Tile yield optimization

How do you judge what to build on a particular tile?

1. Farming a river hill tile is I suppose more acceptable than mining it because Civil Service comes early enough. Hydro Plant makes that a 2/3 by the end, 3/4 if on a desert with Petra. Should you convert to mine once Fertilizer is available

2. Always Trading post on a flat Jungle tile. If it's a Jungle hill, clearing and mining is better. Ends up with a decent amount of everything but not a lot of anything in particular. Except Brazil I guess.

3. What to do with bad 1/1 plains with no river/lake? I generally only hope I can uncover something there (Horses) but otherwise, I tend not to bother with them. Is Trading post viable on those tiles or should you try and save them for Academy/Manufactory/Holy Site?

4. A bit unrelated, I don't suppose you can in any way trick the algorithm that selects next tile to expand to other than just buying the tile you need most immediately?

stormtrooper412 said:

How do you judge what to build on a particular tile?

1. Farming a river hill tile is I suppose more acceptable than mining it because Civil Service comes early enough. Hydro Plant makes that a 2/3 by the end, 3/4 if on a desert with Petra. Should you convert to mine once Fertilizer is available

2. Always Trading post on a flat Jungle tile. If it's a Jungle hill, clearing and mining is better. Ends up with a decent amount of everything but not a lot of anything in particular. Except Brazil I guess.

3. What to do with bad 1/1 plains with no river/lake? I generally only hope I can uncover something there (Horses) but otherwise, I tend not to bother with them. Is Trading post viable on those tiles or should you try and save them for Academy/Manufactory/Holy Site?

4. A bit unrelated, I don't suppose you can in any way trick the algorithm that selects next tile to expand to other than just buying the tile you need most immediately?

Click to expand...

1. I just do this according to need, but I often have mines because I'm a production whore. I also like to be able to switch full production for wonders, and having a 2/2 or 3/2 tile isn't always best for that type of optimization.

2. I hate jungles, but follow those same moves.

3. I usually farm on plains, just for a slight food increase. I don't like putting great people improvements on plains because then they're not supporting their own food cost.

4. I think having the tech researched for the resource you want impacts that algorithm. Sometimes I forget to get quarries and wonder why I'm not expanding to marble.

Sometimes I park units on the tile I want to expand into. I'm not sure if it really does any good.

stormtrooper412 said:

1. Farming a river hill tile is I suppose more acceptable than mining it because Civil Service comes early enough. Hydro Plant makes that a 2/3 by the end, 3/4 if on a desert with Petra. Should you convert to mine once Fertilizer is available

Click to expand...

For me, it's a math test for each city. I want to be able to go 100% into production mode at certain times (when building a Wonder or WF is going on). I should know when those situations are coming up. So, I figure out how many high food tiles I have, and that determines how many mines to build and how many farms to build.

Example: WF is coming up in 20 turns. Expo #2 will be population 12 at that time. This means, assuming no trade routes, that I need 2 food for every 1 population. Let's assume I just have a granary. The granary pays for 1 mine. Now I have 11 population which requires 22 food. Start with your best food tile(s) and pair them up with a low food high production tile. You want to find a combination that maximizes production without going negative in food. At the end of the day, you'll have a few tiles in the middle that can go either direction.

So the short answer to your question, assuming you have more than a couple of those tiles is………I usually do both. High food cities get more mines. Low food cities get more farms.

(As an aside, I always go full production with a Golden Age for WF, try to get every other civ in a war 5 turns prior, AND I have every settler chopping trees that I've saved for this purpose. This almost always works on Deity, with the rare exception of an early runaway.)

One thing I discovered recently (I must be slow) is that you can do things like clear marsh/forest to force the game to choose the underlying tile earlier. I have had many 2nd/3rd ring tiles that will be good farms if they would just be acquired, and I've noticed that if I clear them the priority instantly changes.

stormtrooper412 said:

How do you judge what to build on a particular tile?

1. Farming a river hill tile is I suppose more acceptable than mining it because Civil Service comes early enough. Hydro Plant makes that a 2/3 by the end, 3/4 if on a desert with Petra. Should you convert to mine once Fertilizer is available

2. Always Trading post on a flat Jungle tile. If it's a Jungle hill, clearing and mining is better. Ends up with a decent amount of everything but not a lot of anything in particular. Except Brazil I guess.

3. What to do with bad 1/1 plains with no river/lake? I generally only hope I can uncover something there (Horses) but otherwise, I tend not to bother with them. Is Trading post viable on those tiles or should you try and save them for Academy/Manufactory/Holy Site?

4. A bit unrelated, I don't suppose you can in any way trick the algorithm that selects next tile to expand to other than just buying the tile you need most immediately?

Click to expand...

1. Usually yes river hills are turned to farm due to civil service providing a double food instead of a single hammer. However, a city with very little production (grassland) could use the mine instead. A better balance will always be better than 1 food among a ton of it.
Fertilizer comes too late to make it impactful to change your farm into a mine. Could help for Spaceship production I guess.

2. There is no rule for this. You get a mine only if you don't have enough hammers. If you have enough working hills/horses, get a trade post instead.

3. Farm or GP improvements.

4. The algorithm goes by some priority lists, you can influence it by clearing terrain and buying some adjacent tiles.