Are farms worth it?

[enKage]

If I ever build farms, it is on resources. For irrigation eureka at least. later I don't waste builders on farms. Who needs farms as Cree? If I build over 10 farms in the whole game, it means I am haevily overfarmed. I never get inspiration for feudalism too.

 

[Karmah]

I spamm cities yet never get happiness issues. Wether I conquer or trade them, still I have them. I also never really felt I had issues with builder charge. I do plan a bit and build them in waves to make sure I have the right card (+charges) slotted and I love ancestrals hall. Therefore the farm triangle is a classic in most of my cities. Brings health and food so I can reach a district threshold fast enough.

 

[Archon_Wing]

It also depends on where you put the farm. Putting farms on wheat or rice would make more sense than just putting down on flat plains tile that wouldn't be worked anyways. Farm triangles can make sense when they boost an already strong tile you're already working.

Farms are only bad if you just randomly paint them across a flat grassland which has no value in being worked to begin with.

 

[Jkchart]

I generally have one massive farm city and it makes a good internal trade route city since i can build most districts in it. It's also a pleasant area to look at on the map. Other than that, it entirely depends on the resources of the city and what I need.

But I also like my high pop cities even though it's not optimal due to Civ VI math. So I'm a bit biased in favor of them.

 

[Bibor]

It is quite strange that Civilization VI encourage infinite city sprawl given that all past civ iteration tried to discourage it in various ways. How many other 4x games would growth be considered to be not a good thing?

Must admit they managed to find a clever way to mitigate ICS, instead of just locking it down. Now it's the district cost that scales up, so newest cities can only be merely outposts that contribute to the empire with land tiles (resources etc).

 

[criZp]

Must admit they managed to find a clever way to mitigate ICS, instead of just locking it down. Now it's the district cost that scales up, so newest cities can only be merely outposts that contribute to the empire with land tiles (resources etc).

It's an improvement over how it worked in civ 5, but I don't understand why district cost is tied to technological progress rather than number of districts/cities.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Must admit they managed to find a clever way to mitigate ICS, instead of just locking it down. Now it's the district cost that scales up, so newest cities can only be merely outposts that contribute to the empire with land tiles (resources etc).

It is here chopping comes in since the yield of a chop scale the same way as district cost, meaning if you have 3 trees you can get a district out.

 

[Bibor]

It's an improvement over how it worked in civ 5, but I don't understand why district cost is tied to technological progress rather than number of districts/cities.

Because the point of ICS is snowball, which is in culture, gold and tech. Thus, it makes more sense to tie it to this. If you expand by conquest or ICS, but are otherwise "behind", it doesn't penalize you for expanding.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

There are a few reason when ICS are not the best option such as:

• Certain wonders buff specific tiles for one city, meaning you want to maximize the number of tiles the city can work
• Unit production works alot better with few powerful cities, military districts are stronger the more production a city have

 

[Sostratus]

There are a few reason when ICS are not the best option such as:

• Certain wonders buff specific tiles for one city, meaning you want to maximize the number of tiles the city can work
• Unit production works alot better with few powerful cities, military districts are stronger the more production a city have

There’s almost no circumstance you don’t want to settle cities 3 tiles apart. Usually it’s if coast or mountains or something gets in the way and doing a 4 tile space makes more sense.
The example you give of something like Ruhr valley or Petra just means you MIGHT want to swap some tiles and possibly do 4 tiles away in a specific instance. And there are only a handful of those instances in the game.

But ICS is unique from “go wide/expand/conquer.” The original motivation for the strategy was that city tiles were your best tiles, therefore you should have the largest % of your tiles being city centers as possible.

You can envision the difference between civ5 wide play- control a lot of tiles- and civ6’s optimal play: fit as many cities as possible into a given space. This “carpet of cities” is the heart of ICS and it absolutely is the best way to play civ6 for pretty much any victory. Only because we are humans that don’t want to click endlessly do we restrain ourselves - adding a city, no matter how crappy, is universally a positive in this game.

I find that once I establish my carpet of cities, it can make sense to add farms in because it raises my district capacity.
Yes, you can only build 1 of each district in a city, but almost every district adds value to your empire. It’s very cheap to spend 3 builder charges to add a farm triangle somewhere (Builders let you transfer production from one city to another- critical!) and that will give you a district slot or two.
Pretty much any city could use another district. You need farms (or fishing boats) to get to the point where you run out of decent districts to build. (Size 16ish.)

For you attempted min maxers who want everything to be size 10 while letting your people subsist on tundra shrubbery, farms also let you hit a target pop faster, and time is everything in Civ.

 

[criZp]

Because the point of ICS is snowball, which is in culture, gold and tech. Thus, it makes more sense to tie it to this. If you expand by conquest or ICS, but are otherwise "behind", it doesn't penalize you for expanding.

By tying the cost progression to scientific progress, you are punishing players who expand more slowly. If one player gets his 10th city up in the medieval era and another player does in the industrial era, who is getting hit harder my the cost progression?

 

[iammaxhailme]

Honestly, not really, but I built my cities tall anyway. I'm a civ 5 player at heart. I wish 6 made tall a bit better than it is.

When I play higher difficulty games and do things more optimally, I will usually make a couple of farms in my first few cities, but after that I basically only make them on farm bonus resources, or if I need some housing.

 

[kaspergm]

There’s almost no circumstance you don’t want to settle cities 3 tiles apart.

This is quite sad, but probably true from a min/max-ing point of view. One of the biggest design flaws in Civ6.

 

[Tech Osen]

There’s almost no circumstance you don’t want to settle cities 3 tiles apart.

I rarely settle less than 5 apart. And 3 only in very specific circumstances. But I don't play for efficiency.

 

[AntSou]

I only care about cities 3 tiles apart in the beginning. Once land becomes scarcer and impossible to squeeze two cities in an area I put them farther apart to get control over max amount of tiles, prevent tile overlap between my own cities and deny other civs those tiles.

 

[RohirrimElf]

9 out of 10 times i rather prefer production over food. But heck. If i plan to use the tile anyway i might just build a farm. I do rarely pass by the 6 farm boost as i will always find a good enough place to build a couple of farms. On my first x cities.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Farm triangle is not that productive, just +2 food farms, +3 with replaceable parts. At most a feudal farm can produce +4 food if completely surrounded by farms and +7 with replaceable parts. A good farm area would be a very large flat area in which you fill with farms in a long line (think like a river), the thicker the line is the better. A single line thickness is like a farm triangle, except for the edges. A double line give +3 food farms, except for edges. A triple line or thicker give +4 food for inne farms and +3 food for outer farms except for edges. With replaceable parts these numbers nearly double.

Purpose of food, as far as I can tell there are two reason to want tiles to produce huge amount of food. First is Obviously growth, cities that have access to super food tiles will grow much quicker which do have advantages, such as the city will be able to work more tiles in the future and produce more total amount of resources. Secondly a strong food tile can support several population that can't feed themself. Like a single plain +7 food farm can support the farmer +3 specialist or +6 plain mine tiles.

Farms is thus a bit like districts, their value is dependent on their location and good planing can make your farms much more valuable and productive than you would normally see.

Also you should try to place your farm in such way several cities can work them, something like this:

C = city center
F = Farm
U = unspecified

U-F-F-F-U
C-F-F-F-C
U-F-F-F-U

While more cities are better, there are considerations:

• Cities are not free to found and settler cost increase, packing cities close together may mean that each city become less productive compared to spaced further out
• Production, especially military units there are many advantages of concentrating production in big cities rather than having many cities, like you need less encampments or similar and units are produced more constantly.
• Wonders that affect a single city like Petra you want the city to maximize the amount of such tiles it can have
• Certain civ abilities like the Mali gold from desert flatland is about a city controlling large amount of specific tiles, similar can be said about Mauri unique building.
• All governors to some extent benefit from large cities

 

[Victoria]

Getting to 10 pop early is worth the (relatively cheap) builder charges.

I for one love a 10 pop city early (inspiration) and used to triangulate and water mill but since disasters it’s just easier to chop the wheat, cows etc.
A plains city near a natural wonder needs farms but it’s your choice if you want to settle there.
When I am pushing big pop cities, want to get to 10 pop within a decent time or playing a bad start or want the specialists are times of exception.
When playing for 30 pop cities it’s Food halls and fisheries I choose.

 

[PenngwynXVII]

Yeah... After reviewing some save files, I didn't have any games where I built more than 8 farm tiles on a standard size map. So, I guess I don't like farms as much as I thought I did.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Here you can see what a rather large farmland may look like, unfortunatly I doubt it is Worth the effort. It is not the farms fault but how the economy in the game works, for example if I spent those builder charges on chopping out settlers and campuses I would have more science than I have right now.