6K Man
Bureaucrat
This isn't really a complaint (or even an important issue 
) but why is the cottage the only terrain improvement that must be worked in order to become more productive?
It seems to me that there are three varieties of terrain improvements - those that have to be worked to increase their production, those that gain production when techs are discovered or civics are adopted, and those that always produce the same amount of commerce/food/hammers.
Cottages are in the first group. Build a cottage, and it's a cottage for 10 turns, then a hamlet for 20, and so on. Provided that a citizen is working it, of course. To a small extent, Mines are in the first group too - work enough mines long enough, and you may discover some valuable resource under it.
Workshops, Watermills, Windmills, and Farms are in the second group. They produce more (albeit just a little more, in some cases) with techs like Electricity and Biology, and with civics like State Property.
Fishing Boats, Wineries, Whaling Boats, Quarries, Plantations, Pastures, Camps, Lumbermills and (for the most part) Mines are in the last group. Other than Lumbermills and Mines (both of which benefit from railroad), these improvements can only be built on a resource. For the resource-only improvements, what you see is what you get, and that's probably because most of us will (nearly) always be working the resource tiles that we have - no need to add an incentive.
Now that I have that straight in my head, once again, why force the player to steadily work some improvements (cottages) and not others (the second group above)? I'm fairly sure cottages work the way they do as a matter of game balance - otherwise the micromanagers among us would steamroll their towns and build workshops on them when hammers were urgently needed, and then rebuild all the towns (assuming towns were available with a tech, rather than with the passage of time) when the crisis had passed. That makes sense. But why not make workshops - and mines, and farms, and so on - work the same way? As it is, I seldom build farms and workshops on non-special tiles, unless I'm truly starved for food or production, simply because I KNOW that these tiles will be underproducing my cottage tiles in the long run. If I knew that eventually, that -1 food +1 hammer workshop would evolve to something better than a +3 hammer tile, the decision of what to build would be that much more complicated.
Moreover - we now have the CE (cottage economy, based on cottages) and SE (specialist economy, based on farms and resulting specialists) strategies. If farms, workshops, etc, grew the way cottages do (eventually providing +7 commerce/+1 hammer), we might see new strategies evolve.
I'm sure I'm not the first person who's thought of this. Any ideas why ONLY cottages develop by being worked?
) but why is the cottage the only terrain improvement that must be worked in order to become more productive?It seems to me that there are three varieties of terrain improvements - those that have to be worked to increase their production, those that gain production when techs are discovered or civics are adopted, and those that always produce the same amount of commerce/food/hammers.
Cottages are in the first group. Build a cottage, and it's a cottage for 10 turns, then a hamlet for 20, and so on. Provided that a citizen is working it, of course. To a small extent, Mines are in the first group too - work enough mines long enough, and you may discover some valuable resource under it.
Workshops, Watermills, Windmills, and Farms are in the second group. They produce more (albeit just a little more, in some cases) with techs like Electricity and Biology, and with civics like State Property.
Fishing Boats, Wineries, Whaling Boats, Quarries, Plantations, Pastures, Camps, Lumbermills and (for the most part) Mines are in the last group. Other than Lumbermills and Mines (both of which benefit from railroad), these improvements can only be built on a resource. For the resource-only improvements, what you see is what you get, and that's probably because most of us will (nearly) always be working the resource tiles that we have - no need to add an incentive.
Now that I have that straight in my head, once again, why force the player to steadily work some improvements (cottages) and not others (the second group above)? I'm fairly sure cottages work the way they do as a matter of game balance - otherwise the micromanagers among us would steamroll their towns and build workshops on them when hammers were urgently needed, and then rebuild all the towns (assuming towns were available with a tech, rather than with the passage of time) when the crisis had passed. That makes sense. But why not make workshops - and mines, and farms, and so on - work the same way? As it is, I seldom build farms and workshops on non-special tiles, unless I'm truly starved for food or production, simply because I KNOW that these tiles will be underproducing my cottage tiles in the long run. If I knew that eventually, that -1 food +1 hammer workshop would evolve to something better than a +3 hammer tile, the decision of what to build would be that much more complicated.
Moreover - we now have the CE (cottage economy, based on cottages) and SE (specialist economy, based on farms and resulting specialists) strategies. If farms, workshops, etc, grew the way cottages do (eventually providing +7 commerce/+1 hammer), we might see new strategies evolve.
I'm sure I'm not the first person who's thought of this. Any ideas why ONLY cottages develop by being worked?
into 
or mass out courthouses. Though mostly it makes slavery "less effective" due to the fact that whipping takes away gold/(more gold)...
