Resource-efficient way to compare Culture Point buildings and Resource field upgrades - Theorycrafting

TL;DR: When you need to decide if a certain resource field or culture point building should be built before the other (or built at all), choose the one that has a lower break-even point. This means that your investment will return profits faster.

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Early in the game, you are likely going to be valuing Culture Points more, than late in the game. Which means that early on you might want to be building buildings that might not have any useful utility value on their own, but only increase your base CP creation. Some buildings and levels are better for that, than others. Similarly comparing resource field upgrades to buildings is rather common question early in the game. Late in the game when you might value CP much less than previously, when you already have all the villages you need and want, most of the building levels become unattractive investments outside of their utility value. Some buildings don't have a break-even point, when the increased CP gains are smaller than the increased population and crop consumption.

Below break-even points for resource fields and buildings can be used for this decision making. Tables list how many days it takes to pay back their initial costs for increasing each field or building level, with different 'Resources to CP' exchange rates. In other words, how long you need to wait until you theoretically have more resources and CP compared to a situation where the investment would have never been done.

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travian_kingdoms_buildings - Google Drive -> 'Building Prod + CP' tab.

Example how to read this with Academy.

Early in the game even very high levels of Academy are good investments in your villages, even when you don't actually need it to research to unlock any of the more advanced troop types. If you value 200 resources to 1 Culture Point, your upgrade costs would be paid back in full by day 10 even for lvl 11 Academy.

Later in the game when you can effectively keep back to back celebrations, or just are close to reaching your wanted amount of villages and senators, you are going to be valuing each CP to be around or even less than 50 resources. At that point you no longer want to upgrade Academy in your support villages, unless you want it for certain troop types, or for Town Hall.

For example lvl 11 Academy with '50 res = 1 CP' exchange rate, is already going to take 50 days before the base-CP increase is going to break-even with the initial cost and increased population and crop consumption. So you might want to leave it not upgraded higher than lvl 10 Academy, and save the resources and crops for something else (more troops).

Quote from DrugsInc

TL;DR either but I have some technical questions :

• Why 50 res ?

• Why aren't you able to keep celebrations at start but high levels of academy ?

• When using res for level up useless buildings become worth ?

To be honest, I don't have a good answer to why "50 res = 1 CP" or "200 res = 1 CP". 50 is about the rate of resources for celebrations, and knowing it's beneficial to keep doing celebrations at least sometimes, it must be the minimum value. For 100 or 200 rates are just for reference, because at least to me they seemed to give reasonable results for early game, that felt about right. Most likely the value of CP changes over time, and is different for different play styles, so there isn't one "correct" exchange rate for everyone.

Early in the game I would do those high Academy levels, in addition to Marketplace and Main Building, to reach first +400 base-CP per village, and later on 2000 base-CP overall as fast as possible. So that Large Celebrations would be as efficient as possible. So I would do both at least early in the game.

Some building levels are indeed going to be leveled up, even when not needed for anything else than base-CP. For example early in the game Main Building and Marketplace lvl 20 are not needed for their other benefits than cheap base-CP. But you don't want to level the Town Hall for example any higher than lvl 1 for it's base-CP, unless when planning to get faster back to back celebrations.

Quote from iribuya

Nice sheets, are you able to share the data entry points, so we can make our own sheets? I have them somewhere too, but I cant find it

Hi iribuya , all the field and building costs and stats should be here:
Travian :: buildings

I got my values from Travian Kingdoms Wiki | Buildings , but some of them are a bit outdated and incorrect. Will need to redo that myself based on the travian.kirilloid.ru values, that seem to be more correct.

Thinking and comparing the buildings in a different way, here is the grouped suggestions based on "how much I need to value Culture Points in terms of Resources, for the Building level upgrades to break-even within 30 days?"

Even very early in the game not upgrading buildings unnecessarily further than the above '1 CP = 80 res' should be the most efficient way for Culture Points. You will of course want to be building and upgrading for example Barracks or increase Warehouse further, but mostly due to their utility value, not because of their CP increase alone.

Why '1 CP = 80 res' is a good-enough limit?
Even with village having only 300 CP daily base production, lvl 1 Town Hall allows instantly exchanging resources to Culture Points with around '1 CP = 67 res' exchange-rate. And above building levels - with resource fields and other necessary buildings - already allow reaching that +300 CP daily base production. Leaving you with more resources for troops and more frequent celebrations at Town Hall.