Stabs's heuristic exchange rate mechanism (SHERM).

[Sumorex]

@MadDjinn
If 1 gold = 2 cogs, you would work an unimproved fish over an unimproved grassland forest?

Alternately an unimproved fish is equivalent to an unimproved forested grassland hill?

 

[MadDjinn]

Depends on what period the game is at. And whether that city working it is building something useful, or is too far from the colony front to be useful. Plus, I'd rather have improved and boosted hexes to work.

That being said, brand new cities tend to get more production than gold because they have districts to build. Later game, they get more food than production because they have to grow into the pop needed to get more districts.

Really what it comes down to is time. Turns matter more than individual increases in supply.

Small example with settlers and builders:

New city gets planted on another continent far from home. You want to expand more in that area, but it takes 10 turns to get there. So while more production in your capital could let you build a settler a tiny bit faster (which with diminishing returns means possibly not faster turn wise) getting more gpt means you can buy a settler in the new city sooner. If the gold income is faster to buy a settler in the new city than production time + travel time for the capital, you cut turns off and therefore more production wasn't worth it.

Same thing goes with builders, especially after policies are used. How many turns of not using those charges did you go if you went the slightly more production route vs the gold route? That's the true cost difference.

And on that note, it's usually why I'll hook up a city back home before sending a route elsewhere. If the travel time without the road is high (basically non flat land all the way) then the lower output trade route gives more value due to increased speed to get to the new city.


Edit:

And really, the big reason gold has more value than production to me atm is that there is too much easy gold in the system now. If some non hex based gold was reduced the balance would swing back towards production.

 

[MyOtherName]

Cog to gold spending wise is 1:4, or less depending on what it is specifically. But, gold to cog income is 2:1. Which means when you factor in both income and expenses, you get 1:2.

I presume, those two ratios are:

• 1:4 is the purchase price of buildings
• 2:1 means "gold-producing choices yield twice as much as cog-producing choices"

in which case the 1:2 ratio you compute is means

For the purposes of building buildings, taking the cog-producing choices is twice as productive as taking the gold-producing choices.​

Which is an important figure since it expresses the inefficiency of producing gold for the purposes of buying buildings, but that's not what the thread is discussing.

---

I've been saying "value" -- maybe let me change the word to "utility", to reduce the potential for confusion with purchase prices.

The point of quantifying the relative utility of gold vs cogs is to guide you when you make choices, such as:

• You could buy a building with gold rather than produce it with cogs
• You could send envoys to gold giving CS's rather than cog giving CS's
• You could build cog-giving buildings rather than gold-giving buildings
• You could work a tile 213 or a 22 tile

or other more complicated things.

In the broadest strokes, any self-consistent way of making these choices can be described by assigning a utility to each yield, and noting that each choice maximizes utility.

One can use the converse: one can make self-consistent choices by trying to judge the utility of each yield, and then making the choices that maximize utility.

For example, if you assign utility so that 1 cog = 3 gold, that means:

• (all other things being equal) you would pick a trade route that produces 3 cogs instead of one that produces 8 gold, but you would prefer a route that produces 10 gold.
• You would never buy a building or unit, unless you're willing to spend 34% extra to have it now rather than in the future

There is a fair amount of fungability in yields, which means this broad stroke has a lot of applicability; gold is obvious, but for cogs:

• You can redistribute cog production via trade routes
• Most builds don't care which city they are built in, which lets you redistribute cog consumption
• You can focus cog-producing infrastructure in cities that will need to build more things
• Various forms of rushing (e.g. chops, gold spending) can be used to make up deficiencies in fungability

Yes, the assignment of utility will vary over time (e.g. you probably want the utility of 1 cog to be nearly that of 4 gold in the very beginning of the game, and decreasing over time). Yes, there may be times when you need to make local deviations from the general rule. The point of the heuristic is to set things at a broad level.

 

[Arent11]

And really, the big reason gold has more value than production to me atm is that there is too much easy gold in the system now. If some non hex based gold was reduced the balance would swing back towards production.

If I understand it correctly, the idea behind the "heuristics" is to give you a rule of thumb whether you work a tile that gives you 1 production or a tile that gives you 2 gold. In the case of city states or buildings, the designers made commercial city states give double as much gold as production city states give you production. Obviously this is because the designers themselves internally value production double as much as gold. The question is whether the designers are right.

 

[EpicWestern]

If I understand it correctly, the idea behind the "heuristics" is to give you a rule of thumb whether you work a tile that gives you 1 production or a tile that gives you 2 gold. In the case of city states or buildings, the designers made commercial city states give double as much gold as production city states give you production. Obviously this is because the designers themselves internally value production double as much as gold. The question is whether the designers are right.

Right, the designers themselves are basically forced to come up with a conversion rate, so we shouldn't really think of it as some sort of abstract concept that doesn't matter. No one is arguing that we adhere to any kind of strict formula, just that there is something out there we can loosely acknowledge. We can "it depends" the conversation up all day, but we aren't adding any value to the discussion unless we measure how much whatever factor moves the needle. I mean, I get that X exists, but does that make gold worth 2.75 cogs or 3.5 cogs?

Anyway, as someone who (very generally) thinks 3 gold = 1 cog, I would say the designers did very slightly get that wrong. Its not just city-states, but also how the AI prioritizes where citizens go. Sometimes you have to micro your citizens away from whatever luxury plantation they might be at to ensure you get the more important food and/or production. Only a slight annoyance though. Also, I'll say that it could just be the designers erring on the side of caution. Gold is so flexible, if they undervalue it the game can quickly become destroyed as you'll just be hoarding it every single game, and only slightly deviating in order to rushbuy whatever buildings you need for your victory condition, or waiting to rushbuy military once you get attacked. So while I think 2 gold = 1 cog is wrong, I wouldn't start buffing gold city states. There's also another small factor with AI citizen placement, that I'm sure the designers might place a bit more emphasis on gold since it would be a lot more annoying for less experienced players to face a gold deficit than it would for them to not have their cities grow as fast (they don't really have any idea how fast a city is supposed to grow, or any real desire to end the game efficiently).

 

[Victoria]

4 extra gold at the beginning is great.

On the 2:1 ratio... it is in place and we are swimming in gold. Increasing that to 3:1 seems excessive?

 

[MadDjinn]

If I understand it correctly, the idea behind the "heuristics" is to give you a rule of thumb whether you work a tile that gives you 1 production or a tile that gives you 2 gold. In the case of city states or buildings, the designers made commercial city states give double as much gold as production city states give you production. Obviously this is because the designers themselves internally value production double as much as gold. The question is whether the designers are right.

We're talking about more than just hex based yields wrt heuristics.

@MyOtherName while this has been amusing, you have yet to provide good reasoning for your choice of the heuristic utility balance. In fact, your op is entirely wrong wrt faith being 0 value with no religion founded. So maybe try to validate your reasoning, and compare/contrast with others opinions or choice of heuristics.

It does continue to amuse me that you feel that you don't seem to need to explain it, but rather just pretend I don't know what a heuristic is, let alone utility values.

Your focus on the spending side of utility does seem poor heuristically. If you're trying to make a heuristic, it's best not to ignore the inputs.

 

[MyOtherName]

@MyOtherName while this has been amusing, you have yet to provide good reasoning for your choice of the heuristic utility balance.

I haven't even provided a choice of heuristic utility balance; why am I being held accountable for justifying one?

(note I am not the author of the OP)

Your focus on the spending side of utility does seem poor heuristically. If you're trying to make a heuristic, it's best not to ignore the inputs.

One of the main points of assigning utility to the yields -- in fact, the specific reason for doing so in the OP -- is to quantify the desirability of potential inputs.

 

[MadDjinn]

I haven't even provided a choice of heuristic utility balance; why am I being held accountable for justifying one?

And you're absolutely free to change the values.

I'll just leave that there and you can go back to see your post history as people talked about changing those values. You really went whole hog on trying to claim your listed ones were the ones to use, and dismissed reasoning why it was different. Ergo, you need to justify it when deciding to counter argue someone elses /stated opinion/. You even went so far as to ignore things by derping this line a lot:

Great. That has nothing to do with how much you value gold relative to cogs.

also, as I didn't mention it before, /you/ posted that multiple times and didn't see the irony in telling me that the variation in volume input didn't have anything to do with how /I/ valued that, despite me saying that it did?

One of the main points of assigning utility to the yields -- in fact, the specific reason for doing so in the OP -- is to quantify the desirability of potential inputs.

yup, and I posted a bunch of things that gave reason to increases in the gold supply such that the base reasoning of the 1:4 (cog to gold) values inside the game code were not sufficient to base value on. Ie, while that is a ratio for a number of items, and you seem to be using it as a baseline, the sheer volume of gold supply in the game is well above that ratio vs supply of production, and therefore it doesn't hold heuristically for a utility proposition.

 

[MyOtherName]

That said, I will offer up that I tend to set 3 cog = 1 gold for much of the game the following reasons:

• Due to the 'buy building' button, I'm pretty sure that I should prefer options that give 4 gold over options that give 1 cog, so my utility ratio is at most 4:1.
• Buying things is inefficient enough that doing it on a whim is a bad idea, so my utility ratio is less than 4:1.
• I think, when you want advanced units, that upgrading is one of the most efficient ways to do so, so my utility ratio is at least than 2:1
• I'm pretty sure it's better to develop cog-producing infrastructure where cogs can be fruitfully used (and am confident in my ability to balance cog load), so my utility ratio is greater than 2:1.

I feel that the utility is not near the extremes (except at the very beginning of the game where you just have one or two cities and I put the ratio at or very near 4:1), and don't really feel like I have enough information to pin it down very precisely, so picking the simplest option (3:1) that is not near the extremes is best.

 

[CountAccountant]

I like the approach used in the previous post - defining the maximum and minimum possible values and going from there. Gold vs. Production is well suited for this, since gold can substitute for production at a set rate (more or less).

My follow-up question is, can we identify approximate minimums and maximums for other resources? For example, I'm pretty sure that one gold is worth more than zero science but less than 1,000 science. And that range can probably be shrunk further.

If a narrow range can be established, I don't think an exact value is necessary for decision making. For example, it's enough to estimate that one production is usually worth between 2 - 4 gold - the "true" value within that range would fluctuate based on situation and strategy.

 

[Victoria]

This thread is getting similar to the gold vs production thread. You will find there is a fairly strong number of people agreeing they are not the same, you just cannot compare them correctly.
Heuristics just do not fit this version of the game (thank god)

For a start people will bang an internal trade route down for +2 production while there is a perfectly good +10 gold route nearby. Is that their stupidity or the fact that 2 prod is greater than 10 gold or is it that they are quite different. Yes there is +2 food as well but do people factor that in their brain but just look at the prod