Stabs's heuristic exchange rate mechanism (SHERM).

[Callduron]

One of the more complicated things in Civ VI is pondering the relative value of different resources. Cutting through those complexities like a spearhead of Sherman tanks is my patent SHERM system.



1 Food* = 1 Production = 1 Culture = 1 Science = 1 Faith** = 3 gold = 0.66 housing = 0.33 amenities =1 great person point



* Food value drops to zero when a city hits its population limit.



** Faith drops to zero if you don't have a religion.

Now this is a heuristic, an attempt to come up with a simple brute force rule to impose simplicity on complex problems.



We use heuristics all the time. When I buy toothpaste I don't want to have to think about which one to buy, I just want to grab the one I always get without thinking about it. We all have a range of heuristics we use in all sorts of contexts, from political voting to buying a new car we don't do the rational thing of investigating the pros and cons, we do the lazy thing: "I've always voted Labour," "we've always had Volkswagens."



In Civ decision making there's a hierarchy:



top: a carefully thought out and checked numerative analysis that reflects the context.



middle: a lazy heuristic



bottom: a lazy gut impulse



Let's look at some examples:



Picking a pantheon.

If we aren't going for a religion then we can discard all the faith ones (they produce zero sherms), and evaluate the + culture, + food and + production ones based on the resources we have available to us that we expect to develop. In the area we've explored we see 4 pastures, 5 fish, and 6 tea, coffee or other things in that pantheon resource group for the Festivals pantheon. 4 pastures = 4 sherms; 5 fishing boats =5 sherms, 6 coffee = 6 sherms while our cities are growing dropping to zero when they hit their housing caps. Fishing boats looks like the best choice.



Choosing which tiles to farm early on:

2 food, 1 production, 1 science = 4 sherms

1 food, 2 production, 2 gold = 3.66 sherms.



Farm the first one until you hit the housing cap



Which wonder to build?

A 6 rain forest tile Chichen Itza will use one tile for the wonder then give 2 culture and 1 production to the other 5 tiles, it's worth 15 sherms. Huey Teocali gives +1 amentiy to each adjacent lake tile (+3 sherms) and +1 food and +1 production to each lake tile in your empire (+1-2 sherms).Huey on a 4 tile lake gives +13.5 and so is slightly worse than a 6 rain forest tile Chichen.

Choosing an improvement

A farm is 1.75 sherms, 2.75 with adjacency after Feudalism. A ziggurat is 2 sherms or 3 if it's next to a river, rising +1 sherm at Natural History and gaining bonus Tourism with Flight. Ziggurats therefore beat farms for much of the game, especially (but not limited to) games where you aim for a Cultural Victory. (The window when farms are better is from Feudalism to Natural History and then only if it has adjacency and isn't next to a river).


Which civic: Trade Confederation or Triangular Trade?

Trade Confederation is +2 sherms to each international trade route. Triangular Trade is +2.33 sherms if you have a religion, +1.33 sherms if you don't to all trade routes. Triangular Trade is always better if you have a religion. Otherwise look at the sherm value of the trade routes available, remember any civ bonus you get (Egypt gets a +1.33 sherm bonus to international routes, Persia gets a +1.66 sherm bonus to domestic routes). Do the international ones with a +2 sherm bonus pay out more than internal trade routes with a +1.33 bonus? Once the city hits its cap then almost certainly they do. Situationally of course it might be worth taking a sherm penalty to get a new city built up quickly or whatever.



Now it's possible to pick holes, of course there are holes these are heuristics. Hey, maybe there are better toothpastes than Colgate but doing the research isn't worth my time, equally you'll get a feel for when to go by the heuristic here and when to let your better judgment overrule it. In a war for instance production goes way up.

And you're absolutely free to change the values. I'll admit GPP was just a guess and I suspect I'm undervaluing pre-housing cap food.

I'll explain where I derived the numbers for amenties and housing. If you add 2 pop to a city it costs 1 amenity and 2 housing and gives you 2-3 sherms per tile they work plus a little innate science and culture. We'll call it 3 sherms. So 2 housing and 1 amenity gives 6 sherms. From there we just assume equal importance so 2 housing = 3 sherms and 1 amenity = 3 sherms. Those are our values.


Having a quantitative system is better than having nothing and you can always fine tune it over time to suit your priorities and specific game contexts. As General Patton once said:

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

 

[Arent11]

1 Food* = 1 Production = 1 Culture = 1 Science = 1 Faith** = 3 gold = 0.66 housing = 0.33 amenities =1 great person point

I think many people use the old "1 production = 2 culture/science/gold" conversion. So, I would be very interested in the detailed reasoning behind equating 1 production and 1 culture.

This is not a criticism. I'm really interested in how various people value different yields & why they think they are right.

 

[Callduron]

I didn't follow Civ strategy before Civ VI so I'm coming to it without those prior heuristics.

First and most obviously is the tiles. The game seems to present you with tiles where the equivalency is 1:1 except gold that's 1:2. I think gold is worth a little less than that, it's not worth half a production.

Next is the districts. They all give roughly similar amounts of points without the industrial one being obviously twice as good just based on its adjacency payoffs.

Watching streams and communities I sense that people don't value production as highly as your heuristic. If it were true then Granaries would be the first choice early building ahead of Campuses and Monuments because they give you more tiles worked and thus more production. And that's not the way most (any?) streamers start.

Another thing I find it that quite soon units get outdated. Science matters. It's horrible to see a Knight when all you have is Archers and Chariots.

Also the game very quickly lets you get an improvement worth +2 production and a little further +3 production. Can you imagine an improvement that gave +6 culture, it's twice as good as what there is as UIs (things like Ziggurats etc).

It's possible that production is slightly higher, perhaps I should have written 0.9 production = 1 science, etc, but that's getting away from the point of a heuristic.

As for gold it's certainly not on a par with science and culture because you get so much of it and it doesn't destroy the game. It's not hard to get 100 gold per turn by the Mediaeval period but if you had 100 science per turn at the point you finish Feudalism and Apprenticeship you'd be absolutely killing it.

 

[Leyrann]

I disagree with making production equal to science and culture, as well as food and faith, to a lesser degree. In the early game, food is arguably more important than any other yield, as it allows you to grow your cities faster, thereby allowing you to get more of the other yields. After that, production becomes the most important yield, as it is the one that you need to build units, buildings, districts, basically everything. You can convert production into culture per turn, science per turn, gold per turn, great people points per turn, etc, while you cannot do that for any other yield but maybe gold and (for great people) faith.

I also already disagree with taking the pantheon. You are only looking at "what do I get right now?", but if you are going for a science victory and you're sitting at 10 cities, you probably have something like 8 campuses and 3 theater squares, giving you 13 free great people points if you go Divine Spark. That by far beats 13 food, 13 science, 13 culture or 39 gold. I would not say it beats 13 production, but that's just because production is so important. Which, of course, also extends to God of the Sea being a relatively strong pantheon if you're coastal, but that's a matter of chance. Whenever you're unsure what to take, Divine Spark will beat the others (as otherwise you wouldn't be unsure).

You're also making a... let's call it a minor calculation error regarding Huey Teocalli. You assume that, in the rest of the empire, there is only one lake tile. What if I am in a lake-rich area, and have nearly 20 lake tiles in my empire? That's 20 food and 20 production. Much better than Chichen Itza on 6 tiles (though CI can certainly be good wonder if you manage to grab it before the AI does).

You also assume that every farm has a +1 from adjacency bonus with feudalism, while there will also be farms without bonus, or with two adjacency bonus (a big triangle with six farms, for example, has 3 of them with 2 adjacency bonus and 3 with 1 adjacency bonus). Additionally, you are then considering science and culture equal to food for Ziggurats, and while Ziggurats can very well be a nice bonus in certain cases, they do not grant anything that directly helps the city itself. The city won't grow faster (allowing it to work more tiles and earn more yields) nor will it produce more (allowing you to build districts, fight more, etc).

For Trade Confederation vs Triangular Trade, you are ignoring that internal trade routes (which are not enhanced by Trade confederation but are enhanced by Triangular Trade) yield food and production, which are considered far more important yields than gold. In fact, the whole "internal trade routes are superior to external trade routes" is because internal trade routes grant food and production while Triangular Trade allows you to keep your gold positive until you have Banks and Stock Exchanges.

Considering I have over 200 hours in the game by now, I prefer my "lazy gut impulse" over a system like this.

 

[Leyrann]

I didn't follow Civ strategy before Civ VI so I'm coming to it without those prior heuristics.

First and most obviously is the tiles. The game seems to present you with tiles where the equivalency is 1:1 except gold that's 1:2. I think gold is worth a little less than that, it's not worth half a production.

Next is the districts. They all give roughly similar amounts of points without the industrial one being obviously twice as good just based on its adjacency payoffs.

Watching streams and communities I sense that people don't value production as highly as your heuristic. If it were true then Granaries would be the first choice early building ahead of Campuses and Monuments because they give you more tiles worked and thus more production. And that's not the way most (any?) streamers start.

Another thing I find it that quite soon units get outdated. Science matters. It's horrible to see a Knight when all you have is Archers and Chariots.

Also the game very quickly lets you get an improvement worth +2 production and a little further +3 production. Can you imagine an improvement that gave +6 culture, it's twice as good as what there is as UIs (things like Ziggurats etc).

It's possible that production is slightly higher, perhaps I should have written 0.9 production = 1 science, etc, but that's getting away from the point of a heuristic.

As for gold it's certainly not on a par with science and culture because you get so much of it and it doesn't destroy the game. It's not hard to get 100 gold per turn by the Mediaeval period but if you had 100 science per turn at the point you finish Feudalism and Apprenticeship you'd be absolutely killing it.

This whole post basically hinges on what the game gives you on certain yields, which is a wrong assumption. Yes, yields from districts are similar between one another, but that most certainly does not mean that different yields are equally useful. There is a reason Industrial Zones and Commercial Hubs have been nerfed while Theater Squares and Campuses have not. The rule of the game for Civ VI is "production beats all".

Also, streamers do a lot of things sub-optimal, so don't look to them. They have to make decisions (sort of) quickly because otherwise they wouldn't be interesting to watch, while people here have all the time to think out what the best option would be and then write a long and detailed post about it.

 

[MyOtherName]

I think by far the biggest hole in this heuristic is in the valuation of food.

The first main point is that the raw of a food is at a very rough estimate) inversely proportional to the city population. The only thing you can do with food is buy a population point, so as the cost of a population point rises, the value of a food drops.

The second main point is that the value of a population point -- and thus the value of food -- diminishes over time, simply because the end of the game approaches. A pop point bought on turn 100 can produce almost twice as much as a pop point bought on turn 200, simply because it has more time to do so.

The third main point is in regard to the tiles available. A small city with 8 good tiles to work usually wants to grow quickly, because it's losing out on the productivity by being so small, making food valuable. However, a small city with only a few good tiles usually just wants to work those good tiles, and so doesn't value food much.

Better, I think, is to remove food entirely from your equation and settle on some alternate heuristic for deciding if you want food or not.

 

[Arent11]

I disagree with making production equal to science and culture, as well as food and faith, to a lesser degree. In the early game, food is arguably more important than any other yield, as it allows you to grow your cities faster

We all use some rough estimate of the "value" of a certain tile yield, which does, of course, vary over the course of the game. I just want to give my personal reasons for "value" of different tile yields:

(1) Food: Is important as long as there is enough housing, afterwards drops off, as mentioned in the OP
(2) Production: Is important to build settlers & units to settle/conquer cities. Since more population equals more everything, pop growth is hampered mainly by housing & population generates science & culture, production is at least in the early game far more important than other yields. The question is just how much more important it is.
(3) Science & culture: As soon as you have many cities/units, one might argue that technologies that give you higher tile improvement yields (apprenticeship, industrialization) for *all* your cities & better units for your *whole* army raise the "effectiveness" of your cities & armies more than having one additional city or one additional unit
(4) Gold: Is a tradeoff between direct "purchasing power", i. e. how much gold a single production costs, & "flexibility", i. e. the ability to shift gold towards the cities where you need the production. For example, if you are being attacked, you need to buy that additional unit in the city that is being attacked, not build it in a city on the other side of the world. Therefore gold has a higher value than just its immediate purchasing power, the question is just how much higher.
(5) Faith: Similar to gold, but also dependent on whether you have a religion at all, also mentioned in the OP

First and most obviously is the tiles. The game seems to present you with tiles where the equivalency is 1:1 except gold that's 1:2.

I also got this impression, but the question is whether the developers are right. Just because they *think* culture is as important as production in their game, doesn't mean it is The community is sometimes more clever than the devs

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Sherman tanks

trash tier vehicle

** Faith drops to zero if you don't have a religion.

this is incorrect

 

[Photi]

Civilization VI's Hierarchy of Needs

Early game:
Food>Production>Gold=Faith>Culture>Science

Post-Pantheon:

Food>Production>Gold>Culture>Science>Faith

Post- Political Philosophy:

At this point, Civilization VI's Hierarchy of Needs becomes increasingly determined by the victory condition one is aiming for, though all yields are useful for all victory conditions with specific yields having transient degrees of value depending on strategy, playstyle, era, environment, victory condition etc.

However, I think a heuristic approach to playing Civ does not do justice to the game's complexity. Would assigning somewhat arbitrary and, throughout the course of a game, shifting values to various yeilds be helpful to a beginner or a newcomer to this release? Possibly, but the values are misleading.

Would you rather have a hammer or a loaf of bread? Well, it depends.

 

[Victoria]

We all use sherms to some degree but we do not call them sherms and do not necessarily place a value in them the same as you or the same each game as victory conditions dictate how many sherms a point of culture is on a tile at the beginning of a game.

trash tier vehicle

 

[MyOtherName]

However, I think a heuristic approach to playing Civ does not do justice to the game's complexity. Would assigning somewhat arbitrary and, throughout the course of a game, shifting values to various yeilds be helpful to a beginner or a newcomer to this release? Possibly, but the values are misleading.

Would you rather have a hammer or a loaf of bread? Well, it depends.

I think, with rational play, the big picture of the economy management really has something like this as part of its description assigning values like this: the bulk of the game's complexity is about judging what the relative values are and how they trend over time.


For a simplistic example of what I mean by rational play, an example of violating it is: (all other things being equal)

* In one city, you take a chance to increase science by 1 instead of increasing culture by 1
* In another city, you take a chance to increase culture by 1 instead of increasing science by 2

so that you've made contradictory tradeoffs. In this special case, you can even see that by making the opposite choices you'd be in a strictly superior position!

 

[Leyrann]

I think, with rational play, the big picture of the economy management really has something like this as part of its description assigning values like this: the bulk of the game's complexity is about judging what the relative values are and how they trend over time.


For a simplistic example of what I mean by rational play, an example of violating it is: (all other things being equal)

* In one city, you take a chance to increase science by 1 instead of increasing culture by 1
* In another city, you take a chance to increase culture by 1 instead of increasing science by 2

so that you've made contradictory tradeoffs. In this special case, you can even see that by making the opposite choices you'd be in a strictly superior position!

But if you're focusing science in one city and focusing culture in another city, that is a good decision only if the first city is better at science and the second better at culture. If that is not the case, you make a mistake on a deeper level than these two decisions.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

But if you're focusing science in one city and focusing culture in another city, that is a good decision only if the first city is better at science and the second better at culture. If that is not the case, you make a mistake on a deeper level than these two decisions.

Increasing culture to get important tiles can lead to more of everything total 50 turns from now, including the science you sacrificed to attain it.

For a heuristic to be useful it must allow a fast decision that is right a large enough percentage of the time. Otherwise, you can't use it due to too many exceptions or it's not very good as a heuristic (if taking too long).

 

[stormerne]

Would you rather have a hammer or a loaf of bread? Well, it depends.

Sheaves or shields (for the older players among us ).

Yes it all depends. Not only on the phase of the game, but also on the phase of life of a particular city (which may be brand new to grab a resource in mid-late game). And it depends on the victory you're going for, the difficulty level you're playing on, the civ you're playing and their special abilities, whom you're trading with and why, and even the map type.

As @Victoria said, we all use our own heuristics - whatever they're called - but a good civ player knows how and when to vary those heuristics according to all the above and more. Life would be so much simpler if we could all use the same heuristics ("My Civ II city now has 6 beakers. Time to build a library.") but then it would be far less fun and it would demand far less artistry of players.

 

[Photi]

Sheaves or shields (for the older players among us ).

Yes it all depends. Not only on the phase of the game, but also on the phase of life of a particular city (which may be brand new to grab a resource in mid-late game). And it depends on the victory you're going for, the difficulty level you're playing on, the civ you're playing and their special abilities, whom you're trading with and why, and even the map type.

As @Victoria said, we all use our own heuristics - whatever they're called - but a good civ player knows how and when to vary those heuristics according to all the above and more. Life would be so much simpler if we could all use the same heuristics ("My Civ II city now has 6 beakers. Time to build a library.") but then it would be far less fun and it would demand far less artistry of players.

they'll always be shields in my book, whatever overlay may be current. i can't even pass as civ hip, as 'hammer' is out of date now too.

 

[Leyrann]

they'll always be shields in my book, whatever overlay may be current. i can't even pass as civ hip, as 'hammer' is out of date now too.

I tend to use "production" these days. I used shields in the past, when Civ II was the only one I knew, but I hadn't really played the series for years and then came back at 5, and I've just never liked "cogs". Also, it's easy to abbreviate as 3f2p, for example.

 

[Victoria]

I try to use whatever anyone else is using, if someone wants to talk in groats then great.
In my mind its all feel, I do not even think production, I just think grass hill
It's only here I will stop and think how my grass hill converts
I still struggle with not having a mine on a plain though just because there is no lump.

 

[MIS]

I'm not sure it's helpful, since the ratio will change throughout the game, depending on context and victory condition. I think you've undervalued production. Pretty much every victory condition is production heavy (much more so than Civ5, for example). A simple test - compare the value of a Boost in Science/ Culture v the production to meet it. 3 slingers and a bit of gold gets you the machinery boost - do the math. You can even ignore the value of the 3 archers.

 

[EpicWestern]

Production, food, culture science, and gold are the big ones by far. With faith, housing, and amenities the game just gets too complicated for me to even want to try coming up with some sort of exchange rate. Like in real world exchanges rather than coming up with some imaginary good to pin everything to, its better just to pick one (usually the most important one) and use that as a base. So I would use production, and mentally I think of it as "production" (not cogs or hammers, etc.).

So IMO for an AVERAGE civ spot (yes obviously it depends) my rates would be something like this:

1 production = 1.25 food, 1.25 science, 1.5 culture, 3 gold

That would also probably be a weighted average in the sense that production is worth more in the stage of the game that matters the most (super early game and early midgame for deity players). Mid/late game science becomes extremely important for all victory types and I would say its even worth more than production:

1 production = 1.75 food, 0.50 science, 1 culture, 3 gold

And obviously late game you hit a point where the important stuff has been researched and there's a huge dropoff to how much science and culture are worth.

 

[Leyrann]

mentally I think of it as "production"

When you said that I realized I thought of it as "green", "red", "yellow" etc.