Warehouse Buildings - When / How Often to Build?

[vorlon_mi]

Disclaimer: I'm still going through my first passes with each leader and don't play at Deity. I'm having lots of fun, but I'm sure that I'm missing some nuances.

In my cities, I've been de-emphasizing warehouse buildings because they can't be overbuilt. If I have a tile with decent adjacency for an Antiquity Library, then I want to be able to put a University there in Exploration and probably a Laboratory in Modern. Since the Palace/City Hall is also ageless, I'm never sure if I want to put a warehouse building in the city center or something else, like an Altar that will be overbuilt with a Temple.

I've built a few quarters on rivers with both the Sawmill and Gristmill; they seem to go well together in Exploration. Should each town also get a Granary? Island towns in Distant Lands need a Fishing Quay, but what else?

Over in the "Fast Science Victory" thread, they mention spamming warehouse buildings in settlements that will remain towns. Why? What am I missing?
Does this tactic depend on certain leader attributes to amplify yields / succeed?

Perhaps my perception needs changing -- I look at every town as potentially being promoted to a city. Should I instead view some settlements as perma-towns?
What about medium-sized settlements that I capture from the AI? Might they not make sense as cities, if not in the present age, in a future age?

 

[Bleidraner]

Ageless buildings retain their bonuses througout the ages, while the others lose the adjacencies. That granary that went in at Antiquity, will continue to produce food directly and indirectly in modern, 200 turns later, and if you have 10 farms it will be producing 11 food per turn, if you have independent powers alliances it could be producing 16 food + 1 science + 1 culture. So it scales without investment.

It is true that the prime adjacency spots need to be reserved for the key buildings (science, culture, influence, production) but there is always plenty of space for warehouse buildings. I almost always have a granary in every town or city (a food IP will give you +4 food on a granary, or for that matter on a Fishing Quay). Also, after the patch, the only buildings that are not scaling their cost are the warehouse buildings. Food and production are mega important for the specialist game and almost all victory conditions.

You should definetely look at some towns as perma towns. In fact in Modern I tend to only have three cities and I have seen nothing yet in the patch notes that will make me change my mind. For a speed run, cities will be 3 Ant, as many as you can Expl, logically 5-6, three in Modern.

One of the reasons towns are so important is that once you specialize them, they are sending their food to the cities (and their production as gold), which allows accelerated growth in the cities, which in turn allows specialists, and they are the key to high culture and science. Not always, but in general, after the patch, given the choice between a 3300 gold building (and you can find yourself very quickly in that situation with the scaling costs) and 15 warehouse buildings across the empire, I prefer the latter unless there are specific reasons why you need that specialized building.

 

[Manpanzee]

In addition to the stuff mentioned above:

--Buying warehouses in towns allows you to connect resources faster, rather than needing to wait around to grow through “naked” tiles.

--Warehouse buildings are buffed by the Expansionist attribute tree. If you have this attribute node, the basic warehouse buildings eventually become (relatively) cheap enough that you can justify spamming them regardless of what terrain they are/aren't buffing. You might have access to other effects buffing food/production buildings too, which will further justify buying these.

--A tile with two warehouse buildings forms an ageless quarter, meaning it will perpetually benefit from anything you have that buffs or is buffed by quarters. Currently, the very-strong quarter buff is the Lyceums modern legacy. Before, there was pre-nerf Borobudur buffing all quarters. But there's also a lot of stuff in the game that cares about quarters on a smaller scale.

--Add these together, compare the costs of warehouse buildings to Exploration and Modern buildings, and you easily get to "I just want warehouse quarters everywhere, I don't care what they do". But of course they do actually have their inherent yield effects on top of that.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Thanks everyone for the great answers! Of course, as I finished my first Antiquity age (using 1.2.5), I got the Barbarian crisis. <voice= old knight from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"> You chose poorly <\voice> for my Crisis policies, so I ended up with a net gold drain as the age was ending. I have been buying some Warehouse buildings in the first turns of Exploration, so I have begun to reap the benefits in my towns.

 

[MutilationWave]

Thanks everyone for the great answers! Of course, as I finished my first Antiquity age (using 1.2.5), I got the Barbarian crisis. <voice= old knight from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"> You chose poorly <\voice> for my Crisis policies, so I ended up with a net gold drain as the age was ending. I have been buying some Warehouse buildings in the first turns of Exploration, so I have begun to reap the benefits in my towns.

That's the only crisis I like. I play through the others but barb crisis is more challenging.

 

[Salamis]

One way to think about the advantages of warehouse spamming in towns is:
Say you settle a town on t30 and buy a granary warehouse straight away, that building will help the town grow faster and acquire more resources and tiles. Each resource provides a benefit to your empire and every hammer adds 1g to your economy and that begins to add-up. If you add a production warehouse, every improvement type that it boosts will now add 1 more g to your economy. If you purchase all of the warehouse buildings, you can feasibly have the town to pop 7 and eligible for specialising within 20 turns of settling it. You can let it continue to grow to provide more gold and resources or specialise for other benefits.
Towns are the heart of your economy and warehouses make them pump!

 

[magicq99]

@Salamis: But what is the best way to prioritize the selection of tiles in towns in this case? The granary and the production warehouses improve different tiles. So should one focus on food tiles (farms) to accelerate the growth of the town? If you want to get to pop 7 as quickly as possible, this seems to be the way. But in this case you won't have many improvements boosted by production warehouses, so it will take a long time for them to recover their cost.

So far I have mostly purchased either the granary (if there are a lot of food tiles) or one of the production warehouses (if there are a lot of producion tiles) in my towns, but only rarely both. In both cases I then specialize either as farming town or mining town, respectively. One example for when I purchase both would be a town with some mining resources. In this case I may purchase the respective production warehouse in addition to the granary. But I would still exlusively claim farm tiles as soon as I have claimed all the resources.

But if I understand your point correctly, it is in many cases benefitial to purchase both types of warehouses. But from my point of view, one can only utilize the production warehouses at the expense of the food warehouses and vice versa. So it seems to be more cost effective to focus on one specific yield exclusively. Therefore, warehouses should not be spammed but purchased selectively where they provide the highest yields.

 

[Manpanzee]

Keep in mind that warehouse buildings remain available in all ages, and their cost doesn't increase over time. Meanwhile, the cost of everything else you can do with gold scales up over time, and your gold income scales up with it. The opportunity cost of 220g for a Granary is much higher in Antiquity than it is in a later age.

The Expansionist attribute node that adds food on warehouse buildings directly scales with age, and you will not have it at the beginning of the game. Similarly, many other effects buffing warehouse buildings or quarters will come on-line throughout the game.

In effect, the yields of warehouse buildings increase throughout the game, while at the same time their relative costs decrease. It makes sense to be judicious about where to place warehouse buildings in Antiquity. But the calculus changes over time, and you can and should reevaluate later.

 

[Salamis]

@Salamis: But what is the best way to prioritize the selection of tiles in towns in this case? The granary and the production warehouses improve different tiles. So should one focus on food tiles (farms) to accelerate the growth of the town? If you want to get to pop 7 as quickly as possible, this seems to be the way. But in this case you won't have many improvements boosted by production warehouses, so it will take a long time for them to recover their cost.

So far I have mostly purchased either the granary (if there are a lot of food tiles) or one of the production warehouses (if there are a lot of producion tiles) in my towns, but only rarely both. In both cases I then specialize either as farming town or mining town, respectively. One example for when I purchase both would be a town with some mining resources. In this case I may purchase the respective production warehouse in addition to the granary. But I would still exlusively claim farm tiles as soon as I have claimed all the resources.

But if I understand your point correctly, it is in many cases benefitial to purchase both types of warehouses. But from my point of view, one can only utilize the production warehouses at the expense of the food warehouses and vice versa. So it seems to be more cost effective to focus on one specific yield exclusively. Therefore, warehouses should not be spammed but purchased selectively where they provide the highest yields.

I do tend to try and purchase both types of warehouses but it’s not only for town specialisation/tile selection purposes, it’s also for reducing the cost of converting a town to a city and benefitting from the warehouse IP bonuses.

For the first few towns in Antiquity, my typical approach is to purchase the granary (or quay) first even if the location has more production-type tiles to improve; have a farm/pasture/plantation (or fishing boat) as one of the first two growth events to give a decent growth base; then improve available resources (preference for production resources that can be dropped in the cap - food resources put in towns to accelerate growth); purchase the next warehouse building which gives the most benefit and so on.

Opportunity cost is always in play; it may be better to purchase a level 1 building in an Urban Center (with each city now increasing building costs, this specialisation gains importance) or City or buy units etc.

For towns settled later in Antiquity (say t70+), I don’t often purchase anything in the age beyond a granary or quay as the purpose of the Town is generally to grow to acquire resources.

 

[Bleidraner]

All the above, really well explained by salamis and manpanzee, plus the biggest benefits of the warehouse “spam” is really in Expl and Modern, rather than antiquity. But every decision needs to be weighed, it is not spamming indiscriminately. I do the same as Salamis, food priority in towns up to the point when I want to accelerate into specialization by buying warehouses, later in Antiquity.