Hello all,

I am struggling to find the balance between cottage spamming and having sufficient food to grow the city until possible limits. What do you think is best for a cottage rich city? Do you think a "minimum-cottage strategy" could score more overall in the late game, because you will have more farms, therefore more population up? :scan:

2 different "tricks", 2 different goals

- 1) early game farms to grow to happiness cap, then cottage : the goal is to work the cottage "early" (well, it's to grow as fast as possible, to come to happiness cap, where you start working cottages all in the same time) so that you can achieve a tech lead, GNP lead, ....

- 2) late game farms to take advantage of biology : the goal is to grow as fast as possible, with no thought about tech or commerce. You' ve basically already won, it's just a question of score. So you start to farm up everything, starting with pop poor cities (growing faster than the big ones!).

1) is a strat about winning or not
2) is a milking tweak

2 different "tricks", 2 different goals

- 1) early game farms to grow to happiness cap, then cottage : the goal is to work the cottage "early" (well, it's to grow as fast as possible, to come to happiness cap, where you start working cottages all in the same time) so that you can achieve a tech lead, GNP lead, ....

- 2) late game farms to take advantage of biology : the goal is to grow as fast as possible, with no thought about tech or commerce. You' ve basically already won, it's just a question of score. So you start to farm up everything, starting with pop poor cities (growing faster than the big ones!).

1) is a strat about winning or not
2) is a milking tweak

Thx for input; I always build way too many cottages that are never worked on, because I never seem to approach the happiness limit. I will trying working on farms first and only when I approach my happiness limit, I will work on cottages.

Which tiles do you put your cottages and which tiles do you build farms? Plains or grassland? Late game golden age can give 1 hammer extra for towns as well if you place them on grassland. You will get both plains 1 hammer and grassland 1 hammer. Is golden age a good consideration or should I build all grasslands farms for +3food at start?

well,
my input is purely theoretical :lol:
i do neither 1 nor 2

Should I go for 1, i would try to have max food farms = bonus ressources+flood plains farms if possible
after that, go for grassland/flood plains cottages first (making enough food to sustain themselves) then plains cottages.
The good part about this strat is flexibility : you could be building the plains cottages while working the farms, then start converting grassland to cottage, then floodplains.

for 2), what would you need a golden age for?
you've basically won, don't waste time on production or commerce. Farm everything (starting on the fresh water of course)!
As I said before, the fast growth is only efficient on small size cities (needing less food to grow from 1 to 2 than from 21 to 22!), so just leave your core cities alone and start growing those fishing villages.

When I cottage spam, I like to build cottages on grasslands because you need the 2 :food: to support the citizen who is working that tile. Otherwise you will need lots of food resources to balance this out. Say you build a cottage on a brown tile (forgot the name), you only have 1 :food:, 2 :commerce: (from the cottage). This person will have to use an extra food from a 3+ :food: farm which will slow your growth (not always bad), but may eventually limit the number of tiles you are working. You have 21 tiles to work. Meaning a minimum of 42 food in order to work all the tiles. So I suppose the quick answer would be, farm until you have 42 food available (at least), and the rest can be cottages.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm doing all of this from memory.

I'm not sure what the point is boosting score after you've basically won. It's nice to get a good score but not something I regard as the main object of a game.

the way i see it:

cottages take time to get up to max(especially on longer games).
farms dont.

simply put: build cottages now, and if you need food later, replace the extras.

Take a look at the strategy article regarding improvements - can't remember the title or author, but credit goes to him.

Take a look at your city's fat cross when you build it. Every person requires 2 food to feed, so count those as neutral. Flood plains and other squares such as those which give 3 or more food are positive, hills, plains and squares that have less than 2 food are negative. Do the math out, and that will tell you how many farms you need to reach maximum population, health nonwithstanding.

There a bit of a balance that is not part of that description I'll explain:

Every city has a population cap before cities become unhappy. You don't really want your cities to grow bigger than that until you have more happiness to pay for them.

So right from the start you are not aiming to get a city of size 20 because that impossible until you have a lot of lux and happiness buildings. Instead you want enough food to get to the happiness limit early but also you want some cottages very quickly too as money is very important in the early game to get a tech lead and pay for greater expansion.

I build farms in cities that have a lot of taundra but if I have a cow and a rice I woun't build any extra farm for the early game cause that is enough to get my city up to it's happiness cap quickly. Early on farms are more important for cities that don't have much to food naturally i.e. lots of plains (brown) and no food resources.

I build farms in cities that have a lot of taundra but if I have a cow and a rice I woun't build any extra farm for the early game cause that is enough to get my city up to it's happiness cap quickly. Early on farms are more important for cities that don't have much to food naturally i.e. lots of plains (brown) and no food resources.

better to just not build the tundra/plains city

There are always better things to do than to build useless cottages with your workers. More population gives you more options, plain and simple. Three citizens working cottages on a river are inarguably better than 2 working hamlets, whether you are financial or not.

Read the "Feeding your city" part of this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=158482

I don't agree with it completely, but it is a good example of the sort of long-range thinking you need to have. I view my workers as my most precious resource. Therefore, I prioritize what they need to do.

In the early game, I typically improve any resources I can first, if they are within my fat crosses, or if they are resources my civ does not have yet, and I build roads connecting my cities. Sometimes I build a farm or two before I'm finished connecting all my cities and resources, but typically not. When that is done, I build the farms and cottages. In the early game, your max population is relatively small, so it makes sense to only build a few farms that you need for max growth at that point, and in the near future.

Unless you have a lot of them, if you're building cottages on flood plains, I say you're doing the wrong thing. It takes two citizens working cottages on flood plains to produce enough excess food to work one more tile (6 food means 3 tiles can be worked). However, 2 citizens working farmed flood plains produce enough extra food for 2 more citizens, who can work tiles that don't even produce any food. That means you could put 2 cottages on normal plains tiles, and still have enough for one more citizen (4 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 10).

Furthermore, it means that when you use the slavery whip, you grow back a lot more quickly, and you can turn around and use it again. Back when I did the cottage spamming thing without regard to farms, I never even used slavery, because I knew it would take a long time to get the population back.

I started with the strategy in the guide that I linked above. I saw an immediate improvement in my game. Later I developed my own strategies that weren't as rigid as "just enough to get to 20 population". It's highly situational, and there is no magic bullet, but one thing I can say for sure, if you are not growing to max happiness, you are being very wasteful of what you've got.

There are always better things to do than to build useless cottages with your workers. More population gives you more options, plain and simple. Three citizens working cottages on a river are inarguably better than 2 working hamlets, whether you are financial or not.

Read the "Feeding your city" part of this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=158482

I don't agree with it completely, but it is a good example of the sort of long-range thinking you need to have. I view my workers as my most precious resource. Therefore, I prioritize what they need to do.

In the early game, I typically improve any resources I can first, if they are within my fat crosses, or if they are resources my civ does not have yet, and I build roads connecting my cities. Sometimes I build a farm or two before I'm finished connecting all my cities and resources, but typically not. When that is done, I build the farms and cottages. In the early game, your max population is relatively small, so it makes sense to only build a few farms that you need for max growth at that point, and in the near future.

Unless you have a lot of them, if you're building cottages on flood plains, I say you're doing the wrong thing. It takes two citizens working cottages on flood plains to produce enough excess food to work one more tile (6 food means 3 tiles can be worked). However, 2 citizens working farmed flood plains produce enough extra food for 2 more citizens, who can work tiles that don't even produce any food. That means you could put 2 cottages on normal plains tiles, and still have enough for one more citizen (4 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 10).

Furthermore, it means that when you use the slavery whip, you grow back a lot more quickly, and you can turn around and use it again. Back when I did the cottage spamming thing without regard to farms, I never even used slavery, because I knew it would take a long time to get the population back.

I started with the strategy in the guide that I linked above. I saw an immediate improvement in my game. Later I developed my own strategies that weren't as rigid as "just enough to get to 20 population". It's highly situational, and there is no magic bullet, but one thing I can say for sure, if you are not growing to max happiness, you are being very wasteful of what you've got.

Great post, thank you for your feedback. One part I did not understand tough:


That means you could put 2 cottages on normal plains tiles, and still have enough for one more citizen (4 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 10).

Well the idea was to have cottages on grassland or foodplains, but build farms on plains. Thus, you get 3+3+2+2=10 food anyway. If you build cottages on foodplains&grassland, you might not utilize the whip as good, I agree with you on that point.

But the counter argument is when you have a late Golden age, having a Town produce 1 hammer with Universal Suffrage can get 2 hammers out of grassland or foodplains tiles.

On marathon, golden ages last 10 turns. Lets say you have a 10-20 city large empire and each city has 5-10 towns on each city when you start the Golden age. You would produce 500-2000 hammers more per Golden age in that case. Per city you would have produced 50-100 base hammers more than you would with the other setup.

I never whip unless the city has 2 or more food&sea resources. I could farm grasslands and floodplains on cities with no food resources, just to whip more tough. So I am not sure which one is best tactic :) What do you all say?

I whip on recently captured cities to rush theaters for cultural borders or whip for basic defending units. On coastal cities with mass sea resources, I whip nonstop every 30 turns when +1 unhappiness disappears.

what a shame ! razing down all cotages just to allow mass farming a few turn before victory...
thats uncivilized behaviour ! i hope I will never use that kind of trick ! just play nation + watermill + workshop if you hate cottages :o

what a shame ! razing down all cotages just to allow mass farming a few turn before victory...
thats uncivilized behaviour ! i hope I will never use that kind of trick ! just play nation + watermill + workshop if you hate cottages :o

:) I think you meant state property, but yea scoring high at the cost of being uncivilized.

What do you say about building watermils on rivers instead of cottages? Whenever I play a financial leader, I always build cottages on rivers to utilize the +1commerce bonus, watermills work great too after electricity. I build farms/windmills on nonriver locations.

i agree that time frame and population are the biggest factors.
i recently finished a game around 1150 bc (tiny, pangea, 5 civs. yes, i have an older laptop and have to go small).
anyways, i wiped out 1 civ right away as the city was size 1. I took over another city size 2, then another at city size 3. the last city I took over was size 4. my city was size 6.
so i have 4 cities (the last still in the angry stage) with a total population of 16. my game score was about 770.
my final score was about 42,000.

better to just not build the tundra/plains city


I still build on plains / tundra - even snow! .. I just keep the population small enough so all im working there is the resource tiles .. until biology.
In regards to the snow .. I really dont build on it unless the site simply screams "build on me!" like a recent game I played, there was a snow island off my north coast .. 4 squares were hills .. you can mine hills in snow .. so I settled on one hill .. had 3 fish and 3 hills to work .. add light house and presto .. not so crappy location after all - one of those hills even had uranium.

Great post, thank you for your feedback. One part I did not understand tough:


On marathon, golden ages last 10 turns. Lets say you have a 10-20 city large empire and each city has 5-10 towns on each city when you start the Golden age. You would produce 500-2000 hammers more per Golden age in that case. Per city you would have produced 50-100 base hammers more than you would with the other setup.

I never whip unless the city has 2 or more food&sea resources. I could farm grasslands and floodplains on cities with no food resources, just to whip more tough. So I am not sure which one is best tactic :) What do you all say?

I whip on recently captured cities to rush theaters for cultural borders or whip for basic defending units. On coastal cities with mass sea resources, I whip nonstop every 30 turns when +1 unhappiness disappears.

Thank you, I'm glad I could help.

Golden ages last 16 turns on marathon.

I've run a test in worldbuilder, and posted it in the articles section, which tends to bear out what I was saying earlier about growth first.

Your point about golden ages is pretty broad. What is important is not necessarily that your civ as a whole produces more hammers during a golden age, but that the cities that need production have enough. 5 extra hammers in a city for 16 turns = 80 hammers, which isn't all that significant in the long term, in my opinion. Certainly not more significant than an early boost to science and production through farms.

By 990 ad, my cottage/farm city produced over 1000 more gold than my cottage only city. This is pretty huge in the early game, as I think you will agree.

Here is the link to my article:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=173074

Thank you, I'm glad I could help.

Golden ages last 16 turns on marathon.

I've run a test in worldbuilder, and posted it in the articles section, which tends to bear out what I was saying earlier about growth first.

Your point about golden ages is pretty broad. What is important is not necessarily that your civ as a whole produces more hammers during a golden age, but that the cities that need production have enough. 5 extra hammers in a city for 16 turns = 80 hammers, which isn't all that significant in the long term, in my opinion. Certainly not more significant than an early boost to science and production through farms.

By 990 ad, my cottage/farm city produced over 1000 more gold than my cottage only city. This is pretty huge in the early game, as I think you will agree.

Here is the link to my article:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=173074

Firstly, I think your test with 10 farms and 10 cottages and whether to build cottages on grassland&floodplains or hills&plains are about 2 slightly different things. I don't see the connection clearly. I see your point about growing quickly, but perhaps I can work on a cottage on floodplains(hmm, yea I guess i get less growth then), but still better growth then a grassland cottage or plains farm.

Can you test this out then? Lets say a city has 4 grassland, 4 foodplains, and 4 plains. All those are on river. Should I farm the floodplains or cottage them? Should I farm 1 foodplain then 1 cottage on the other foodplain? Should I approach population limit, by alternating farms and cottages as population increases or growing first to a specific population(i.e. you picked 6) then putting all guys on cottages?

As far as gold ages go, in my opinion, 16 turns is really long. I thought it was just 10 on marathon, but if I will have 2-4 golden ages overall throughout the game, that is a huge boost to production in my opinion. For a single golden age, that would make 16x (5to10townspercity) x (10-20cities) = 800-3200 more hammers. Late golden ages with more towns would make even more hammers. An average 1600 hammers would make mass units(10 redcoats) sufficient to wipe out at least a single civilization. I think you are underestimating the power of golden ages. Even if initially farming grassland&floodplains might give out more gold in the short term, at one point after sufficient population has been reached, i.e. 5-6 city size, I would like to switch the roles and build cottages on floodplains and farms on plains. I would be losing some worker turns, but with some massive worker army, things will be quick. 5 workers can build cottages&farms in 1 turn on marathon with Hagia Sophia. Without Hagia Sophia, 4 workers can work 2 turns. You can rechange the farms into cottages in around 10-15 turns, which is not much for a few cities.

4 golden ages???


i almost never use GP for a golden age, and if i do, it's in the late game, and that's only one time.
Say you get the taj mahal, that makes 2 golden ages.
That would be my maximum...

4 golden ages???


i almost never use GP for a golden age, and if i do, it's in the late game, and that's only one time.
Say you get the taj mahal, that makes 2 golden ages.
That would be my maximum...

I usually have 3-4 in my games with TajMahal. I get useless artists sometimes, imho, their best use is triggering golden ages with prophets&merchants.

Later in the game (by which point you've probably got electricity) replacing riverside towns with watermills gets you extra production. If you're financial you still get the commerce bonus with watermills.

Unless you have a lot of them, if you're building cottages on flood plains, I say you're doing the wrong thing. It takes two citizens working cottages on flood plains to produce enough excess food to work one more tile (6 food means 3 tiles can be worked). However, 2 citizens working farmed flood plains produce enough extra food for 2 more citizens, who can work tiles that don't even produce any food. That means you could put 2 cottages on normal plains tiles, and still have enough for one more citizen (4 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 10).


IMHO, i think there is an error in your math.

Using cottages on 2 foodplains and 1 plain, you get 3 cottages and +1 surplus food for 3 tiles, what you said is not a good idea.

But your idea, using farms on 2 foodplains and cottages over 3 plains, provides the same 3 cotages and +1 surplus food... but taking 5 tiles for that!

Getting the same result in fewer tiles is better, so i think the VirusMonster approach is better. And there is also another advantage:

For a direct comparison, lets say a city has 15 usable tiles: 10 foodplains and 5 plains.

Approach 1: 15 cottages, with a net result of +5 food surplus

Approach 2: 2 farms on foodplains every 5 tiles, cottages on the rest. Thats 6 farms on foodplains, 4 cootages on foodplains, and 5 cottages on plains. Result: 9 cottages, +11 food surplus.

So in approach 1 you get 6 more cottages (15 vs 9), in approach 2 you get 6 more food (11 vs 5).

Imho, in a commerce city (and we are talking about commerce cities, arent we?), 6 cottages are worth more than 6 food. 6 more food would give you only 3 more cottages somewhere else, or 3 more specialists, which, no matter if they are Artists, Scientists or Merchants, would never produce the same output as 6 cottages (towns) could.

So, unless this is a GP farm (where specialists are welcome) or you need to use whip frequently, or im mising some point (most probably :), i think cottages on foodplains are an excellent idea.

Judging from other posts Remowilliams uses poprush for the majority of building thus farming floodplains for excess pop means you can whip the extra population without affecting the plains cottages. But I guess I'll have to wait from Remowilliams to see if I got that right.

This is a very controversial topic, and I am not sure what is best. I like the idea of growing fast tough. Especially on higher difficulty levels, you want to grow fast so you can whip 1 axeman.

Only after I reach a certain population, 70-80% of city happiness limit, I will slowly start converting some farms into cottages.