Where do you place your academies?

You should place them on the strongest tiles you have , excepting the ones where the alternative improvement cannot be forgone.
Camp resources are good candidates. Wheat or Deer are good because Granary. Placing on something mineable is safe when you're drowning in alternates; Hill or Grass Iron, Stone are functional. Deer is pretty much the best.

Place on Deer. Then any Camp. Then good tiles you wanna work like Horses and Cattle if this is much before Fertilizer. Then flatland resources offering a mine/quarry, then the ones on hills. Then the pasture critters when nothing is left.

"strongest tiles you have" are "the ones I will keep working no matter what job this city is directed to for the rest of the game". If this wasn't the cap you'd have to ponder food vs. hammers, maybe even gold (post-Fertilizer Free Thought), but it's the cap, so just replace all the +1p1g camps and the +2p mines and quarries, and +1f1p pastures when you're havin none of that. Pastures are the easier choice than mines , though, because the mineable tiles are worse than the pasture ones, plus Fertilizer is who even gets that tech.

Placing on Lux is almost always terrible; the theory would be the gold you're working, except selling that lux is more gold. Gold and Silver with pantheon , in theory. For an early triggered Scientist , I guess? Maybe ? I doubt it.

Horseshoe_Hermi said:

Place on Deer. Then any Camp. Then good tiles you wanna work like Horses and Cattle if this is much before Fertilizer. Then flatland resources offering a mine/quarry, then the ones on hills. Then the pasture critters when nothing is left.

Click to expand...

You better sacrifice 1 food instead of 1 hammer. Hence going on sheep at best instead.

If you have deer on a grassland tile I think you get 3 food and 2 hammers from the forest and the camp. You can chop the forest for quick hammers and lose the 1 hammer from the forest tile. Planting the academy means you get a 4 food 8 science tile or on plains it is 3 food 1 hammer 8 science. That is probably the best outcome

One game, I had a truly HORRIBLE start; starting bias OFF, Elizabeth, river coastal hill, with adjacent mountain, on a 16 tile island-12 of which were snow tiles; the water tiles made that Arctic island worth settling, crab, whale, pearl, and 2 fish; surrounded by deep ocean .

Until Astronomy, it was an extreme case of Gilligan's Island on a huge map; an involuntary OCC .

My GSs made Academies in the snow tiles, nowhere else to put them, and we had indoor heating and plumbing before the Classic Age .