City growth pattern / what's up with rivers?

[Solf]

Hi,

me and my friends have recently started trying to play RoM in multiplayer.

Currently I'm struggling with the concept of city growth in RoM. To put things in perspective, in vanilla BtS you basically had food-neutral tiles (grassland) and tiles that traded some of the food for hammers (plains, hills). So a 'good' city in BtS would have means to produce enough food to cover all the 20 tiles plus a bit of surplus so that it actually can grow in reasonable timeframe. So something like a couple of food resources and not too many plains/hills (although there were also windmills for hills).

In RoM, though, it seems that every non-special, non-sea tile is food-negative (I'm counting flood plains here as 'special'). So I can see only two ways to build reasonable cities in early game --
1) Lots and lots of river tiles plus Pyramids wonder (which acts as canals which gives +1 food on each river tile).
2) Lots of sea tiles plus Colossus wonder (+1 commerce for water tiles). This path, however, leads to a city with a very low hammer count and rather low 'cap' since even with Colossus 'town' is still better (and gives hammer to boot, possibly two if in forest).

However with several players it gets annoying to find a start where everybody has enough rivers & resources to have a reasonably fun play.

So the question is -- are there any viable strategies (in relatively early game) for cities that are not based on rivers? In BtS you could, for example, clearcut jungles for grasslands, catch one-two (half-)decent food resources (e.g. bananas or something), and have reasonable city (possibly with a bit of irrigation to help with food a bit). It seems that such city would be worse than useless in RoM though -- considering that each city seems to need to bring in several times the amount of commerce it costs to maintain to avoid 'Financial Trouble' flag which leads to revolutions fast enough.

I tried to scan buildings/techs/improvements (in civilopedia) for possible options... What I found is that farm improvements seem to require quite advanced techs (thus is of no use at early game), that there are a couple of buildings that give like +6 food together -- but they are not terribly early either (Bakery was one, not sure about the other one), and that there are watermills which basically seem to be rather overpowered, but they again require river tiles (I presume).


So to summarize it:
- How do I play non-river city in the (relatively) early game?
- Are rivers really that overpowered as they seem? (+1 food from canals/pyramids, +1 hammer from levee, +1 commerce, watermills)
- What is 'intended' growth pattern for the cities? Isn't the difference between river and non-river cities too drastic?

 

[vincentz]

Hi,

me and my friends have recently started trying to play RoM in multiplayer.

Currently I'm struggling with the concept of city growth in RoM. To put things in perspective, in vanilla BtS you basically had food-neutral tiles (grassland) and tiles that traded some of the food for hammers (plains, hills). So a 'good' city in BtS would have means to produce enough food to cover all the 20 tiles plus a bit of surplus so that it actually can grow in reasonable timeframe. So something like a couple of food resources and not too many plains/hills (although there were also windmills for hills).

In RoM, though, it seems that every non-special, non-sea tile is food-negative (I'm counting flood plains here as 'special'). So I can see only two ways to build reasonable cities in early game --
1) Lots and lots of river tiles plus Pyramids wonder (which acts as canals which gives +1 food on each river tile).
2) Lots of sea tiles plus Colossus wonder (+1 commerce for water tiles). This path, however, leads to a city with a very low hammer count and rather low 'cap' since even with Colossus 'town' is still better (and gives hammer to boot, possibly two if in forest).

However with several players it gets annoying to find a start where everybody has enough rivers & resources to have a reasonably fun play.

So the question is -- are there any viable strategies (in relatively early game) for cities that are not based on rivers? In BtS you could, for example, clearcut jungles for grasslands, catch one-two (half-)decent food resources (e.g. bananas or something), and have reasonable city (possibly with a bit of irrigation to help with food a bit). It seems that such city would be worse than useless in RoM though -- considering that each city seems to need to bring in several times the amount of commerce it costs to maintain to avoid 'Financial Trouble' flag which leads to revolutions fast enough.

I tried to scan buildings/techs/improvements (in civilopedia) for possible options... What I found is that farm improvements seem to require quite advanced techs (thus is of no use at early game), that there are a couple of buildings that give like +6 food together -- but they are not terribly early either (Bakery was one, not sure about the other one), and that there are watermills which basically seem to be rather overpowered, but they again require river tiles (I presume).


So to summarize it:
- How do I play non-river city in the (relatively) early game?
- Are rivers really that overpowered as they seem? (+1 food from canals/pyramids, +1 hammer from levee, +1 commerce, watermills)
- What is 'intended' growth pattern for the cities? Isn't the difference between river and non-river cities too drastic?

Try to use the Improve folder from my mods. It gives +1 from Cottage-Town and +1 from Farms with Roads and later (but not railroad). And remember that in RoM Jungles acts as a water source so a farm next to a jungle is already irrigated, plus it have the Jungle Camp which is quite good starter improvement for "lost" cities in the middle of a jungle.
But also keep in mind that overgrowth used to be a problem in RoM, and different measures has been taken so cities wont grow to 20+ size in classical era.

 

[Solf]

Thanks for the suggestion, however we've played AND (which sadly appears to be unusable in MP due to corrupted saves) and kind of came to the conclusion that extra food for cottages is probably overpowered (to the point of where there's little point to build anything but the cottages).

Although truth to be told those AND cottages gave extra hammer too


I guess what I'm looking for is understanding Is it intended that initial cities should be built only on rivers? And if not, what redeeming qualities do non-river cities have?

 

[vincentz]

I guess what I'm looking for is understanding Is it intended that initial cities should be built only on rivers? And if not, what redeeming qualities do non-river cities have?

I know for gaming balance it can be difficult to find good cities for all players in MP. I remember when I played CIV4 vanilla with a friend, that more than half the games were abandoned due to uneven starting positions. If you want to get same same startpositions there are some mapscripts that will do so (but also create terrible dull maps IMO).

But for a realism point of view, well, just look at almost every single metropolis on the face of earth. They're built more or less directly on one or have a river connection or delta.