Better farms and hills

[Makenshi]

Did humanity forget how to irrigate and fertilize? No! Farms should yield +2 food right from the start. Only then Vertical Farming, being the apex of farming technology, would further increase crop production as it currently does.

Are ALL the hills of ALL other planets lesser useful the the hills of Earth? No! Unimproved hills should always yield at least 2 production. Mines are correct, currently yielding +2 production.

 

[Ryika]

There's literally no reason to directly compare the two, it's another game and the numbers are chosen to fit the gameplay, not to have a "realistic" ratio to the other game. Farms yielding +2 Food from the very beginning would pretty much make the other improvements at that stage useless, although if you scaled everything up a bit then it would of course open more room for smaller balancing changes (but that's another topic).

Hills: Mines actually yield +2 Production, not +1. There are some pros and Cons to Hills only giving +1 Production, main pro is that mines now actually are the best basic improvements on hills, quite the opposite to Civ 5, where you'd use them for farms whenever fresh water was available. It also reduces the bonus that a city gets when founded on a hill - once again, in Civ 5 you always wanted to settle on a hill if possible, in BE it's rather balanced now. Settling on Flat Land (that is not desert, snow or tundra) gives more yield to the city, but settling on a hill makes it easier to defend.

Main downside is of course the weak base tile.

 

[lilgamefreek]

If you want to discuss realism, the Civ5 Hydroplant costs 360 hammers. In CivBE the Organ Printer is 390 bolts. The two yields are very different units of measure.

From a gameplay standpoint, it would be nice if freshwater had more strategic uses. At the moment, I think it only allows you to build farms on hills and that's the only difference. I would happily trade +energy from river tiles for better freshwater farms.