When to farm, when to trade post?

Like the title says, when is the appropriate time to use farms and when is it better to use trade posts?

farms when you need food and posts when you need gold?

posts on every tile in puppet cities when possible.
posts on jungles.

farms/posts on flood plains/river grasslands - depends on if the city wants to focus great people or gold.

It really depends on what you want the city to do. Gold cities will need some food and lots of posts, specialist cities need tons of food, and production cities need a good amount of food but obviously with production squares. Only the first needs lots of posts. Generalist cities can work too, doing a bit of everything, but the downside of that is that you usually end up having to buy a wide array of buildings for those cities to be effective and their upkeep will hurt your economy big time.

Another very general rule I like to follow is, I significantly favour farms on rivers and lakes simply because they produce +1 food with civil service. A trade post on a river is a waste most of the time.

Thadian's rules are good. Posts on jungles so you can create university super squares later on, posts on puppet tiles so they float your economy and since their production is kind of wasted anyway.

Edit: Oh, also, if you ever play the Iroquois, the longhouse allows for you to make some very neat trading post forest cities that give you money, production, and a tiny bit of food. Very neat, those things

Thanks for the quick and helpful responses guys

posts on rivers LOOK good - gold max. You even get bonuses to those posts later but there is a catch - nothing increases the value of "post on a river" while there is increases in value of "farm on a river" at different points. So i put farms on rivers - this makes all those hills workable and if i have room left later in the game, i go back and post them.

thadian said:

posts on rivers LOOK good - gold max. You even get bonuses to those posts later but there is a catch - nothing increases the value of "post on a river" while there is increases in value of "farm on a river" at different points. So i put farms on rivers - this makes all those hills workable and if i have room left later in the game, i go back and post them.

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I make the call on each tile, individually, as I play the game. I don't generalize and say "always put farms on this, and always put trading posts on that". Early on, you'll mostly be putting farms on the sweet river and floodplain tiles. Because you need food more to grow your population in early-mid game. But there always comes a time when your cities are well grown and you have more need for gold, and then some of those river tiles can usually be used for high-output trading posts. It's all situational. If you've improved a lot of river tiles for food, then you notice later on that your civ isn't even using some of those and doesn't need all the food, then put posts up.

I am generally a farmer except on jungle tiles, due to the university research boost. You can do more with big cities (switch to hammer production, run specialists, etc.) than you can with a TP city, though more gold is always nice. I sometimes switch over to some trading posts after Economics, the tech that grants bonus gold for TPs. Puppets for me are terrain-dependent; sometimes they need farms to grow.

Smokeybear said:

I make the call on each tile, individually, as I play the game. I don't generalize and say "always put farms on this, and always put trading posts on that". Early on, you'll mostly be putting farms on the sweet river and floodplain tiles. Because you need food more to grow your population in early-mid game. But there always comes a time when your cities are well grown and you have more need for gold, and then some of those river tiles can usually be used for high-output trading posts. It's all situational. If you've improved a lot of river tiles for food, then you notice later on that your civ isn't even using some of those and doesn't need all the food, then put posts up.

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There's also nothing stopping you from changing an improvement, so if you're working the tiles, farm everywhere until Guilds to maximise growth, then replace.

Also, trading posts are the only improvement that doesn't remove jungle, so they're always a good investment there for university towns.