What is your favorite city maintence reduction building?

[Slobadog]

I myself prefer Organized ones. I find that they help to provide a degree of momentum. Which is my often my main goal. Aquire more and more momentum to where things become increasingly easy and a triumph of the will without having to play beneath my difficulty level. Can't say i've achieved it yet but i'm still trying to prefect a empire development strategy that never has to stop to catch its breath.


Sorry I misspelled maintenance. I'd fix it if i could.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

I chose the Ikhanda. It functions as a barracks and reduces maintainance in it's city earlier than courthouses. If you can get that extra city before CoL, then that's more land early...

 

[Polycrates]

I'm all about the ikhanda. It's a steal at 30 hammers, you can build it right from the word go (meaning extra early game expansionism), plus it's a barracks for lots of xp and happiness under nationhood.

 

[xanadux]

Reducing maintenance is for non-beurocratic progressive sissies.

 

[Killroyan]

Love the ikanda. Cheap and available right away. Makes expansion with zulu's a lot easier.

 

[popejubal]

One very nice feature of the Ikhanda is that its maintenance reduction is added to the Courthouse rather than multiplied.

That means you take (50 + 20)% off the maintenance for a total of 70% off.

If it were multiplied, you'd take 50% off and then 20% off the result for a total of 60% off.

Ikhanda + Courthouse is very nearly as good as the Rathaus in terms of maintenance reduction and comes with the outstanding addition of the cheap barracks for each city as a "free" addition.

 

[frob2900]

One very nice feature of the Ikhanda is that its maintenance reduction is added to the Courthouse rather than multiplied.
That means you take (50 + 20)% off the maintenance for a total of 70% off.

Don't pretty much all buildings with percentage modifiers (e.g. libraries/universities for , forges/factories for ) work that way? I.e. add the actual percentages, then multiply?

 

[popejubal]

Don't pretty much all buildings with percentage modifiers (e.g. libraries/universities for , forges/factories for ) work that way? I.e. add the actual percentages, then multiply?

Yep. With percentages that increase, it's weaker than multiplying each bonus. When it's a percentage decrease, the total change is much greater when you add them together and then multiply than if you multiply each individually.

The real difference with the Ikhanda is that nearly all of the percent bonuses are an increase to something (research, commerce, gold, hammers, etc) while the Ikhanda is a percent decrease to maintenance.

 

[cabert]

I chose the Ikhanda. It functions as a barracks and reduces maintainance in it's city earlier than courthouses. If you can get that extra city before CoL, then that's more land early...

same for me.
I like going to CoL through currency, and with the zulus, I'm not punished

 

[LedHead]

Zig you get it at Priest.
Why wait when your doing a UU axe rush?

 

[cabert]

Zig you get it at Priest.
Why wait when your doing a UU axe rush?

still not as good as straight away
+ I still get the courthouse on top of the ikhanda

 

[slobberinbear]

I'm a big fan of the sacrificial altar. 1/2 happiness duration for whipping suits me just fine for playing Monty ... it lets me whip out all of those irritating-but-necessary buildings and still keep sending my horde of Jaguar Warriors to the front line.

The only downside of it is the tech route required to get it. If you research CoL "manually," you are almost halfway through the period of the game where whipping is pre-eminent. I therefore like to chop out the Oracle for a CoL slingshot early.

Frequent whipping requires an investment in farms and granaries, too. But cottages are for pansies.

 

[Polycrates]

I'm a big fan of the sacrificial altar. 1/2 happiness duration for whipping suits me just fine for playing Monty ... it lets me whip out all of those irritating-but-necessary buildings and still keep sending my horde of Jaguar Warriors to the front line.

The only downside of it is the tech route required to get it. If you research CoL "manually," you are almost halfway through the period of the game where whipping is pre-eminent. I therefore like to chop out the Oracle for a CoL slingshot early.

I'm a huge fan of Monty, but not at all a fan of the Jaguar. It's very hard to fight the early warmonger urge, but I find that being peaceful for a while, ignoring Iron Working and beelining straight for CoL works really well (and lets you get to CoL before the "Warmonger Slump" starts messing up your economy). You can then whip in your altars, whip out obscene numbers of axemen from a couple of high-food cities (especially if you whip two pop at a time), and then beeline construction for an equally obscene number of cats.