Purchase costs and Gold to Hammers conversion

[darrelljs]

Here are a few plots of rush buy costs.





You can see the more expensive things get, the more efficient rush buying becomes. Throw in the fact that gold multiplying buildings are more plentiful than hammer multiplying buildings (at least from what I've seen) and it implies to me that hammers are what you want early, but late game you are probably going to be cash rushing most things.

Darrell

P.S. Civil Service is uber, and the ability to select what tech a GS can bulb makes early Library -> early Great Scientist -> early Civil Service quite powerful. It seems like a safer bet than building the Great Library...although its a surprisingly cheap wonder and the tech path for it is on the way to Civil Service.

 

[Ahriman]

Thanks for this.
Something I haven't checked yet: if you buy a unit, do you get the benefits of any barracks/armory etc in that city?

 

[Celevin]

I love you.

And yeah, rush buying gets the benefits of the armory and such. It makes it more efficient to have a "troop building city", and have all your other towns producing gold to supply it, than to actually have more than one place making units.

 

[sanderz]

Can you "rush" partially completed units/buildings - or can you only buy them from scratch?

 

[Dizzy75]

P.S. Civil Service is uber, and the ability to select what tech a GS can bulb makes early Library -> early Great Scientist -> early Civil Service quite powerful. It seems like a safer bet than building the Great Library...although its a surprisingly cheap wonder and the tech path for it is on the way to Civil Service.

Seems to make Babylonians pretty good. Also, a gold-maximizing strategy could be optimal. I haven't played far enough to tell, really.

 

[Shillen]

Throw in the fact that gold multiplying buildings are more plentiful than hammer multiplying buildings (at least from what I've seen) and it implies to me that hammers are what you want early, but late game you are probably going to be cash rushing most things.

1. I think there are as many hammer multiplying buildings but you don't get most of them until factories and power plants.
2. Gold income is reduced by maintenance, nothing is reducing your hammers.

That said, I do think the game intends for you to rush buy buildings and units quite often.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Can you "rush" partially completed units/buildings - or can you only buy them from scratch?

Rush from scratch. It's a surprisingly big change. It seems I usually just rush things because I get impatient waiting for it to finish (or the citizens are getting unruly and I want to murder them). This change means I have to plan ahead what I want to build and what I want to rush. If I want to rush barracks, I have to build something else and save my gold (although usually what I'll do is build the barracks and save gold to rush the units coming out of it).

 

[obsolete]

Thanks for saving me a few calculations here. I should maybe bookmark this for later reference.

 

[Jaaboo]

Very helpful, thank you.

 

[royal62184]

Does the gold value associated with rush buying change based on difficulty/map size. I would expect the overall trend to be the same/proportional as you posted but just curious myself as I haven't gotten the game yet.

 

[Dizzy75]

The "rush from scratch" thing seems odd to me. If someone beats you to a wonder, you still get gold as compensation. But for some reason, the same thing doesn't apply to regular buildings.

It makes it seem like one efficient technique may be to build a wonder that will take a billion turns, then rush the stuff you actually need. Assuming you go heavy into gold, that is. Maybe late-game maintenance would make that strategy not viable.

I haven't gotten this far in the game yet, but if

R = Gold-to-hammer cost ratio
I = Total possible income per turn (gold)
P = Total possible production from cities (hammers)
N = Number of cities

Then if R*P/N < I/N, it's clearly more efficient to rush things than build them, especially if you have some of those rush-cost-reducing social policies. Or you could produce in your higher-than-average production cities and rush the crap out of your less-than-average ones. This could be especially relevant to rushing units during a war.

It seems to me like they would have to design the later-game mechanics to favor production-increasing for "typical" civs, in order to keep production, uh, productive. If not, maybe there's a potential optimal strategy here.

 

[darrelljs]

I am not sure what effect map size, etc. have on these costs. I'll try to vary it for my next game and see what changes I notice.

Tile yields are the other important consideration. For example, if the conversion cost was a flat 4:1, and a farm could feed 3H or 4G, then from a production perspective mines are thrice as good as trading posts. The problem with static analysis like this (ah, the good old CE/SE comparisons based on tile yields!) is that it ignores important factors such as city growth, happiness, turn advantage, etc., etc.

Darrell

P.S. You'll also want at least one hammer heavy city for wonders, which can't be purchased.

 

[Kordanor]

Sounds to be a nice idea to focus on money in most cities while producing (e.g. military units) in another. Not just that you save maintenance for the military buildings, it also has the advantage of being more flexible as you can use money for bascially everything. Normally your science would decrease if you would run out of money, this way only your gold (or gold income) would decrease. You want to rise a new city? All other cities basically build these buildings by providing the gold to rush it.
This would be huge. The only question left is: How much gold do you get in a gold focused city? And how much production would you get? (as Dizzy75 said)

 

[alpaca]

Judging from the demo code it seems every unit could have a different cost modifier so your graphs could turn out to be a bit unreliable because two things costing the same amount of hammers may in theory cost different amounts of gold when rushed.

 

[Louis XXIV]

P.S. You'll also want at least one hammer heavy city for wonders, which can't be purchased.

I was curious about that. I figured, even if they allowed purchasing of wonders, that the costs would be exorbitant. Nice to know that's not even a viable option.

 

[Alexfrog]

Rushing a building costs 4x+100 right? X is the cost.

 

[Ahriman]

The problem with static analysis like this (ah, the good old CE/SE comparisons based on tile yields!) is that it ignores important factors such as city growth, happiness, turn advantage, etc., etc.

The other point to note is that gold boosters (market, bank) give much larger bonuses than hammer boosters (watermill, workshop, forge).

 

[Wulf38]

It also seems like you can't buy courthouses, meaning any captured cities need hammers or else they'll have to stay as puppets for a very long time.

 

[soprof]

Sorry to reanimate such an old topic, nothing about this has been created since.

Is the info in the initial post true? Can anyone link me the exact formula please?

for instance, I want to know how much buying 3 factories on "quick" speed will be.