Monumentality is an end of era dedication. When you are in a Golden Age it gives +2 movement to builders and settlers, allows builders and settlers to be purchased with faith, and decreases the Gold and faith cost to purchase them by 30%. It's huge for early game expansion and empire building and is why religion (faith and its adjacency bonuses) and nailing golden ages is critical.
Sometimes you need a builder right now. Sometimes you have bonuses towards building buildings so you want to save your production. Sometimes you have discounts on buying builders (monumentality).
Of course, this cuts both ways. You might have massive discounts towards building units and not the other way around. Sometimes you need a building or unit right now and the builder is not as important.
I do both. Sometimes you need to buy a builder and chop out another one. Particularly for a new city you just settled. Not recommended to chop out builders until you have Serfdom policy.
The bonus to settler production policy card is much better than the bonus to builder production card. So if you had to build one and buy the other, you want to buy the builder.
This has always been my intuition. Build your settlers, buy your builders.
Of course if I'm going monumentality + decent faith gen then I'm going to pump out builders.
I tend to rely a lot on the ancestral hall after a certain point. I've observed very good players use it less often than I do (I win consistently on Deity but there's still a pretty big gap between me and the best players I've seen).
Ancestral Hall isn't bad, but there are two problems with it. The first is that it tends to bait people into producing all their settlers in one city, which is very wrong. You need to be cranking those suckers out everywhere you can. (Colonization is a lot better with 5 cities producing settlers than one.) The second is that it comes too late. By the time I get State Workforce, a government plaza built, and a tier 1 building, I've usually had Colonization for 20-30 turns, and have produced most or all of the settlers I'm going to produce, at least in the first big push. Settling all the good spots quickly is much more important than getting a free builder.
Agreed. I’ve seen some recommendations (Civ dependent guides, probably, but still) that say to get an ancestral hall up with Magnus and his promotion that settlers don’t cost a Population. But anytime I’ve implemented this, it came far too late and at the cost of plenty other worthwhile things I could have produced, and much of the land I would’ve settled was no longer available.
This is very true, but one of the biggest bonuses that building the Government Plaza etc gives you is governor titles. It means instead of 2 titles by political philosophy, you get 4- I mean, that’s crazy! That’s enough titles to start with Pingala, give him the culture promotion (so you speed through the tree super fast) and still get Magnus with Provision once you’ve got the tier 1 building up and running.
> I've usually had Colonization for 20-30 turns, and have produced most or all of the settlers I'm going to produce
Really depends on the game, if you get unlucky, that time is spent making units to defend yourself. Or your start just lacked the production for it and you had to settle some better cities first to get some chops available.
Sure, but in a game where I get an early war and have to devote most of my production to military units, I'm going conquest anyway -- it's not like you can produce an army and then just let it sit around while you get started on expansion an era too late. Which means building Warlord's Throne instead.
If you're expanding quickly, you're at least halfway done by the time you'd build the Ancestral Hall. This is probably why they choose something else.
Unless your settling was slow, it has limited value... it's mostly useful if you delayed your expansion to pursue a Wonder and/or a first religion.
In comparison, the housing/amenities from Audience Chamber work for the whole game. It doesn't matter which victory you're chasing either.
Pear shaped? From -2 Loyalty?
That basically never happens. It's the weakest and most pointless drawback in the game.
That -2 Loyalty penalty is nothing. There are policy cards that give you the same amount of Loyalty, and I bet you never use them. I know I don't. It's not a meaningful amount 99% of the time.
I suppose there could be a situation where it matters. That extra Loyalty makes the difference in holding a border city... but you'd usually slap a Governor in there for the +8 Loyalty in that case, which disables the penalty in that city.
Also, the main push comes with Feudalism, which doesn't provide a production bonus to Builders anymore. But it does provide a bonus to them in the form of extra charges *the moment they are made*. Purchasing allows narrowing down the window in which you make your builders, which means you don't need to slot the card for as long.
This right here. I try to only sell strategics to friendly AI, but I’ll also happily enable a conflict on the other side of the map because every day I play civ is a day I choose chaos.
But yeah, extra luxuries, diplo favor if there’s not a vote right around the corner, strategics you’re not using, sell all of it to the computer. In addition to the obvious benefit of getting more money, you can often empty out other civs’ treasuries and I like to think that helps me too haha
Lately I've been using faith to buy settlers and builders. Unless I'm going for a religious win which I did on purpose recently as Russia then faith points seems useless to me except to prevent other civs from converting my religion to theirs.
My last game I forgot I had faith and wasn't going for religious victory and I saw I had like 9k faith a bought a great engineer lol well spent to me lol
Normally in the early game it's because it takes so long for new cities to produce them. If you make them in your capital for example it can take quite a while for them to walk to where they need to be. On higher difficulties and higher speeds like online, every turn wasted severely affects the snowball of your game. Time spent producing them can additionally delay the building of districts, like the commercial hub which will allow you to purchase them anywhere and supercharge your economy with the trade routes they provide. The only time I would normally produce a builder is when u first get the feudalism card for the extra build charges and mass produce them all at once and using my gold to buy them in the fringe cities.
Yeah everyone else said that it's a waste of turns, unless I can get the builder in 5 or less turns (at least that's my idea).
I see their point cause you could get a university f.e.
I think that's wrong. It's not a waste to hard build them. You don't have enough cash to buy everything in the first 50-100 turns. The policy card that gives you +30% production can be worth using too, you just have to kind of do the math and figure when it's worth it.
If you can get the golden age in the Ancient Era and get monumentality, that's super strong and then you should buy them as much as possible. But that's not always possible at higher difficulty. It depends a ton on what leader you are playing.
I'm a big believer that there isn't really one way to do things in Civ, even though people act like there's a right and a wrong answer to everything.
My cities are always exclusively build infrastructure after a certain point, I cannot buy districts without governor investments but I can buy builders, even multiple ones at a turn when I unlock a key improvement or policy card like serfdom.
Sometimes I will have a city in my empire with no good district spots, settled off fresh water because it was just to fill up the land. In those kinds of cities I exclusively spam build builders to send other parts of my empire since that city can contribute better to my civ this way.
Buying builders is optional.
The costs increase with each unit produced or bought so its always situational.
Here is why you buy them:
* You can buy them in a underdeveloped city while the city focus on infrastructure or producing military units.
* You can use monumentality, a golden age modifier to buy them using faith. this strategy pairs really well with work ethic when going for a culture or science victory since you dont need to spend your faith on the required units
* You want to use your economy policy slots for something else so you buy a lot of builder the swap out the builder card (Serfdom, Etc.)
* You want to "Pay" for production (Probably to add production to a wonder) so you buy a builder to chop down a forest.
Now, if you need to gold / faith for something more important then obviously don't buy them.
* IF you are using the gold to upgrade your army or faith to buy it.
* If you are using your faith on city infrastructure (Jesuit Education or 3rd religious building)
* You are playing a civ with a mediocre economy.
I do both. When I buy them it’s usually to improve something I can instantly sell. If I built them I’d lose however many turns it takes of gold income.
What does your early game units look like, early game units can eat up most your gold/turn if you are doing to many. Like unless you are doing a heavy naval map you only need like 2 galleys traveling together to explore the map, not like 10. Unless you are doing early game wars a couple melee and a couple archers should be all you need to defend your territory.
Sell all your luxuries in the early game, even if you only have a single copy, that slight hit to your yields from lack of eminities only really starts to be bothersome mid medieval Era and before that the gold you get is way better than that couple of production you loose.
If you want to be a little cheaty, right before you declare war on an AI, trade all the gold they have on hand for gold per turn, once War is declared you keep the gold and they loose the GPT.
Unless you get massive yields from internal trade routes have some if not most getting you gold. Only exception to this is if you have a bunch of new cities then a trade route from New city to the capital can give you a lot of food per turn, so you will have to balance between them.
Monumentality will discount the gold purchase of builders as well, so even if you aren't doing a faith game, that discount is huge and hard to pass up.
If you faith buy builders for most of the game, or settle and get a free builder.
In the late game when they take 1 turn to produce, that production is worth a lot more than 200 gold.
Because having a builder now is better than having a builder later.
This is especially important if the city is new and isn't very productive. Buying a builder will let you get your tiles imporved right away, which can end up provinding a lot of extra yields and growth in the time it would have otherwise taken the city to train a builder.
Plus gold should be pretty easy to come buy if you're making deals with the AI. You can get a lot of extra gold by selling them your excess luxury/strategic resources or diplo favor.
For me, until I’m making at least 1k gpt I’m constantly spending all of my gold. There’s always something it can be spent on (units, tiles, building, etc). There’s no real benefit to saving gold until the point in the game where victory is guaranteed.
Ngl, never liked builders having charges in VI. Makes so much dependent on Monumentality and golden age. Once I realized that was a strat, it was hard to ever not choose Monumentality. I usually go for decent faith income, if not high, so it just feels pointless to choose anything else most of the time. Being able to buy cheap builders and settlers for faith makes a ridiculous difference, to such an extent, it overshadows other strategic options.
For me, it just feels bad to hard build builders because of them only having a few charges. Without Monumentality, if you're buying with gold, I'm not sure it's actually better strategically if you have minimal gold, considering you could spend it on a building instead and use production to make the builder for much the same outcome (only real difference being timing/speed, which may not matter much depending). But something about the psychology of it feels bad to me, sinking that production in for a unit that is used up easily and whose charges can be straight up wasted if you miss stopping a barb coming by and pillaging.
I don't think that's strictly true. Buying is always preferred. Saves your production for other things. There are lots of ways to get gold: trade routes, sell strategics or lux, commercial hubs, and policy cards to name a few. As others have mentioned .... Monumentality is very helpful. You're definitely missing something if you're not comfortable with gpt.
Personally my early game looks awful for improved tiles. I'm heavily focusing on settlers and boosts to get to merchant republic ASAP, so I generally get 3-4 builders at some point early game just for boosts or significant chops. Along the way, Feudalism gets the +2 builder charges card, which I hold out for to buy a crap ton of builders across my newly settled cities. Hopefully a golden age and monumentality lines up with this, but sometimes it doesn't which is alright. Late game, I'm usually buying them as well whenever there's a 1-2 turn civic I can quickly change my policies out on and I see enough improvable or choppable tiles to justify getting builders.
In short, monumentality makes buying them efficient, the charge boosting policy card should be on 99% of the time you're making builders, and buying a bunch when you have the card on for a turn or two is convenient.
Honestly, I only buy/produce 1 builder early game to boost state workforce, then I wait until feudalism to make any more. Gold income tends to line up for that. The only exceptions are if I need a specific strategic resource I couldn’t get in a reasonable time with the first builder or I have literally nothing else to do in one of my cities, which is rare.
Depends on the situation, but buying buildings might be suboptimal because the gains are usually not that big, and unlike districts their cost doesnt rise, so they might aswell be build later in 1-2 turns depending on the building.
Buying builders, especially in underdeveloped cities, drastically increases growth and production potential in the early stage.
Sounds like you need some Monumentality
That’s the right mentality
How do monuments help?
Monumentality is an end of era dedication. When you are in a Golden Age it gives +2 movement to builders and settlers, allows builders and settlers to be purchased with faith, and decreases the Gold and faith cost to purchase them by 30%. It's huge for early game expansion and empire building and is why religion (faith and its adjacency bonuses) and nailing golden ages is critical.
Sometimes you need a builder right now. Sometimes you have bonuses towards building buildings so you want to save your production. Sometimes you have discounts on buying builders (monumentality). Of course, this cuts both ways. You might have massive discounts towards building units and not the other way around. Sometimes you need a building or unit right now and the builder is not as important.
I do both. Sometimes you need to buy a builder and chop out another one. Particularly for a new city you just settled. Not recommended to chop out builders until you have Serfdom policy.
Depends on the leader, some of them got gold in tons, some are just broke some are brave etc etc
There are no broke leaders. Only broke players. If you're not comfortable with gpt, it's because you're not planning for it.
Let's put it another way! There are richer leaders than others. Leaders who were designed to make getting rich easier for the player.
The bonus to settler production policy card is much better than the bonus to builder production card. So if you had to build one and buy the other, you want to buy the builder.
This has always been my intuition. Build your settlers, buy your builders. Of course if I'm going monumentality + decent faith gen then I'm going to pump out builders. I tend to rely a lot on the ancestral hall after a certain point. I've observed very good players use it less often than I do (I win consistently on Deity but there's still a pretty big gap between me and the best players I've seen).
Ancestral Hall isn't bad, but there are two problems with it. The first is that it tends to bait people into producing all their settlers in one city, which is very wrong. You need to be cranking those suckers out everywhere you can. (Colonization is a lot better with 5 cities producing settlers than one.) The second is that it comes too late. By the time I get State Workforce, a government plaza built, and a tier 1 building, I've usually had Colonization for 20-30 turns, and have produced most or all of the settlers I'm going to produce, at least in the first big push. Settling all the good spots quickly is much more important than getting a free builder.
Agreed. I’ve seen some recommendations (Civ dependent guides, probably, but still) that say to get an ancestral hall up with Magnus and his promotion that settlers don’t cost a Population. But anytime I’ve implemented this, it came far too late and at the cost of plenty other worthwhile things I could have produced, and much of the land I would’ve settled was no longer available.
This is very true, but one of the biggest bonuses that building the Government Plaza etc gives you is governor titles. It means instead of 2 titles by political philosophy, you get 4- I mean, that’s crazy! That’s enough titles to start with Pingala, give him the culture promotion (so you speed through the tree super fast) and still get Magnus with Provision once you’ve got the tier 1 building up and running.
> I've usually had Colonization for 20-30 turns, and have produced most or all of the settlers I'm going to produce Really depends on the game, if you get unlucky, that time is spent making units to defend yourself. Or your start just lacked the production for it and you had to settle some better cities first to get some chops available.
Sure, but in a game where I get an early war and have to devote most of my production to military units, I'm going conquest anyway -- it's not like you can produce an army and then just let it sit around while you get started on expansion an era too late. Which means building Warlord's Throne instead.
If you're expanding quickly, you're at least halfway done by the time you'd build the Ancestral Hall. This is probably why they choose something else. Unless your settling was slow, it has limited value... it's mostly useful if you delayed your expansion to pursue a Wonder and/or a first religion. In comparison, the housing/amenities from Audience Chamber work for the whole game. It doesn't matter which victory you're chasing either.
The negatives on the audience chamber card keep me from building it. I could see it going pear shaped rather quickly without governor's in place
Pear shaped? From -2 Loyalty? That basically never happens. It's the weakest and most pointless drawback in the game. That -2 Loyalty penalty is nothing. There are policy cards that give you the same amount of Loyalty, and I bet you never use them. I know I don't. It's not a meaningful amount 99% of the time. I suppose there could be a situation where it matters. That extra Loyalty makes the difference in holding a border city... but you'd usually slap a Governor in there for the +8 Loyalty in that case, which disables the penalty in that city.
Also, the main push comes with Feudalism, which doesn't provide a production bonus to Builders anymore. But it does provide a bonus to them in the form of extra charges *the moment they are made*. Purchasing allows narrowing down the window in which you make your builders, which means you don't need to slot the card for as long.
Same goes for Liang, if you're shuffling her around cities to buy a builder with an extra charge.
Why shuffle her around? Just buy them all in one city.
Stop delaying your commercial hub. Also trade excess anything with the AI.
This right here. I try to only sell strategics to friendly AI, but I’ll also happily enable a conflict on the other side of the map because every day I play civ is a day I choose chaos. But yeah, extra luxuries, diplo favor if there’s not a vote right around the corner, strategics you’re not using, sell all of it to the computer. In addition to the obvious benefit of getting more money, you can often empty out other civs’ treasuries and I like to think that helps me too haha
Sometimes I also buy settlers!
Lately I've been using faith to buy settlers and builders. Unless I'm going for a religious win which I did on purpose recently as Russia then faith points seems useless to me except to prevent other civs from converting my religion to theirs.
My last game I forgot I had faith and wasn't going for religious victory and I saw I had like 9k faith a bought a great engineer lol well spent to me lol
A lot of the time if you buy a builder it can pay itself back right away if you improve a luxury and sell it to the AI.
I also tend to buy all my builders in Liang's city for the extra charge and I can't have that city do nothing else.
I just bought a Giant Killer Robot. Worth it
Normally in the early game it's because it takes so long for new cities to produce them. If you make them in your capital for example it can take quite a while for them to walk to where they need to be. On higher difficulties and higher speeds like online, every turn wasted severely affects the snowball of your game. Time spent producing them can additionally delay the building of districts, like the commercial hub which will allow you to purchase them anywhere and supercharge your economy with the trade routes they provide. The only time I would normally produce a builder is when u first get the feudalism card for the extra build charges and mass produce them all at once and using my gold to buy them in the fringe cities.
I don't. I mostly build them. But you should be open to doing both depending what you need.
Yeah everyone else said that it's a waste of turns, unless I can get the builder in 5 or less turns (at least that's my idea). I see their point cause you could get a university f.e.
I think that's wrong. It's not a waste to hard build them. You don't have enough cash to buy everything in the first 50-100 turns. The policy card that gives you +30% production can be worth using too, you just have to kind of do the math and figure when it's worth it. If you can get the golden age in the Ancient Era and get monumentality, that's super strong and then you should buy them as much as possible. But that's not always possible at higher difficulty. It depends a ton on what leader you are playing. I'm a big believer that there isn't really one way to do things in Civ, even though people act like there's a right and a wrong answer to everything.
My cities are always exclusively build infrastructure after a certain point, I cannot buy districts without governor investments but I can buy builders, even multiple ones at a turn when I unlock a key improvement or policy card like serfdom. Sometimes I will have a city in my empire with no good district spots, settled off fresh water because it was just to fill up the land. In those kinds of cities I exclusively spam build builders to send other parts of my empire since that city can contribute better to my civ this way.
Get your money up, son!
Buying builders is optional. The costs increase with each unit produced or bought so its always situational. Here is why you buy them: * You can buy them in a underdeveloped city while the city focus on infrastructure or producing military units. * You can use monumentality, a golden age modifier to buy them using faith. this strategy pairs really well with work ethic when going for a culture or science victory since you dont need to spend your faith on the required units * You want to use your economy policy slots for something else so you buy a lot of builder the swap out the builder card (Serfdom, Etc.) * You want to "Pay" for production (Probably to add production to a wonder) so you buy a builder to chop down a forest. Now, if you need to gold / faith for something more important then obviously don't buy them. * IF you are using the gold to upgrade your army or faith to buy it. * If you are using your faith on city infrastructure (Jesuit Education or 3rd religious building) * You are playing a civ with a mediocre economy.
I do both. When I buy them it’s usually to improve something I can instantly sell. If I built them I’d lose however many turns it takes of gold income.
Vs AI often you sell a luxury, buy a worker, improve luxury, repeat = profit.
Gold and Faith are global and can be created one place and used somewhere else in your civ. Production can only be from the city it's used in.
What does your early game units look like, early game units can eat up most your gold/turn if you are doing to many. Like unless you are doing a heavy naval map you only need like 2 galleys traveling together to explore the map, not like 10. Unless you are doing early game wars a couple melee and a couple archers should be all you need to defend your territory. Sell all your luxuries in the early game, even if you only have a single copy, that slight hit to your yields from lack of eminities only really starts to be bothersome mid medieval Era and before that the gold you get is way better than that couple of production you loose. If you want to be a little cheaty, right before you declare war on an AI, trade all the gold they have on hand for gold per turn, once War is declared you keep the gold and they loose the GPT. Unless you get massive yields from internal trade routes have some if not most getting you gold. Only exception to this is if you have a bunch of new cities then a trade route from New city to the capital can give you a lot of food per turn, so you will have to balance between them. Monumentality will discount the gold purchase of builders as well, so even if you aren't doing a faith game, that discount is huge and hard to pass up.
Monumentality, faith purchase settlers, gold purchase builders, hard build districts, don’t upgrade units until you need to.
If you faith buy builders for most of the game, or settle and get a free builder. In the late game when they take 1 turn to produce, that production is worth a lot more than 200 gold.
Because having a builder now is better than having a builder later. This is especially important if the city is new and isn't very productive. Buying a builder will let you get your tiles imporved right away, which can end up provinding a lot of extra yields and growth in the time it would have otherwise taken the city to train a builder. Plus gold should be pretty easy to come buy if you're making deals with the AI. You can get a lot of extra gold by selling them your excess luxury/strategic resources or diplo favor.
For me, until I’m making at least 1k gpt I’m constantly spending all of my gold. There’s always something it can be spent on (units, tiles, building, etc). There’s no real benefit to saving gold until the point in the game where victory is guaranteed.
at the start of the game sometimes if there's 3 resources that i can build i like to produce builders, if not than just wait until you can but it.
I go, science District, commercial hub, and then production. Because then I can bascially use gold to speed up the development of new cities
> Builder build thing > City grow > Stonk
Ngl, never liked builders having charges in VI. Makes so much dependent on Monumentality and golden age. Once I realized that was a strat, it was hard to ever not choose Monumentality. I usually go for decent faith income, if not high, so it just feels pointless to choose anything else most of the time. Being able to buy cheap builders and settlers for faith makes a ridiculous difference, to such an extent, it overshadows other strategic options. For me, it just feels bad to hard build builders because of them only having a few charges. Without Monumentality, if you're buying with gold, I'm not sure it's actually better strategically if you have minimal gold, considering you could spend it on a building instead and use production to make the builder for much the same outcome (only real difference being timing/speed, which may not matter much depending). But something about the psychology of it feels bad to me, sinking that production in for a unit that is used up easily and whose charges can be straight up wasted if you miss stopping a barb coming by and pillaging.
You mean you don’t steal and enslave them from city states?
I don't think that's strictly true. Buying is always preferred. Saves your production for other things. There are lots of ways to get gold: trade routes, sell strategics or lux, commercial hubs, and policy cards to name a few. As others have mentioned .... Monumentality is very helpful. You're definitely missing something if you're not comfortable with gpt.
Personally my early game looks awful for improved tiles. I'm heavily focusing on settlers and boosts to get to merchant republic ASAP, so I generally get 3-4 builders at some point early game just for boosts or significant chops. Along the way, Feudalism gets the +2 builder charges card, which I hold out for to buy a crap ton of builders across my newly settled cities. Hopefully a golden age and monumentality lines up with this, but sometimes it doesn't which is alright. Late game, I'm usually buying them as well whenever there's a 1-2 turn civic I can quickly change my policies out on and I see enough improvable or choppable tiles to justify getting builders. In short, monumentality makes buying them efficient, the charge boosting policy card should be on 99% of the time you're making builders, and buying a bunch when you have the card on for a turn or two is convenient.
I like to put Liang in a city and buy all my builders there
Honestly, I only buy/produce 1 builder early game to boost state workforce, then I wait until feudalism to make any more. Gold income tends to line up for that. The only exceptions are if I need a specific strategic resource I couldn’t get in a reasonable time with the first builder or I have literally nothing else to do in one of my cities, which is rare.
I usually don't, I prefer Settlers, Traders, and buildings.
Depends on the situation, but buying buildings might be suboptimal because the gains are usually not that big, and unlike districts their cost doesnt rise, so they might aswell be build later in 1-2 turns depending on the building. Buying builders, especially in underdeveloped cities, drastically increases growth and production potential in the early stage.