Only Noobs generate their own food surplus, good players have City States do it!

Some thoughts on the Civ 5 economy, after a couple days of playing a bunch of games on Immortal difficulty:

* Building costs are insanely high, production is lower than it was in Civ4 (worse specials, mine gives +1 not +2, etc). Also, production bonus %ages that you can get in Civ5 are lower than they were in Civ4.

There are two things that we should take from this.:
1) Your ability to build buildings is extremely limited, so only build the most critical ones. Don't build ones that give stupid bonuses and then cost you 2 gold in upkeep. Also, specialize cities. Build money bonuses is only one city that has trading posts. Build barracks and forge in only one city to make military, etc.
2) Mines are very helpful, as is working plains and hills tiles. Plains is better than grassland. Hills is better than plains. You should not ever farm a non-river tile. +1 food is much worse than the alternatives (except maybe right at game start). River tiles give +2 with civil service, so they are worth it. However, what we really want is not river grasslands, its river hills (2/2 with farm) and river plains (3/1 with farm). The presence of the hammer means it also gives another hammer in a golden age.


* A Maritime city state alliance can produce your food surplus FAR FAR more efficiently than farms, granaries, watermills, etc. Do a quest for a maritime city state and then gift them 250 or 500 gold. (Its worth selling resources to the AI to get gold to do this. The city state alliance will give you resources so you get them back). You get A bonus of food to every city that grows bigger with each age you enter, and its bigger in the capital as well.

The result of this is that you can focus a lot of your population on spaces that make good production and gold, not food surplus. The costs to grow city size start to get huge anyway after 6-8 or so. Run scientists, and utilize spaces with mines and trading posts, as well as farmed river plains and hills.


Maritime City states are they way to get your food. Do NOT build crappy granaries and watermills that cost 100 hammers and gold upkeep! Hammers are too scarce! Build science and happy buildings instead and get your food surplus from maritime city states!


* GOLDEN AGES (the way to actually be able to have decent production and gold income). Golden Ages are key to actually being able to build something in a reasonable time. You should aim to get a hammer and a coin from every space.

Non River grassland? Pile of crap that you shouldnt ever use.

Non River plains or hill? Trading post it. These are decent if you run out of good river spots and special tiles to work.

River grassland or floodplain? Ugh. I find myself trying to Academy some of these. Farm them and use them to grow to decent size, after which you stop using them and make specialists instead.

River plains or Hill. YAY! These are good tiles!! Farm it for good food with some production and gold.


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Civ V is like Civ III, not IV!! You mine land, you dont farm it! You want to get at least 1 hammer and 1 commerce from any space you will use, so that a golden age makes it good! You can get a bunch of food from a maritime city state. You dont need a ton of farms!
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Finally, in the Renaissance on you can get the Rationalism civic that makes trading posts give +2 science. If you arent going for a Piety based culture win, this is the way to go. +2 gold and +2 science is an amazing improvement for a tile! At the very least, make a gold and science city full of trading posts that has your science and gold bonus buildings!

If you go Piety tree instead (another strong tree), then you will instead focus on large excess happiness. This rolls into culture and triggers faster golden ages. At this point I would highly recommend investing heavily into either Piety or Rationalism, these definitely seem like the strongest pre-industrial trees to me.

+100 on farming hills, and pretty much everything next to a river.

What about Patronage as a tree? It seems to be worthwhile for the extra food, and though I haven't got the great people one yet that seems good as well.

es4 said:

+100 on farming hills, and pretty much everything next to a river.

What about Patronage as a tree? It seems to be worthwhile for the extra food, and though I haven't got the great people one yet that seems good as well.

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I agree, patronage is reallllly good. Free great people and research!

I think that you should not spend any policies on the first three trees, and then you should focus on Patronage, and one of Piety or Rationalism, depending on strategy.

So I've formed friendships/alliances with a few of the maritime city states, but I don't seem to be receiving any food from them in my cities. I check the diplomacy screen to confirm, and the tooltip says I should be receiving X food in my capital and Y food in each other city (age dependent), but there's no indication of this in any of my city interfaces. Is there something I'm missing here? The other two city-state types seem to work just fine.

The food is added directly to the city's base hex.

There seems to be diminishing returns for the maritime city state bonus. The first city state gives you +2 food (+4 in capital) but the second one only givesy you +1 (+2). This is in the demo. But I agree, maritime city states seems to be the way to go. They also scale with bigger empires. The bigger your empire, the better maritime city states get.

ChristofferC said:

There seems to be diminishing returns for the maritime city state bonus. The first city state gives you +2 food (+4 in capital) but the second one only givesy you +1 (+2). This is in the demo. But I agree, maritime city states seems to be the way to go. They also scale with bigger empires. The bigger your empire, the better maritime city states get.

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They all give you the same bonus, and the bonus depends on what age youre in. However, even though in later ages you are getting a large bonus, there is still somewhere where the interface tells you its giving +1/+2, dont remember where but it is wrong. When you hit Renaissance age they each give +3/+5. So with two of them thats 6 food per city and 10 in the capital!

I agree with Alexfrog. Maritime city-states can feed the majority of your population.

Yes, quite powerful, I wrote a quick strat guide for taking advantage of City states and it pretty much mimics this.

http://apolyton.net/content.php/126-CITY-STATES-who-s-your-buddy

Great post Alex. I agree that Maritimes city-states are great. In one game, I had 2 of them giving food. My cities grew like crazy.

My only issues with your post is a) getting to Friendly/allied isn't that easy in the early game. b) I would thing that non-river grassland would be good for trade posts at best in a nice gold city.

I do get however that plains are better in Civ 5 especially with crappy production.

@rah

This is really a great review, especially for not going Aristocracy with Egypt.

I will need to try the direct Patronage approach.

Maybe one difference if I find culture bonus in huts early I will go for tradition and aristocracy for the additional wonder boost. But of course not finish tradition but going Patronage after. If I don't get it before building Stonehenge then I will save it for Patronage.
I think the key is really selling ALL resources. Because if you don't do that and aren't playing Greece or gold Civs you have too little gold early.

I'll do the Aristocracy after I finish the patronage branch whichever civ I'm playing because wonders are really important and any boost to do them faster is good. The first three patronage ones are more important because the faster you can prime the pump the faster you can start doing things to defend your civ. If you start next to someone at the higher levels, like the mongols, they can get quite aggressive early before you're ready. And I don't like building that first settler till I have those first three patronage ones.

Do you mean create one specialist city full of gold and science buildings or two seperate cities?

Yea, golden ages are pretty powerful in civ5, I found myself doing whatever I could to get them in 1 game. Greece is pretty good for that because after the 1st GG I just tossed the rest of em into the golden age pool... Alex's military is strong enough.

As Siam and allies with maritime states, you really don't need any of those buildings. Quite an interesting post.

Though you can't always go this way. There's only one maritime city state out of 6 on my starting continent in my current game as Arabia. I feel the need for some more food. Nonetheless, I really like this post.

Surely a plain is worse than a grassland:

3 farmed plains = 2F/1H * 3

The food cancels with the worker for each tile, so you ultimately get 3H.

2 farmed grass = 3F * 2 = 2 surplus F

That 2 surplus F can feed a mined hill for 3H.

They are thus basically equivalent, except that the higher food ultimately has more growth potential. You can have a bunch of these 3F tiles to build your population which can then work the mines, and as your workers that have nothing else to do continue building more 3F tiles, you can grow ultra fast in comparison. Having a bunch of break-even food tiles means you can only ever have +2, whereas the grassland guy could be at +10 or whatever by temporarily maxing food. You also can use trading posts at no loss.

Now, either one of these are certainly not the most spectacular tiles, and a river is preferable in either case, but we already knew that. Like sure a banana-floodplain-cow-bread-forest-uranium-hill would be an above average tile...but that doesn't mean grassland has suddenly become the new desert.

Especially early game, when each population more means that many more beakers...a companion cavalry world domination tactic hinges on getting them quickly, and sitting around accumulating gold so that one day you can buy the food you could've already had seems to not be so good.

Yes, if you want every game to end before gunpowder, yes the greeks are excellent. But if you want to play a longer game you have to set the stage for it. Specialists really help later because there are policies that make them consume less food, count 50% against your happy hits. So if you want to run a full bank of specialists you need a heck of a lot of food. If you rely on just farms you won't be working enough production, money, or settled hexs. (at least till quite later when some of the techs make food easier.) Getting it from CSs is cheaper. Yes if you don't have access to Maritime CSs early, it just means you have to search them out. They're out there. With the freebie happy from the earth wonders, you should be out exploring anyway.

Seanner said:

Surely a plain is worse than a grassland:

3 farmed plains = 2F/1H * 3

The food cancels with the worker for each tile, so you ultimately get 3H.

2 farmed grass = 3F * 2 = 2 surplus F

That 2 surplus F can feed a mined hill for 3H.

Click to expand...

That comparison is true only until Civil Service (which is quite early). At that point farms become more effective, while mines stay the same. At that point your plains setup gains 3 food while the grass/hill setup only gains 2.

No matter how you try to change the tile counts, plains/farms will have an advantage. You basically want to maximize the number of farms compared to mines, which (for a given amount of desired food and production) means that base production is better than base food as it reduces the number of mines you need to achieve the desired production.

In general, too, production is better than food. Once you get to higher sizes, food is only giving your tiny fractions of a new population point while hammers are as effective as ever. Things are expensive! You need lots of hammers.

Finally, it's critical to have at least one hammer on as many tiles as possible, because of golden ages, which are common and powerful. In a golden age, the plains setup gets 3 bonus hammers and the grass/hill setup only gets 1!

Also, given that GAs are so frequent in this game, you want to mix up the tiles as much as possible. When the GA comes, two 2-1-1 tiles are better than one 3-0-0 and one 1-2-2.

Is it just me our is Plains, River, Wheat the about the best tile? Especially early in the game.

2F,1H,1G