How much should you buy rush?

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Quillan


Ah, but you are looking at it differently than I am. I do not ask "How long will it be before I earn back the money I'm spending on this?", rather I am asking "How quickly do I need to finish this and move on to building something else?" That determines whether I rush it or not. By the time I start using gold to rush production, I'm usually earning so much money empire-wide that it's not so much an issue.

I typically view it the same way you do, i.e., in terms of freeing up the city's production for something else. However, I often find that the answer isn't so much to rushbuy the bank as to just bump it down in the build queue. If it's going to makae monetary sense to buy it, I do. If not, I won't, but either way, if there's a more pressing use of that city's hammers, I can switch to it.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by couerdelion

Out of interest, what is a normal breakeven period. When you consider that many people spend 120 hammers on a courthouse to save just 2 gold, doesn't that mean that 200 hammers on a bank to produce 4 gold is a good deal?

For determining the break-even point, if the courthouse will save 3 gold per city, for example, and the average gold to hammer ratio is 3:1, then you are saving about 1 hammer per turn. So to break even you need 120 turns. If you were saving 6 gold per turn, which is typical of the outer cities, then the payback period would be about 60 turns. So, courthouses should be built in the outer cities, often pop rushing them in if you're organized (not on the first turn though). Naturally, in a high production city, the gold to hammer ratio may be lower (~2:1), making the payback faster, but 3:1 is a pretty good number.

For banks, I would look at the base commerce level and using an average slider rate of 60% science, 10% culture, 30% goes through the financial multiplier. With the 3:1 gold to hammer ratio, we should look for 600 gold equivalent for the 200 hammer bank cost. The bank savings is 0.3*0.5*base commerce = 0.15*base commerce. If the base commerce was 20 coins, then it would generate 3 gold per turn and take 67 turns to amortize the cost. If the base commerce were twice that, it would take half as long. So, the core cities get banks first, slowly growing outwards, the opposite of the courthouse distribution. Of course, when you capture an enemy capital, it may have quite a bit of commerce and development, so it may warrant a bank right off, and most likely a courthouse.

Of course the FP and Versailles change that by adding new local minima to the distance maintenance cost map. But the distance factor is only half of it, the number of city maintence cost is the other factor, so eventually, courthouses are needed even in the capital for a large empire.

In the game I just finished I built one bank for my capital, running bureacracy until the end, while the AI built 2 banks that weren't destroyed by capture. Being organized, I built 19 courthouses, with the AI building 7 courthouses that weren't destroyed. But the game was over in 1332AD after I discovered steel, but before rifling. Banks had little use. Forges, on the other hand, were worth their weight in gold , and I should have built a few more.

[Hermann the Lombard]

I suppose there's also an "ego" reason to rush a bank: the GNP looks better even though the treasury doesn't.

[Shaka II]

Here's a good case for rush buying a courthouse and the benefit of being organized. The distance cost is also a function of the city size. I just captured Paris and jacked the culture rate up to 50% to pop the borders a few times, to save the population. No need for a theater here with all the wonders. At size 17, the maintenance was 34 gold, 7 for number of cities and 27 for distance penalty. I'm playing on a standard pangea, marathon speed, but I think the speed only effects cost in hammers, not maintenance costs.

Paris can build a courthouse for being organized in half the time or 16 turns in this case, instead of 32 turns for non-organized. That's a savings of 17*16 = 272 gold, and a 16 turn advantage. Paris can build a grenadier or a cannon in 14 turns, so we get 272 gold plus 1 grenadier or cannon for being organized.

Alternatively, to speed things up, since I'm running slavery, I'll probably rush build the courthouse, since I've accumulated a turn's worth of hammers, costing me 2 population instead of 4.

This was an extreme outer city, but for the expansionist, not that unusual, as I still have only 21 cities and Paris is the direction of my expansion. I'm looking for a good place to put my Forbidden Palace. I went from 6 cities to 21 rather abruptly. Paris would be nice, but Rome would be nicer.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Shaka II
The worst is if the UN gets built and a resolution enforcing Universal Suffrage.

If you can't stop an unfavourable resolution from passing in the UN at least you probably couldn't win by domination.

What's better of course is to force resolutions favourable to you through the UN

[Solver]

With that screenshot, you'd probably gain a couple hundred GPT by switching to State Property.,.

[Velociryx]

Health problems continue to keep me from posting much, or even having much computer time in general, but I would say this:

With regards to rush buying, my opinion is that the salient points (in order of importance) are these:

1) To generate more per turn cash
2) To free up the build queue
3) The build's ROI

The reasons that these points are listed in this particular order are thus:

1) Generating more cash per turn (regardless of ROI, or turns to payback) is the vital consideration here because there are a limited number of viable city builds available and the sum-total of viable builds in all your cities, collectively, can be arrived at by evaluating each city individually, and summing these individual accountancies. ROI is (relatively) unimportant when evaluating financial buildings (banks, markets, etc) because of the macro-economic nature of currency in the empire. The GOAL is to build every available improvement you want or need, and then free up the city to the exclusive building of whatever military unit you currently need/desire.

2) Per above, given the limited number of viable builds per city, there are only a limited number of buildings "in the way" of you devoting the city in question to building either mainline or supporting military units (or, in some selected cases, building wealth or research points). The faster you can chew through these, the more flexibility you will have in terms of the Empire as a whole.

3) ROI is a consideration ONLY when evaluating what to build NEXT in any given individual city, and then, only when there are no financial builds to consider. Obviously, the choice will be to start with whatever building (unit or city improvement) that will net you the biggest current return, and move on from there, but as a general rule, ROI is a relatively poor guideline as the "prime mover" (or decider) when evaluating what to build next because ROI is inherently tied to a particular city, whilst the building or unit (in many, if not most cases) is tied more to the empire as a whole, and thus, ROI does not give you a complete picture.

Examples: If rushing a tank this turn (with a ROI of zero for any city in particular) means capturing a rival city, or preventing the capture of another of YOUR cities, then its value is inestimable, REGARDLESS OF THE FACT that it's ROI from the building city's perspective is zero.

Likewise, if a rushed Observatory is the thing that puts you over the top, shaving one precious turn from the pivotal tech you are researching, the Empire-Wide ROI is FAR greater than whatever the particular city's ROI might indicate.

Same with banks...increasing your per turn cash for the empire as a whole is FAR more important than any consideration of a particular city's ROI.

While this SEEMS to stand in direct opposition to most of what I've written about resonating hammers in the early game, in reality it is not in opposition to that at all. By the time you are in a position to make extensive use of cash rushing, the character and shading of the game has altered considerably, and rushing becomes the "queen unit" in your arsenal. In short, it is the most powerful tool at your disposal.

If you're not using it at every possible opportunity, then you are willfully ignoring vast amounts of turn advantage you could be creating for yourself, and IMO, you do this at your peril.

More drugs and bed for me.



-=Vel=-

PS: I've completed the first "surviving sub-par starts scenario (actually, completed it some two weeks and change ago before the health took a turn for the worse), and as soon as I'm feeling up to par, I'll convert those notes and raw screenies into the promised tutorial!

-v.

[Crossfire]

Good luck Vel, and thanks for your thoughts. Get well soon!

[fed1943]

It's nice to see you posting.
Take care and all good for you.
Ave atque vale,Velociryx.

[Velociryx]

Thank you, fed!

-=Vel=-

[alva]

Ah, was how wondering how you are doing, good to see you posting, Vel.

Get well mate.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

If you can't stop an unfavourable resolution from passing in the UN at least you probably couldn't win by domination.

What's better of course is to force resolutions favourable to you through the UN

Yes, as I found out, though if I could have run police state, I could have achieved domination. I had about 45% of the land area with ~65 turns left, but the war weariness was so much. As I learned, the best way to achieve domination is not to let the game get that far.

Originally posted by Solver
With that screenshot, you'd probably gain a couple hundred GPT by switching to State Property.,.

Quite true, but this game won't get past Rifling, it should end in 100 years, so Communism and State Property won't be options. But I do have the Pyramids now and have switched to Police State. I'll take over Rome now, as Julius doesn't have Grenadiers, let alone cannons, and neither does Ghandi, so it will be a steady wave of expansion, while my good friend Ghengis looks on (I'm Mao). Sometimes he gets in on the action, but I beat him to Paris .

On marathon speed you get more time to use your units and make more of them, so early domination is possible. Hence buy rushing with US is not usually an option, unless you have the Pyramids, but even then, you probably don't want to be running US very long if you're involved in a protracted war, unless you have Mount Rushmore and jails in the big cities. But all of this extra building pushes you toward the modern era. In the present game, I have one university in the capital and no banks, that I built anyway. I no longer have a need for research or money other than to pay for expenses, so I have no need for universities or banks.

But I have a great need for courthouses and theatres, and an FP right now (pop rush built). But I'm not sure I can force myself to use Paris in that way. It's a city of wonders. Besides, I don't really need the money, I need production, and people who want to work.

[couerdelion]

I should make some comments in defense of ROI and “term to repayment” since I believe these are the very factors that will determine the optimal decisions for rush buying, pop-rushing or choice of build options. The important thing to recognise is that the ROI is a civilisation-wide calculation and not based at the micro-level of the city. Each city serves one sole purpose and this is to increase the research, wealth and military strength of the whole civilisation.

Having said that measuring the ROI or term to repayment of even something as simple as a granary is not easy and so we often rely on either gut-feel or trial and error. If we do make calculations, we still have to make some assumptions with the biggest one being the gold/hammer conversion rate. At least rush-buying gives us a benchmark 2:1 ratio which we can use as a benchmark so that by rushing we are implicitly stating that, for this build, that we value those particular hammers at more than 2 gold each.

Consider the humble worker. At 60 hammers, he can chop a forests in 4 turns for 30 hammers (or 7.5 hammers per turn). Conveniently we have a hammer cost -> hammer yield so we can easily work out.

ROI = 7.5/60 = 12.5%
Term to repayment = 100/12.5 = 8 turns

One of the best investments in the game

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I should make some comments in defense of ROI and “term to repayment” since I believe these are the very factors that will determine the optimal decisions for rush buying, pop-rushing or choice of build options. The important thing to recognise is that the ROI is a civilisation-wide calculation and not based at the micro-level of the city.

Yes, that's the key, to have an empire wide perspective, what's good for the civ as a whole.

Originally posted by couerdelion
Each city serves one sole purpose and this is to increase the research, wealth and military strength of the whole civilisation.

I'll add one more reason from the domination perspective. Many outlying cities sole purpose is to deny the AI that which would make them thrive (like their capitals), while adding to your own empire's land area, regardless of whether they are productive in income, science, or manufacturing. Of course, we try to make them productive, but if they've been partially destroyed in capture, there's often limited potential for ROI in the game time remaining. Usually, it's put in a theater, a courthouse to stop the treasury drain, and start building units.

I suppose there are different ways of looking at returns on investment. How does one determine the ROI of an army? It's a bit easier to determine the ROI of an economic or science building, or perhaps a growth building. To determine ROI, you need to know the time duration over which benefits are felt. But you're right, most people will intuitively build what seems the best choice at the time, generally the cheaper buildings go first, but not always. When you see your growth limited by health or unhappiness, it's a rush to take care of that problem with resources, grocers, markets, temples. But you realize the ROI when you see that struggling pop limited capital grow up to be a size 15 or 20 city, fueling the empire to victory.

I still look for a return on all buildings that I make, no matter the era. A bank should not be built, if you end the game 50 years later, unless you can see an ROI. The domination player will rather build military units, and the space victory player will rather build a factory to build the SS parts. Unless, for example, buy rushing a bank will allow cheaper buy rushing of SS parts, but that's the sort of thinking that would be required. Is it worth it? if it means an instantaneous build of your SS parts via buy rushing, then the answer is yes!

When I'm in the late Industrial era where Democracy and US are usually available, I usually need the spare cash to upgrade my old units, like cavalry, cannons, grenadiers to gunships, artillery, and infantry. This is expensive and takes away all the cash I have left, except what is devoted to science in hopes of discovering Robotics.

If you have the money and are running US, sure buy rushing is great, but those two conditions are not met that often for me. But for the player who is primarily a builder it may be quite different.

[couerdelion]

Measuring ROI of military units

If I had the answer to this then I would gladly share this with you all. All I have are rough idea how the military contribute to the empire and thereby improve ROI

The comment which you make about different victory conditions is a good one and, to a certain extent, makes the ROI calculations less meaningful after a certain point. If you’re building culture, military domination, or space ship parts then money loses its importance as victory approaches. However, it is important for most of the game so we can probably assume that a lot of military units fall into the same sort of ROI equation.

At the most fundamental level, military units are first there as an insurance against losing existing investments. Perhaps a somewhat negative view but if everyone who has lost a city to barbarians will understand this. The undefended city produces a stream of income which will REDUCE over time to allow for the chance that it is captured or razed. Each unit you create will reduce the chance of capture so will increase that future stream of income. Stronger units will reduce the chance of capture more so that a city defender archer will theoretically show a very good ROI.

Beyond the initial insurance value, you then have the ROI on surplus units used to capture new sources of income (AI and barb cities). Each extra offensive unit will increase the probability that the first/second/third city will be taken. Probabilities, unfortunately, can be messy calculations and it might be easier to think in terms of the reduced time it will take to capture a city with more units.

Still really just ideas and I suspect that the breakdown of all this into some sort of scientific formulae will be are significant task and too large for me to look at for more than a fleeting moment.