What is your approach to build warehouse buildings?

[stealth_nsk]

I found that I rarely build warehouse buildings and it's probably a mistake, so what are general strategic things you consider?

For me:

1. I don't use mods, so I cant overbuild warehouse buildings, which makes them a pretty final decision in sacrificing your tiles.
2. Earlier warehouse buildings give less bonuses than later ones, so their value greatly diminishes.
3. The effect of warehouse buildings depend on the number of rural tiles, so it's hard to grasp too. Some cities have pretty few of them remain, especially with wonders.
4. Fishing Quay is the biggest exception, because I build it in any seaworthy settlements and most settlements with navigable rivers.
5. Exploration has a couple of warehouse buildings which could be built on navigable rivers and since they are not accessible for majority of buildings, I often build them as well if the settlement has navigable river.

So, I really want to master this part of the game, what are your considerations?

 

[UWHabs]

Build them all.

Especially once you get the expansionist attribute to give food on warehouse buildings, they're worth it in the end. You usually have plenty of tiles to use, I don't worry about losing a few tiles here or there. You only need like 6 tiles to get all the buildings which have adjacencies, so plenty of others to use.

 

[pjotroos]

No mods here, either. I try to get most of them in most of my settlements. The reasoning being:
- they have no maintenance cost
- they all become a food boost with the expansionist node
- they are the most efficient way of getting yields out of city states
- I will never need all my tiles anyway - cities want specialists by mid-exploration and towns stop growing eventually

Patch 1.2.5 made them even better, since they are unimpacted by the growing production costs, and all the stronger city state bonuses have been removed.

In terms of placement; I try to pick a direction in a city where I obviously won't want to build out; if there's no peninsulas, no mountain ranges and no resource clusters, I'm unlikely to prioritise that section for districts or wonders. I then pick the best tiles for my antiquity buildings in there - if two of them are on a minor river, I can claim all three in antiquity, otherwise just two.

If I don't have a hostile neighbor, I'll grab an early granary and saw pit or brickyard in the capital, while researching towards library. Otherwise, they come later in the era, when there's nothing immediately useful to build.

If I know something will be a town - low production, no good adjacencies, low production tiles - I use the warehouse buildings to connect to resources earlier. Placement doesn't matter there at all.

The only one I don't care for is the grocer; there is always something more useful to build in modern.

 

[MrRadar]

Yes, I agree that patch 1.2.5 indirectly buffed them, as now they feel much cheaper than specialty buildings. They help you to reach better placements for specialty quarters that now you strongly want to place in the most suitable spots, and food ones help you to get that another rural tile. With buildings becoming so expensive, you'll seldom get to build them all, if ever, so more rural tiles will persist until the end. And I found that the patch also indirectly helped the unique improvements, as now in many cases they are quite a viable option to build, as they're cheaper than specialty buildings, and have much better chance to persist until the end of the game. I have never built/bought so many Institutes as post patch 1.2.5.

Now I even want to do a game with minimal number of urban districts and make my society predominantly rural, with as many different unique improvements as I can get.

 

[bengalryan9]

Earlier warehouse buildings give less bonuses than later ones, so their value greatly diminishes.

I tend to look at it from the opposite direction, at least as far as towns are concerned - those early warehouse buildings are super cheap so they will more than pay for themselves over time. Paying something like 1800 gold for a grocer or ironworks probably never will.

Cities are a bit different... most of the time I'm choosing the two warehouse buildings that will buff the lands around the city center the most, usually focusing on what resources are nearby (ie, if a city is going to have a bunch of plantations and camps, I'd go granary and saw pit). I'll choose my rural tiles based on which buildings I ended up picking.

I'm also a big fan of both mills in both cities and towns, especially if I have non-navigable rivers to put them on.

 

[McSpank01]

Maybe I am wrong to do this, but for new towns or cities I always feel like I need one quarter which has a food and a production warehouse building. This seems just like a basic requirement in my mind because it pretty much doubles the yield of most rural tiles. Settlements just seem so useless and slow without that bonus.

To be honest I am rarely getting warehouse buildings past antiquity however, because by that point there just seems to be better ways to get those bonuses and this is when having a useless ageless building starts to feel really bad in my settlements, like it's just taking up space.

I do feel like there should be a way to upgrade warehouse buildings rather than just having to build a ton more.

 

[McSpank01]

I was just watching an old tutorial video on Civ 7 city placement and I think it raised a point in my mind as to why these warehouse buildings exist, and what the developers expected you would do with them.

One of the advantages of warehouse buildings is that they do not lose their adjacency bonuses after an age reset, because they never had any. Therefore they should be considered long term buildings used to help smooth the transition between ages.

I think the problem there is that by the next age, most warehouse bonuses look pretty rubbish in comparison to the numbers needed for that age. A granary seems to be mostly useless in a city by Exploration.

One of the reasons for this however I think is that the plan for cities I'm guessing was for there to be a much more reasonable mix of urban and rural tiles in a city, but the cheapness of buildings meant that by the end of an age, many cities may have used up most of the rural tiles and replaced them with urban ones. So a granary in that case becomes basically useless.

I know I am now trying to stop the urban sprawl and building more carefully and with more quarters, something I tended not do very much before.

 

[Krikkit1]

I was just watching an old tutorial video on Civ 7 city placement and I think it raised a point in my mind as to why these warehouse buildings exist, and what the developers expected you would do with them.

One of the advantages of warehouse buildings is that they do not lose their adjacency bonuses after an age reset, because they never had any. Therefore they should be considered long term buildings used to help smooth the transition between ages.

I think the problem there is that by the next age, most warehouse bonuses look pretty rubbish in comparison to the numbers needed for that age. A granary seems to be mostly useless in a city by Exploration.

One of the reasons for this however I think is that the plan for cities I'm guessing was for there to be a much more reasonable mix of urban and rural tiles in a city, but the cheapness of buildings meant that by the end of an age, many cities may have used up most of the rural tiles and replaced them with urban ones. So a granary in that case becomes basically useless.

I know I am now trying to stop the urban sprawl and building more carefully and with more quarters, something I tended not do very much before.

Although a Granary is (almost) exactly the same as a Gristmill or a Grocer they each give the same bonus to (almost exactly) the same tiles.

 

[MutilationWave]

Maybe I am wrong to do this, but for new towns or cities I always feel like I need one quarter which has a food and a production warehouse building. This seems just like a basic requirement in my mind because it pretty much doubles the yield of most rural tiles. Settlements just seem so useless and slow without that bonus.

To be honest I am rarely getting warehouse buildings past antiquity however, because by that point there just seems to be better ways to get those bonuses and this is when having a useless ageless building starts to feel really bad in my settlements, like it's just taking up space.

I do feel like there should be a way to upgrade warehouse buildings rather than just having to build a ton more.

As someone already mentioned, getting the +4 food on warehouse buildings attribute node will make you want all of them, at least the cheap ones.

 

[CliffCo]

I was just watching an old tutorial video on Civ 7 city placement and I think it raised a point in my mind as to why these warehouse buildings exist, and what the developers expected you would do with them.

One of the advantages of warehouse buildings is that they do not lose their adjacency bonuses after an age reset, because they never had any. Therefore they should be considered long term buildings used to help smooth the transition between ages.

I think the problem there is that by the next age, most warehouse bonuses look pretty rubbish in comparison to the numbers needed for that age. A granary seems to be mostly useless in a city by Exploration.

One of the reasons for this however I think is that the plan for cities I'm guessing was for there to be a much more reasonable mix of urban and rural tiles in a city, but the cheapness of buildings meant that by the end of an age, many cities may have used up most of the rural tiles and replaced them with urban ones. So a granary in that case becomes basically useless.

I know I am now trying to stop the urban sprawl and building more carefully and with more quarters, something I tended not do very much before.

It hasn't been updated recently so i'm not sure if it's working, but there's a mod that makes warehouse buildings age, called Aging Warehouses.

 

[uppi]

An important aspect is that if you stack warehouse building on a tile, the tile will become an ageless quarter. So it will get all the quarter effects for the whole game and especially after the age transition when you will not have many other quarters. My cities will get all the warehouse buildings sooner or later. Late game cities do not really need farms, so sacrificing a farm for a warehouse building is usually a good deal.

Towns really benefit from the early warehouse buildings and should get them as soon as you can spare the cash. If there is spare cash lying around at the end of an age, I will go through all towns and buy everything I can afford to prevent wasting the cash. When founding towns in Exploration to grab treasure resources, I immediately buy all the food warehouse buildings to accelerate grabbing those resources and might use the production ones to bump rural population towards those resources. In Modern, warehouse buildings are a bit too expensive to justify prioritizing them for towns and by the time you have spare cash, the game is over. So often those do not get build in towns.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I try to put warehouse buildings together, but if I do end up with some warehouses mixed with adjacency buildings, I don't care very much.

 

[MutilationWave]

An important aspect is that if you stack warehouse building on a tile, the tile will become an ageless quarter. So it will get all the quarter effects for the whole game and especially after the age transition when you will not have many other quarters. My cities will get all the warehouse buildings sooner or later. Late game cities do not really need farms, so sacrificing a farm for a warehouse building is usually a good deal.

Towns really benefit from the early warehouse buildings and should get them as soon as you can spare the cash. If there is spare cash lying around at the end of an age, I will go through all towns and buy everything I can afford to prevent wasting the cash. When founding towns in Exploration to grab treasure resources, I immediately buy all the food warehouse buildings to accelerate grabbing those resources and might use the production ones to bump rural population towards those resources. In Modern, warehouse buildings are a bit too expensive to justify prioritizing them for towns and by the time you have spare cash, the game is over. So often those do not get build in towns.

Yep, settling exploration towns is like antiquity on fast forward if you use them to buff the town while getting to the resources.

 

[UWHabs]

I was just watching an old tutorial video on Civ 7 city placement and I think it raised a point in my mind as to why these warehouse buildings exist, and what the developers expected you would do with them.

One of the advantages of warehouse buildings is that they do not lose their adjacency bonuses after an age reset, because they never had any. Therefore they should be considered long term buildings used to help smooth the transition between ages.

I think the problem there is that by the next age, most warehouse bonuses look pretty rubbish in comparison to the numbers needed for that age. A granary seems to be mostly useless in a city by Exploration.

One of the reasons for this however I think is that the plan for cities I'm guessing was for there to be a much more reasonable mix of urban and rural tiles in a city, but the cheapness of buildings meant that by the end of an age, many cities may have used up most of the rural tiles and replaced them with urban ones. So a granary in that case becomes basically useless.

I know I am now trying to stop the urban sprawl and building more carefully and with more quarters, something I tended not do very much before.

Yeah, I think the game still definitely struggles with generalism, in that in every city, you basically still want every building always. Even if you don't have any mountains, always have a few wonders or whatever to at least give you a +1 or a +2 adjacency, and that's enough that you want to build them anywhere you can. Especially once you get to like the exploration era T2 buildings, which start giving bonuses on all your quarters.

I think also it's pretty rare that I find a city spot where I actually run out of room. Mostly because I just don't turn anything which doesn't have that many usable tiles into a city. So in the end, it's not like the granary is costing me anything to build. And more often than not, even if I didn't 100% need it, it's worth it to take the 1-2 turns to build the granary even to just reposition a rural tile into a specialist.

Maybe if they changed it so that when you bumped off a rural tile, it only spawned a migrant, so had to go back to being a rural tile? At least there, you would probably need to keep more rural tiles in your empire.

 

[MutilationWave]

Yeah, I think the game still definitely struggles with generalism, in that in every city, you basically still want every building always. Even if you don't have any mountains, always have a few wonders or whatever to at least give you a +1 or a +2 adjacency, and that's enough that you want to build them anywhere you can. Especially once you get to like the exploration era T2 buildings, which start giving bonuses on all your quarters.

I think also it's pretty rare that I find a city spot where I actually run out of room. Mostly because I just don't turn anything which doesn't have that many usable tiles into a city. So in the end, it's not like the granary is costing me anything to build. And more often than not, even if I didn't 100% need it, it's worth it to take the 1-2 turns to build the granary even to just reposition a rural tile into a specialist.

Maybe if they changed it so that when you bumped off a rural tile, it only spawned a migrant, so had to go back to being a rural tile? At least there, you would probably need to keep more rural tiles in your empire.

Good points, although I'm a big fan of being able to bump rural pop to specialists. I think it's important for the flow of the game. For immersion purposes it shows the way rural populations migrate to the city as it grows.

 

[UWHabs]

Good points, although I'm a big fan of being able to bump rural pop to specialists. I think it's important for the flow of the game. For immersion purposes it shows the way rural populations migrate to the city as it grows.

Yeah, I do agree that it's a nice natural urbanization. You could potentially replace that with like a project that unlocks at some point if you want to keep it somehow in the game.

 

[Uberfrog]

Placing warehouse buildings on worked tiles so you can claim a new tile also massively speeds up resource acquisition for new towns.