End game financial towns produce 6 commerce unless riverside, in which case the corresponding financial farm produces 4 commerce, not 3.
Stupid mistake on my part.
So let's start the comparison from the best possible case for cottages (they spring miraculously from the workers plow as fully developed towns with Taxation already in).
No need. I will instead assume for simplicity that my first 3 cities will contain several fully-grown towns, farms and mines. I am unlikely to have more than 7 happiness at this point. Now I just settled my 4th city, and I am thinking about what to do with it. Furthermore, whether I would be relying on cottages or farms, my first improvement will be a farm anyway, to grow population.
This is very simple. What is more valuable: two food or three commerce?
A simple question, but the answer is not so simple.
This question may be complicated by health caps, happy caps, available civics, individual city size and infrastructure,
All of which favours the cottage economy, actually. Calendar is much faster in this game than in BTS regular, a detour that I assume you will take for agrianism, but after that, you are stuck. Religious temples give you 2 happiness, herbalists 1 or 2, but you only get massive happiness from Social Order, and massive health if you are running GoN. Neither you would get early as Calabim.
But you did mention that health is more of an issue for the Calabim than happiness. I will concede that CoL is a cheap tech, and move on, for I have no opinions on this matter. So
if you do want to get GoN in a reasonable timeframe, you have to skip mining for long enough for your first great prophet to appear to lightbulb WotF, which means getting mysticism, building a pagan temple and running a priest specialist for 34 turns. Not chopping forests to build workers and settlers in the early game is significant. Then you have to build a temple of leaves, hire another priest specialist and wait for another 33 turns. Thats a lot of turns. And even then, youre not the elves, so you still have to leave some forests lying around doing nothing to sustain the happiness cap.
the amount of commerce produced before the break even point is significant with the farm getting its commerce front loaded (better in general) relative to the cottage.
This seriously favours the farm economy. In the late game you will have a larger empire and lots more happiness and health, but at the same time most of your conquests would already have all the tile improvements constructed. If not, then go spam your farms, but otherwise, by that point the most efficient use of new cities is just to take it as it is, with only minor adjustments.
More importantly, the food can be very valuable depending on each cities state, possibly being worth:
If you can realise it. Slavery is efficient in the early game because populations regrow quickly, but one you have a higher cap, I am not sure if the whipping cycle can recover quickly enough. I am sure the Calabim would make it work much more efficiently, but remember you have to feast as well as whip. But either way, I dont see how that favours the cottage or the farm economy. All this says to the original thread starter is that he should run slavery.
1. Require fewer turns to reach its happy cap
2. Require fewer worker turns to complete needed improvements
3. Produce enough commerce to make it a viable contributor to the civilizations economy far quicker
All major benefits of the farm economy. The only gripe I have is that by the time you reach sanitation, most of your settled and conquered cities are already quite improved. Sanitation is expensive, so the best way to do this is to skip mysticism, research writing, then pop a great sage to lightbulb sanitation. But that delays the religious solution to your health and happiness problems even further, because after all, you have to skip mysticism, and once you have popped a great person already, the 34 and 33 turns become 67 and 50 turns, respectively. Were well into the mid-game by that point.
4. Produce a higher output in terms of actual unit production (or building production if this is desired).
Again, provided that you can support all that population. Sanitation or religion first? Either way, it takes a lot of time to setup both. Commerce now is more valuable than commerce later, agreed
so do actual unit production. I want units now, not later.
the Aristocratic Farmer will be able to build a larger army than the cottager in the same amount of time.
During times of war, I could also switch my citizens from working towns to working farms and mines, and without the food penalty from aristocracy, I could work even more mines.
Also, the 25% WW penalty is relevant. Regardless of Manors, that is a penalty to city states.
This sounds very similar to a city states versus god-king argument. The WW penalty is significant, but the benefit of city states is simply too large to ignore, and in my personal opinion, a sufficient reason alone not to run an aristocracy farm economy. CoL is a cheap tech, but if you have 6 cities and you are not running city states, then it will be a very expensive tech indeed. Especially for the Calabim manors only reduce maintenance by 25%, also very relevant!!!
This is also ignoring the fact that cottages (still) are much more vulnerable to wars on their own soil.
Definitely villages take a lot longer to grow into towns than rebuilding a farm. But if you relied on farms, then a pillaged farm would mean you start losing population, and growing back your population when its already high is a painfully slow process.
Manors are just the laziest conversion of food to hammers available to the Calabim and can easily be boosted by Sacrifice the Weak and/or Slavery. Plus these hammers can be spent on non units.
With StW the math changes. Back to out basic comparison, the theoretical difference is now 6 commerce and a specialist, versus 3 commerce and 3 extra citizens. The key is still how many happy citizens you can support. Considering that you will lose some happiness resources to hell terrain spread, rendering even more citizens unhappy, what you will end up with is a few worked farms, some specialists, a lot of 1-hammer unhappy citizens and a lot of unworked farms, towns and mines. Your new cities will be cranking units quickly because you will grow tons of unhappy citizens rapidly, but their potential will end there.
3 issues I am awaiting your response of:
- health and happiness (I treat them as one issue, in case you want to solve both using GoN)
- getting to the civics that allow running lots of specialists
- early military. If warriors will do, please elaborate.
. Especially when my economy was in such bad shape to take forever to research a 320 beaker tech.
.![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
