Anyone Build Food (Gardens and Baths, not Granaries) and Maybe Gold Buildings in Cities?

[Leefizzy]

I can see an argument for +Growth % for the 2nd Tier food building, but the more I play, the more it feels like Food and maybe Gold buildings outside of Exploration Science Legacy are just way weaker than they should be cause of Towns.
If you're trying to go for the absolute highest amount of food/gold per turn, sure, I dig. I'm also aware of resource slots, but you're building those for the slots, not the 4-8 food/gold.
But it's just not that good vs sci/culture/maybe prod for wonder races buildings competing for production when towns exists as they are, right?

The more I plan for a city, the more I notice I don't really care about them outside of urban crawling like warehouse buildings or more resource slots and I'm wasting my time planning Quarters for them.
Maybe it's a nice way to reserve a tile for a wonder for the next era that you need to crawl over to a spot for the other buildings since I'm pretty sure you can overbuild wonders on two obsolete buildings, might be misremembering though.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Gold buildings are important and not only for resources. Gold produced by towns is limited to either being directly gotten from improvements, or converted from production at really bad rate of 1/4. So your cities could be a very good source of gold.

Food buildings without additional effects don't seem to be worth it, though. Especially if they take land tile.

 

[Leefizzy]

Gold buildings are important and not only for resources. Gold produced by towns is limited to either being directly gotten from improvements, or converted from production at really bad rate of 1/4. So your cities could be a very good source of gold.

Food buildings without additional effects don't seem to be worth it, though. Especially if they take land tile.

While I see why you'd say prod from towns is 1:4 conversion to gold, I'd have to disagree with this.
The fact you can't buyout Wonders outside of 1 specific civ and you can't upgrade units or convert towns to cities or get buildings for towns using production is enough of a difference that that I don't completely subscribe to the base 1:4 ratio that exists in the game.

I never really saw production in towns as production, just gold in a different skin, unless I'm planning to convert the town because it is so production rich.
Edit: Not to mention, from my experience, converting a town to a city costs around 20 GPT in the antiquity era, even more later, I don't see a city being able to match that with gold buildings alone, not without pulling specialists off of culture or science.

 

[stealth_nsk]

While I see why you'd say prod from towns is 1:4 conversion to gold, I'd have to disagree with this.
The fact you can't buyout Wonders outside of 1 specific civ and you can't upgrade units or convert towns to cities or get buildings for towns using production is enough of a difference that that I don't completely subscribe to the base 1:4 ratio that exists in the game.

I never really saw production in towns as production, just gold in a different skin, unless I'm planning to convert the town because it is so production rich.

I don't argue with this, I'm just pointing out that unlike food, gold production in towns is not that high, so you may need cities doing it too if you want a healthy economic.

 

[Leefizzy]

I don't argue with this, I'm just pointing out that unlike food, gold production in towns is not that high, so you may need cities doing it too if you want a healthy economic.

Maybe you have a different play style than I do, but cities in my games are gold neutral or negative, even with the buildings I do end up building since I'm drowning in production at some point in the era.
Towns make up a lot of my GPT if I don't get trade routes from the AI and it's a very real consideration when converting a nonProd rich town into science and culture cities, the thing towns can't do outside of edge cases.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Maybe you have a different play style than I do, but cities in my games are gold neutral or negative, even with the buildings I do end up building since I'm drowning in production at some point in the era.
Towns make up a lot of my GPT if I don't get trade routes from the AI and it's a very real consideration when converting a nonProd rich town into science and culture cities, the thing towns can't do outside of edge cases.

Cities are gold neutral or negative because they spend a lot of gold, not because their gold produced is low.

Also, some specialization, like stacking Jade could make quite a gold mine from cities.

 

[UWHabs]

Gold buildings are also secretly better than you think, because they don't pay gold maintenance. So a "+5" market in reality compared to other buildings is actually +7, because you don't have gold maintenance on it. And because they tend to be pretty easy to get adjacency on, they tend to have pretty good yields.

But yeah, when you just look at the city display, often I see my cities are at like -5 gold net, but when you throw a Jade tile in it, I get back 2-3 gold per turn, because the city is actually getting 20-30 gpt, but the net is due to maintenance.

 

[Leefizzy]

Cities are gold neutral or negative because they spend a lot of gold, not because their gold produced is low.

Also, some specialization, like stacking Jade could make quite a gold mine from cities.

I just don't see it, asides from the bridge stacking bug or that city in particular pulled a boat load of trade routes from all the civs, cities can't pull that much gold off of the 2 specialty buildings alone.
Would I like 10-15+ gpt, sure, am I willing to spend production or god forbid specialists to do it, not when towns can give me same or most of the time more than that on top of the food, depending on if it's a food town or a resource town that has production attached to it, not when a decently placed city pulls 12-24 gpt trades by just existing for resources you wanted outside of gold.

Gold buildings are also secretly better than you think, because they don't pay gold maintenance. So a "+5" market in reality compared to other buildings is actually +7, because you don't have gold maintenance on it. And because they tend to be pretty easy to get adjacency on, they tend to have pretty good yields.

But yeah, when you just look at the city display, often I see my cities are at like -5 gold net, but when you throw a Jade tile in it, I get back 2-3 gold per turn, because the city is actually getting 20-30 gpt, but the net is due to maintenance.

I usually make gold buildings in the tail end of eras cause there's so much more you can build, when my gpt averages around 40-80 in antiquity to 200 then 400 or even higher in later eras when you don't have a single gold building til the last 30-40 turns. I can't justify it at all when in antiquity, you're setting up your teching engine and military as a deterrence or outright conquest and in later eras, it's small enough that you're probably realistically only gonna buyout a single building per city or unit if you somehow didn't get any gold or silver resources, and even after five copies of either, one more buyout?

 

[npburg]

I have been experimenting with pairing food buildings with other buildings.

For the first age, I will build a market / garden combo since they both get the same adjacency bonus and you can't building the lighthouse on land. The garden doesn't have happiness maintenance and the market covers the gold maintenance cost so the pair just has happiness maintenance. In exploration age, I overbuild the market / garden with the bazaar / bank and then in the modern age I often just build the railstation on top if it. I previously built the guildhall with the bazaar in the exploration age but I have been trying out guildhall / inn combo that works similar to the monument / villa combo from the antiquity age.

I will try to build the bath on minor rivers in the antiquity age to pair with the sawmill / hospital in the exploration age and the sawmill / cannery in the modern age. While the bath and the sawmill work with a navigable river, the hospital and cannery are land only so need to use the minor river for these combos. You could in theory still build the bath in antiquity and then the sawmill on a navigable river if you don't have a minor river that will work but I would make sure to build a second building (dockyard or bridge) to overbuild the bath since paying gold/happiness maintenance for it is not worth the food and no growth modifier. If I don't have a minor river for this combo, I don't normally bother with the hospital or cannery in that city since I don't want to waste a tile for those buildings and haven't worked out alternative pairing.

As I mentioned, I have been trying to pair the guildhall with the inn since the inn is a food building that also has a secondary happiness bonus so just has gold maintenance which is covered by the guildhall. The guildhall is a gold building with a secondary diplomacy bonus so it just has happiness maintenance which is covered by the inn. In the modern age, having a bunch of cities with monument/villa and guildhall/inn combos means low maintenance diplomacy points.

As for gold from towns, I find I often make quite a bit gold from towns because of the way I found and develop towns. In the antiquity and exploration age, I am looking to settle towns which are worthy to grow into a city and almost none are just farming/fishing towns except for getting key resources or an important strategy location. I also develop the towns with the mindset it will become a city (or mining town) so I prioritize production in towns, not food. This means they generate a lot of gold especially if they become mining towns. They still grow since a small town doesn't need much food and a large town growth slow even if it was filled with farms.

With my style of play, gold generation from towns and gold buildings is critical since I am looking to covert nearly all my towns to cities. If you convert too many towns to cities too quickly in antiquity age, you stop producing much gold making it hard to convert the last few towns so the gold building or focusing on mining towns helps. In the age transitions, I have had a number of games where I did the economic golden age and had all my settlements remain as cities. When all my settlements were cities in the previous age, the gold building kept the budget positive but in the transition, the obsolete gold buildings couldn't keep up and I had no towns to generate gold so would run a deficit until I could get gold buildings and new trade routes established. I have since stop picking the economic golden age unless I have enough cash to float the deficit, but it highlights how dependent that kind of build can be on gold buildings and trade routes.