Building rewards per square should be different

[sail0r]

When trying to evaluate which building is better (e.g regarding culture or mana production) everyone divides total reward by the number of squares of the building to find the reward per square. This is fine as long as the building does not require a street.
If the building requires a street then the size of its narrow side divided by 2 should be added to the number of squares of the building as without a street you cannot use it. Large buildings have this way a better reward per square than smaller buildings.
Let me show you an example:
The large building is 6x3. The small one is 1x4. In order to be able to compare them we need the same number of squares. Two of the large buildings for a total of 36 squares and 9 of the small buildings for a total of 36 squares.

The 2 large buildings need a total of 39 squares in the city. The 9 smaller ones however need 41 squares because they need more streets.

So when calculating the reward per square for a building that requires a street you should add the narrow size divided by 2 (because it shares the street with the opposite building) assuming that you will place the street on its narrow size.

 

[Julian]

This is certainly true. Of course, there's always the building at the end of the street that only needs one street square (or even half of one, if it shares it). It's often good to put a large building there, so that makes it very efficient.

 

[Pauly7]

So you would say the formula is W x L + (W/2).

But I would say it's (W x L + (W/2)) x P

(P = prettiness )

 

[Stucon]

(P = prettiness )

lol

 

[Silly Bubbles]

I've noticed that too, I do my own calculation for these things as you say it does make a difference.

 

[Gargon667]

It is only a question of how complicated you want to make it...

As you talking about road connections I assume you are not talking about pure culture buildings as those don´t need roads at all.

Which then means you are also talking about population? So you have to include that. but of course that gets much more complicated then as the population per square depends on many factors again.
I wrote myself a calculator in excel where I calculate various factors But definitely not all of them, only the ones I found the most important ones...

But the idea is, if the building gives population, it means you can free up X amount of squares of other pop buildings in your city, so that makes the effective footprint of your building smaller. The same is true if your building provides culture, but you can of course only calculate that bonus if you have culture buildings in your city that you can delete or if you would otherwise have to build a culture building. Oh and of course if you delete a residence because you add population that not only frees up space, but also additional culture, which then can be fed into the culture calculation and so on... Highly entertaining if you like fooling around on spreadsheets, but it did also provide quite interesting results

 

[Pauly7]

As you talking about road connections I assume you are not talking about pure culture buildings as those don´t need roads at all.

Which then means you are also talking about population?

Also culture/pop.