Expenses under the Microscope, value of Organized etc.

[Alkis2]

Yeah man I now understand what you meant. You were not comparing, you were just trying to estimate the value of organized, exactly as the title says. And you came to the conclusion that
value of organized = merchant city to pay for the extra maintanence cost.

The way I think about it, is like comparing two companies were the first pays full taxes while the other has a reduction. It isn't actually 50% because both org and non-org pay the same amount for supporting extra units. It would be tempting to say that the org civ "earns" X gold per turn (which he can use to run science at a higher rate).

With spiritual you can estimate it's value, again as gold, 100% gold for the turns he was saved from anarchy. Unfortunately that varies a lot but anyway if we say that organized saves 33,3% gold per turn, it means, if it's in anarchy every 3 turns it will be on the same grounds as spiritual !!

(Of course being in anarchy carries with it more evils, for example you don't get the + happy faces or +health that some civics give).

But anyway, this means a lot. First it's just impossible to be in anarchy every 3 turns and second I suspect that the reduction the organized civ gets is more that 33,3 %. This can give you an idea about the value of organized.

[The_Paladin]

I think you made a minor mistake regarding the spiritual analysis. Don't feel bad about it... I completely ommited making my earlier post clear as to what I was actually talking about and needed yourself, sovietwaffle and Blake to clarify it for me.

Civic upkeep makes up at most around 50% of your total expenses. So organized saves you 25% at most of your expenses directly. However it also has cheap courthouses so lets say is saves 30% of your total upkeep.

Spiritual saves 100% of your entire empire's production, commerce, and food, not just 100% of your upkeep, whenever you change governments or religions.

If we suppose that upkeep consumes approximately 25% of your total empire's commerce over the entire game, then organized, which saves you 30% of your upkeep, saves you 30% of that 25%, which is 7.5%. Thus organized saves you 7.5% commerce for the entire game and spiritual saves you 100% commerce, production and food for every turn you revolt.

Ignoring the production and food, if we have X turns of anarchy over a normal game, which has 460 turns, we save X / 460 % of our commerce over that game with spiritual.

So how many turns, then, of anarchy do we need to save via spiritual to get the same 7.5% savings from organized? Well 460 * 7.5% = 34.5 turns.

It may seem, then, that spiritual is poorer than organized then as you are unlikely to have 34 turns of anarchy in a game. However we have ignored production and food. If we count production and food as equal to commerce, then we only need 34.5 / 3 = 11.5 turns of anarchy to save as many raw income points. That seems more reasonable... its likely that you will have 12 turns of anarchy in a game.

So again testement to the testers and developers of Civ4... seems like they did a pretty good job balancing spiritual with organized.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by The_Paladin

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.

If you want cheap granaries, you want to be expansive. Yes, granaries are better than lighthouses, but courthouses are better than harbors.

Organized already gets 1/2 price civic cost, and 1/2 price courthouses, which provide 1/2 maintenance cost, so 1/2 price lighthouse is a reasonable addition without making organized overpowering. On a map that has a fair amount of water, cheap lighthouses are powerful. The Romans have both traits and are very strong traits that work together to allow a large empire. Highlands is a weaker map for the Romans, since they can't build lighthouses or harbors.

Originally posted by The_Paladin

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.

Yes, but 1/2 price courthouses reduces your maintenance costs by 1/2. To compare apples and apples, consider the example where the organized civ builds courthouses for all cities, while the non-organized civ builds courthouses for only half of it's cities (same build cost). Taking the example where unit, civic, and maintenance costs were equal, the organized civ has only 72.7% of the costs of unit, civic, and maintenance, or a 27.3% savings, not the 16 - 20% that you mention. Inflation then would work on that amount.

I think for the empire builder, organized is one of the best if not the best trait. Financial/organized (Washington), aggressive/organized (Tokugawa), expansive/organized (Caesar), philosphical/organized (Mao) are some of the best players. Well, Tokugawa is up to the human player to play as, since the AI personality makes him too much of an isolationist. My best game was when I played as him.

[Alkis2]

Yeah, I knew (inwardly) that somewhere I made a mistake. In any case I won't edit it, I will leave it there as a lesson for me to be more concentrated in the future.

Spiritual saves 100% of your entire empire's production, commerce, and food, not just 100% of your upkeep, whenever you change governments or religions.

You are right and this is where I made a mistake. I don't agree with the food part though. When you are in anarchy your cities don't grow but you don't have zero food output.

I would be glad to know what percentage is the upkeep of an empire's total commerce. If we had that info maybe we could compare Spiritual and Organized more efficiently. I suspect that in the earlier parts of the game the upkeep you pay is a large percentage of your total commerce. For example, if you have to lower your science to 50% that means that your upkeep is really a large percentage of your total commerce.

Another thing I would like to know is how "city upkeep" is calculated.

[justkilled]

Just some little Error Paladin

If we count production and food as equal to commerce

Which in the Case of food is definitly to much, since you only lose your food surplus. When changing to slavery after beelining to BW it may hold the equation. But in the industrial age the lose +1 food surplus of a decent city is nothing compared to its hammer/commerce income (since it will be multiplyed by all the buildings, civics etc). I would roughly estimate it around 15-20 turns, which is somewhat more than I tent to have.
But well in the end your analysis here is O.K., since when I'm spiritual I will change civics a lot (I've found myself sometimes angering about this X turns to wait until next revolution).

EDIT: it seems like Alkis2 wrote something similiar first but well...

[platypotamus]

Originally posted by The_Paladin
It may seem, then, that spiritual is poorer than organized then as you are unlikely to have 34 turns of anarchy in a game. However we have ignored production and food. If we count production and food as equal to commerce, then we only need 34.5 / 3 = 11.5 turns of anarchy to save as many raw income points. That seems more reasonable... its likely that you will have 12 turns of anarchy in a game.

The one potential problem I see with your analysis, Paladin, is that it doesn't take into account WHICH turns those anarchy occur in.

Spiritual is saving you a lot more for late game revolutions than it does for early game revolutions, because in the late game your empire is (hopefully anyway!!) producing a lot more than it is in the early game.

I'm not sure if this is testable really (I'm basing this mostly on gut instinct rather than hard evidence), but my theory is that revolutions are much more frequent earlier in the game, and thus the turns of anarchy saved have less of an impact.

So that 25% savings coming in the modern era (where your overall numbers are quite large) each turn is more significant than the 100% savings for sporatic revolutions n the pre-industrial type times (100% of a small number is still a small number).

Of course, perhaps I am wrong, and revolutions are spread relatively evenly across the whole game--but there are still some happening early (the obvious example being the slavery switch), and you get much less benefit from spiritual on these revolutions.

[justkilled]

No, I think concerning this point Paladin was right since:
earlier advantage = bigger advantage

just to crunch some numbers an example:
Standard ancient defense unit: 25 hammers (archer)
Standard modern defense unit: 140 hammers (infantry)
so your ancient city needs less then 20 % of the hammers of your modern city, for archieving the same goal (decent protection).
So a turn anarchy in an ancient 5 hammers city will hurt you more than a turn in a modern 25 hammer city. And even more, because you will need those archers to even survive until the time you can build infantery.

[tetley]

I've been able to reduce the cost of Anarchy by doing it in the late stages of a war, when my people are unhappy anyway (due to WW, no units for HR bonus, and cut trade routes). If they're already unhappy anyway you're not losing anything, and you can actually turn unhappy, starving cities into stagnant by going Anarchy then.

[Alkis2]

I did the following experiment: I loaded several saves, looked at the expenses screen and compared the cost with organized if my civ was not organized and visa versa. If you want to do it yourself too don't forget to calculate inflation as well.

Then I used the sciense slider to see how much gold difference is a single click. Comparing the difference in civic upkeep with the sciense slider I found that around 1500-1600 AD an organized civ saves about 10%-12% of total commerce. I know that there are other factors to take into account, (religious shrines for example) but approximately being organized is equal to about one click on your science slider. At that era anyway.

I loaded a save just before space victory and the difference between what Elizabeth paid and what she would have paid if she was organized was about 5%.

I had strange results with ancient era saves. In one game Mao paid zero civic upkeep at 540 AD even though he had caste system. And 540 AD is not even ancient era. Obviously there are a lot to learn on the subject.

Things are not clear with city upkeep too. We know that you pay for number of cities and distanse from Palace but these numbers change as the game progresses even if you don't found any more cities.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Alkis2

I loaded a save just before space victory and the difference between what Elizabeth paid and what she would have paid if she was organized was about 5%.

How did you do that, edit her attributes? Also, which way does the 5% go? 5% better than organized, or 5% worse? Still, you would have to consider the effect of courthouses on the equation. Take half of her courthouses away and see what her expenses are.

[Aeson]

A couple of points in response to the trait "equivalency" costs.

AGG doesn't work well as a Civic +XP equivalency. That is because it doesn't apply to all units, and the equivalent amount of XP will scale by promotion level. For high level qualifying units it is worth much more XP than for low level units. The +XP Civics give an up-front one time only bonus. The AGG trait gives a bonus that can scale with time.

IND's closest or at least most straightforward equivalency would be having the resource bonus for each Wonder.

ORG's effect scales by difficulty level a lot. The Civic Upkeep on Deity is twice what it is at Settler. So the savings on Deity are twice what they are on Settler.

[Alkis2]

No I didn't edit anything, I just calculated. I saw what she paid for civic upkeep on the screen and assumed she would pay half of that. I also calculated the +gold she would have to pay from inflation. I know it's simplistic, but then again what else could I do.

I didn't take courthouses into account because at that era everybody has courthouses. If you want to take out half of my courthouses I will take out half of your univercities

The 5% means 5% worse than Washington who is also financial but organized.
To answer your question in detail each click on her slider was about 160 gold. Her civic upkeep was 93 plus 71% inflation which is about 159 total if I am not mistaken. Had she been organized she would pay half of that. That's about 80/turn. So by not being organized she "lost" 5% of total commerce.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Alkis2
No I didn't edit anything, I just calculated. I saw what she paid for civic upkeep on the screen and assumed she would pay half of that. I also calculated the +gold she would have to pay from inflation. I know it's simplistic, but then again what else could I do.

I see. Perhaps it would also help if you calculated the cost reduction that would have occurred, just to compare to the results I got. I'm sure that financial is quite the income generator, when all of the banks, town, etc., are in place. Go back to when you were researching physics, when I did my calculation, and see what the ratio is. I suspect the ratio of gains from organized increases quite a bit.

Originally posted by Alkis2
I didn't take courthouses into account because at that era everybody has courthouses. If you want to take out half of my courthouses I will take out half of your univercities

Not quite true. My last game was over in 1562AD, when I had 7 universities, 10 banks, and 18 courthouses, with 33 cities. I had universities in enough cities to build Oxford . Courthouses are built much earlier enabled by CoL, so more of them get built. Also, the AI does a very good job of building them, so probably half came from them. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but universities are destroyed along with other cultural improvements, unlike courthouses, granaries, observatories, etc.. So I built 6 cities and captured 27 cities, and in about half of those I captured, there were courthouses, while there were no universities in captured cities, but plenty of wonders.

It depends on the kind of game you're playing. I would agree if you're going for a culture or SS win that universities get built in many more cities, but even then not every city has research potential, but every city is a burden on total costs. In playing a domination type game, cheap courthouse are more important than cheap universities.

Originally posted by Alkis2
The 5% means 5% worse than Washington who is also financial but organized.
To answer your question in detail each click on her slider was about 160 gold. Her civic upkeep was 93 plus 71% inflation which is about 159 total if I am not mistaken. Had she been organized she would pay half of that. That's about 80/turn. So by not being organized she "lost" 5% of total commerce.

I looked up the costs in that game as I was approaching the end, before I switched to state property. My calculations, if they are right, indicate a savings of 16% for the ORG civ over the non-ORG civ, which is pretty big. Here's how I calculated it:

On Edit: I made an error in the courthouse assumption. Really, if I use courthouse effect at all, I have to use the net difference in courthouses between the number that would be built for an ORG civ vs. a non-ORG civ. I estimate that I built 9 of the 18 courthouses, so, if they're 1/2 price for the ORG civ, a non-ORG civ might only build 5 instead of nine, adding to the 9 captured, for a total of 14. To summarize, this would yield an increase of 8% in maintenance costs for the non_ORG civ, which is not that much, since so many courthoues were captured and not built.

Civic upkeep for the non-ORG civ is twice that of the ORG civ. This would increase the upkeep cost from 107 to 214 gold.

There is 56% inflation at that point, which operates on the subtotals, which are 364 and 487 respectively, making inflation costs 204 and 273 respectively.

The total costs are then 568 for the ORG civ (Japanese), and 759 for the non-ORG civ. The total income at that point was 1212, making the fraction of total costs to total income 0.47 for the ORG civ, and 0.63 for the non-ORG civ, a savings of 16% or 191 gold out of the income of 1212. Granted, if I was financial, the total income would be considerably higher.

number of courthouses 18
number of cities 33

ORG Non-ORG Savings

unit cost 68 68 0
unit supply 0 0 0
city maintenance 189 205 16
civic upkeep 107 214 107
------------------------------------
sub total 364 487 123
inflation (calc) 204 273 69
inflation (actual) 202
Total cost 568 759 191
Total income 1212 1212 0
Cost/Income 0.47 0.63 0.16

[The_Paladin]

Looks like I opened a can of worms here . There's been a flurry of posts since I last came through here.

@Shaka II - good analysis re cheaper courthouses and yeah that's probably a good way to look at them, that a non-org civ would build approx. half as many of them.

The only thing is that if you replace ORG with something else, then you will have another cheaper building... say you replace it with IND and you get cheaper forges.. now those cheaper forges can build those courthouses faster... thus giving you a few more of them. So to me its almost impossible to compare apples to apples with traits at least. Though I do freely admit that I think your numbers are much closer to the truth than my own.

The same thing with the buildings too - again I agree that courthouses are better than harbours... except if you also have the great lighthouse... then harbours are better than courthouses. Trying to analyze this game can give you nightmares because everything depends on everything else are really there is never a wrong answer... so my solution in the end is to put out a proposal here and hope someone can catch my mistakes, if I made any .

@Alkis2

Yes I did overvalue food. You are right. I probably undervalued production though too ... Some people seem to have these conversion ratios worked out but personally I can't equate a hammer to a coin and have that make any sense in my world. I just know I like them both . I also omitted any bonuses you might have got from specialists as they are destroyed with anarchy as well.

Spiritual is just a bloody nuisance to analyze when you get right down to it... though I think most would agree its fairly good and gets better if you can exploit it by say flip-flopping back and forth between univ. suff. and representation to get both the gold rush and science bonuses. And how do we take that into account in our analysis... like I said - I'm going to have nightmares if I try .

@justkilled and platypotamus

Yeah I did overvalue food - good catch justkilled.

About the timing of the anarchy. Yes the earlier the anarchy the less gross savings you will have. Its easy to save 1000's later on but only 10's early on. However the same is true for organized - early on it saves a little bit but later on it saves a lot more. So they both kind of scale.

To compare the two, I made the assumption that expenses make up 25% of an empire's commerce averaged throughout the entire game... that's a huge simplification over the actual case whereas the empire's commerce tends to grow exponentially and there's no reason to assume that expenses will grow exponentially right along with it... but I had to assume something or else I couldn't do anything at all.

I guess more so we can get a trend from the analysis: That if your expenses make up a small percentage of your commerce, the spiritual benefit improves in comparison to organized and visa versa if the expenses are a large portion of your commerce.

@tetley

That's a very nice idea - I never thought of that. If you citizens are angry with you and you want to revolt anyways... might as well do it then. Nice idea.

The one thing I do is that if I know I'm going to revolt soon to something that's going to give me extra happiness (enviro, rep, hereditary) I let my cities grow past their happiness cap anyway... that way they are ready to go when I do revolt.

@Aeson

No surprise that I messed up AGG... considering I've played with it a total of two times since I got the game.

I considered that with IND - to compare it to a resource... but then I got thinking that many wonders don't have that speed build with a resource and the resources actually double production where ind gives you a +50% boost... But I could see the point for arguing IND = free stone / marble. Actually that's maybe that's actually a good way to look at it, IND = free stone OR marble, not both. That way you speed up approx. half the wonders by 2x.

Definitely good point about ORG scaling with difficulty.

[The_Paladin]

Another minor point to muddy up the analysis of all these traits is not only how they are compared but when they are compared.

As justkilled put it, early advantage = bigger advantage. Those of us who played Civ3 undoubtedly remember the ultrapowerful agriculture trait. That trait was nothing spectacular towards the end of the game... but it was by and large considered to be the strongest trait by most beacuse of its huge impact on the early game.

So if a trait benefits you by say X in the early game that's probably worth 10X by the mid game, 100X by 3/4 through and 1000X by the end. So when comparing things we have to take that into account as well.

All traits give turn advantages via some method (spiritual being the most obvious - it actually saves you turns). Turn advantages cascade. For example if I'm one turn ahead to get the oracle, I'm one turn ahead with civil service. One turn ahead with CS might grant me currency 2 turns faster and that in turn gets me philosophy 3 turns faster which then gets me a great scientist sooner putting me 5 turns ahead, etc, etc.

Your analysis has been scientifically sound, Alkis2 and Shaka II, but I might also suggest that you should look at expenses earlier in the game as well. I realize that's a lot of work and you might not have that data but I think it might grant some very valuable insight.

My personal feeling re: financial vs organizes is that financial has a slight edge in the early game if you really focus on it as there is no real way to focus on maxing organized in the early game. Around the time you get 3 or 4 cities organized starts to come back to even again.

Now since org picks up courthouses faster than financial gets banks, it will probably go a little ahead for the player focused on courthouses allowing for a bit better expansion for the org player. Again financial will pull even again though once more cottages grow and it too expands after setting up its more expensive courthourses.

It's a flip-floppy, hand-wavy analysis to be sure, but my feeling is financial, when maxed = organized, when maxed, at least on emperor+ difficulty. They both can do great things when they are focused on and neither one is really better than the other.

On lower difficulties however, financial >> organized (sorry, >> = much much greater for the non-math folks out there).