Banana resources.!

[Bibor]

Guys, you can't compare improved/uninproved bananas on a yield vs. yield level.

Improved Bananas provide 5 food with Plantation and Granary (6 with Fertilizer). While jungle cities won't starve, they won't grow fast either. Two or three Banana plantations will give the jungle city the proper growth boost it needs. Not only will you get more science from higher population, but also from the extra jungle tiles you can now work.

The same is true for those jungle gem, gold and coal mines, as jungle cities are chronically low on production.

My observations are for general jungle cities that you need as core, not those fancy gold/science generating peripheral ones.

 

[H.I.M.Selassie]

As Sid Meier himself said, a game is a series of interesting choices.

So you can either gain 1 food at Calendar or 2 science at Education, and that would depend on how much you need food early in the game.

I agree though that you should be allowed to add farms, trading posts or mines on top of resources if you want to. Perhaps you could lose the "resource" status of the tile as a disincentive... e.g. if you mine a sheep on a hill, you get 3 hammers instead of 2 food and 2 hammers for pasturising it.

Can't build mines on pastures...

 

[Koiranputki]

Guys, you can't compare improved/uninproved bananas on a yield vs. yield level.

Improved Bananas provide 5 food with Plantation and Granary (6 with Fertilizer). While jungle cities won't starve, they won't grow fast either. Two or three Banana plantations will give the jungle city the proper growth boost it needs. Not only will you get more science from higher population, but also from the extra jungle tiles you can now work.

The same is true for those jungle gem, gold and coal mines, as jungle cities are chronically low on production.

My observations are for general jungle cities that you need as core, not those fancy gold/science generating peripheral ones.

Good analysis...I generally don't improve Banana hexes, but I might have to re-think that...sometimes it may make more sense to improve them....

I suppose it's the continual "problem" of short term/long term decisions.... trying to think long term, but having short term "issues" that seem more pressing...you know...do I chop this forest down now for the immediate production bonus, or should I keep it for long term yield?....do I "plant" the Great Scientist or go for the short term tech boost?.... Decisions, decisions, decisions....

 

[Browd]

Guys, you can't compare improved/uninproved bananas on a yield vs. yield level.

Improved Bananas provide 5 food with Plantation and Granary (6 with Fertilizer). While jungle cities won't starve, they won't grow fast either. Two or three Banana plantations will give the jungle city the proper growth boost it needs. Not only will you get more science from higher population, but also from the extra jungle tiles you can now work.

The same is true for those jungle gem, gold and coal mines, as jungle cities are chronically low on production.

My observations are for general jungle cities that you need as core, not those fancy gold/science generating peripheral ones.

And unimproved bananas provide 4 food with granary. Fertilizer doesn't come until deep in the game, so the question is, for a given city, is 4 food and 2 science from, say, turn 120 or so onwards more valuable than 5 food now and 6 food late in the game. My answer: it depends. If I have 2 banana tiles in a city, I probably won't improve the bananas. If only one banana tile and plenty of regular jungle tiles, may well improve the bananas, for the reasons you state.

 

[Marathoner]

The addition of bananas seems forced to me, like they had to find a food resource to put on jungle tiles. What society has bananas as a staple in their diet? Especially because so many staples are left out, corn, rice, potatoes. It also makes no sense why one can only grow wheat where it is found. Part of the basis of civilization was the cultivating of crops. Probably a balance issue, but it would make more sense if I could spread the wheat I find to other tiles (looking at you plains) and increase the food that way. Then when my farms become more productive, I.e. fertilizer tech, I could pave them into suburbs, just like modern day.

 

[Zaimejs]

Marothoner... you can grow wheat on other tiles... what do you think farms are? I think that the special wheat tiles are just especially fertile farm lands... you can grow food just about anywhere, but some places are more inclined to production than other.

And yes, some people do eat bananas. It's all metaphorical.

 

[Natural_20]

You can only build the appropriate improvement for a resource tile. For example, you can't build a farm on gold, a lumber mill on silk, etc.

That is a statement of how it is, but not an explanation as to why.

I believe the cause stems from initial game design decisions by the Shafer/Firaxis development team. One of their stated goals from the beginning was to make cities feel more specialized, and IMO one of the ways they accomplished this was by restricting tile improvement possibilities. Looking back to Civ3, every tile ended up producing more or less the same yields because you could always mine grassland and farm plains. In Civ4, there was increased city specialization, but tiles improvements were still determined by the base tile type, not the resource on it, so food/prod./gold amounts were still relatively comparable across cities.

In Civ5, the idea is that certain resources cannot be "watered down" by opting to gain alternate yields from a tile at the expense of its intended one. (For instance, trying to farm a gems hill on a river, thus gaining food at the expense of prod./gold). It is not so much bad design as has been stated above so much as an intentional mechanic to make cities more unique. And it works.

 

[Hinterlander]

I would suggest making bananas a luxury.
Add +1 gold at improvement on top of the food bonuses.
Remove the granary bonus and make the additional food native to the original improvement.