When is a good time to build courthouses?

[Urban Ranger]

Courthouses cut the maintenance cost of a city by 50%, but each costs 150 hammers IIRC. So, assuming a hammer is worth 3 coins, that's 450 coins you need to save just to breakeven.

In a city with a 6-coin maintenance cost, a courthouse will save you 3 coins each turn after completion. IOW, you don't recoup the cost until 150 turns have passed. That's not so hot, not to mention that the construction time could be used to build something else.

So unless a city has at least a 8-coin maintenance cost, it's not worth the time to build it. That means it's almost never a good time to build a court house, unless you want to build the Fobbiden Palace on a new continent.

Or am I completely off?

[Blake]

1 hammer = 1 coin, and in some cases the ratio favors coins even more, depending on how starved for commerce you are - you can "always" get more hammers by expanding, but expanding will often reduce your commerce.

The time to build courthouse is at 6 maintenance for non-org and 4 for org (IMHO). Or any time you have an abundance of hammers relative to coin (ie your civs economy is staggering along at 20% research...).

If you read my post in the expenses under the microscope thread, 3 expenses is often worth 4-5 beakers, so using more reasonable assumptions time to payoff might be more like 30 turns, and city maintenance goes up over time too.

[unamablebuiler]

As soon as possible , cut those expenses then xpand again grab those good city sites from the AI Admitedly its a civ 3 mindset but if theres space you can bet thats where the only copper or horses on your land wil turn up.

[Willem]

For myself, anytime I see a city with a maintence cost of 2 gold, I think it's a good time to build a Courthouse. This equating Hammers to coins baffles me really. Anything that can bring my overall cost down, even if by just 1 gold is a good thing. That leaves 1 more gold I can devote to research and is not being wasted. If I had to wait until a city was at 6 or 8 gold maintenance cost, I'd seldom build Courthouses and I'd probably be losing lots of money in the process.

[ndur]

Courthouses are just another science building in practice.

Say your base research is 8, city maintenance is 6.

A courthouse will save you 3 gold/turn for the cost of 150 hammers.

A library will make you 2 gold/turn for 120(?) hammers.

This means it's 50 H/(g/t) for a courthouse, and 60 H/(g/t) for a library, making the courthouse a cheaper solution in this specific scenario. (If you disregards a library's cultural effect!)

For me there are 2 main reasons to start making these financial/science buildings, not having enough money (as in never?) or not having anything better to do.

Regards,
Tobias

[Gelondil]

When building courthouses, I don't ever look at the shield vs gold ratio. That really doesn't make any sense, because half the buildings give 0 income. It's all a matter of whether a courthouse is better than the alternatives available at THAT moment.

It really depends on the game, of course:
If an empire is expanding quickly (militarily or otherwise) then cities tend to be undeveloped and have high maintenance costs. In these cases, a courthouse is probably a better bet financially.

If an empire is developing big cities rather than expanding, then cities tend to be well developed and have low maintenance costs. In these cases, a courthouse loses to most any production-improving building, even monasteries!

Personally, I usually just wait until the advisor recommends building a courthouse, unless I'm focusing specifically on commerce.

[Velociryx]

As soon as I get the tech. But then, I play with BIG empires, and not nearly as interested in the hammer:coin ratio as I am in meeting the minimum requirements to lay down a forbidden palace. Even the capitol gets an early courthouse, cos that's one closer to FP, and an easy doubling of the size of my holdings.

CH's are among the best building in the game, IMO.

-=Vel=-

[ndur]

Originally posted by Velociryx
As soon as I get the tech. But then, I play with BIG empires, and not nearly as interested in the hammer:coin ratio as I am in meeting the minimum requirements to lay down a forbidden palace.

Good one. I never actually bother to build FP or move my capital. Another way to optimize my game I guess.

BTW, would it be possible to make a Python plugin that automatically calculates, money-wise, which of courthouse, library, monastery, market, etc would be most efficient for this city under current conditions and display that somewhere?

Regards,
Tobias

PS Having lots of fun in my current game. Settlers started in a very foresty area, and my capital spend the first umpteen turns chop-rushing only workers and settlers. Chopped 30+ forests. My capital is not among my smaller cities, but my empire is now bigger than in any game I played before.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by ndur


BTW, would it be possible to make a Python plugin that automatically calculates, money-wise, which of courthouse, library, monastery, market, etc would be most efficient for this city under current conditions and display that somewhere?

Regards,
Tobias

I think all those costs are skew so the conclusions are faulty. Having said that I made a comparison of market/courthouse in the “Expense thread” and convinced myself that courthouses were certainly not a bad investment if you were hitting 4 maintenance. Below that, I don’t think they do a great deal but still could be a reasonable investment if there is not much else to go for.

Regards, Library(90 hammers), even in a low commerce city this may be the quickest way to get the full city radius if you haven’t got the Caste System civic. For Markets (150 hammers) you get the happiness bonus and Grocers give health bonuses. Courthouses (80 hammers) seem to sit weakly alongside those buildings because it just has the one benefit of cost reduction.

I don’t believe you should be valuing hammers on a 1:3 ratio with gold. Would you think a 1/2/1 tile and a 1/1/4 tile were broadly equivalent? You’d have to also have compelling reasons to select a specialist scientist or merchant ahead of an engineer. Using a 3:2 ratio with courthouse cost at 80 hammers gives a pay-off in 60 turns – not that bad. A library in a city with 8 commerce will only pay-off more quickly if you factor in the value of the culture it generates.

p.s. If you are rapidly expanding your empire and sweeping away all in your path then you are probably in the same position as Vel and, since he is far better at this game than I, I would suggest you follow his advice and think of courthouses almost as a pre-requisite for a city. If, OTOH, you haven’t just wiped out at least 4 other civilisations by 0 AD, you may find you can delay building them for a little longer.


Regards the "plug-in" someone could do this although it would be extremely advanced if it were to factor in those other benefits of happiness, health, culture etc that libraries, theatres, markets bring.

[ndur]

Regards the "plug-in" someone could do this although it would be extremely advanced if it were to factor in those other benefits of happiness, health, culture etc that libraries, theatres, markets bring.

Accessing the data (available buildings etc) and displaying it would seem the hardest. The rest is just a bunch of formula's. (Although picking value-ratio's for the different results would give cause for some dissent as we see in the discussion about value of hammer:gold)

Regards,
Tobias

[Arrian]

As an ORG civ, I built them early... sometimes even as the very first improvement (that might be going too far).

As an non-ORG civ... I delay, because of the high hammer cost. I want to get the city up in size and get a forge up so I can build the CH in a reasonable amt of time.

-Arrian

[Dominae]

When?

Build them once you have sued for peace after a successful war of conquest, in the cities that you just conquered.

Build them in far-flung colonies post-Astronomy.

Truth be told, they're pretty low on my build list. It's very rare that a city cannot pay for itself by growing in population and working Commerce tiles, so I choose improvements that help do this; Granaries, Lighthouses, Forges, Harbors. Eventually I get to Courthouses if the returns from a Library, etc. are not significant compared to the reduced Maintenance.

If my Treasury is low I'll tend to prioritize them more. That's why I try to keep a lot of Gold in the bank, in order to keep my Science high without having to build Courthouses. I get all the Gold I can from AIs in trades, I rarely upgrade, and I really like Great Merchant Trade Missions.

[couerdelion]

The production/gold exchange rate

Originally posted by ndur

Accessing the data (available buildings etc) and displaying it would seem the hardest. The rest is just a bunch of formula's. (Although picking value-ratio's for the different results would give cause for some dissent as we see in the discussion about value of hammer:gold)

Regards,
Tobias

This is, in reality, dependent on the circumstances within a civilisation and its component cities. The three more obvious elements of output are gold/science/production with each city applying its own multiplier to those factors. Each city will have a notional exchange rate between the three elements but I cannot quite work out whether this is driven by the supply side or simple by the city multipliers.

Take this to the macro level and you find that the civilisation as a whole has an “exchange rate” from gold to science and gold to production. It has various methods of transferring between these three so we can operate a simple sort of market for these commodities are both levels. Of course, the market has its imperfections since you can’t turn unlimited amounts of cash into production just when you feel like it. In fact, at a city level your options to “buy” production are limited to building workers/settlers, pop-chopping, forestry and unit upgrades.

What is more important is that the circumstances of the civilisation will affect the cost of production (expressed in terms of gold). If you only have floodplains, desert, sea and grassland with the odd dye, incense, sheep, pigs, gems thrown in you’ll have plenty of cash to generate gold and science but little production. In those situations, you would probably pay quite a bit for production. If you left with lots of hills with copper, iron, horses, stone, you’ll probably not think production that valuable since you already have so much.

Either way, your “price” for production will be neither 3:2 nor 3:1 but a civilisation specific which will change with time.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Arrian
As an ORG civ, I built them early... sometimes even as the very first improvement (that might be going too far).

That's standard procedure for me later in the game, Org or not Org. With Granary right after that. If I can shave a few gold off my overall empire costs, then I'm better off.

[DirtyMartini]

I've struggled with the courthouse early v. late question for a while now. I did some scribbling based on some assumptions Blake used in arguing (very convincingly) for courthouses over markets in the "expenses under a microscope" thread.

I used the following assumptions

-6 cities
-capital with +75%science, producing 50% of empire's raw commerce
-5 satellite cities with no science or gold bonuses
-costs evenly divided between city maintenance and civic costs
-all of the maintenance costs in the satellite cities
-80% science rate, set to break even each turn.
- no extraneous gold income (shrine, trade, etc).

The three ways I looked at to increase science were --

1) build libraries in all satellite cities and maintain 80% science
2) build courthouses in all satellite cities and shift to 90% science
3) build markets in all satellite cities and shift to 90% science

Assuming 200 raw commerce as well as the conditions above:

Option 1 --> +20 spt/+0 gpt
Option 2 --> +27.5 spt/-10 gpt
Option 3 --> +27.5 spt/-17.5 gpt

Option 1 clearly provided the biggest boost in science output while remaining at break even gold-wise.

Option 2 provides +27.5 spt by stemming the loss of 10 cpt to maintinance and deficit spending by 10 gpt for a net effect to 20 cpt diverted from gold to science. This is due to the increase in (+75%boosted) science spending in the capital (as nicely explained by Blake previously). It would provide +13.75 spt/+0 gpt if you were allowed to set science to 85%, a little greater then half the benefit of option one. As an aside, as your science rate drops lower at the break even point, near the 50% range, the value of an early courthouse versus an early library increases as proportionately less science spending is being boosted and proportionatly more capital commerce is being drawn off.

Option 3 was an even bigger dud than I'd expected it would be, definitely not worth considering early

All of this seemed somewhat intrinsically obvious, but it helped me to see the magnitude of the numbers (I'm a pretty concrete person really). For example, with option one, empire spt went from 220 to 240.

The big caveat here is that these numbers and assumptions are arbitrary, and I'm not sure how applicable they are to a true game situation. In particular, I'm not sure how realistic an empire with 200 raw commerce and 20 gold city maintenance really is. I've also neglected trade routes and so forth, which confound the economic assumptions considerably. I meant to start a game, play out an expansion, then use the world builder to tweak buildings and peek at the effects, but got distracted by Que'cha rushing.

Anyway, that's my two cents. Please let me know if I totally screwed the pooch on any of my calculations.

Dirty