Getting food into a mining town

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Sailorstick

Vanilla 1.29 - Conquest
Joined
Apr 28, 2003
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183
Location
Australia
Last game I played I set up a town in the hills surrounded by 9 gems! The only problem was that the town grew slowly and reached a max size of 9. In Civ2 I was able to use caravans to support these kinds of towns (the ONLY reason I ever used caravans) but now there are no alternatives. Especially as you can't irrigate hills anymore. Is there ANY way I can get these cities to grow?
 
well, by hills I assume you mean mountains (as hills don't support gems). What food giving terrain is there other than the hills? If its plains/grasslands, then irrigate it all, and the put railroads in it later for more irrigation. Or, you could pack you cities denser to work more squares.

Sadly, you can't trade food around in civ3.
 
You can sort of trade food around: build workers in high-food cities and then merge the workers into low-food cities. The low-food city will still need to have enough food supply to support the population added to it, but it does speed up growth immensely.

This tactic can be so powerful that it can border on exploitive.

-Sirp.
 
Originally posted by Hygro
well, by hills I assume you mean mountains (as hills don't support gems). What food giving terrain is there other than the hills? If its plains/grasslands, then irrigate it all, and the put railroads in it later for more irrigation. Or, you could pack you cities denser to work more squares.

Sadly, you can't trade food around in civ3.
Click to expand...

Well, it was about 60/40 mountains and hills with only two plains to grow from. The city was already at max population so adding workers to it would just starve them to death :eek:
 
Yes - but you can add two workers per turn for example and only one will die. This will allow you to have a city that is as large as you want. I think the record is several thousand by Bamspeedy.

It is regarded as a banned exploit in competition games.
 
Adding workers into starving cities no longer works (they got rid of this in a patch), so no more size 9600+ cities! You could add as many workers per turn as you could build. Each city (except the super city) could produce a worker every other turn or few and join them into the super city. And this is the tactic that is banned in all competition games.

You can however add workers to a city just to speed up it's growth, like Sirp was stating. Cities that are high in food (or all those 1-shield high corrupt cities), can build workers to join into the high production (but low on food) cities, to get these cities to be powerhouses much quicker. Many players don't have much of a problem with this, but there are a few (mainly from the RBE crew) that think it is exploitive, since the AI would never do this, among other reasons.
 
Sailorstick-could you post a screenshot? Sometimes it is best to build a city on the border of the mountain range, so you have more grassland/plains to irrigate, so you can work more of the mountains (especially after railroads). If there is a big block of mountains, I build on both sides of it, so there is usually enough grassland/plains to irrigate to work most, if not all of the mountains. I almost never build directly smack dab in the middle of a mountain range, unless the mountain range is just too large to build cities around it (and colonies aren't feasible).
 
Yes - I slid together two ideas. You cant increase city size indefinitely any more but you can sustain an all mountain city at maximum size working every tile by adding workers each turn. I've seen some truly awesome production from an iron works city under those circumstances.

In the tournament the rule is that you cant add workers to a starving city ie one that is already red.
 
In PTW, you can't possibly add workers into a city that is starving (population number is red). The 'join' option does not come up.

I thought they had also eliminated this in vanilla civ3 1.29, but maybe they didn't. I guess you could keep adding 1 worker into a city every turn just to get 1 more tile out of the city, but that doesn't amount to too much.
For example, you have -zero growth- or just +1 food, then join 1 worker, and you are now starving, so you can't join any more workers.
 
I'll check Bam but I thought under vanilla civ31.29 you can add - but I may well be wrong and this loophole has hopefully been closed.
 
It's funny how all the cities in your civ can share resources by being connected by roads, but not share food. Time to resurrect the Caravan. This would be so useful not just in Sailorsticks mining town, but also to enhance desert and tundra cities as well.
 
A size 9 city isn't so bad. In my currnt game, I have a city nestled in the mountains. Only two grassland tiles nearby, plus the one it sits on. It's maxed out at 9/10 population, but with the Iron Works inside, it is the most productive city in my empire.
 
A size 9 city isn't so bad. In my currnt game, I have a city nestled in the mountains. Only two grassland tiles nearby, plus the one it sits on. It's maxed out at 9/10 population, but with the Iron Works inside, it is the most productive city in my empire.
 
Originally posted by Leovigild
A size 9 city isn't so bad. In my currnt game, I have a city nestled in the mountains. Only two grassland tiles nearby, plus the one it sits on. It's maxed out at 9/10 population, but with the Iron Works inside, it is the most productive city in my empire.
Click to expand...

True, 9 is a nice size. If NYC was located in the Himalayas it probably wouldnt be as densely populated.
 
Originally posted by kaslks75
It's funny how all the cities in your civ can share resources by being connected by roads, but not share food. Time to resurrect the Caravan. This would be so useful not just in Sailorsticks mining town, but also to enhance desert and tundra cities as well.
Click to expand...

Shipping food is expensive. How many large cities lie north of the Arctic Circle? Or in the middle of deserts with no rivers nearby?
 
Originally posted by Leovigild


Shipping food is expensive. How many large cities lie north of the Arctic Circle? Or in the middle of deserts with no rivers nearby?
Click to expand...
Yep, that's why the caravans in Civ2 were so expensive.
Bamspeedy: I'll post that screenshot when I get home.
 
As you can see, tragically only one of the gems are being worked and if I try to work the gems I'll starve the town. I think I got greedy placing the town to get ALL of the gems, I should have really placed a town on both sides of the mountains.
 

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Well, not knowing where other cities are situated or terrain further away, I would have put one city 2 or 3 tiles to the northeast (on a hill and be on the coast), another city 2 tiles south of where that city is now, and a 3rd city to the northwest (most likely on that coast or freshwater I can see on the edge of the map).

But like I said, this is not knowing more about the map or where other cities may be, that could screw up my ideas (too much overlap, where the coasts are, etc).
 
Actually, 2 tiles to the southeast looks tempting. It would be somewhat close to that other city, but using those floodplains will give you alot of food to work many of those mountains.
 
Originally posted by Leovigild


Shipping food is expensive. How many large cities lie north of the Arctic Circle? Or in the middle of deserts with no rivers nearby?
Click to expand...

Right on Leovigild! I agree that it would be quite an 'expense' to support cities that are mainly comprised of desert or tundra, but I was generally thinking of those one or two cities that I always seem to have that I built because they are in a strategic location or near a resource. A colony isn't 'permanent' enough sometimes. I would like a way to take those few cities from a size 2 or 3 to maybe a 4 or 5 (so it doesn't take FOREVER to make city improvements). I would gladly spend some 'cash' to support these slightly larger cities. Sort of like part of my 'defense budget'. :)
 
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