Most valuable unique tile improvement?

TheGuineaPig · Apr 27, 2015

It's definitely the terrace farm, either in singleplayer or multiplayer. It always gives you a huge boost to early hammers and food, which just makes snowballing effortless.

More important than that, it makes Inca the only civ that can effectively turn otherwise worthless land into productive cities (Polynesia being the other candidate). In Civ, your starting land is much more important to your success than what civ you get... but with the Inca you can turn otherwise garbage terrain into not only good, but phenomenal cities. And then you get bonuses to improving all the tiles in that terrain, and moving and fighting in it. The Inca are absurdly strong, a top tier singleplayer civ and imo the best multiplayer civ.

deidre4kd · May 18, 2015

Chateau are the best for culture victory.

Delnar_Ersike · May 18, 2015

deidre4kd said:
Chateau are the best for culture victory.

Both Moai and Brazilwood Camps are better for culture victory because they are a lot more spammable. As good as Chateau cultural yields are, the fact that they cannot be built en masse makes them a fairly poor UI to rely on for CV.

Heck, I'd even say that Terrace Farms are as good for CV as Chateaux with the added advantage of being good for everything else, too: Terrace Farms' improved growth means you can work more specialist slots sooner, which means you can work Guilds slots early and consistently.

den1998 · May 18, 2015

I havent played incans yet, im not sure i understand the fuss?

If no mountains at the start they are regular farms, albeit ones you can put away from rivers initially?

Delnar_Ersike · May 18, 2015

den1998 said:
I havent played incans yet, im not sure i understand the fuss?

If no mountains at the start they are regular farms, albeit ones you can put away from rivers initially?

Not just away from rivers, but on hills tiles. A terrace farm on a hills tile makes that tile give either 1 food and 3 hammers or 2 food and 2 hammers. This combination of food and hammers is crucial earlygame, since it lets you increase production on your city without slowing down its growth; remember, growth means science and faster access to more production for the entire game, with your options broadening as specialists become available. AFAIK, most experienced players will put regular farms on hills whenever possible for this very reason, unless their lands are really lacking production. In Civ5, a lot of the most boring bonuses are also the most useful.

If you are not playing on a naval map, it is fairly likely that you will have a mountain tile near your capitol and/or your first three expansions: you will want to settle near mountain tiles anyway for Observatories and the extra defensibility. With a single mountain, a terrace farm away from a river will give as much food as if it were receiving the Civil Service bonus. Once you start considering two mountains and/or being riverside in addition to neighboring a mountain, Terrace Farms can basically act like Wheat on hills.

twilson1972 · May 19, 2015

Delnar_Ersike said:
Not just away from rivers, but on hills tiles. A terrace farm on a hills tile makes that tile give either 1 food and 3 hammers or 2 food and 2 hammers. This combination of food and hammers is crucial earlygame, since it lets you increase production on your city without slowing down its growth; remember, growth means science and faster access to more production for the entire game, with your options broadening as specialists become available. AFAIK, most experienced players will put regular farms on hills whenever possible for this very reason, unless their lands are really lacking production. In Civ5, a lot of the most boring bonuses are also the most useful.

If you are not playing on a naval map, it is fairly likely that you will have a mountain tile near your capitol and/or your first three expansions: you will want to settle near mountain tiles anyway for Observatories and the extra defensibility. With a single mountain, a terrace farm away from a river will give as much food as if it were receiving the Civil Service bonus. Once you start considering two mountains and/or being riverside in addition to neighboring a mountain, Terrace Farms can basically act like Wheat on hills.

Yes i farm river hills generally, however i do like having some mines.

Do non-river terraces get the civil service or fertilizer buff?

Browd · May 19, 2015

Fertilizer buff.

Solutionfinder · May 19, 2015

I`m going to go for Terrace farm. It`s an awesome improvement, especially on tiles surrounded with more than 2 mountain tiles. Just think for a second, you can grow your cities into the sky on HILLS. What is better than that? Having from 2 - 7 food + 2 hammers is just amazing, not to mention how hard is to conquer these cities on hills, surrounded with mountains. You just form a line of units to block the path and have ranged units behind of them to shoot. Movement on hills is also very limited for your opponent.

Agree on Polder being better than Kasbah but whenever I played Netherlands those marsh and floodplain tiles were very scarce to say the least.

consentient · May 19, 2015

Athenaeum said:
Btw, has anyone noticed that civs which have unique tile improvements tend to have shoddy UA's?

Morocco, Portugal, France, Dutch, etc.

It's a BIT off-topic, but the Dutch UA is much-maligned and a wee bit misunderstood I feel. The happiness and gold saved in the first T150 turns is usually sizeable. The UA and the Sea Beggar are the reasons to play as William. Polders are not great.

Delnar_Ersike · May 19, 2015

consentient said:
It's a BIT off-topic, but the Dutch UA is much-maligned and a wee bit misunderstood I feel. The happiness and gold saved in the first T150 turns is usually sizeable. The UA and the Sea Beggar are the reasons to play as William. Polders are not great.

It's still one of those abilities that is actually detrimental in multiplayer: while players might be willing to trade single copy luxuries with any other civ, they are much less likely to do so with Netherlands purely because of the UA. The UA relies on AI or player stupidity.
The fix would be to make both players receive the happiness bonus. When Netherlands is trading away all of its copies of a luxury to multiple players, all players receive the same happiness bonus, while Netherlands would receive the combined happiness bonus (eg. if 3 copies are being traded away to 3 people, Netherlands gets +6 happiness). It would be like Sweden's UA, only for luxury resource happiness. However, it would enable a lot of counterintuitive play, eg. people would prefer to leave a certain number of luxuries unimproved to make sure they maximize happiness; in turn, this could be solved by having Netherlands give and gain +1 happiness from all traded luxuries (+2 would be too powerful), a UA that retains the original's intent while expanding its viability without making it more powerful.

I'd rather we get back on topic though, this thread is supposed to be about UI's, not Netherlands' UA.

ToothedBomb · May 19, 2015

Athenaeum said:
And I consider the Inca's UA to be shoddy too. Then again I don't typically build a lot of roads, but tend to rely on harbors.

Ignoring terrain movement costs for hills is amazing. It comes in handy during warfare, improving tiles and scouting. It's a tremendous advantage.

Sebulous · May 19, 2015

joncnunn said:
Assuming you have the Incan & Spanish DLC, the Incan Terrace Farm.

Out of curiosity as a relatively new player with some experience (won my first Emperor game recently) isn't it a bit counter intuitive to build the terrace farm? I understand that they give a lot of food to your city, especially if bordering a mountain but where do you get the production from? Is the strategy to only build a few if the city has many hills and save the rest for your mines or is the general strategy to use all the extra population you're getting to spam specialists and get some production from there?

Browd · May 19, 2015

You will get 2 hammers from each terrace farm (base yield of any hill) plus the food bonus, which is regular farm yield and +1 food for each adjacent mountain tile. Not only does then food support greater population growth, but you can assign the additional citizens to work regular mined hills (not adjacent to mountains).

Delnar_Ersike · May 19, 2015

Sebulous said:
Out of curiosity as a relatively new player with some experience (won my first Emperor game recently) isn't it a bit counter intuitive to build the terrace farm? I understand that they give a lot of food to your city, especially if bordering a mountain but where do you get the production from? Is the strategy to only build a few if the city has many hills and save the rest for your mines or is the general strategy to use all the extra population you're getting to spam specialists and get some production from there?

It's not just specialists. Let's say you have two plains hills, both 3 :c5production:

, plus your city tile. If you build mines on both hills, they will each give 4 :c5production:

, but you would need 4 :c5food:

to cover the food consumption of the two citizens working those hill tiles, while your city tile only provides 2 :c5food:

. This means that even though you have two mine'd hills, you can only get 4 :c5production:

in total from them, because you can only provide for one citizen's food consumption. If you build terrace farms on both hills, they will each give 1 :c5food:

3

, so a total of 2 :c5food:

6

. Since the food from the terrace farmed hills and the city's tile's food covers the food consumption of the citizens working both hills tiles, you'll get 6 :c5production:

in total from the two hills tiles.
Things are obviously a bit more complicated in real scenarios, with mountains and civil service rivers and surrounding terrain shifting things around a bit, but the simple example I gave does largely hold up so long as you have the population to spare (which is more often the case in the early- and mid-game when running Tradition than when running Liberty). Usually, every two extra food you can get from your tiles means being able to support one more population in addition to growing faster, so if you have a 4 :c5food:

tile as well in my example, you will get 8 :c5production:

from the two mines vs. 2 :c5food:

6

. That extra 2 :c5food:

could be used to support a population that will work another improved plains hill, which will turn your 2 :c5food:

6

income into 1 :c5food:

9

, which definitely beats the two mines' output of 8 :c5production:

.

Besides specialists, the other important thing to remember is that science primarily comes from population, so having a larger population, even if they are not working specialist slots, usually means more science. Civ5 BNW places a huge important on science, so having even four extra population in your empire thanks to terrace farms can mean more than the extra production you'd get from mines.

Aheadatime · May 20, 2015

Terrace farm is by far the best unique improvement imo. As for the math (as it seems some people are curious about how they work), it's quite simple. Each terrace farm provides +1 food to a hill. For every mountain adjacent to that hill, you get another +1 food. If that hill is adjacent to a river/lake/oasis, you get +1 food after researching civil service. If that hill is not adjacent to a river/lake/oasis, you get +1 food after researching fertilizer. It's that simple.

The math always adds up in your favor after hitting fertilizer (minimum yield is 2 food/2 hammers), and almost always adds up in your favor before then, if you place your cities intelligently. Keep your eyes on mountainous terrain.

I've gotten extremely lucky once. I had a river hill that was tucked behind Mt Sinai, but completely inaccessible as it was literally surrounded by mountains (Mt Sinai counts as a mountain for terrace farm purposes). I had to surround my city with workers/great people and time out a caravan expiration so that it booted my worker out the turn it expired. It got booted to the surrounded hill and I was able to improve it for +8 food +3 hammers.

twilson1972 · May 20, 2015

I decided to try incans last night after looking at a few play through's.

My start had- 1 hill, with no mountains within 4 turns movement.

So, i broke my golden rule and re-rolled a few times.

I did have starts with more hills, but no mountains for capital at all in 6 restarts, so i dont understand why so many play through's show mountains everywhere.

Sebulous · May 20, 2015

Delnar_Ersike said:
It's not just specialists. Let's say you have two plains hills, both 3, plus your city tile. If you build mines on both hills, they will each give 4, but you would need 4 to cover the food consumption of the two citizens working those hill tiles, while your city tile only provides 2. This means that even though you have two mine'd hills, you can only get 4 in total from them, because you can only provide for one citizen's food consumption. If you build terrace farms on both hills, they will each give 13, so a total of 26. Since the food from the terrace farmed hills and the city's tile's food covers the food consumption of the citizens working both hills tiles, you'll get 6 in total from the two hills tiles.
Things are obviously a bit more complicated in real scenarios, with mountains and civil service rivers and surrounding terrain shifting things around a bit, but the simple example I gave does largely hold up so long as you have the population to spare (which is more often the case in the early- and mid-game when running Tradition than when running Liberty). Usually, every two extra food you can get from your tiles means being able to support one more population in addition to growing faster, so if you have a 4 tile as well in my example, you will get 8 from the two mines vs. 26. That extra 2 could be used to support a population that will work another improved plains hill, which will turn your 26 income into 19, which definitely beats the two mines' output of 8.

Besides specialists, the other important thing to remember is that science primarily comes from population, so having a larger population, even if they are not working specialist slots, usually means more science. Civ5 BNW places a huge important on science, so having even four extra population in your empire thanks to terrace farms can mean more than the extra production you'd get from mines.

Thanks for the explanation

Solutionfinder · May 20, 2015

twilson1972 said:
I decided to try incans last night after looking at a few play through's.

My start had- 1 hill, with no mountains within 4 turns movement.

So, i broke my golden rule and re-rolled a few times.

I did have starts with more hills, but no mountains for capital at all in 6 restarts, so i dont understand why so many play through's show mountains everywhere.

Make sure you have unchecked "Disable start bias"

It`s either that or you have been extremely unlucky...also check nearby area first because it doesn`t necessarily guarantee you mountains next to capitol but it surely should close by where your land is.

den1998 · May 20, 2015

I found this threads discussion on incans interesting so played a game myself..i did restart as i started in a jungle with no hills!. The second time i got a mountain range and hills

Terrace farms are very nice, i had some spots getting 5 food 2 hammers, and my capital was size 50 when i headed into space.

Im about to try celts as i want to play every civ once, i have to admit i dont think they sound very good at all (i imagine the benefit of forest faith will diminish fast), ive played all the 'top' civs first and im considering dropping back to emperor to try the celts out

Delnar_Ersike · May 20, 2015

den1998 said:
Im about to try celts as i want to play every civ once, i have to admit i dont think they sound very good at all (i imagine the benefit of forest faith will diminish fast), ive played all the 'top' civs first and im considering dropping back to emperor to try the celts out

Off-topic, but I find that the best way to play Celts is similar to playing wide Ethiopia. The +1 or +2 faith might be negligible later, but it's vital for securing a good pantheon and religion early on. Pictish Warriors are not that good to rush with, though they are still useful. Ceilidh Halls are extra happiness, which is always nice for wide, but they are Opera House replacements, which aren't as essential as Monuments (Ethiopia), Shrines (Maya), Markets (Arabia), Banks (Persia), Libraries (China), or Temples (Songhai/Egypt).

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