Trading posts: the only improvement you ever need to build?

[Sc4Freak]

As you probably know, gold is powerful. Really powerful. It buys units, buildings, upgrades, research agreements, and city state alliances. By rush-buying units and buildings (and alliances with militaristic city states), gold can be converted into production. Through maritime city states, gold can be converted directly to food. Through cultural city states, gold can be converted to culture. And using research agreements, you can convert gold to science.

The trading post tile improvement gives +2 to any tile, and can be built on top of forests and hills. So why build anything other than trading posts?

Here's a thought: don't build anything other than trading posts. No farms, no mines, no lumber mills, nothing. Just trading posts.

City States

Gold can be used to buy allegiance of city states. By default, 250 gold will buy you approximately 30 influence points, and influence changes at a default rate of -1 per turn.

So if you are allied with a city state, it costs 250 / 30 = 8.33gpt to maintain that alliance. Adopting Patronage will drop this down to 6.25gpt.

Trading Posts vs. Farms

Food comes from maritime city states. It costs 6.25gpt to keep an alliance with a city state with Patronage - this corresponds to just over 3 trading posts worth of gold, and an alliance with a maritime city state will give you +2 food in every city. A farm on the other hand gives you +2 food if you have both Civil Service and Fertilizers. So if you have 4 or more cities, it's more beneficial to build trading posts and get your food from a maritime city state, rather than building farms.

This also doesn't take into account modifiers - markets and banks provide modifiers to gold production, but nothing provides bonuses to food production. A market and a bank in a city will give you +50% gold, which means that a trading post gives you +3gpt instead of +2gpt! In that case, trading posts are cheaper than farms if you have just 3 cities.

The benefit is actually even greater than that, because you have to wait for Civil Service for irrigated farms or Fertilizer for non-irrigated farms if you want +2 food, whereas trading posts give you +2 commerce immediately.

Trading Posts vs. Mines/Lumbermills

This is a little bit more iffy, because rush-buying is really expensive. It varies depending on what you're buying, but on average it seems that the rush-buy price is around 4-5x the cost in hammers.

A trading post gives +2G, and mines and lumbermills give +1P, which means that building a trading post then rush-buying is more expensive than just building stuff normally. But not entirely - because you can still build stuff while you're waiting for enough gold to rush-buy.

Let's take a hypothetical city with 3 mined hills, which is a total of 9 . A pikeman (100 ) takes 12 turns to build = 0.083 pikemen/turn. Now let's replace those mines with trading posts, which is a total of 6 and 6 . It now takes 17 turns to build a pikeman normally = 0.058 pikemen/turn. But you can also rush buy a pikeman for 400 , which at 6gpt = 67 turns = 0.015 pikemen/turn. So with trading posts, you get in total 0.058 + 0.015 = 0.073 pikemen/turn.

So replacing mines with trading posts is still a net loss if you look only at production - if you're building pikemen for example, in the worst-case scenario (a city working only hills) using trading posts is about 12% slower than mines on hills.

But remember that Big Ben and the Mercantilism social policy each reduce the rush-buy cost by 25%: if you have them both, it effectively halves the rush-buy price. If you have either Big Ben or Mercantilism, the production advantage of mines/lumbermills vanishes completely and you're better off building trading posts over hills/forests and just buying everything you need.

Notes

• There's a policy on the Rationalism branch which gives you +1 science per trading post. So in addition to all the gold you get, you also get a ridiculous amount of science!
• Golden ages will give you crazy amounts of gold because every tile will have +2 gold.
• Greece and Siam are really powerful because of their city state unique abilities. Greece have their influence decay halved, and Siam gets 50% more culture/food from city-states.
• Gold modifier buildings (market, banks, stock exchanges) are available earlier and quicker to build than production modifier buildings (windmill, factory, solar plant), making trading posts even more powerful for production.
• If you have more than a couple of cities, allying with a maritime city state is much cheaper than constructing granaries or watermills.

 

[vranasm]

yep...lately i spam TPs everywhere and spare early SPs for commerce to cheapen rush buy.

 

[Johan de Witt]

just a thought and perhaps the wrong place to post this, but wouldn't it be better if they removed trading posts and added +1 to farms?

Trading posts look awful. Kinda kills how the map looks (perhaps this is just me, but a map full of farms looks cool and lifelike).

What do you guys think?

 

[Cyberian]

Generally spoken you are right.

This is especially true for quick expansion strategies like Liberty Settlers with france. And also the No Happiness Rush strat discussed here.

But It does not apply to all combinations IMHO. My latest game on Immortal large Earth Egypt had a beeline Civil Service with building only farms on river hills and plains.

By this I was going for way faster tech and wonder production. The gold acquired from trading resources and normal generation was enough to ally with all maritime city states without the need for only tradepost. Even up to turn 100 I built no trade posts in my other cities doing farms on tiles with rivers and production instead and the normal resource improvements.
From then on I of course also built lots of tradeposts especially on tiles without a river or other coin income.

 

[Knut_Are_M]

yes tradeing posts are very good. and graineries/water wheels are bad because of maritime city states. maritime city states are just way too good.
ever tried india with lots of maritime city states on your side?

in fact maritime city states is the reason farms are bad. in my opinon they need a nerf.

 

[kaltorak]

Asuming infinite maritime citi states?

What about building world wonders with no production?

 

[Newti]

If you have the first 3 patronage policies and buy CSs alliances in 500g bits it only costs 4.5 gpt to maintain. Also don't forget that your capital gets an additional +2 food.
So with 3 cities you get 4 from capital + 2x2 from other cities which equals 8 food for 2.25 trading posts. It basically starts paying off with just 1 city, even if you have irrigated farms.

The stupid thing about it is, it all depends if you manage to find 2 Maritime CSs early in the game (on your continent). If you don't, though luck.

But yea, massing TPs also allows you to run a lot of specialsts if you need to get a few lets say GS out. And its very hard to lose when you are so flexible with your gold that you can rushbuy a defensive army in 1 or 2 turns.

You can have +50 or more gold per turn in the first 100 turns of the game and later on +200 gpt is easily achievable.

 

[Cyberian]

@Knut
This is of course true, but more food means faster growth so for me it was good to have river farms AND maritime city states. If you can handle the happiness and if you have nice spots where the additional tiles you get for faster growth also mean additional money and hammers.

So you need river hills or river plains. If you don't have those just go straight for tradeposts.

 

[Johan de Witt]

Made a new thread about the removal of trading posts: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=384287

Sorry for stealing ur thread Sc4Freak! You guys can go discuss the tactics again.

 

[Stanislaw]

Just so I can play the Devil's Advocate, I will present my counter-arguments here:

City States

Gold can be used to buy allegiance of city states. By default, 250 gold will buy you approximately 30 influence points, and influence changes at a default rate of -1 per turn.

So if you are allied with a city state, it costs 250 / 30 = 8.33gpt to maintain that alliance. Adopting Patronage will drop this down to 6.25gpt.

First, providing that you start off with 0 influence points because haven't done any missions for them, you will need approximately 500 gold to turn them into an ally, and unless you are far along enough in Patronage (which is not accessible until you hit the Medieval Era), you will need to fork over additional 250 gold lest they not become your allies anymore just after a few turns. Therefore, to turn them into allies in the beginning stages of the game costs 750 gold, which is nothing to scoff at early on.

In addition, City States effectiveness, with the exception of Military City States (unless I'm mistaken), scale in effectiveness of providing Culture and Food further along the eras you are. Which means that, in the beginning, City States provide negligible bonuses to your empire for the amount of money you're investing. Mid to late stages of the game City State bonuses are incredibly powerful, but during the early stages of the game I find it's better to do missions on your spare time and gain influence that way and slowly building up your relationships rather than forking over the money which can be better spent on other things. Also note that there are 'Hostile' City States, in which relationships degrade 33% faster (I think) than normal, and thus are harder to maintain, as well as the possibility of foreign civilizations adopting the United Front social policy, which further degrades your relationships with City States (although by that point it shouldn't be too much of a problem).

Trading Posts vs. Farms

Food comes from maritime city states. It costs 6.25gpt to keep an alliance with a city state with Patronage - this corresponds to just over 3 trading posts worth of gold, and an alliance with a maritime city state will give you +2 food in every city. A farm on the other hand gives you +2 food if you have both Civil Service and Fertilizers. So if you have 4 or more cities, it's more beneficial to build trading posts and get your food from a maritime city state, rather than building farms.

This also doesn't take into account modifiers - markets and banks provide modifiers to gold production, but nothing provides bonuses to food production. A market and a bank in a city will give you +50% gold, which means that a trading post gives you +3gpt instead of +2gpt! In that case, trading posts are cheaper than farms if you have just 3 cities.

The benefit is actually even greater than that, because you have to wait for Civil Service for irrigated farms or Fertilizer for non-irrigated farms if you want +2 food, whereas trading posts give you +2 commerce immediately.

A LOT of people miss this fact, but you're completely forgetting the existence of Trade Routes, which are (I'm pretty sure) dependent on City Population. You're also completely ignoring the fact that additional farms, Maritime City States Allies or not, contribute heavily to the growth rate of the city. And I find that a growth rate for a city is very, VERY important in Civilization V. More citizens faster = more people working more tiles = more gold from city + more gold from trade routes + enough food to convert population into great people = profit. And let's not forget Science is tied with City Population too, so you would be researching faster along the way with higher citizen growth. Sure, there's Rationalism, but without farms to encourage city growth, that'll be quite a ways away.

To name an extreme example, I'm sure you will agree with me that building nothing but trade posts on a city surrounded by hills is a rather stupid idea since the growth rate of citizens would be pitifully slow it'll take ages before the city size is sizable enough to profit heavily from the trading posts. Those cities need the support of a Maritime City State to make it work, but if not enough of your citizens are working the tiles to reap the benefits of the gold it can harvest, then you also won't have enough gold to pay off the Maritime City States. Also, what if your Maritime City State ally came under attack and it died? There goes your population and, consequently, your gold output. It's one thing to reap the benefits of City States, but relying too heavily comes with its own sets of risks.

Building farms may sound iffy at first, but building a number of them really helps, possibly more than you realize.

Trading Posts vs. Mines/Lumbermills

This is a little bit more iffy, because rush-buying is really expensive. It varies depending on what you're buying, but on average it seems that the rush-buy price is around 4-5x the cost in hammers.

A trading post gives +2G, and mines and lumbermills give +1P, which means that building a trading post then rush-buying is more expensive than just building stuff normally. But not entirely - because you can still build stuff while you're waiting for enough gold to rush-buy.

Let's take a hypothetical city with 3 mined hills, which is a total of 9 . A pikeman (100 ) takes 12 turns to build = 0.083 pikemen/turn. Now let's replace those mines with trading posts, which is a total of 6 and 6 . It now takes 17 turns to build a pikeman normally = 0.058 pikemen/turn. But you can also rush buy a pikeman for 400 , which at 6gpt = 67 turns = 0.015 pikemen/turn. So with trading posts, you get in total 0.058 + 0.015 = 0.073 pikemen/turn.

So replacing mines with trading posts is still a net loss if you look only at production - if you're building pikemen for example, in the worst-case scenario (a city working only hills) using trading posts is about 12% slower than mines on hills.

But remember that Big Ben and the Mercantilism social policy each reduce the rush-buy cost by 25%: if you have them both, it effectively halves the rush-buy price. If you have either Big Ben or Mercantilism, the production advantage of mines/lumbermills vanishes completely and you're better off building trading posts over hills/forests and just buying everything you need.

I'm not an avid fan of mines as I usually favor building trading posts on hills, but I am a big, big fan of lumbermills. Lumbermills built on top of forests provide food. Sure, it's just one food, but I like it because unlike mines, it still encourages city growth where hill mines provide no food at all. You also forgot the existence of Steam Power, of which lumbermills will then provide you +2P instead of 1, making them the single best production improvement, which, if you put it in your formula, will completely outperform trading posts.

However, let us not forget that Wonders are the one thing that cannot be bought with gold, and a specialized production city that is surrounded by farms and mines/lumbermills is much more effective at crunching out wonders and units in the long run.


In conclusion, I believe that rather than an 'all trading post for all cities' strategy, I believe it's much, much more effective to have a 'farms and trading posts for most cities coupled with a farms and mines/lumbermills in few cities' is a much better and effective strategy if you want to go for effectiveness.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Building a low tech unit and upgrading it with gold is a cheaper way to rushbuy. Another +1 for trading post usage.

 

[Diadem82]

I agree with the general sentiment. But your calculations are a bit off here and there.

First off, there is a policy for increasing the effectiveness of spending gold on city states. With this you can reduce the actual cost of buying alliances below your 6.25 gpt. On the other hand however the amount of influence you buy for 250 gold decays over time. So late game it will be more expensive.

Secondly city state bonus scales with age. Maritime city states give you 5/3 once you're in renaissance. So even with one city (capital => 5 food = 2.5 farms) you break about even on the food count when going for city states.

On the other hand city states require a huge initital investment. Once you have an alliance it's cheap, but it costs about 500 gold to get it going.

Also you are forgetting that lumbermills give you 2 hammers once you have a mid-game tech (forgot which one for a second). So you might consider building those on forests. Especially because you can not rush-buy wonders. So you want at least one good production city.

 

[Newti]

The initial investment is around 235 gold if you wait until you save up the polices until Medieval and donate 500g once you unlocked the first 2 + patronage.
You start with 20 Influence, 60 is allied.
500g nets you 85 influence, 40 of that is the investment -> 235 Gold.

Also @ Stanislaw: Population IS important, yes. But it is limited by hapiness not food.
If you cities grow too slow dont build farms, instead build a new city or conquer one. But keep the gold flowing.

 

[thwump]

I think even in this strategy you would want at least 1 high production specialized city. Farms on plains and hills by the river, etc. You might still want to build some things.

 

[Newti]

Why build if you can buy?
I usually build TPs on all nonhill tiles and work those + a lot of specialists.
When i need to build someting fast or when I hit a golden age, i switch to working the mined hills and remove the specialst for the time.

 

[Stanislaw]

Building a low tech unit and upgrading it with gold is a cheaper way to rushbuy. Another +1 for trading post usage.

I often wondered if this is true, if only for the fact that while waiting for the correct technology to come by before you could upgrade the unit you'll also have to pay for the unit's maintenance costs. Aside from the obvious benefit that you'll have some military to protect yourself with, but in times of peace is this strategy really viable?

Also @ Stanislaw: Population IS important, yes. But it is limited by hapiness not food.

Honestly, I find that it's not too much of a problem. I did find myself hitting the happiness cap very fast due to my city size, but on the other hand because I had a large population in each of my cities I could build Colosseum/Theatre/Stadium quite quickly without the need to rush buy them, and the maintenance costs I could pay for from the gold I was getting from Trade Routes.

Also, since the initial penalty for unhappiness is slower city growth, hey, that means I can take my citizens off the farms and instead put them on trading posts/mines/lumbermills and know my citizens are working the land under maximum effectiveness, and before the happiness dips any lower and I suffer a production penalty, I would have finished building the happiness buildings in addition to accumulating a sizable treasury from all the trading posts my citizens worked off of, of which I can promptly use on other things, such as buying units, buildings, or city state influence.

The only drawback of course is I accumulate less Golden Age points. But because I have a sizable population I'll be producing a lot more great persons as well, of which I can use them to trigger Golden Ages any time I want. And the 'any time' part has quite a bit of advantages simply because you have total control over when exactly you want to trigger your Golden Ages, not to mention having the potential of speeding up your research using Great Scientists, which is something Golden Ages can not do.

 

[Hybrisma]

I want cottages and health back. Thanks.

Now it's spam trading posts or spam trading posts. So many options!

 

[King Jason]

Let's take a hypothetical city with 3 mined hills, which is a total of 9 . A pikeman (100 ) takes 12 turns to build = 0.083 pikemen/turn. Now let's replace those mines with trading posts, which is a total of 6 and 6 . It now takes 17 turns to build a pikeman normally = 0.058 pikemen/turn. But you can also rush buy a pikeman for 400 , which at 6gpt = 67 turns = 0.015 pikemen/turn. So with trading posts, you get in total 0.058 + 0.015 = 0.073 pikemen/turn.

So replacing mines with trading posts is still a net loss if you look only at production - if you're building pikemen for example, in the worst-case scenario (a city working only hills) using trading posts is about 12% slower than mines on hills.

I don't think this validates the use of trading posts over mines/mills at all because it's subtracting gold from a global pool of which you're performing all actions. For every unit you build purchase, that subtracts from a research agreement you could have, or a city-state ally you could purchase, etc. etc. granted, those things take time, so purchasing is certainly viable, but I wouldn't say a sole means of production to the point of spamming posts everywhere. Though I'll try this next game. Personally, I rush-buy buildings, primarily. Units only when in a pinch. But perhaps I have that backwards.

Even still, definitely agree with the Trading posts over farm bits, with one exception ~ Riverside hills. A Riverside hill with a TP gives 2production and 3 gold, with a farm is 2F,2P,1G... I personally feel this is the better choice as it's a 2P 1G tile that pays for itself. I almost always farm riverside hills. In fact, I usually farm everything by a river, but I'll definitely test out Trading post spam... since I essentially spam farms at the moment.

 

[Shiggs713]

Why build if you can buy?
I usually build TPs on all nonhill tiles and work those + a lot of specialists.
When i need to build someting fast or when I hit a golden age, i switch to working the mined hills and remove the specialst for the time.

because as already mentioned, you can't buy wonders. Interesting strategy though, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets changed somehow with a patch soon. Really this entire game was released without doing much game balancing it appears.

 

[Johan de Witt]

I don't think the makers realized spamming trading posts was a viable tactic perhaps trumping most other tactics.