Great Engineer Idea

Hey all,
Random thought I had and was hoping for some feedback regarding its potentially application and balancing/abuse thoughts.

New Ability for GE

Agricultural Complex - Your Engineer creates a massive and innovative Agricultural Complex to bring food to the masses where it was never thought possible. Cannot be created in Snow.

This would essentially be the other side of the coin when it comes to Manufactories. It would give Engineers more flexibility then they currently have. Most people just burn them for must have wonders. Or they drop a Manufactory early to and to reap the benefits in the long run. With this ability you could boost growth, especially if you have a lot of desert/tundra. I think the Inca exemplify this idea quite well with their Terrace Farms. And realistically, most of the practical engineering efforts throughout history was dedicated to further food production. Once we had enough food then we thought about mastering the world around us.

Should it be tech dependent?

How much Food? Same as number of hammers from Manufactory? (+8? iirc)

Restriction on 1 per city?

-Dental

Not sure if this would be balanced or not, since food is so important.

Anyway, another way to go might be a new great person- perhaps a Great Philanthropist who can found a Charity Center that boosts food growth.

(Or something else if that makes no sense.)

Perhaps a Great Philanthropist could also be expended to give a temporary food and growth boost to a city.

There are those "we love the king day" moments which give cities a growth bonus, but it's totally random what the city wants imported to make them happen. And what if no one wants to trade?

Some kind of food boost would be welcomed. There are already boosts for gold, culture, production, faith, science, military unit XP, why not food? It would certainly help those late-game cities get on their feet. Something like a Great Inventor or Great Philanthropist would do the trick.

"Great Healer" would be an interesting alternative.
Alexander Flemming, Florence Nightingale and Hippocrates for example were important to the history of Medicine.

They could build a Great Person Tile improvement "Sanatorium" (Justified as Hospitals and Medical Labs provide a food boost) or heal a large number of ground units at once like the Great Admiral does for sea units.

Alternatively, if you stick with the Great Engineer option, the tile improvement could be a great "Public Works Project" reflecting, say, water purification plants, sanitation facilites or food stores and the like.

I hadn't thought of the medical take on food, but it makes sense. A breakthrough in medical science is sure to increase population.

Norman Bethune can also be added as a Great Healer.

Lots of interesting ideas.

I suppose what sparked my thought about a food bonus, and i'm sure i'm not the first, was similar to mdl's line of thought. Why is there a tile bonus for everything but food?

I am playing an OCC game as Ethiopia and i'm on a hilly island with minimal sea resources. I've only got a few GE's so far, which I used on wonders exclusively, and I don't have the money to maintain high influence with any maritime City-States. I would totally have used one of those early GE's to get a food bonus for the rest of the game.

And I had never considered a medical take on what a GE or some new Great Person could do. Personally, i'd rather see something like that turned into a National Wonder that could be built if there are Hospitals or Medical Lab in all cities or something. It would give a +food or +growth to the city or to the whole Civ.

The Hanging Gardens, which seems like the strongest wonder by a long-shot, is a good option if you want a big city with a sparse start.

Anyway, I would like to be able to set up a food source in otherwise sparse areas using food-based GPs.

I think it risks getting too powerful (the reason why it probably isn't in). It's essentially a mini-Hanging Gardens. To be balanced, it can't be as high as 8. I suppose limiting it to one per city could work, but it would be messy.

It's an interesting idea. However, I would suggest that it needs to be its own great person, not a great engineer. It would be weird for them to start doing more things than anyone else.

Due to the power of food as an output, it would probably have to output considerably less than other GP- maybe an easier to get but less powerful GP.