Expenses under the Microscope, value of Organized etc.

[Shaka II]

Thanks xxFlukexx for clearing that one up. I was never quite sure about that calculation.

Great analysis Blake. This helps understand why Washington is so powerful with organized and financial.

BTW, I just played a game on highlands/standard/marathon/Washington/9 civs. It was great fun. I noticed that the five survivors had at least one of the organized or aggressive traits. Monte was eliminated by Tokugawa and Ghengis, leaving Ghengis, Tokugawa, Mao, and me in the end game.

[couerdelion]

Courthouses? Who needs 'em

I find it somewhat remarkable that I have not yet built a courthouse in any game that I have played.

There may be many reasons for this. Firstly, I have concentrated games on early period and only once played into the Renaissance Era (a strange name for a period which suggests the rediscovery of things once known). Second, I have rarely pushed out the boat on the more aggressive style of game, which “requires” courthouses to be viable.

In contrast, I have found the payoff from a markets/grocers (which also help city growth) exceed that of something which seems just to save a flat x gold per turn. I also know this is a strategy at prince level which can give you a big lead in the middle game and allow you to adopt a more aggressive stance later in the game where such an advantage will usually be decisive.

Suppose we have a moderately developed city (granary, library) generating 15 commerce and a science rate at 70%. Looking at the prices, perhaps the grocer is starting to look a little expensive since the health bonuses from that are more marginal than the happiness bonus of a market. The market will still generate me an extra 1 gold (compared to a courthouse saving of 2 gold) but I will also gain the advantage of extra happiness so that if I can just work an extra cottage grassland I will have one extra commerce (increasing). The option to select specialists though gives a much more dramatic comparison and, if food is sufficient, a merchant will bring in an extra 3.75 gold (with multiplier). Of course, the trade-off in this city might be for production if my extra active citizen can also work a mined-hill tile leaving other financially efficient cities to worry about my rising costs.

The simple trade-off in building a courthouse (bearing in mind that I never built one) is a fixed production of 80 hammers for a saving of 2 gold/turn. Using a conversion rate of 1 prod = 1.5 gold (my working assumption), the gold cost of building the courthouse is 120 leaving a pay-off term of 60 turns – or 1.66% if expressed as a long term yield.

The market (using a the cottage grassland) option will cost me 225 gold (=150 x 1.5) and will generate an extra 1.125 gold from the market itself and (1.25/2.5/3.75/5) from the cottage. So while the initial running yield will be little over 1%, when the cottage turns to hamlet it will be about the same as with a courthouse and will be 2.7% by the time the cottage finally becomes a town. The market pays for itself in 57 turns - slightly better than the courthouse – but by this time we could also imagine that the city has grown further and the extra commerce from that new tile would be adding to the benefit that the market is giving.

So I would suggest that where happiness limits are being approached, the market is almost always going to be the better investment than the courthouse.

[Alkis2]

Just to add one thing. Since you will be running your science at 70% or higher most of the times, a science building is always a better choice than an economy building (unless health/happines problems are an issue).

On how inflation works I had an idea but didn't have time to test it. Maybe if you generate much gold per turn your inflation rises.

[Blake]

Well if you don't play into the later parts of the game and don't expand aggressively then courthouses aren't going to be much help. and it's always nessecary (or at least desirable) to do the cost/benefit analysis, in even the most sprawling empire a marketplace will probably beat a courthouse in a shrine city.

Where courthouses are primarly useful is in reducing gold-bleed. When you scam some gold from some source (bullying, loot, trade, merchant bomb) you can set research to 100%, during this period marketplace & friends are providing absolutely no gold benefit. On the other hand courthouses means it takes longer for your gold supply to bleed out. Courthouses also provide a benefit in cities with zero or next to zero gold income.

Courthouses can be useful both for the sprawling empire and for the paradigm research economy, if you aim to be running 100% science at all times then courthouses help more.

Health and Happy sometimes matter and sometimes doesn't. Sometimes you just don't get the resources that are boosted by markets/grocers, sometimes happy outstrips health or vice-verca. Performing the analysis on the fly is what it comes down to.

[couerdelion]

Courthouses for low income cities

My brief situational analysis has only convinced me that courthouses have lower value than marketplaces if you are running close to a happiness deficit in a city. I am now more of the opinion that courthouses have a reasonably respectable payoff period so will start building them a little earlier.

One point I would pick up on is the remark about the situation with a low-income city. Here, I think there may be a tendency to view things at a micro level and not to consider the comparative strength of your individual cities. Micro decisions may be based on happiness or health but the gold/science thing is a macro one. The overall principle is that the maintenance costs of the city are paid for by the civilisation and not by the city itself. It’s the city with the market, grocers and bank with cottages by the river that can pay for these costs as long as the other city continues to churn out the other things. City B pays City A for producing those units that it doesn’t want to.

Once again if we are nearing our happiness limit, then the market place could allow me to work another mined-plains hill. With a forge that’s –2 food/+5 production and since I may be working on the same 1.5 exchange rate, that’s 7.5 gold (after modifiers).

p.s. If happiness is the problem then a theatre can often be the cheaper option.

[Blake]

Hammers are abundant. Commerce is scarse. This only becomes more true as difficulty level is raised and expenses progressively increase.

Also regarding low commerce cities. Imagine I have a capital with a library and Acadamy, that's a +75% multiplier for science. It doesn't have any gold multipliers - too early in the game, all other cities have +25% science (just a library). Imagine furthermore that the capital accounts for 50% of my total raw commerce (which isn't really an unreasonable assumption, if a bit on the low side because capitals can truly rock for commerce).

Now say I have captured another players capital and it's sucking 5g/turn in city upkeep. A courthouse will liberate 2 gold. Now the question is: How much is that 2g worth?

It's 3 science. 1g was coming from non-capital cities, and via the slider becomes 1.25science. the 1g from the capital becomes 1.75 science. (this assumes slider-tweaking to have reserves of ~0g)

It is precisely because of this science multiplier effect that it is fallacy to think that 2 less expenses is worth less than 2 more raw commerce. This only becomes true somewhat later in the game when gold multipliers start to catch up.

For the same reason it is fallacy to think that in a city with 4 science and 4 expenses that you may as well build a library, because you get 2 science which is as much as the 2 expenses you'd save. No. The 2 less expenses frees up commerce in cities with higher multipliers and might give 3 science. It is of course okay to still build the library for Culture, just as it makes sense to build markets/grocers for the happy/health - assuming you have the resources.

One final thing - just as commerce increases throughout the game, so does city upkeep. Upkeep doesn't increase as fast as commerce, but the courthouse will continue to increase in value as the game progresses, just like the libraries/markets etc.

[Shaka II]

Couerdelion -Courthouses are a priority for the organized trait, where the're 1/2 price. So, if you're not organized, it may shift down in priority, until such a time that your empire size makes the costs burdensome.

[The_Paladin]

I was going to post a new thread on this topic but found this one and decided to bump it up a bit. Good discussion here and some very good information that will help people manage their empires a bit better. Civ4 seems to me to be all about managing your economy (at least that's the hardest part) and this discussion is to the heart of it.

My first impression when starting to play Civ 4 was ORG was useless... you have to expand like a mad man to make it useful. Of course then I moved up in difficulty .

When I first started playing emperor and above I thought wow... how can you live without organized? You second city puts you at -5 upkeep / turn!!! That's half your income.

Now I'm starting to pull back a bit from ORG... I'm finding I can "live without it" a bit more if I play a certain way and I'm curious what other people think about this. I might be missing something in my thoughts so hopefully if I am someone around here will catch me on it. I'm not going to compare organized to financial... just organized vs. not having it.

There's two general impressions I had of organized at the beginning:

1) It allows me to expand bigger and still keep a decent science rate.

2) It starts out to be a small benefit that grows with empire size. Hence it gets better all the time.

So it lets me get bigger and research faster. A definite plus in this game. I don't think I'm assuming too much by suggesting this is generally why people take the trait. However I've grown skeptical as to whether it actually does either of those things. Consider the hypothetical situation (the numbers likely aren't right but the idea should be):

We have two empires, A & B. A is an empire of 6 cities run by an organized leader resulting in a civic upkeep of 10. B is an empire of 4 cities run by a non-organized leader resulting in a civic upkeep of 10. Thus is would seem that organized would allow empire A to grow bigger and still have the same civic upkeep. However suppose empire B now expanded to 7 cities increasing its civic upkeep to 19 or so (yes I know it should be more like 21 or something but I wanted nice numbers... the exact number isn't that important). That's much higher than the non-organized upkeep... however now assume that in that 7th city 3 merchants are assigned... now that city generates 9 gold. That gold can pay for you civic upkeep reducing your effective net civic upkeep back to 10/turn. You still have 6 productive cities, the same as the organized leader, and you have the same effective net civic upkeep.

Note empire B also has that 1 merchant city... it could be argued as still being productive but for the sake of argument lets assume its useless save for generating money.

So it seems that the first benefit of organized, that you can grow bigger and keep a better science rate than a non-organized leader isn’t exactly true.

The second benefit is that the benefit starts small but grows with empire size. Returning to the example, let us suppose that both have grown in size such that their civic upkeeps have both increased by approx 50%. Thus empire A has a civic upkeep of 15 / turn and empire B has a civic upkeep of 30 / turn. Now it would seem that organized saves you 15 / turn civic upkeep. Recall though that empire B has 3 merchants... that lowers the benefit of organized to only 6 / turn. However both empires have grown... thus it should be easy to assign extra merchants to that seventh city and regain all the lost upkeep. An even bigger benefit... obviously time has passed and new techs are available - most likely those currency and maybe guild techs. So you can put a market and maybe a grocery in that seventh city and make your merchants more effective. If you have both, those same 3 merchants now make 14.5 gold / turn... that's practically paying all the new upkeep by itself.

So it seems again that the second benefit isn't actually true. Yes the gross civic upkeep in both empires have gone up and yes the organized trait reduces that civic upkeep by a larger amount - the effective net civic upkeep of both empires has remained the same due to new techs. So organized hasn't really saved you anything more than it did originally.

So what has organized really saved you then? Well... if you do use the extra city (or cities depending on how large your empire is) + merchant approach, all organized saves you is the time and production required to create those extra cities, that may or may not actually be considered effective. So it saves you maybe 100 - 200 production for a medium to large empire + worker time to farm the extra cities tiles.

Of course one can argue that empire A can also make a seventh city with merchants in it thus restoring the difference in effective net civic upkeep between the two empires. Yes that's true.... but in that case organized is even weaker. All empire B has to do now to maintain parity is simply assign a few more merchants. Thus all organized has bought you in that case is a few less merchants.

As a further example, if we take this to the extreme. Suppose we have enough direct gold income (from shrines and / or merchants) to pay all our empire's upkeep. This is quite possible if you spread your religion and put wallstreet in your holy city. Suppose both empire A and B can do this. Now what has organized saved you here? It no longer saves you research since your research can be 100% - as remember you have no problems with upkeep. So instead its saved you some gold. To me a little extra gold just isn't that useful. Even if it was 50 gold / turn it saved you (that's massive empire) what are you going to do with that gold? Well you can upgrade military units or rush production with the proper civic.

Upgrading military units with gold is good and organized would let you upgrade a few more than normal but if you really wanted a stronger military, aggressive would be the proper trait to take - not organized.

Now for rushing production... the main things I "rush" are wonders usually. My other cities have enough production that they can build what they need to anyway. Recall that the civic that lets you rush production also allows town to produce hammers thus making your weaker production towns beef up a bit - that's why those "other" cities can produce what they need to. So organized here has let you rush a few extra buildings and maybe an extra wonder. Again though if you want to build lots of wonders... industrious is your trait - not organized.

To me it seems now that organized is an early game trait. It works well until you get CoL and the caste system. As soon as that happens it stops helping as much if you run the merchant approach I talked about.

The thing is that organized reduces your gold income, not your commerce. Thus as your commerce-to-gold multipliers get better, organized gets worse and can be manipulated to have little effect at all in an empire. So instead of getting better over time, even if you don't run merchants, it gets worse as it takes less commerce to pay that upkeep. If you take advantage of that fact by using gold producing specialists, you don't need organized at all.

So I'm not really impressed anymore with this organized trait. I used to consider it a top-tier, must have trait. Now its more a second tier, nice to have but not great trait.

As I said earlier I may have missed something in my thoughts here and if so someone can point that out to me. By no means am I saying organized is useless - its still good... just not great and can be "played into obscurity" if you are willing to use merchants or shrines.

[Blake]

Your logic appears to be horrible, some kind of rob peter to pay paul thing. I'm not sure how giving the non-organized civ a bunch of free merchants proves anything, take two empires of equal size - one organized, one not. However you arrange things, the organized civ has better cash flow.

What you're saying (I think) is that non-org can support expansion by (essentially) having a dead-city of merchants (maybe spread over the empire), well an organized civ can support the same empire with a live city doing useful stuff.

Secondly, Organized gets cheap Lighthouses and Courthouses. Very strong free buildings, possibly the strongest.

While you'd think the multiplier effect does diminish the value of reduced expenses, there is something you are forgetting to account for. *spooky*Inflation!!!!!*spooky*. Think expenses don't get multiplied? Think again!

And also Organized civs tend to be able to use the org trait to justify running more expensive civics such as Vassalage and Org.Religion, in the case of Vassalage the free units easily outstrips the increase in civic cost for org leaders.

Org enjoys a certain compounding benefit of expense reduction, such as free unit upkeep being based on empire population, organized can support a larger, more populus empire which then helps support the units which go on to conquer more empire, with quickly rushed courthouses bringing the fresh territory to a profitability level that can support yet more units. Organized naturally works best when expanding at the limits.

[The_Paladin]

Originally posted by Blake
Your logic appears to be horrible, some kind of rob peter to pay paul thing.

Actually... that's the idea behind city specialization, is it not? I think that most people agree that building everything in every city is not a good idea. Specializing cities is the way to go, at least to some extent.

Doesn't it make sense to get one city that's good at something to help the rest of the empire out? That the general idea behind free trade as well (real world). Some examples would be having the national epic in your GP city to get GPs out faster to help the rest of the empire or having your heroic epic city provide the military defence for the rest of your empire. In both cases those cities are the best at what they do and yes they have to sacrifice... the GP city likely has little production and the heroic epic city likely has little time to build infrastructure. They have to make sacrifices... but its for the good of the empire. So yes those cities (Peter) have to sacrifice to help the empire (Paul).

If you take another example more close to the discussion at hand. Say you are losing -3 gold / turn with 0 treasury at 70% science. Assume also you have an empire of 10 cities. What is the best choice to resolve this upkeep problem? Do you lower your science rate by 10% or do you assign a merchant in one city? Well lowering the output of your major science cities by 10% can really impact your overall science generation and ultimately slow your empire's growth but adding a merchant in a secondary city hurts that one city, but the rest of the empire remains pumping out science at the same rate. To me, sacrificing the one city to add a merchant is certainly better than hurting the entire empire. If you extend this, is this not general idea of having a wall street city pay for the empire, as so many people talk about around here?

Was it not you that suggested in this thread that missionaries be used instead of courthouses? Wouldn't those missionaries just be providing money to your holy city such that it could help pay for the rest of the empire?

And was it not you that suggested that getting two religions in the same city is great because, at least I presume, that that city could easily pay for the rest of the empire?

You also said at the top of this thread that if your empire is easily paying expenses, financial is better than organized. What I’m talking about is simply a method of getting your empire to easily pay expenses.

My suggestion is merely to augment the income of your empire through the use of merchants until such a time that your holy city (or great prophets or great merchants or whatever you want) can fully support your empire, if you actually manage to get one.

So why is it when you suggest using a single city to augment the empire's income its a good idea but when I suggest it (albeit with merchants and not shrines) its a horribly illogical idea?

Originally posted by Blake
I'm not sure how giving the non-organized civ a bunch of free merchants proves anything, take two empires of equal size - one organized, one not. However you arrange things, the organized civ has better cash flow.

The merchants aren't free - of course - you have to sacrifice working citizens to become them. Also naturally comparing two empires of equal size with one being organized and one not would favour the organized civ. That I believe is obvious. However I'm proposing a method that I use to compensate for not being organized and showing what its cost is compared to the benefits of the organized trait. That is what I'm comparing, not simply non-organized to organized.

Originally posted by Blake
What you're saying (I think) is that non-org can support expansion by (essentially) having a dead-city of merchants (maybe spread over the empire), well an organized civ can support the same empire with a live city doing useful stuff.

You are close. I'm saying that a non-org civ can support an empire by having a city of merchants (or shrines + merchants) to make up for what it would have had by being organized. So in another way of looking at it, an non-organized civ can have the same effective upkeep as an organized civ that has X cities by having X + 1 cities, where the extra city is full of merchants to make up the upkeep that organized would've saved you. So as I indicated the cost of this approach is the time to generate that extra city and work its tiles to fill it full of merchants (and of course if you have 11 cities, the 11 one doesn't have to be the merchant city, it could be the second one, the third one, or any of them).

This is why I didn't compare 2 empires of the same size together... it wouldn't be an equal comparison. In the organized empire you would have X productive cities but in the non-organized empire you would have X - 1 productive cities, and one last city with merchants in it. Thus everyone would say I have less cities in the second example and thus it isn't a fair comparison.

And personally I like that extra city... it generates my gold for me and generates great merchants. Its essentially a secondary GP city.

Originally posted by Blake
Secondly, Organized gets cheap Lighthouses and Courthouses. Very strong free buildings, possibly the strongest.

Admittedly I did not take into account the effect of the extra buildings that can build cheaper. That was because every trait has at least one building that is cheaper so if you don't have organized presumably you have something else that's cheap.

Also, though it doesn't matter much, I would much rather have cheap granaries than cheap lighthouses... lighthouses help you grow in coastal cities... granaries help you grow everywhere.

Originally posted by Blake
While you'd think the multiplier effect does diminish the value of reduced expenses, there is something you are forgetting to account for. *spooky*Inflation!!!!!*spooky*. Think expenses don't get multiplied? Think again!

Yes expenses do increase as your empire grows and time passes. And yes inflation does increase your expenses. However inflation increases ALL expenses (units, cities, civics)… not just civic upkeep. Civic upkeep makes up less than half your expenses, depending on how many units you have. So civic upkeep only represents maybe 1/3 of the base cost used to calculate inflation and thus you only save around 16 – 20% from being organized from your inflation costs. Thus inflation is significant for all empires – not just non-organized ones.

Also I did mention that upkeep costs go up over time (i.e., inflation) and with increasing empire size but so, too, does your ability to pay those upkeep costs so the idea that organized gets better over time isn’t exactly true… more it kind of stays the same (i.e., doesn’t get better, doesn’t get worse). In my experience the later I am in the game the easier a time I have paying expenses so to me organized actually gets worse but I won’t argue this point – I’ll concede that organized doesn’t get worse or better – just stays of equal value throughout the game.

Originally posted by Blake
And also Organized civs tend to be able to use the org trait to justify running more expensive civics such as Vassalage and Org.Religion, in the case of Vassalage the free units easily outstrips the increase in civic cost for org leaders.

Org enjoys a certain compounding benefit of expense reduction, such as free unit upkeep being based on empire population, organized can support a larger, more populus empire which then helps support the units which go on to conquer more empire, with quickly rushed courthouses bringing the fresh territory to a profitability level that can support yet more units. Organized naturally works best when expanding at the limits.

I don’t agree with this benefit of decreased unit costs for organized empires because they are bigger. In fact in an empire built using merchants as I suggest will be bigger by one city thus it will actually have better unit costs.

I also don’t agree that organized empires can expand that much faster. As soon as you can get access to the caste system, you can run at least 2 merchants in a little city (more if you have a happiness resource or religion) and at that point you can expand just as fast as someone who is organized.

I’m not saying organized is useless. I’m just saying there is a trade-off – for the price of building an extra city, working it, and filling it with merchants (or founding a religion, or great prophets or whatever) you can make up the primary benefits of being organized allowing you to take another trait. To me getting one city to do this is a big price but not so huge that it isn't worth it in some cases. In fact I think later on most players do this too – get one city to pay for their empire. And is organized really all that useful in the late game when you are already paying your upkeep easily? Using merchants, you can have one city help to pay for your empire a lot sooner (at least make up the loss of civic upkeep by not having organized) thus diminishing the value of organized sooner. I’ve heard a lot of people suggest that you can’t play emperor+ without organized. This is just a way to play with practically the same benefits as organized and only have the cost of a city + merchants to contend with. If you can take your other trait you replaced organized with and use it to great benefit, that can outweigh the cost of the extra city + merchants.

[sovietwaffle]

Your argument is kinda odd... You can use it to pretty much argue for all the traits.

Expansive?
You can build another city near two health resources.

Financial?
You can build another city on flood plains and cottage the hell out of it.

Industrial?
You can build another city near a resource to help wonder production.

Cultural?
Uh, well, kinda hard to argue that one (Same with agressive).

Really, if you want to compare two traits you want it to be a controlled experiment, with the only factor being the traits.

[Velociryx]

I like Organized, but I regard it as more of a helper trait. For example....Organized finds relatively MORE power, depending on what it is partnered with (as opposed to say, Creative or Spiritual, which has roughly the same "power" regardless of what it is paired with.

Examples of this:

Org + Creative = not so great. The two don't "work" very well together.

OTOH, Org + Fin....heart stoppingly powerful because of the synergies (which is what makes Washington one of my favorites).

Also, it is fair to say that Org favors those players who enjoy big empires. If you play with 5-8 cities, Org will be "ho-hum" at best.

If you play with globe spanning Empires, then Org will be one of your very best friends (see DW1a, and try to envision what the civics expenses would have been like WITHOUT Org....*shudder* )

-=Vel=-

[Alkis2]

Sorry for intruding Paladin but it just isn't fair to compare two empires one with X cities and the other with X+1.

If it was easy for the non organized Civ to build that city, the organized one will also build it, don't you think? Even more so (because it's organized).

There is another thing, the city you have to "sacrifice" will not be the new one, but one of your good cities, one that has the capacity to support 3 merchants. You have to wait a long time for the new city to grow and you have to invest a lot to actually make it possible to support 3 merchants.

Also your theory assumes,
1. that you have caste system, and
2. that you will use that civic and nothing else.

Ok, caste comes out early, and it's good but there are times where you would prefer something else.

However you arrange things, the organized civ has better cash flow.

That says it all I think.

[The_Paladin]

@sovietwaffle

Yeah I can see your point and its a good one I think. You probably could argue for / against a lot of traits in a similar manor.

I guess I should've been clearer in my intentions... my suggestion is more of a way of survivng without organized - not to argue against picking it. I know for myself I had a hard time living without it for quite a while and this is one of my survival methods. Though I do still pick it likely 50% of the time.

@Alkis2

Again yes I can see what you are talking about. My thoughts were that the organized city need not build that X + 1'st city because they were organized.

Yes that organized civ could build that "extra" city as well (of course yes it might be an early city as you suggested) and that again would give them an advantage too.

Again I think it was more that I wasn't clear - this isn't really an argument against organized at all, just a way to survive without it. To explain it I ended up comparing org vs. non-org which gave the wrong impression.

Techincally you don't to run the caste system always though - once you get a market you can assign merchants and run whatever you want - until currency though the caste system is necessary (or if you need more than 2 merchants and don't yet have another structure).

Ultimately if your empire can pay for itself easily, ORG is not very good because it only saves you gold... but if it can't then ORG is quite good and methods (such as merchants) are needed to make up for its loss.

[The_Paladin]

Actually I was just thinking about what sovietwaffle said and its quite accurate actually. It's a great point. You can argue that most of the traits are equivalent to something else... but isn't that what the analysis is all about and its fair to do so? I mean if there was no way to replace / compensate for what a trait does it would be absolutely insensible (at least if it did something good). On the other hand if a trait can very easily be replaced it is of little value. So whereas my argument may have been odd , every trait should be comparable to something else in the game and should be replaceable by that something else (i.e., if you have the something else you it should give you the exact same ability as the trait)

For example (ignoring the cheaper buildings):

Expansive - I would consider it equal to 2 health resources or a free aqueduct in every city

Creative - Roughly equivalent to stonehenge or founding a religion (its a bit better +2 culture / turn over + 1)

Industrious - Equivalent to allowing the bureaucracy production bonus in any city that's building a wonder or equivalent to both a forge and running organized religion again for building wonders.

Philosophical - equivalent to running pacifism or having a national epic in every city

Aggressive - Equivalent to running theocracy or having a free barracks in every city

Financial - Equivalent to starting with the printing press (or working an additional X cottage squares, X / 2 hamlet squares, X / 3 village squares, X / 4 town squares, where X is the number of cottage squares the financial civ is working)

Spirtual - This one is hard... equivalent to saving 10 - 20 turns a game (maybe tons more if you switch all the time)... I can't honestly think of a good comparison except this - spiritual is hard to replace (makes it pretty good then )

Organized - Equivalent to having a city devoted to merchants, producing wealth, and / or a holy shrine, as I suggested originally.

So to me at least this is a good way to measure the traits. If the cost of replacing them is huge, then they are great traits. If the cost of replacing them is very small, then they are poor traits. Now of course with all of these traits, if the person with the trait also does what the replacement suggests, they again get a bonus. So for example if I'm aggressive (which is equivalent to a free barracks everywhere) and I also build a barracks then I get a bonus again or if I'm organized and I also have a merchant city then I get a bonus again. So its not like you will ever be able to completely replace a trait but there are things that are equivalent to having them.

Thus knowing the "cheapest" equivalency of a trait gives me, at least, a measure of how valuable that trait is. Also a good measure secondary measure of the trait would be that if the person with the trait also builds the equivalency is it still a benefit to them?

So just running through them again quickly (just off the top of my head stuff - again ignoring the buildings completely) :

Expansive - fairly easy to build aqueducts... but its a free aqueduct everywhere - so its pretty good. Its equivalency is approx. 100 free production in every city that actually would've needed health bonuses to begin with (or it allows you to chop more trees). So obviously this gets better with difficulty.

Now if the expansive leader also builds aqueducts he can get even more health... is that a benefit? Maybe but probably not huge. You'll probably hit happiness limits or find some more health resources by the time you need that in most places.

Creative - equivalent to stonehenge or founding a religion (roughly). Stonehenge is only 120 production in one city and is available pretty early... so not a huge benefit fot the creative trait here... or founding a religion which a lot of people do anyway because it has a lot of other benefits... again making the equivalency cost pretty low.

If the creative person also builds stonehenge or a religion, do they get a great additional culture bonus? Eh not really... they only got +2 culture to begin with and now they got an extra +1 culture... ok but not great.

Industrious - Not bad... equivalent to bureau everywhere when building a wonder. Or having both a forge and org. religion when building a wonder... hmm... that's a pretty high equivalency cost. If you are building lots of wonders (and most people at least try for some - especially national ones) this is a hard one to replace. If you are not its obviously not too valuable. Probably saves you 1000 production over the course of the game.

Now if the industrious player also gets org. religion and a forge they get an additional bonus again to getting wonders so its still a benefit to them.

Philosophical - equivalent to pacifism. That's pretty easy to get via some tricks... but it does require some significant effort to get and you can't get it incredibly early (to help with that early academy or whatever) so in that sense the equivalent cost is fairly high.

If the philosophical leader also runs pacifism they get the full benefit again. So its still good to them.

Aggressive - Equivalent to 60 production everywhere a barracks would've been built. Hmm... not bad but on the surface doesn't seem as good as expansive that was 100 free production everywhere an aqueduct would be. But still pretty good - it kicks in early and helps with early wars but only equivalent to an early 60 production building doesn't make it great.

Now where this shines really is for aggressive players who also build a barracks. That makes it good - they are that much closer to the all-powerful second promotion that usually opens up the more interesting ones... so for them this is a great benefit.

Financial - Printing press is a pretty darn good and not easy to get so this is a pretty heavy equivalency cost. Also if you tend to work a lot of cottage squares, being non financial means you have to work a lot of extra cottage squares to make up for its loss. Both are pretty hefty equivalency costs - hard to make up for.

Now for the financial player getting printing press is quite good so that's still a benefit and working extra cottage squares certainly never hurts a financial player... so that too is good.

Spiritual - Practically impossible to replace except by adding more turns to the game... so non-spiritual players have no way of making up for spiritual completely. Spiritual players who switch governments a lot will save huge numbers of turns... there is simply no equivalency.

Organized - Finally back to the purpose of the thread, organized has a pretty hefty equivalency cost - you have to build a religious shrine... or build an extra city entirely devoted to merchants... both are pretty hefty equivalency costs.

The organized player who also has a religious shrine or builds that extra city gets the full benefit too (unless they are rolling in gold at the end of the game - then its not much of a benefit save for rushing a few extra buildings) but in general will still support the organized player a fair amount.

This is the kind of analysis I do at least to value one trait over the other... of course it all depends on play styles and map settings. Others may have cheaper equivalencies to things... this is just off the top of my head - not fully thought out so I may have missed something.

My original intention was to suggest something that is equivalent to organized as, like spiritual, it is a hard one to nail down an equivalency to. I still think that having a city devoted to merchants is the cheapest equivalent to organized I can think of (though others may have something cheaper). Though ironically having that city is not that cheap.

At least to me, financial and organized have the highest equivalency costs making them good traits.

Spiritual, ironically, has no equivalency cost so its hard to value... though the fact that its irreplaceable makes it pretty good.

Philosophical and industrious are also decent though somewhat cheaper than financial and organized to replace (IMHO at least). If either one of them is played to an extreme early advantage before they could possible be replaced (by a slingshot or something), then their value goes up immensely - I'd say to the same level as organized / financial if played right.

Aggressive is cheap to replace for non-aggressive civs but still pretty darn powerful for the aggressive player himself. I wouldn't rank it as great but its still quite good (though I'm a builder so... take it with a grain of salt ).

Expansive I'd put on par with aggressive... its good but happiness limits you more than health. The equivalent of a free aqueduct is nice but not great... I don't find I build that many or have that huge a health problem... though I suppose if I was alone on an island it might be better.

Creative has a cheap equivalency cost and is really not that great... its probably one of the poorest traits.

I know I got a little sidetracked (sorry) but sovietwaffle gave me this idea and I think its a pretty good method of trait analysis... of course it requires the person doing the analysis to know what they are talking about which may be in question .

The most relevant point to this thread is that organized is good... its not irreplacable but the cost of replacing it is fairly high - though doable in the right conditions.

Anyways thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow.