Posts: 5,304
Threads: 115
Joined: Nov 2007
Yuris makes an interesting point about the effect of limited-use Builders on tech path, but I'm not buying his conclusion. To the extent the importance/interest of the decision has been taken away, it's due to boost timing constraining when you can efficiently finish techs, or failure to plan far enough ahead: If you don't care what techs you'll get in the next 10 turns, which ones will you want to have all of in the next 20 or 30 or 50, and what's the most efficient way to get them all? (This is a question Yuris doesn't appear to be trying to answer, which is why I'm posting this here instead of his thread. And if boosts and perhaps a bland tech tree mean the answer is the same every time with unimportant variations, the problem still isn't with the builders.)
One version of his argument that I can see though: A builder is fairly costly (and the cost keeps increasing) but worth the cost to get three good tile improvements. If you're limited by housing/amenities and/or land quality (e.g. all non-resource flatland) so you'll only want one more tile improvement for a long time, the payback horizon for a 3-charge builder may be too distant to bother with one until you're nearly ready for more tile improvements. Even so, there must be some long-term plan you'd want to execute; e.g. in the case of resourceless flatland, maybe work toward Bronze Working to see if there's an Iron resource to make things more interesting?
