The Humble Builder

A guide to using Builders in single and multiplayer to improve your gameplay.

Why on earth would I use a builder?

This is a question I see people thinking quite often. At first glance, they seem pretty worthless. Sure, roads are nice, but watchtowers exist in the wild, and I could just build cities.

Truth be told, builders are amazing units, who simply do a very good job of hiding their true strength. This guide is designed to go over exactly what those are and illustrate them. As a result, it's short, but points out a few tricks that proves how valuable builders can be.

The builder itself

Builders cost 60 gold each, build in one turn from any developed city, posess no offensive ability whatsoever, and build terrain features, namely Strongholds, Watchtowers, and Roads. Each of these has a use. Each of these will complete at the start of your next turn.

Builders are about as fast as any other foot unit, and posess no real strengths outside of their ability to build.

Fortresses.

Fortresses cost 100 gold, build in one turn, and project domain. Simple right?

Fortresses can also work gold, research, and mana granting improvements, effectively acting as miniature cities. They also come pre-equip with wooden walls, which cost 100 gold, equal to the cost of the fort itself.

For 120 gold, you can upgrade to stone fortresses, which gives them stone walls and +1 border distance. Also simple.

However, where they get useful, is that you can settle cities INSIDE fortresses, to pass the wall on to the city. So that 220 cost fort, one settler later, is an outpost with stone walls PRE-BUILT. Stone walls can take multiple turns of build time, not to mention wooden walls and the builder's hall. But because you sent a builder in advance, not only were you working the tiles sooner, but you also skipped directly to maximum fortification, for no turn cost.

And the builder can go on their merry way, and set up another fort to boot, meaning you just got an instantly max fortification outpost that can hold your opponents back, has extra domain, and it costed you no extra time at all, and just the 60 gold to get the builder out of the gate.

Watchtowers.

Watchtowers give you vision of surounding lands. Again, simple, right?

Honestly, it's pretty simple, they give you a massive amount of vision range, and can be dropped just about anywhere. They're not super useful, but well placed, they can see into enemy cities due to their immense vision range.

Underground, as a dwarf, you can tunnel right into the wall, and build a watchtower inside your carved out area, making it nigh inaccessable without the enemy being a dwarf, while you can see everything that moves in that area.

Knowledge is power, right?

Roads.

Roads reduce the movement cost of moving across tiles to 3. Again, simple.

The movement cost of flatland in the underground is 6, so every road tile doubles your movement speed underground, and will force it to three, even going through underground forests, which cost 8. If you play with underground, not building roads to speed up your units is just handicapping yourself.

Added in Patch: Bridges

Note: This section was added post guide completion.

Bridges were recently added to the list of features builders can construct, and are quite the valuable tool.

Bridges, at first glance create a simple path over water, but in actuality, can be used to create nasty chokepoints that mess up enemy tactics.

Bridges, when attacked, create a combat map with a massive natural chokepoint, namely, the bridge itself, which gives defenders a massive edge. letting you funnel enemies quite well. As a bonus, the map is large enough that a particularly fast unit, such as cavalry, can retreat while on defense and the battle will actually end due to not taking damage in a long enough time (Note: DO NOT DO THIS ONLINE. PEOPLE WILL NEVER WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU AGAIN). Bridges also naturally manipulate the amount of stacks that can enter battle. You can easily position a blockade of units just past the bridge, and force the enemy into doing a single stack battle or embarking their units, which is simply death if you have access to warships or flying units to sweep them up. With proper bridge placement, this can even get as bad as forcing them to embark a very small number of units at a time, which you can quickly overrun.

Credit for MrNo for the following, who was kind enough to post it in the comments section. Thank you for the help with this.

To those having trouble building bridges:
You build a bridge by researching basic seafaring, and then selecting the "build a road" option on the builder. Builder MUST NOT be embarked. If you have seafaring, this allows you to have the move option cross a river, which will create a bridge for 60 gold.

Limitations on this:

• The river may only be 1 tile wide. You can't have 2 hex long bridges.
  
• The bridge must have non-forest, non mountain tile on the other side (incidentally, terraforming the ends to forests can remove bridges, last I checked)
  
• "The Other End" means the end OPPOSITE the start point of the builder. Bridges cannot curve in water.
  
• You cannot build 2 bridges next to each other, they must be separated by at least 1 hex.

In summary.

Fortresses are amazing, and severely boost your cities.

Watchtowers let you do tricky stunts and scout territory.

Roads are a must have for underground games.

It takes six turns of working a goldmine before a settler gets there for the builder to pay for himself.

Build a builder once you enter midgame, you will be glad you did.

[George]

I am a bit late, but I want to add one thing: a builder with the 'repair machine' ability can also repair SHIPS, as the are treated as machines. So no need to retreat your battered fleet to the harbour on the other end of the map, just add an embarked builder with that ability (as mentioned earlier this builder itself has to be built in a city with a masters guild).

[ItchyDani3l]

There's an additional detail which you may have missed:

Roads and Bridges do not take a full turn to finish construction.

This seems like a trivial fact, but it's actually useful for certain strategies.

You see, you can move over a bridge with units immediately after it's constructed, no need for waiting. You can ambush a city which is protected by a river or a lava river, by bringing a builder unit with you.

In the same turn you build the bridge, you can attack the city. They will not have a chance to respond.

[Knight who says Ni Hao]

Useful guide, thanks

[Doctor G]

we can build it,YES WE CAN

[AmySloth]

You know, I'm thinking of more and more situations where roads are useless: Also useless for frostlings in arctic terrain.

[AmySloth]

Oh, and tigrans also should be terraforming barrens, probably not to have roads either. After all, they can move on barrens as if they are roads. Building roads as opposed to sowing salt for them is literally only helping the enemy. I don't know about anyone else, but Tigrans, Goblins and Elves are actually my most played races XD Soo I never really ever use builders for roads.

[AmySloth]

For high elf terraformers, builders for roads aren't quite as useful. I for one like to terreform every tile around cities with forests, to slow enemies down(unless you're fighting another high elf). Should work too with goblin terraformers with wetlands. Building roads also means your enemies can move more quickly, whereas planting trees or flooding lands slows them down, but not yourself when a high elf or goblin.

But yeah, outside of those two races, roads have an argument to be made for them despite helping the enemy too. Plus everything else you said about builders is true, so I still use them even as high elves(but not for road-laying usually)

[Mr McNificent]

Don't forget you can send them underground to tunnel for gold.
And this all works better with Expansionist specialisation giving Mr Builderson here extra move speed.

[AnemoneMeer]

That's not quite how it works.

You build one builder, singular, and have it go around setting up in advance. When you build a settler, by the time it gets there, you already have the fortress set up, roads set up to get the settler there sooner, and your builder is probably now elsewhere doing other things. You don't build a new builder for every fortress, your builder just sets up fortresses in areas you want to claim in a few turns.

[T.N.Tobin]

ok so i didnt realize you could build a city over the fortress ... here is why your wrong about this and it will take longer the way you want to do it.....

my way.... build a settler 2 turns. settle city 1 -2 turns ... city built 1 turn ok total 4-5 turns

your way ... build a builder 1 turn, build a fortress 1 turn? upgrade 1 turn , build settler 2 turns, settle city 1 - 2 turns , total 6-7 turns... your way is NOT FASTER then just building a settler.