit the production bar will be increased and you can count the difference.

I don't use soldiers for production much but when one add warrens, command posts, etc, they become more interesting. They also allow remote production which can be a big advantage even when it is 'inefficient'.

 

[Calavente]

Lol.
I knew it
I just thought about all that, without possibility of testing it before the week-end (no cIV on my portable PC), and I wanted to check with the community if there was really something to check.

SoK are fine for spreading production. It is still better for spreading prod than building gold in the big city and buying the building/unit (because you can have +100% + command post + civics + warrens). But I never checked the "efficiency" of the aide when rush building.

My question is really the question between : more option/felxibility/strategic use vs real tactical use.

even better, it seems (in any cases) that in the Eroic-Epic-City (if you have at least a command post or a civic boosting military units), for building a building it is better to build SoK and then rush-build them into building than building the building directly.(save if you have civic reducing military production)
If the incoming are counted before the multipliers, it is always better to build a SoK .
If the SoK are counted after the multipliers, only the building reduced by trait or by marble/stone/copper are best built without SoK.

 

[Luned]

I think you also aren't taking a sufficiently long-term view of SoK units. You get them pretty early, they're useful enough in that part of the game as a step-up from warriors. Moving on into the mid-game, you'll gain access to better units, at which point SoKs have one pretty unique advantage: flexibility and return on investment (or lowered depreciation, depending on how you look at it). You can either upgrade them to Paramanders if you've got enough gold... or you can decide to dump them off in newly-conquered or settled cities, where 45 hammers goes a long way toward an early improvement (Courthouse, etc.) to get the new territory paying for itself ASAP---and get 45 of the original hammers you spent on the SoK back! So the lifetime cost of a SoK unit that survives until you don't need it as a fighting unit anymore is really only 45 hammers, not 90. I call that a good bargain.

Now, 45 hammers= a lot of turns in a new city, but usually only a fraction of a turn in an old city. Maximum immediate benefit, therefore, comes from burning the SoK on a low-hammer building in a low-hammer city.

In other words, turning them into hammer-fodder in old heavy-production cities isn't what the SoK unit was designed for, doing so would be pretty foolhardy unless it was a case of "all-hammers-to-the-forge because I'm in a neck-and-neck race with Group X to get The Nexus built."

 

[Calavente]

Luned:
I am really well aware of the strategical use of SoK.
When I have OOOOld SoK, In general I don't "squash" them into 45 as they are well promoted, I try to upgrade them to Paladins.

My thread was not about SoK being useful or not. They ARE useful period.

My question is :
-What is best for the Heroic-Epic-City : build units directly or build them using SoK that she built?
(Warrens in the Heroic-Epic-City is quite out of bounds !!)

 

[Emptiness]

Soldiers of Kilmorph cannot be used to hurry units, so your plan to alternate production of a SoK and a military unit to get extra s without slowing down your military unit production rate won't work.

One can definitely make use of SoK to hurry buildings to great benefit. This can be especially beneficial when used to accelerate production of buildings in a new city (which will have very low s output). An additional hidden benefit of this approach is that the city can work tiles improved to boost output, to accelerate city population growth, without the need to devote any population to production. Your military production center would need to output 31 s per turn to produce a SoK each turn with these modifiers: Nationhood Civic (+10%), Military State Civic (+15%), Command Post (+20%), Capitol + God King Civic (+50%), and Heroic Epic (+100%). That SoK could then be used to add 45 s to a building elsewhere, so the process actually increases your empire's effective production output. With a Warrens you get two SoK, for a total of 90 s, which is almost triple your investment. With all necessary building construction being done by Soldiers of Kilmorph, your cities can focus on building units - which is ideal, because you benefit more from Nationhood and Military State when more of your cities are building units.

-------------

Some additional clarifications:

Chopping a forest in a city's BFC (on standard speed) adds +13 s to that city. That production is considered the same as city production - meaning that it is affected by production modifiers such as military unit production bonuses/penalties, Wonder production bonuses for having access to a resource, or building production bonuses from traits. Ideally, you want to chop your forests so that you get to apply a production bonus to the extra s, to maximize the benefit.

Rushing production adds s directly to the thing being produced itself, and so does not benefit from production bonuses. If you are playing Arturus Thorne, who gets double production for building a Courthouse, and you use a SoK to hurry a Courthouse, you get +45 s from the SoK, not 90.

 

[Calavente]

ok. thanks for the explanations...