(July 18th, 2013, 18:08)Krill Wrote: I'm sensing a philosophical argument coming on about how everything in civ ultimately interacts in with the map...unless you can force a concession via economics. This is probably not the thread for that debate though.
[Leading Question] How does this apply to military units? Or is this only useful for valuing items that are not represented on the map?
The less something interacts with the map, the more accurately you can abstract what it does. Sometimes you can abstract things accurately enough that it's useful. That's the point of models, to abstract things. I mean, we are in a lot better position in Civ IV than in real life - at least we can look up the game rules! And people still do chemistry.
I don't know well enough to apply it to military units. Well, sometimes you can figure out how many units you need to garrison a particular spot, and then you can figure the cost of those units into the cost of settling the city. (But then what are you planning to do with that number?) And of course you can figure out a better approximation of the real cost of building a unit - not the hammer cost, but the value of whatever you could have built instead.