Tile Improvements, Management, and Trading

Hello again,

I have 2 questions involving tile improvements that may have already been answered, but I couldn't find the answers. Feel free to link if I just missed it.

1. I tried to do the math on this in game, but I couldn't work it out for some reason. When you open your city window and look at the tiles your citizens can potentially work, there's a limit to the number of tiles out you can work. When you get to 4 or 5 tiles from your city, you can't assign a citizen to that tile thru management. For example: If you only had one huge city, does it behoove you to improve those tiles as farms if you can't assign a citizen to it, or does it only waste time and gold per turn to upkeep? Does your city only benefit from improving a tile to a farm when you can assign a citizen to it, or does assigning it to be worked merely further enhance what you get from that tile improvement? When comparing to reality, it would make sense to me that you get no benefit at all from, say, a wheat field really far away that's technically within your borders, but nobody's working it.

2. Let's say you improve a tile of Coal, for instance, and you trade with an AI Civ that you're friends with for a lump sum of gold. Then use a worker to remove that only coal mine you had, thus ending the trade. Do you know if there are any diplomatic implications such as them hating you? I wouldn't think they could get any more mad at you than if you lost that mine to pillaging via war, and how would they know they difference? I wonder if you could keep repeating that trade, destroy, rebuild as an exploit? It may seem that I'm being lazy not testing this myself, but this is something I just thought of and wondered if anyone else knew.

Thanks as always!
- M

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think,

1. Your city can work up to 3 tiles away from it, so your city cannot work the the outer tiles. However, if those tiles have strategic, luxury, or archaeology resources, you can gain benefit provided that you improve those tiles with a worker/archaeologist. For example you can use or trade the resource, gain happiness/create an artifact or landmark (keep in mind your city won't be able to work the landmark in this case) It should still cost gold in terms of maintenance for those tiles I think.

2. I don't think this would cause a diplomatic incident. This is fairly common I suppose, especially when barbarians pillage a luxury/strategic resource in the early game.

There is no maintenance cost for tile improvements. Only roads and railroads have maintenance cost.

On your second item, there are no diplomatic repercussions -- it's just a cheesy way to play. Arguably the entire game is about how to abuse the AI, and there are many ways to abuse the AI -- some are just cheesier than others.

1. So if a tile is out of range of being worked by a citizen, improving it with a farm would not be useful. Except maybe if it's wheat and you have a granary?

2. Aw, and here I thought I found a good exploit. Is stealing a worker from a city state any less "cheesy"? I'm going to play around with the improvement strategy

metellus said:

1. So if a tile is out of range of being worked by a citizen, improving it with a farm would not be useful. Except maybe if it's wheat and you have a granary?

2. Aw, and here I thought I found a good exploit. Is stealing a worker from a city state any less "cheesy"? I'm going to play around with the improvement strategy

Click to expand...

1. If the tile is more than 3 tiles away from your current city, there is no point improving a bonus resource present (unless you are planning on building a new city near it that can be worked) City buildings that give boosts to local resources also only work out to 3 tiles.

2. That is not an exploit because it carries with it its own diplomatic penalty. Namely you've just used up your only "free DOW" and so if you DOW anyone else the entire game, many of the AIs will get mad at you.