Forums / Guides and Articles / Pez Growth and Micro Armories

TL,DR: 1) If city has homes but no production buildings (defined here as anything but homes and walls), PG is incredibly slow and based only on pez count, and has minimum pez requirement to start generating pez. 2) If a city has more jobs than pez, PG is based only on home count (major boost) and pez count. 3) If city has more pez than jobs, PG takes a sharp nosedive. Troops housed in city "remove" the houses from the equation, reducing the effective home count. 4) PG in one city does not impact PG in other cities 5) Some talk at the end of how I optimize OOP armories.

Greetings all!

As many of you know, I've been doing various testing on the maps trying to figure out some lingering questions I've always had. Part of my arrangements for on-going peace is sharing results here.

A question I've had since I started playing this game is how Pez Growth (PG) works. Namely, how can it be optimized? We all know PG at OOP can make or break a fight. As you Land Drop, a high PG is the biggest factor in determining the "optimal" way to balance tax vs production econ. Even late era when training mass amounts of MUs, knowing PG can assist in maintaining a constant siphon from econ cities and knowing how to best structure them.

Worry no more! I have found some correlations that I think will help any player, regardless of skill level, boost their skill. PG of a city follows one of 3 patterns:

1) City with houses but no production buildings.

2) City with houses and production buildings, but there are open jobs waiting to be filled

3) City with houses and production buildings, but there are more pez than jobs (ie: you have unemployed pez).

Now, what happens in each condition:

1) Houses but no production buildings:

PG is based only on the number of pez in the city. A city built like this but 0 pez will have 0 PG (that single GT in the city helps here, but only slightly). Once a city get above a couple hundred pez, the city will begin to slowly gain PG each tick. As the pez count rises, so does the PG. Its a very slow and very linear rise, but it does exist.

2) Houses with prod, but not enough pez to fill all jobs

Like the above, the more pez you have, the higher the PG value is, up until housing is nearly filled. Once there's ~40k homes left to be filled, PG drops pretty hard until it hits 0 PG at all homes filled.

However, unlike 1) where PG was 0 when pez was 0, this condition has a "base rate" that is dependent only on the number of houses in the city. So if a city has 15k homes, 75k jobs, and 0 pez, the "base" PG will be 1225. If the city has 6667 homes, 33333 jobs, and 0 pez, the "base" PG will be 817. As pez fills the city, the PG increases at a slower rate than 1), but it does increase nonetheless. So for cities with no planned overpopulation, you can really boost PG simply by building a ton of homes.

3) Houses with prod, but more pez than jobs (unemployed pez)

If it sounded like 2) was great and you should always overbuild homes, be warned: there is a penatly for this. When all jobs in a city are filled, the PG takes a nosedive, and it takes a long time for that to recover. Because of this, I dont recommend anyone overbuild houses unless you are Human, as that tax boost is a very significant boost to your econ.

Once BIG note to add here: troops housed in city count against the number of homes built. What does that mean? Lets say you have 15k homes and are using 10k to house your 250k troops. The effective PG of this city would act like it only had 5k homes rather than 15k homes. So dont station troops in a city you want high PG in, as those troops will reduce the max PG value you could have.

How do I use this knowledge?
After finding these tricks, I started doing testing with armories to try and find the optimal "micro armory" (<6400 buildings), useful for any OOP fighter to quickly drop an armory to sustain OOP training without impacting econ by increasing building cost.

Using this info, I found that 3200 homes and 3200 arms was actually a very solid balance. The 3200 arms allow T3 to train in 34 ticks (Hafler, 0 mil) with a base PG of 565. Or, if speed really is a priority, can do 2400 homes and 4000 arms to get them done in 30 ticks, but with a PG of 490, a difference of 75 pez per tick just to gain 4 ticks of training time. Maybe PG is the biggest factor (Halfer and Dwarf), so you go 4000 homes and 2400 arms, which gives a PG of 632 (boost of 67 per tick) at the cost of T3 taking ~39 ticks.

Using this correlation, you can also establish multiple mirco-arms and either train or use them as pez feeders to econ cities. At such low land counts, they arent going to impact econ much, the pez in them generate taxes, and an extra 650+ pez per tick per micro-city could be massively beneficial. Just be wary: troops in city will reduce PG, and more pez than jobs will greatly reduce PG.

I hope to see this used more frequently, particularly in OOP fights, as preliminary field test data from it showed major boosts to training capability without sacrificing econ.