I understand a lot of this game, but I don't understand one key concept, improvements. When you start a city do you food, gold, etc even if you don't build improvements? If you build improvements do you need to put a citizen on that tile for it to work? Why is it that when you place a citizen on a farm tile, you still lose food?

Let me try...

At start, every tile is unimproved. They provide food, production, gold respectively, but it depends upon a tile - you won't get food out of a plains hill, etc. Your very first citizen contributes by working over that tile (think of it as hunting for food or gathering fruit and peanuts). After you build a Worker, you can improve that tile. The tile now provides more food/production/gold (depends what you built - cottage provides commerce, farm - food). Now, to reap benefits from the tile, you must assign one of the citizens to the tile.

The second question I don't understand at all... But:

1: It's just that the bigger your population is, the more food they need, and if you can't leverage your growth with building enough farms, they will soon starve back. Health also steals your food.
2: Maybe you lose food because you assign a grown city to not-producing food tiles?

And remember - Civilopedia is your best friend. If you don't know how the whole system works, try Tutorial. You can find it in a normal Civilization 4 (that's it, no such scenario at Warlords/BTS) in main menu. (Note, however, that tutorial won't tell you how a normal game should work. It has only to let you understand the game, not to make you an uber player.)

First off welcome to CivFanatics and the world of Civilization.

I'll now do my best to answer your questions.

A city automatically works the tile it is on, to include providing access to any special resource in that tile. However, you get NO SPECIAL bonuses from this resource like you would if you built the appropriate tile improvement on it. So basically a city will provide you with some hammers, food and commerce, but not much. If the city is over a resource you get access to that resource and whatever bonus the unimproved resource would provide (usually +1 hammer or +1 Commerce or +1 Food).

Next in order for a tile in a city's fat cross or workable area to be worked, you have to have a citizen working it. Each tile generates a certain amount of base hammers, commerce and/or food. Building an improvement on a tile will significantly increase one or sometimes two of these numbers. However some improvements will increase one number and descrease another (ie a forge will give the tile +1 Hammer, but also subtract 1 food).

Now to anser your last question, you need to understand that each citizen in a city including specialists that are not working tiles in the fatcross consume two food each. Unhealthiness in a city also consumes additional food at a rate of 1 food per point of unhealthiness above yuor healthiness level. Also some tiles naturally provide more food than others, and therefore when they are improved by a farm will provide even more food, and some tiles like deserts don't provide any food at all.

Well I hope I answered all of your questions. If not feel free to send me a PM or post them here.

Building an improvement on a tile will significantly increase one or sometimes two of these numbers. However some improvements will increase one number and descrease another (ie a forge will give the tile +1 Hammer, but also subtract 1 food).



I think you mean to say workshop, not forge. Forges are a city improvement.

Anyway the key point in the above answers is that each working citizen or working specialist must eat 2 food every turn. Therefore the more food, hammers or gold you can pack into a single tile, the more productive that citizen is for you. For example it's wasteful for a citizen to be working a tile that only has 1 food and 1 hammer. He is not even feeding himself and only giving you 1 measly hammer for building things.

But if he is working a tile with 3 food and a village, he is producing 1 extra food that can go to someone else or help grow the city plus the gold from the village.

ok, that helps a lot, but so usually you build farms first than cottages? and if I build a farm over a tile that has coins and food, do still get the coins

ok, that helps a lot, but so usually you build farms first than cottages? and if I build a farm over a tile that has coins and food, do still get the coins

yup, think of it this way. Improvements give bonuses to the tile.

Farms give +1 food.
Mines give +2 production.
cottages give +1 coins, hamlets +2 coins, villages +3 coins, towns +4 coins.


So if you have a tile with 2 food, and 1 production, and build a farm, you have 2+1 food and 1 production. Simple as that.


and building cottages or farms first, depends on the city. Pigs, sheep, seafood, etc. all give you 5 or 6 food. That is a LOT of food. A +3 bonus is the same as if you had 3 farms built. If you have enough of these you need absolutely no farms. You should more likely just build cottages instead.

Another thing is cottages get better over time. So the earlier you build them the better. So even if a city does not have much food, you might want to build a couple cottages before farms.

Ok, awesome. One more thing... what do roads do besides connect resources between cities? I notice that the AI builds them in cities. Whats the point?

they increase movement speed on the terrain..... that's generally a good thing right? :)

Until your enemies get Commando Promotion. But also, the more roads you have the harder to sabatoge a connection between city-city, city-resource.

Roads double movement speed (triple with Engineering). Besides connecting resources and cities, it lets you quickly move soldiers to needed areas when an attack by barbarians or an enemy Civ is imminent.

I notice that the AI builds them in cities. Whats the point?
That's not right, you get roads in cities automatically, the same is with railroad.

Yes, once you discover The Wheel and Railroad, you get that in your cities automatically. Note that you only get the movement bonus when moving from a roaded tile to another. I think if you move from Road to Railroad or vice versa you only get the road bonus.

You also used to get a commerce bonus for each roaded tile. Not anymore.
Think that ended after Civ2. That's why so many long-time Civ players still
seem to road and rail everything. Old habits die hard.;)

It was in Civ3 also.