Unit consumption outside borders and unit build scaling

[Fistleaf]

How much extra consumption for units outside borders by default? How about workers, scouts, settlers outside borders? I am always not sure about the usefulness of the law that has no extra consumption outside borders.
Also, how do I check how much build scaling for units is applied when I keep building workers for example?

 

[Evolena]

It's 150% (so + 50%) for any unit (except Scouts because they have no consumption). You can check that by hovering over a unit to display their bottom-left panel near the minimap and expanding it with the ALT key.
For the scaling build cost, I believe it was +5 growth production for each settler/worker build before the last week patch and +10 now, but this is observation knowledge, I don't know if it is doccumented somewhere.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Settlers, Workers and Disciples belong to the group of "scaling build costs", every time you build ANY of those, ALL prices of those go up. So, it doesn't matter if you previously built 1 settler, 1 worker and 1 disciple, or just 3 settlers, the prices (growth) for settlers in that city is now +30, the price for Workers is +30, and so is the price for Disciples.
This is obviously to make it less feasible to just have one high-growth city pump out settlers/workers/disciples all the time.

edit: removed "%", it's a flat increase.

 

[PiR]

What if you cancel a settler, does it go back to the previous price?

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Since prices go up when you complete a unit, it doesn't go back, it was never increased in the first place.

 

[PiR]

So if you start 10 workers in all cities, can you "cheat" the cost or do the 9 workers get postponed once the first is done?

 

[Fimbulvetr]

No, the cost increase is not global, it's per city. You can't cheat it.

 

[Forster]

You know, I noticed the time to build kept getting longer but it never dawned on me as to why. I have been using my capitol to build most of my settlers.

 

[Stalker0]

No, the cost increase is not global, it's per city. You can't cheat it.

You MIGHT be able to do it with rushing though. Rush costs do factor in how much cost is left on the unit. So if I queue up a number of workers lets say, and rushed each of them.... that's probably cheaper than waiting for workers to finish and having the cost of the next one go up.

 

[Evolena]

Except that rushing leaves 1 turn to actually finish the rushed unit, so the cost of the next one will still increase?

 

[nolegskitten]

you can't cheat the scaling. You couldn't cheat it when it was global either, it just made the completion time harder to predict since each completing settlers (say) would make the price of others go up. This is the actual reason it was changed, btw.

 

[Pfeffersack]

you can't cheat the scaling.

It is one perfect example of a thing I really, really like about OW: There isn't a lot of room for cheesy micromanagment exercises to exploit game mechanics. Instead you have interesting choices to pick your strategy...or poison

 

[Evolena]

So I checked in my new game (no Disciple for now):

Cost of a... > Settler | Worker | Scout | Militia
After a... v
Start __________ 80 ...... 60 ..... 60 .... 60
1st Settler ____ 90 ...... 70 ..... 60 .... 60
2nd Settler ___ 100 ...... 80 ..... 60 .... 60
3rd Settler ___ 110 ...... 90 ..... 60 .... 60
1st Worker ____ 120 ..... 100 ..... 60 .... 60
4th Settler ___ 130 ..... 110 ..... 60 .... 60
1st Scout _____ 130 ..... 110 ..... 60 .... 60

So in a given city, the cost for Scout and Militia seems to fixed at 60 growth, and the cost of Settlers and Workers increases by 10 for each one built (building a Scout doesn't increase their cost), from 80 growth for the first (half-built) Settler and 60 growth for the first Worker. There is no +30% there.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Thank you for testing, I guess I never looked closely enough. So it's not +10% but a flat +10 per built unit.

 

[Stalker0]

It is one perfect example of a thing I really, really like about OW: There isn't a lot of room for cheesy micromanagment exercises to exploit game mechanics. Instead you have interesting choices to pick your strategy...or poison

Well not entirely true, you can in fact cheese the rush mechanics if you really want to, its just quite difficult to the point where its generally not been considered an exploit by the devs.

How it works, when you rush a unit that has overflow on it, the overflow carries over to teh next unit.


So say unit 1 is 90% complete due to overflow (and so the rush cost is low). If you queue up another unit and then rush it, unit 2 will also have that overflow (and a cheap rush cost). So it is possible to rush out 3-4 units for the same price you would have paid rushing just 1 if you can time it just right. The trick though is the timing, getting overflow "just right" is quite tricky.

While you can do this with all forms of rushing, its most noticable with volunteers, since you can't slice a person in half. So getting your overflow adjusted so instead of 2 people per rush its only 1 and then rushing out several units can be a big savings

 

[PiR]

But the discontent will explode, right?