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Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Or I could turn it into better advisers, more mercenaries, and more forts (which means more army tradition), and then use those things to get even more money.

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Gwyrgyn Blood
Dec 17, 2002

Yeah I was wondering the other day about what payoff timeframe you're looking for for buildings. Like I've got a couple of places I could build a Temple and it would pay for itself in ~50 years, but most places aren't anywhere near that.

Or how about Marketplaces, since those increase trade Power which is hard to determine how much money will actually generate in the first place.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
.1 income is ~80, .2 is ~40. except it's even shorter than that with tax/ production efficiency bonuses, which come pretty regularly. Even 80 years is nothing in the game's timescale.

Fister Roboto posted:

Or I could turn it into better advisers, more mercenaries, and more forts (which means more army tradition), and then use those things to get even more money.

With the extra money you're getting from buildings, you can do all of that too! :eng101:

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

I just don't see the pressing need to invest for long term gains when you can stockpile gold infinitely.

Honestly it's mostly because I hate the building interface and having to hunt for the best provinces to build things in. Other than your really good 30+ development provinces it's really tedious.

Pellisworth
Jun 20, 2005
Save up some money, at least a few hundred gold, as a buffer in case you need to hire a bunch of mercs, fight a long war, etc.

Then invest in better advisers and buildings.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

TorakFade posted:

Forts are in a bad place right now, the way they work is actually cool and good imho (blocking strategic chokepoints, protection of highly rebellious areas, funneling enemies towards less defended places, attritioning enemies through multiple sieges) but the immense cost of maintaining more than a handful will send you bankrupt unless you're tiny or richer than God

Afaik the pro strategy is to make a line on your border with as little castles as needed to block movement, then delete all internal Forts and hope no one breaks through. Delete all when borders expand and repeat. And good luck if you have more than one front to defend or frequent rebels...

This describes Ethiopia post-1500 really well right now, and thanks to wasteland placement you only need like 2 forts to completely block access to your capital (one in the southern deserts of Egypt, one in the mountains of Yemen)

Fister Roboto posted:

I rarely if ever build non-fort buildings these days. I think the money is better spent on things that will give me an immediate payoff, like better advisers or mercenaries. Buildings take way too long to pay for themselves unless they're in a very rich province.

Churches and workshops cost 100 ducats each. A province with 5 base tax can pay off a church in 50 years before modifiers, which is practically in no time at all, and 5+ base tax provinces are all over the place. If you play in Europe then you often get insane value for these low-tier buildings

You should at least be building in provinces that you pump up for institution seeding, failing to do so is just leaving money on the table

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Dec 6, 2016

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.

Fister Roboto posted:

I just don't see the pressing need to invest for long term gains when you can stockpile gold infinitely.

Well you get more money and more stability out of it. It's not always relevant- in my Ethiopia run I was hardly making any buildings, same whenever I'm in any poor part of the world. But it really adds up like crazy over the course of the game just about everywhere else (and even in poor land, shipyards are very helpful).

quote:

Honestly it's mostly because I hate the building interface and having to hunt for the best provinces to build things in. Other than your really good 30+ development provinces it's really tedious.

This is fair enough. I'm the opposite; building infrastructure and social buildings always feels like my reward for making a rich empire. It doesn't feel right being world spanning but not having courthouses in the major cities and poo poo. If you don't like the interface I can understand it being pretty tedious though, they should just add a "build in best province" button like there used to be with the ledger.

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

QuarkJets posted:

Churches and workshops cost 100 ducats each. A province with 5 base tax can pay off a church in 50 years before modifiers, which is practically in no time at all, and 5+ base tax provinces are all over the place. If you play in Europe then you often get insane value for these low-tier buildings

Oh boy after waiting 50 years for this investment to payoff, my monthly income has increased by 0.16 ducats! WOW

quote:

You should at least be building in provinces that you pump up for institution seeding, failing to do so is just leaving money on the table

Yes this what I do, and why I said I rarely build buildings, not never. That would be stupid.

uPen
Jan 25, 2010

Zu Rodina!
Anyone have no trail of tears advice? 'Westernizing' is super easy now so that's no problem but there's so many more provinces. It's basically impossible to colonize any significant amount of the coast prior to European arrival, meaning you're likely to have maybe a third of the land you need and you're going to have to conquer the rest.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

If you play as a country with access to coastal raiding you can turn that into manufactories as well. :homebrew:

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Also keep in mind that the increase from buildings is additive with other bonuses, so those don't affect the ROI at all. Except for autonomy, which can only be a penalty. A temple in a 5 tax province will take 50 years to pay off at best.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.

Fister Roboto posted:

Oh boy after waiting 50 years for this investment to payoff, my monthly income has increased by 0.16 ducats! WOW

You get 500 ducats out of an enemy, build 10 temples and then a year later when they're built can start fielding like 8 more troops than you could before. Just sitting on your money, you could have paid for those troops for 25 years, but with the buildings you can do it indefinitely. It's just little additions like that throughout the game- and in most parts of the world, there are much higher base tax provinces you can be doing it on too so it's even better.

I'm not saying building things is the be all and end all of the game, and if you find it's boring then it's fair enough. But recommending against it is objectively wrong; it is better to be putting your money towards that (or better yet, trade ships) than to just sit on it.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Fister Roboto posted:

Oh boy after waiting 50 years for this investment to payoff, my monthly income has increased by 0.16 ducats! WOW

You're not "waiting" for anything, it's fire and forget. That's likely over 500 ducats of profit if you're building relatively early, at the cost of 5 seconds of your time and 100 ducats (sometimes less).

And we're talking in terms of minimums; 10-tax provinces are not uncommon and are pretty great targets for a church.

A dragon's hoard is never as profitable as a dragon's hoard + income buildings

Obliterati
Nov 13, 2012

Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional.
Thunderdome is forever.
These are maybe less important reasons to invest in increased income, but they're real:

- You can't gift money if you have loans and are running a deficit

- Said loan size is a function of income (I think)

- Insurance against getting the poo poo kicked out of you and all your money taken

- Increases score accumulation

- Increased production to snipe the various 'trading in' modifiers

- Resilience against long wars: eventually you'll lose your nest egg, at which point your survival is determined by income

- Ability to drop stupid amounts of money on whoever you like in a war that doesn't involve you

Why yes most of these will only ever matter in multiplayer why do you ask

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
On the singleplayer side, I'm pretty sure AI takes your income into account when it thinks about declaring on you.

Man Musk
Jan 13, 2010

Have you considered the time value and opportunity costs of not building?? 🤔

Man Musk
Jan 13, 2010

uPen posted:

Anyone have no trail of tears advice? 'Westernizing' is super easy now so that's no problem but there's so many more provinces. It's basically impossible to colonize any significant amount of the coast prior to European arrival, meaning you're likely to have maybe a third of the land you need and you're going to have to conquer the rest.

same

I managed to make California great again

but the costs from adopting institutions was so huge coz I blobbed up so much that I was forever behind in tech

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

QuarkJets posted:

You're not "waiting" for anything, it's fire and forget. That's likely over 500 ducats of profit if you're building relatively early, at the cost of 5 seconds of your time and 100 ducats (sometimes less).

And we're talking in terms of minimums; 10-tax provinces are not uncommon and are pretty great targets for a church.

A dragon's hoard is never as profitable as a dragon's hoard + income buildings

That would be true if I was doing literally nothing but hoarding my money, which I'm not.

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug
arghhghs if you have more money than you'll need in the medium term, buildings are a worthwhile way to spend it. HOPE THIS HELPS
for example I just spent half of my 14k bank buying manufactories in indonesia and I have no regrets

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Fister Roboto posted:

That would be true if I was doing literally nothing but hoarding my money, which I'm not.

It's true regardless of what you're doing with your money. Income buildings are useful and often have tremendous payoff, and if you have extra cash you can probably afford even more stuff by investing some of it in income buildings.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

QuarkJets posted:

It's true regardless of what you're doing with your money. Income buildings are useful and often have tremendous payoff

I wish we had a nice construction window that would sort building locations by impact, or even gray out locations that aren't worth building. So you could get a nice list from highest impact to lowest and then click down the row to build temples or barracks or what ever based on that. Instead I hunt around on the map saying "ok click every time you see a number bigger than +0.2"

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

QuarkJets posted:

It's true regardless of what you're doing with your money. Income buildings are useful and often have tremendous payoff, and if you have extra cash you can probably afford even more stuff by investing some of it in income buildings.

Not really? If I have to choose between building a temple and hiring 6 mercenaries, the former isn't going to help me very much in a war. More mercenaries means I can wage more wars, and get even more money (and other things) out of them. I can't do that if I spend that money on buildings.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
You can build the temple and then hire even more mercenaries with the extra money from the temple

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

That doesn't seem very useful if I need the mercenaries now.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
take out a loan

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

Fister Roboto posted:

That doesn't seem very useful if I need the mercenaries now.

i hope you get a 14 year regency followed by a 1/1/1 cruel ruler

Wafflecopper
Nov 27, 2004

I am a mouth, and I must scream

Fister Roboto posted:

That doesn't seem very useful if I need the mercenaries now.

That's why you should have built the temple a decade ago

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Why are people getting so upset about this? I prefer spending my money on things that aren't buildings. I'm sorry if you think that's "objectively wrong".

Atreiden
May 4, 2008

Fister Roboto posted:

Why are people getting so upset about this? I prefer spending my money on things that aren't buildings. I'm sorry if you think that's "objectively wrong".

It is objectively wrong.

Tsyni
Sep 1, 2004
Lipstick Apathy

Fister Roboto posted:

Why are people getting so upset about this? I prefer spending my money on things that aren't buildings. I'm sorry if you think that's "objectively wrong".

You're playing the wrong game and, sigh, I am going to have to take you to task for it.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

While we're talking about buildings, it's also especially critical consider their new importance in Institution spread. As you come through the middle game you really want to be spending money on Trade Depots, Manufactories and Universities, to help save yourself a bunch of cash/time on embracing new institutions.

PleasingFungus
Oct 10, 2012
idiot asshole bitch who should fuck off

Koramei posted:

Yeah they take less than a century to pay off at most unless you're putting them in like a 1/1/1 province. Buildings everywhere.

I always, always have better things to do with my cash than an investment that will break even in a century.

Buildings, like much of EU4, only make sense if you're very constrained on expansion opportunities. That's pretty much a western european issue, I think.

PittTheElder posted:

While we're talking about buildings, it's also especially critical consider their new importance in Institution spread. As you come through the middle game you really want to be spending money on Trade Depots, Manufactories and Universities, to help save yourself a bunch of cash/time on embracing new institutions.

I'm pretty sure this is also bad value for money in most cases. Even the most expensive province's embracement cost is going to be a fraction of what a Manufactory costs to build. Universities are a little more viable, but Trade Depots aren't even unlocked until decades after Global Trade pops!

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

The trade depots are iffy, but as Russia they did seem helpful. The thing with Manufactories and Universities is that they will spread the Institution from their province, so the cost reduction also involves the provinces around them if you're willing to wait a few years. It also gives you the chance to spawn the institution, which can be worth thousands of ducats. And the Manufactories often pay for themselves anyway.

sloshmonger
Mar 21, 2013

Elman posted:

You know how there's a rule where you can't core unless you got an adyacent core? What's the exception to that?

I ask because I keep running into situations like these:



I can core Chengdu and Umung, but not Chongoing.



I can core everything.

couple pages back, but the basics of it are that the provinces in China are overseas, and therefore you can only core adjacent to another core, while the ones in Asia Minor are not, so you can core that little snake without waiting. You can see what the game considers overseas by using the map mode for it, but it's roughly not on home continent and not nearby.

Fintilgin
Sep 29, 2004

Fintilgin sweeps!

uPen posted:

Anyone have no trail of tears advice? 'Westernizing' is super easy now so that's no problem but there's so many more provinces. It's basically impossible to colonize any significant amount of the coast prior to European arrival, meaning you're likely to have maybe a third of the land you need and you're going to have to conquer the rest.





Literally just wrapped this up last week as the Abenaki, `cause I live in Penobscot province. I imagine Cherokee would be easy mode. Very sad I didn't manage to finish annexing my little Mayan vassal or getting Brittany off those Pacific coastal islands, but still did okay.

I manged to colonize up to Quebec to cut off the Canadian interior from immediate colonization and down to New York City before the Europeans showed up around 1560 or so. Did not spend a single point on tech before I reformed my government, instead I spent 100% of my monarch points on development on the Eastern Seaboard. Penobscot province was like 50+ development by endgame. Cultivated Iroquois as an ally/counterweight against any other natives because they kept their tech up.

Highest development in the world. :cryingabenakiflag:

Biggest hardship in the game was that I just didn't have the points to spend on national ideas. Early points all went to development and then I was playing desperate catchup on tech for a long time. Also saved cash by having no real navy 98% of the game, which kinda screwed me over late with those islands held by Brittany.

I took the native repression policy as my colonial policy because it doubles your early monthly colony growth rate. Just wiped out all natives in provinces all game long.

You can do your conquering pretty late. Almost the entire area of the CSA and California up through Alaska was held by Europeans right up until ~1770 or so when I started driving the White Man into the sea. Taking American provinces from Europeans is pretty cheap warscore wise (like 1-2% late game). Probably the best bet with Cherokee would be NOT to to focus super heavy on the east coast right away. Conquer your way up the local natives to the Great Lakes and Quebec to try to block off the deep interior and colonize down the Gulf of Mexico with the goal of grabbing high development and gold provinces in Mexico?

EDIT: There's definitely a bit of a mini-game to prioritizing the right provinces to colonize in order to chain a blocking line across the greatest amount of territory.

Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Dec 7, 2016

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Fister Roboto posted:

Why are people getting so upset about this? I prefer spending my money on things that aren't buildings. I'm sorry if you think that's "objectively wrong".

I don't think that anyone is upset, we're just offering suggestions that could improve your play. One dude even said it was cool if you didn't want to bother because you disliked the clunky interface

PleasingFungus posted:

I always, always have better things to do with my cash than an investment that will break even in a century.

No one is suggesting building things that take a century to pay off, nor is anyone suggesting that you should exhaust your treasury in order to build income producing buildings. Income buildings are treasury amplifiers, and refusing to build them is like refusing to spend mil points rolling up generals for your army; it's totally fine if you want to do that and just use generals that you get from rulers, events, and estates, but you are likely worse off.

Building income buildings effectively just takes three simple rules:

1) Build in your most profitable provinces first; start in institution seed provinces and capitals, where you're probably boosting your income by +0.5/month or more, followed by randomly valuable provinces with low autonomy

2) Don't bother building in provinces where the payoff is small; don't build a temple in a 1/1/1. Some pages back people were talking about building in areas where the payoff was as long as 60 years, but I personally don't bother unless it's about 40 years or less (aka minimum income of 0.2 ducats/month)

3) Only build when you have the funds to spare; don't spend your last 100 ducats on a temple if you're running a deficit and may go to war soon. But if you've got 1000 ducats from some juicy conquest then dropping a few temples in high-value provinces makes a lot of sense, because you're turning 500 of those ducats now into 5000 ducats spread out over a couple hundred years (and that's inflation-free!)

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Dec 7, 2016

PleasingFungus
Oct 10, 2012
idiot asshole bitch who should fuck off

QuarkJets posted:

No one is suggesting building things that take a century to pay off,
Except for the guy I was directly responding to in my last post.

QuarkJets posted:

Income buildings are treasury amplifiers, and refusing to build them is like refusing to spend mil points rolling up generals for your army; it's totally fine if you want to do that and just use generals that you get from rulers, events, and estates, but you are likely worse off.

Other income multipliers are: starting and winning wars of conquest, and buying higher-tier advisors to get more monarchs to invest in all of the wonderful things that monarch points give, and not ending up low enough on cash that you have to pay interest on loans... etc, etc.

(Plus, did you know that if you conquer someone else's stuff, you get their buildings without even having to pay for them? Messed up, but true...)

If your limiting factor on conquest is something other than cash or monarch points - for example, if you're constrained by AE, or you're a south/central american native and have no one left to conquer - then yes, it can make sense to build buildings. Very few of my games fall into that category, but if you play a lot of games in e.g. western or central europe, I think you are perfectly correct! (If you're giving this advice for e.g. Russia or the Ottomans, however, I think you are just wrong.)

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
So when you two have run through your hoard of cash when you're at war do you just immediately sue for peace or what? Loans are in this game for a reason. Cash reserves don't matter for poo poo, monthly income is what's important- it affects how people view you, how big your loans are, how much you get from the money events, or the estates. Nobody's saying you should prioritize buildings over things like advisors, just that when you have an excess of gold, it's better to spend it and have it come back to you than just let it sit there.

Even as the Ottomans or Russia. Heck, even in Africa if I'd somehow managed to come by an excess of gold, I'd have invested it in some buildings.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

If you're not building temples and other buildings in the optimal build order I will fight you.

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jpparker55
Jun 4, 2007
I see a lot of mention of developing provinces for institutions but have no idea how this works. Could someone give me a noobs explanation of what I should be doing for that?

Also, when you hire mercs for a war do you disband them immediately afterwards? I'm still playing as Ottomans (about 20 hours still in the mid 15th century...3 speed and constant pausing) and I've been disbanding my mercs as they tend to put me heavily in negative income however I'm starting to think I should just be rolling them into the next war.

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