Ever wonder what the best supply building is in Forge of Empires? Well, it depends upon on your needs. Do you have plenty of space to spare? Extra population you could employ? Do you not care about space or population and just want to know what will make supplies the fastest? Or do you want to take a more balanced, efficient approach by taking all these factors into account?
Graphs of how much you get out versus how much you put in:
1. Supplies per time
2. Supplies per space and time
3. Supplies per population and time
4. Supplies per space, population and time
5. Legend explaining colors
The above is useful if you're in a rush to make the most supplies as fast as possible and you don't care how much space or population it's going to cost you.
The above is useful if you have limited room but plenty of population to spare.
The above is useful if you have limited population but plenty of room to spare.
The above is useful if space, population and time are equally* important to you. Perhaps you don't have any more expansions left and very little population as well. Upgrading to higher value supply buildings frees up both of these resources (increasing the "density" of value of your supply production).
*One special remark about the fourth graph. If you look at it carefully, it seems to defy intuition. Blacksmith, a cheap bronze age building, is the fifth best! It even beats two premium choices. Before you go and fill your town with blacksmiths, let me explain what the above graph really means.
We're going to look at two buildings very far apart in age and cost that seem to produce odd results: colonial sailmaker and bronze blacksmith. Look at where sailmaker places in all four bargraphs. Did you notice anything? It's very consistent. It places in the top 8 on every comparison. Now look at blacksmith. Did you notice the opposite trend? It's at the bottom in the first two graphs, better but still close to bottom on the third graph, and yet nearly on top on the final overall graph. It even beats the sailmaker! How could a building that performed so poorly on two of three variables (time, space and population) rank so high?
The answer is because we're treating each variable equally important in the fourth graph. If any building kicks butt at one, it can make up for poor performance on others. Blacksmith's require very little population for the amount of output they provide. The same goes for alchemist, which fairs poorly on the first graph, does okay in the second, does very well in the third, and kicks butt in the fourth. Both of these buildings pack such a population-versus-output punch that it makes them seem like gold.
So is the fourth graph useful or meaningful in any way? Yes, when you consider time, space and population equally valuable. But there should be other comparisons because it can't possibly be true that each of these variables are always equally important. What if population is twice as important to you as space? Or space twice as important as population? Each of these would yield very different graphs. They are better than the second or third graphs because they don't completely ignore one variable when comparing, they just 'weight' the value of each variable differently. This is similar to buying a car. Every buyer weights car qualities differently. Fuel efficiency is really important for people with daily drives of long commute and unimportant for people looking for a high performer that they drive once per week. I have not yet created these graphs because I'm not sure what weightings would suit the majority of people.
I just wanted to clarify the fourth graph because I may have mislead people. Personally, I don't want to fill my town with blacksmiths. I'm very tempted to delete it because it can be so misleading. However, I'm leaving it because I hope it will spark some discussion. If you have feedback about what weightings are important to you, tell me in the comments. Tell me why they are important to you as well. I haven't fully wrapped my mind around the issue yet, so your feedback will help.
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