Economy Tool for ETW

[Servius]

Hi all,

I've made an Excel-based tool that will tell you which new building or upgrade currently available to you is the most efficient use of your money. Efficiency is measured by how many turns it will take for the additional revenue generated by a new building or upgrade to equal the cost of constructing that new building or upgrade.

I've also written up a Read Me for it that should explain everything about the file and how to use it.

There are 2 ways you can use the file. The simplest way is to compare one building option to another. The fullest utilization of the tool's abilities requires a greater initial investment of time from you, but will end up telling you which construction option across your entire empire is the most efficient use of your money. The Read Me explains it all.

Here's the link.

http://www.unc.edu/~pcaldwel/ETW Eff...Calculator.zip

Let me know if you have any questions.

Serv

[anweRU]

Nice. I just tried a hypothetical lvl. 2 smith upgrade to lvl. 3 smith, and played with the various technology upgrades.

It seems the calculation consider only those techs that were required to build a particular building, and do not include the additional wealth effect for more advanced techs. Is that correct?

[Servius]

some techs affect cost, others affect income, and others affect per-turn increase in the Town Wealth portion of the Region Wealth. The tool ignores the parts of techs that increase the Town Wealth because it compounds each turn and would require constant updating on your part to measure a relatively small change in tax revenue.

The techs shown are only ones that affect building construction cost, tax revenue, or trade revenue. So, no military techs at all, nor any techs that only decrease the cost of building new units or their upkeep, nor any techs that only deal with research rates or unlocking new buildings or units.

[Servius]

bump. I'm open to suggestions for ways to make this more useful. Are there other features, or better ways of presenting the current features, that would be preferable?

[TinCow]

The tool is great, well done! About the only improvement I can think of would be to have it somehow extra the information automatically from the save file, but I suspect that's absurdly difficult.

[anweRU]

I will need to do some detailed analysis later tonight, but my preliminary test did not match your Excel sheet last night. My industries were bringing in more money than the sheet was predicting.

For e.g. adding the basic iron smith brought in 55% more industrial wealth to the province when it was completed, which is what I would expect from the techs I researched.

Some techs add a % to the industries' wealth, while others add a % to the +xx /turn town wealth contribution the industry makes. I didn't unprotect your calcs. But based on the low-balling of the income, are you sure you have the techs adjusting the correct wealth, that is +xx% industry wealth vs +xx% to town wealth / turn?

[Miracle]

NVM.

[Servius]

@ TinCow: Yeah, I have no idea if it's even possible to do a constant and automatic data pull from the game to the Excel file. That would make it MUCH easier on the player, since you wouldn't have to do any of the updating yourself.

@ anweRU: Yes, I have not taken any bonuses to grown in Town Weath because they compound each turn. For example, each road upgrade addes 3 to Town Wealth each turn. If you could see how complicated the equations are to handle what's currenting in the tool, you wouldn't want to bother writing another one to deal with +3 to x * 30% tax rate each turn either.

On the difference you're seeing between what the tool says and what you're seeing, be sure to check your ministers' traits and ancillaries. I often found that, when there was a minor discrepancy between the two, it was often attributed to a Minister's (or the head of state's) traits or ancillaries. The very top line in the Tech tab is reserved for you to put some info in there. I think it's designed to accomodate the Architect ancillary. If someone could send me a full list of all traits and ancillaries, I could expand that sheet to accomodate all of them.

This is the 6th or 7th iteration of this tool. Before I stopped playing (waiting for the cursed unit triggering CTD bugs to be squashed), I continually used this over several campaigns and constantly updated the calculations. I also used base cost and revenue info that another player pulled directly from the game, so that's likely solid too. If you can narrow down the discrepancy to a particular building type, it's probably a tech. If it's a general discrepancy, it's probably a tech or character trait/ancillary.