At what rate does town production convert to gold?

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

It seems counter productive to throw coins at production when the ROI takes so long. How does more production help a city?

CORRECTION: How does more production help a TOWN.

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

CORRECTION: How does more production help a TOWN.

[Mark Sleith]

Production is converted to gold for towns I believe.

[TheNightglow]

each production in a town becomes 1 gold per turn

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

Thanks! My issue is that if I spend say 165 coins for 4 production that means it takes me over 40 turns to earn that 165 coins back. If I want to invest in production for the Town, what is the advantage to that town with the additional production?

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Curmudgeon Emeritus:

Thanks! My issue is that if I spend say 165 coins for 4 production that means it takes me over 40 turns to earn that 165 coins back. If I want to invest in production for the Town, what is the advantage to that town with the additional production?

You'll get more with gold multipliers, and the cost of purchasing can be pushed down with gold resource and other means, but yeah. Especially in modern age it's not worth buying stonecutters, ironworks and whatever everywhere since you have more important things to buy.

Towns themselves do not benefit from production at all. It's all converted to your gold income.

[DadouXIII]

You need to have some really specialized locations for Towns to become Gold engines.
You'll mostly be using them as a source of Food to support your growing cities.

[TheNightglow]

Originally posted by Curmudgeon Emeritus:

Thanks! My issue is that if I spend say 165 coins for 4 production that means it takes me over 40 turns to earn that 165 coins back. If I want to invest in production for the Town, what is the advantage to that town with the additional production?

oh, I never even thought about buying production buildings in towns
I dont think that is an amazing idea unless you are playing as agustus or carthage or both

increasing production in your town for more gold can be a great idea, but I usually do so through assinging rural tiles that have a production yield instead of purchasing buildings

[JerBeware]

Originally posted by TheNightglow:

Originally posted by Curmudgeon Emeritus:

Thanks! My issue is that if I spend say 165 coins for 4 production that means it takes me over 40 turns to earn that 165 coins back. If I want to invest in production for the Town, what is the advantage to that town with the additional production?

oh, I never even thought about buying production buildings in towns
I dont think that is an amazing idea unless you are playing as agustus or carthage or both

increasing production in your town for more gold can be a great idea, but I usually do so through assinging rural tiles that have a production yield instead of purchasing buildings

There's quite a few reasons to buy them especially in the ancient era.

-Claiming land (and potentially moving 1 population)
-Pays for itself over time (e.g. increases gold income)
-Lowers the cost of city conversion
-Placement unlocks for future districts/buildings

This is why having early access to the resource 'gold' can be huge as well. 20% reduction means you get those towns kicked off a lot easier.

Depending on your Civ/setup that further increases. For example, if you go with the Stone belief you can boost production significantly across your early towns in the right scenario and have gold coins pouring in since you'll be getting production off the altar as well.

[Rhapsody]

You can also replace the mines and woodcutters with unique improvements since they retain the warehouse bonus. You can get more useful yields like food, science and culture that way, while retaining some production to gold income and keeping actual farmland ploughed.

[jorgen_cab]

There are practically no reason to keep a high production town, they should always be converted to cities.

Towns should provide food as their primary function, having some hub or trade towns can also be strategic.

Once you understand the mechanic the best towns to are just an extremely small town in the middle between two cites producing migrants... you can abuse that quite literally.

[gorksocks]

Towns can vastly increase your speed to an economic victory. I am always rich with high production towns. Depending on location a mining or logging town can be killer with the right production building or two. I let my cities focus on on wonders or buildings then specialists. I just started a game as Carthage, I will do some math mostly out of curiosity.

[jorgen_cab]

Originally posted by gorksocks:

Towns can vastly increase your speed to an economic victory. I am always rich with high production towns. Depending on location a mining or logging town can be killer with the right production building or two. I let my cities focus on on wonders or buildings then specialists. I just started a game as Carthage, I will do some math mostly out of curiosity.

I so far never found high production towns to be worth it... using the production to build units or buildings will always be more effective. Towns should focus on food to deliver to cities to increase their population growth. Cities will produce more of everything of actual value.

I seem to overflow with gold quickly enough without production towns as is.

[Jeff]

On the surface, nothing you are saying is inaccurate, but there is some nuance to this:

Britain, for example, gets +5 gold per building in a town. So you gain more.
Carthage has a tradition that gives +20% to all gold towns produce
Towns also produce culture + Science. And you can specialize a town to produce +1 of each if you have a quarter. So buying a building can lead to other bonuses like that.

There is an economic attribute that reduces all gold purchases by 15%

You can get civics that give +1 gold and +1 happiness per resource allocated to the town.

Wood cutters and mines in a town still get boosts from the ageless buildings and can make a town very lucrative

All of this to say that you can get some math to work in your favor to beef up those towns and the ROI can be much better than a first glance.

[Dray Prescot]

I will build up, i.e. spend Gold to buy, production buildings in Towns that I plan to upgrade to Cities in the future. Once the the Town gets large enough, the price to upgrade to a City starts coming down.

I will also buy buildings in Towns in order to culture bomb nearby tiles, so that they become part of the Territory of that Town, i.e. to reach out to nearby Resources, so I can eventually build a Mine/Quarry/Plantation/Camp etc. on that Resource when the Town's population grows.. If I wait for just growing population to culture bomb tiles, it can take a LOT longer before those Resources become part of my internal Trade network.

In some cases, I am trying to Culture Bomb tiles before a Settlement of a different Civ can culture Bomb them.

I will also buy Happiness Buildings to get ready for future problems when The Crisis hits and gets worse.

I will also buy Food Production Buildings to speed up the growth of new Population in that Town.

So there are plenty of legitimate and good play reasons to use Gold to buy Buildings in a Town.

I would rather use the Production of a Town to build Buildings for that Town, but then the Town is really a City and not a Town.

If I had LOTS of Gold, I would upgrade most Towns to Cities so they could use their production to build stuff for that Town that is now a City.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by gorksocks:

Towns can vastly increase your speed to an economic victory. I am always rich with high production towns. Depending on location a mining or logging town can be killer with the right production building or two. I let my cities focus on on wonders or buildings then specialists. I just started a game as Carthage, I will do some math mostly out of curiosity.

Yeah, there's no reason to convert town to city when going for that victory because factories can be purchased cheaper in towns. Typically I end up with like 7-8 different factory resources, I'm not going to convert 6 new towns to cities just to set up factories in them.

Even in militaristic situations, you can consider towns as outposts of little value to enemy, but massive utility to yourself because of being able to purchase troops, heal, set up airbases or just to block off opponent's access to some resources or geography like natural wonder. Same can be said of cities too, though, if you need an aerodrome or extra districts to build toward waterfront for naval deployment.

Originally posted by jorgen_cab:

Cities will produce more of everything of actual value.

Maybe I'm mistaken about what you meant, but I wouldn't say "more of everything", but a greater total yield (and even then old towns can beat new cities) and adding the "refined yields" like science and culture. Especially in exploration age, food is of "actual value" because ultimately it doesn't matter what specialist yields you're pumping out for scientific path (and even less so toward other paths). But in modern, in a more serious game, you likely won't have time and resources to fully develop a city with all buildings anyway, so you'll end up with deficit of gold or far smaller output of basic yields than a specialized (or even non-specialized) tow. Coastal towns in particular can easily feed and pay for cities because you get both food and gold from fishing.