Learning how to use buildings

[Nate]

I took notes on Radio Res' buildings tutorial. I'm interested to see everyone's take on his strategy and if some of these points are out of date. He contradicted himself on a few points of which I can only relay the information that he gave.

Tax Buildings

- Build churches/temples in any province that gives +0.2 ducats a month
- Cathedrals give poor ROI and should be ignored unless you required missionary strength bonus

Trade buildings

- Never build them unless it’s for a trade company or provinces in a trade node that you do not intend to expand into.
- Also, always send trade ships to trade nodes in which you don’t have a lot of trade power.

Production buildings

- Build workshops in any province that gives +0.2 ducats a month
- Counting houses are useless, never build them

Manufactories

- Always build a workshop and manufactory in provinces with trade goods that have a base value of 4
- Workshops give better ROI in provinces with mid level production dev of 8 or 9, and trade good value of 3
- Manufactories give better ROI in low dev provinces with low value trade goods, particularly in the early game.
- Temples give better ROI than workshops and manufactories. Always prioritize temples.
- Manufactories help with institution spread
- Goods produced is the best modifier in the game because it affects both production and trade. Furnace is the best building in the game because it gives +5% goods produced which is insanely good. You should always build a furnace in any province that has coal the moment it becomes available, and consider taking a loan to do it.

Government buildings

- Useless garbage, never build them. Their utility is very situational and almost never justifies the cost.
- Universities can be useful for spreading enlightenment institution and playing tall to stack extra dev cost bonus. But this is situational and should be used sparingly.

Military buildings

- Not useful when playing single player and wide. Mercenaries are more cost effective.
- More useful when playing multi player and tall.
- Build forts in mountains and highlands where you are expecting your enemy to engage. Having many forts early to mid game can help boost army tradition, but they can become obsolete and expensive later. More useful in multi player and when playing tall.

Final verdict

- Build temples everywhere that gives +0.2 ducats and even 0.15 ducats if you have extra cash.
- Build workshops in high dev provinces
- Build manufactories in high trade value provinces and combine with workshops
- Build furnaces everywhere you can
- All other buildings are situational and your ducats might be better spent somewhere else
- These recommendations are mostly applicable to playing single player and wide, not so much for multiplayer and tall.
- Mercenaries might be a better up front investment because you can buy them quickly to win wars and get more land which can make you rich quicker and in the long run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUsgolm9yhA&t=653s

[Octopuses]

Most players agree that 0.1 improvement is enough for churches and workshops. I personally do 0.12.

Courthouses can be very useful in some runs so they are not garbage at all. Also having 5 universities is good for extra splendor.

Trade buildings that give 5+ goods improvement are always worth it.

Barracks help a lot when manpower is tight, which will be in many runs. I personally look for 550 manpower improvement.

Manufactories are great if they give 0.9 improvement or more, but when I have good economy I build even if it's just 0.7 improvement.

[Marquoz]

That RadioRes advice is garbage. My values are much closer to Octopuses'.

The most important buildings are:

Temples: 0.13 if I'm poor, 0.10 later when wealthy.
Workshops: Same, except when I'm really wealthy they go everywhere
Manufactories: 0.50 if I'm poor, literally everywhere when I'm wealthy
Courthouses: Every single province that's not in my capital state gets a courthouse and upgrades to a town hall later. It's the single most important building in the game.

Low dev provinces can't build everything, so prioritization is necessary. Courthouses don't cost a building slot now, so they aren't a problem. The combination of Workshops and Manufactories is usually more valuable than Temples if you only have two building slots, but a province that's heavy on Admin development with a bad trade good could be a exception to this.

Other buildings are less common. For example, Barracks get built when and where they provide significant boosts. Shipyards are occasionally helpful.

And then there are useless buildings, like Docks and Marketplaces. I never construct them, and if I conquer one I will tear it down later to make room for more useful buildings. Why do I say Marketplaces are useless? Because my goal is always to own every single province of trade nodes I care about, and they provide no benefit at all once that happens. The cash that would have gone into markets buys buildings that are useful the entire game or funds my military instead. The same principle applies to light ships--I never build them. Fighting ships (heavies and galleys) and transports fill my naval force limit.

[grotaclas]

information about mercenaries and government buildings are definitely outdated, because the guide is from version 1.28. Version 1.30 changed the mercenaries and introduced governing capacity. Mercenaries now have other trade offs and governing capacity makes government buildings which reduce the governing cost very important if you expand a lot. 1.30 also introduced new manufactories.
And I don't think that recommendations like "Build temples everywhere that gives +0.2 ducats" are useful. This is the wrong way to think about it. It is better to look for the currently best investment and if something much better might come along before it can pay off. A temple which cost 100 ducats and gives 0.2/month(on a 6 tax dev province with 0 autonomy), pays for itself after 1+100/0.2/12=42.66 years, but if you will have an investment in 10 years which pays for itself in 20 years, it is better to save money for that investment. And a temple which gives 0.2, is worse than a workshop which gives 0.3. A workshop+manufactory can be much better than a temple, but it is more difficult to calculate, because they both increase production income in different ways and the manufactory can also increase trade income if you collect the trade value somewhere down the chain. Furthermore it is pretty common to also have some goods produced and trade efficiency and other production efficiency modifiers and to increase the trade value with the multiple merchant bonus and all of this interacts with each other multiplicatively which can greatly increase the effects. On the contrary there is almost nothing in the game which increases the local tax income besides the tax development, so the effects of temples are pretty static and only get reduced by autonomy.

Originally posted by NateDogg:

- Manufactories give better ROI in low dev provinces with low value trade goods, particularly in the early game.

That's definitely wrong, because the ROI for a manufactory will always be higher in a higher valued trade good as long as everything else is equal. Dev doesn't change the ROI if you only build a manufactory, but it isn't better in low dev provinces either. And if you also build a workshop, a high dev province gives a better ROI. And building them both in the province which has the best ROI for the workshop has a better ROI than building them separably(again assuming that everything else is equal).

[bri]

That guide is more than 3 years old and a lot of things have changed so it isn't applicable to the current version. That said, quite a bit of that summary is just flat out wrong and some almost always has been. For example, manufactories should be built everywhere has been the case since they removed the monarch point cost from their construction. Sure, there is a priority system to determine which ones should be built first but saying only build them in high value good provinces is, and has been, wrong.

[Marquoz]

Yup. It's a garbage guide today, and it was really bad when it came out, too. Streamers are very rarely a good source for strategy advice.

[Rabob]

This is really bad advice. The guide is very outdated. Workshops increase the production, but they also increase the trade value in a node.

Market places give you trade power upstream as well, so they can definitely be worth it. Especially in competitive nodes and when you have a building slot left. While you are not creating more money basically, you steal income from your enemies which is even better I guess :D

Government buildings are mainly to reduce governing cap, which is also quite important if you want to expand. Especially since they do not cost a building slot I would spam them everywhere since money becomes a non issue at some point.

Also money in your account earns nothing, so I would even build +0.08; and in general workshops + manufactories everywhere for the synergy.

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by Rabob:

Workshops increase the production, but they also increase the trade value in a node.

Workshops don't increase the trade value. But manufactories increase the trade value.

Originally posted by Rabob:

Market places give you trade power upstream as well, so they can definitely be worth it. Especially in competitive nodes and when you have a building slot left. While you are not creating more money basically, you steal income from your enemies which is even better I guess :D

They can be sometimes worth it, but I think they are often overvalued. Even the best marketplaces take a few decades to pay off if nothing in the node changes. But in these decades, you can conquer more of the node which will reduce their benefit, so it takes longer to pay them off. And once you have 100% of the trade power in the node, their only benefit is in the upstream nodes. But the upstream power is only 20%, so it is often better to build the marketplace upstream if that's what you need. And you will probably conquer the upstream nodes as well and then the marketplace is worthless. The other economic buildings on the other hand pay you till the end of the game unless you have a reason to demolish them later.

[Mr.M]

"Manufactories give better ROI in low dev provinces with low value trade goods, particularly in the early game."

...what is that even supposed to mean. Better compared to what?

Manufactories give a flat value so the dev of the provinces doesnt matter at all for its ROI... Unless its a province that has only 1 building slot so you wont get a workshop in it. Ideally you want to ALWAYS get a workshop together with your manufactory.

[Mr.M]

Originally posted by grotaclas:

They can be sometimes worth it, but I think they are often overvalued. Even the best marketplaces take a few decades to pay off if nothing in the node changes. But in these decades, you can conquer more of the node which will reduce their benefit, so it takes longer to pay them off. And once you have 100% of the trade power in the node, their only benefit is in the upstream nodes.

...the good bonus of TCs depends on the total trade power of the TCs in the node - higher trade power means more goods.

So at least they help you with that, even if you are already at 100% trade power.

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by grotaclas:

Even the best marketplaces take a few decades to pay off if nothing in the node changes. But in these decades, you can conquer more of the node which will reduce their benefit, so it takes longer to pay them off. And once you have 100% of the trade power in the node, their only benefit is in the upstream nodes. But the upstream power is only 20%, so it is often better to build the marketplace upstream if that's what you need. And you will probably conquer the upstream nodes as well and then the marketplace is worthless.

100% this. It's why I never build marketplaces (unless a mission or estate agenda forces me to, that is).

[Nate]

I also should've asked about edicts. How do you gauge the utility of edicts? In my experience, the benefit of edicts is marginal in comparison to their cost and they're really only useful in highly developed states like your capital. I almost never use edicts except in my capital. Perhaps when you scale your economy then you can be more generous with setting up edicts all over the place?

[Marquoz]

I get limited but significant use out of edicts:

--When I'm developing a province to spawn an institution, I turn on the "Encourage Development" edict in that state.
--When I'm trying to spread an already spawned institution faster, I turn on the "Advancement Effort" edict in neighboring states.
--When I'm converting one or more difficult provinces to my religion, I turn on the "Enforce Religious Unity" edict.
--When I have manpower issues in the early game, I often turn on the "Increased Enlistment" edict in high-manpower states.

Many of EU4's tools are situational, and edicts fall into that category for me.

[bri]

Originally posted by Marquoz:

I get limited but significant use out of edicts:

--When I'm developing a province to spawn an institution, I turn on the "Encourage Development" edict in that state.
--When I'm trying to spread an already spawned institution faster, I turn on the "Advancement Effort" edict in neighboring states.
--When I'm converting one or more difficult provinces to my religion, I turn on the "Enforce Religious Unity" edict.
--When I have manpower issues in the early game, I often turn on the "Increased Enlistment" edict in high-manpower states.

Many of EU4's tools are situational, and edicts fall into that category for me.

I really only find the first of these to be all that useful. Maybe the religion one for very specific instances although usually it isn't really warranted/required. Tripling the state maintenance is not always a trivial thing while the edict bonuses quite often are trivial in the overall scheme of things.

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by MrMonocle 2k:

...the good bonus of TCs depends on the total trade power of the TCs in the node - higher trade power means more goods.

So at least they help you with that, even if you are already at 100% trade power.

You are right. I forgot about that. But I have no idea how much income this could bring in a real game.

[Rodi]

Ignore years old guides if the mechanics have changed since