Test games played

[Nelphine]

Question: If you have tons of gold, and you are settling cities like mad, and you are going for max economy (your military cities are already built), what order should you do things in new hamlets?

I've been doing Granary -> Marketplace -> Farmers Market (max growth)
-> Library -> Alchemists Guild -> Amplifying Tower (max casting skill)
-> Sawmill -> Miners Guild -> Foresters Guild -> Builders Hall -> University -> Mechanicians Guild -> Smithy -> Stables (max production)
Everything above this point is bought with gold
Then for actual production
Magic Market -> Shrine -> Parthenon -> Cathedral -> Wizards Guild -> Bank -> Ship Wrights Guild -> Merchants Guild -> Sages Guild -> Barracks -> Colosseum -> Animists Guild -> Trade Goods -> Oracle (if I need more unrest control, as I only have 2 units in the city) -> Trade Goods


I'd suggest Gnolls with Life be one of your sets, but you've just done life with halflings. So I'd suggest Lizardmen, and.. whatever we think goes well with Lizardmen that isn't life. .

[Nelphine]

When selecting new research, and Altar of Peace is a choice, the description in your spellbook still reads 'Opens a gate that allows free travel to the other plane fom the city.' While right clicking on it gives the correct description, that summary is probably going to be VERY confusing.

[Seravy]

My preferred order is Marketplace -> Library -> Miner's Guild/Forester's Guild -> Builder's Hall -> University -> Mechanician's Guild, unsure about Granary and Farmer's, I generally tend to buy those first if I can afford the gold, otherwise mostly when the spot either needs the max pop badly, or it's a low growth race on a high max pop area.

Lizardmen...used to be good with Chaos but I played a lot of Chaos recently. Not sure what else works well for them. Sorcery? Nah, they have bad research.
Death or Nature might work well. I don't mind playing Life again though. In fact, Life/Chaos Runemaster should be ok for Lizardmen too. Worse research but much stronger military/conquest.

[Nelphine]

Casting Skill game:
Feb 1412
432 combat casting skill (100 in 9 months). 2627 power production + 550 ish research.

Finally Found Uranus' Blessing. Also got Stream of Life from one of my found Life books. Still looking for Aether Binding and Gaia's Blessing. Still have only one very rare researched - too many found books means I've only just finished with Common Research. Working on Uncommons now. (Altar of Peace USELESS! At war!) Really wish I had divine order - going to take a while to get Uranus' Blessing and Stream of Life everywhere.

[Seravy]

Looks like the latest DESC.LBX was missing from the released files.

[Nelphine]

My preferred order is Marketplace -> Library -> Miner's Guild/Forester's Guild -> Builder's Hall -> University -> Mechanician's Guild, unsure about Granary and Farmer's, I generally tend to buy those first if I can afford the gold, otherwise mostly when the spot either needs the max pop badly, or it's a low growth race on a high max pop area.

Wait, where's Sawmill in that? Note that I'm specifically talking gold is no object so I'm buying like.. 14 buildings in every city.

Even without practically infinite gold, I'll normally buy (I try to do this on every city past about my 5th):

Granary -> Marketplace -> Farmers Market -> Sawmill
and then I'll start production:
Magic Market -> Miners Guild -> Foresters Guild -> Library

[Seravy]

Oh, Sawmill is always the first. Infinite gold? I buy whatever I actually need, regardless of what is the "better" order. Not that I ever had that much gold recently. I tend to not have large excess amounts unless I already won the game.

[Nelphine]

Why do sawmill first (if you can buy more one building)? By definition it doesn't actually do anything you need, it only builds things hat do things you need. Or do you typically not have enough to buy at least two buildings per city? (I would find that unusual).

[Seravy]

Sawmill converts gold to hammers at a 1 for 2 ratio, which is 4 times more efficient than buying for gold.  And while not as fast as buying, 8 hammers (+bonus) a turn is high enough to be a relevant amount, more than enough to pay for itself, and be a net gain, even during the time frame of 10 turns used for buying things.

Basically, as long as I assume I'm spending my gold on production, a Sawmill is as good as a building that produces 12 gold PLUS the modifiers from terrain and buildings, so likely over 20. Don't think there is anything that can get anywhere near that in a small settlement with low population.

If that's not good enough by itself, I tend to buy buildings in cities that are military production centers (or will be) and there you need every single additional hammer. Other cities can build the stuff themselves, they don't need buying. It's unit production that prevents the city from building economy. (of course this is only relevant if you have limited gold. If you have 20k...then maybe you should spend that to fuel more military centers and win the game? So it's still relevant...why spend on economy if you already have 20k useless gold... unless it's going into Amplifying Towers but at this point I already have one everywhere...)

I have to admit I generally consider gold the least desirable resource and don't care about it much, though. Probably the old habits, gold used to be so abundant you could never use it up in vanilla MoM. (but building costs were so high you didn't even care to...)

[Nelphine]

Military centers are only possible where you can build relevant units. Depending on your retorts, this can be so extreme as to mean only summons *cough ghouls cough*, or only certain unit types (bezerkers, adamantium units, certain fliers, etc). For instance in this game, I have my 81 adamantium steam cannons for defending the 9 towers (sounds like a movie title), and 5 cities producing one adamantium steam cannon per turn to replace the guards, and to send garrisons to arcanus for nodes.

I guess technically I could get a dozen air ships and move steam cannons offensively too, and use transmute to turn another 6 cities into more adamantium steam cannon production. I also have one city building adamantoum orihilacron troll magicians.

But since I have 13 books, I'm hoping to get a rare or very rare summon I can use to make a doomstack that won't constantly need replacements. Then I'll just go raze everything. And since I'm still in uncommon research, I can put all my skill into economy, and keep buying amp towers (I'm up to 29 cities than can build amp towers, in addition to my dwarf cities).

Maybe I've won already, but I don't actually have the units to make it an easy win.