Whenever I read one of these types of posts about building slots and Common Sense, I always get this vision of what non-CS owners must imagine CS-owners to be:
Scene: a stereotypical medieval castle, with thunder and lighting in the background. In a room at the top of the tallest tower sits a gamer wearing a shirt saying "I bought Common Sense...but I already had it naturally", stroking a white cat on his lap with an evil grin on his face. Lightning flashes as he opens the province view window and begins giggling uncontrollably. On the province window is a small button, with sparkles coming off of it and animated rainbows running around the outside. Mousing over it his giggling becomes a full-fledged maniacal laugh as a tooltip pops up: "Click me to spend 1 of each monarch point and unlock the full 16 building slots in this province!" His crazy laughter increases in volume, mingling with the periodic thunder crashes outside as he goes from province to province clicking this button, while shrieking madly to himself "Those non-CS owning fools! They'll never know what they're missing! Ahahahaha!"
But seriously, I own Common Sense. It's nothing like that.
I've got probably close to 75 hours of time playing CS now. I can count the number of times I've spent monarch points to get an additional building slot on one hand, and have fingers (plural) left over (and once was just to test out the new feature). And I really don't see that number increasing for me anytime soon. It's really just a waste of monarch points in 99%+ of situations.
If you're playing the typical expanding empire, monarch points will always be better spent on expanding; coring privinces, annexing vassals, rolling generals, reasearch, ideas...it doesn't matter, it will benefit you more than throwing monarch points at a province to get more building slots. The only time you might possibly give the idea a second thought is if the province development ends in 9 (or very barely, 8) and you absolutely must have a fort in that privince. And only if the province doesn't have a single building slot due to terrain, otherwise you'd be better off overall just replacing a building there. Putting your monarch points towards expansion will always give you a better return on the monarch-point-to-building-slots ratio.
The whole point of the new building system was to introduce some actual strategy into this grand strategy game when building buildings; strategy meaning "no more mindlessly building all the buildings in all the provinces, but actually having to make tough choices occasionally when deciding what to build where." Even with CS, it is simply impossible to go back to the old building system; building all the buildings possible in a single province would probably set a Western tech nation back 9 or 10 tech levels. Owning CS doesn't magically return you to the pre-1.12 way of doing things, I'm afraid.
The one situation where the extra slots are useful is the case of playing a small nation that doesn't expand. Development gives you an alternative (and much worse) way of turning monarch points into extra development and building slots besides expansion (and remember, expansion will always give you more of both for the same cost). And that's basically the selling point of Common Sense: making small, non-expanding nations actually maybe viable against their bigger neighbors and more fun to play.
Y'know, back when Johan first said that development improvement would be a CS feature I, like many others, was apprehensive about it. Then I got CS, tried it out, saw how it worked and what it was for, and realized Paradox was perfectly justified in putting it where they did.
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