Cottage or farm?

[Tronicoz]

when u get a city area whit, for example a lot of flood plains, what is best to build? farms so the city will grow very big and you will get a lot of scientists and stuff like that, or cottages so you will get cash

 

[Hero]

Cottages..

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

if yoiu want it to be your gp farm, build farms.

 

[DigitalBoy]

I farm a few tiles if the city lacks for food, but I cottage otherwise. Exception being great people farms.

 

[r_rolo1]

My answer would be: Do you want a GP ( Great person) farm or a gold city?
For the first: farm, farm, and farm again; you'll need the food to feed the necessary specialists. For the second ( my favorite): one, two farms ( to ensure that the city pop will grow easily) and cottage the rest ( especially if your leader is a Finacial one).

 

[Nials]

Sometimes you don't even need to make any farms at all, save the ones that are placed on resources. The exception being GP farms where you want to maximize food.

What I do is that I compare the food surplus and deficit of any given city and work out how many farms I need from there. Some terrain I usually ignore, such as tundra or snow, but it depends on the circumstances.

Don't forget that the city tile itself also produces two food

 

[DaveMcW]

Flood plains = Cottages.

Corn, pigs, seafood = GP Farm.

 

[obliterate]

What about water mills? Still get +1 food with state property plus two production.

 

[druidravi]

Depends on your traits. Philosophical have fun farming it out rushing to caste system and run specialists helped with many warriors as military police.

Financial build cottages again use cheap warriors for hapiness cottage the hell out to max size including plain squares, greassland hills and run buearacy.

Have both Philosphical and financial and I pity you. I wouldn't be able to withstand the agony wondering on each square whether I should cottage or farm with Lizzy . if none of them your secondary traits determine it. spiritual is made for se. mass farms run lots of scientists got a new technolgy switch out to slavery and whip out armies, you need not wait for 10 turns for each whip 3,4 unhapiness from whip is nothing to be afraid of. You can use culture sliderand /or the army you whipped out could capture more happy resources.

Non-financial,non-philosphical,non-spiritual have a boring cottage fest.

 

[r_rolo1]

With watermill and SP, a flood plain is a 2H 3F 3C tile. Compare with a full developed town under US.... I would stay with the cottage

 

[druidravi]

I would love it too if I could build a town directly as an impovement and get free speech universal suffranage enabled at 4000 bc.

 

[UncleJJ]

With watermill and SP, a flood plain is a 2H 3F 3C tile. Compare with a full developed town under US.... I would stay with the cottage

Actually a watermill under SP is 4F 2H 3 C and compares favourably in certain situations with a town which is 3F 1H 8C under US. It depends what the city can use the extra food for.

Early in the game the watermill is not available and so it is a choice between farm for food, and extra production using Slavery or feeding a mine, and cottage for commerce and growth. It depends on what sort of game you want to play and how this particular city fits into the overall plan. For SE use farms, CE use cottages and for a HE a mix of farms and cottages is perfectly good.

Late in the game whenever I capture a floodplain city, my rule of thumb goes something like this:
Keep any towns
Keep villages if they're nearly a town
Keep some farms if the food can be used effectively
Turn farms to watermills and workshops if there is too much food to use easily
I certainly would not build cottages over farms

 

[Dirk1302]

I think it's dependent on the leader traits, with philosophical i'd farm everything, financial i'd cottage everything. Spiritual is not as important but is more useful for farming and switching slavery/caste system. Also a map with initial gold resources makes farming somewhat more attractive i feel.

 

[r_rolo1]

UncleJJ, I think that normally is better to use floodplains for cottages... at least that's my rule of thumb, except one or two for city growth. My personal beleive is that watermills are a weak improvement, not by it self but because of what you're missing (cottage vs watermill is a 5C vs 2H + 1F(by the way thanks for the correction, it was a typo(writing and eating at the same time = bad move))), and I only use them in Hammer-weak cities that need to do some infrastructure. But I'm a CE player and CE players normally only see cottages...

 

[Ecofarm]

1. Early war for standard 5-9 cities.
2. Watermill + Windmill + workshops + Electricity + Universal + State + GA
3.
4. Profit

The problem is that it is a space-race strat. Boring, but I may still try it as military powerhouse and watch the AI build parts while I mass an army.

 

[axident]

UncleJJ, I think that normally is better to use floodplains for cottages... at least that's my rule of thumb, except one or two for city growth. My personal beleive is that watermills are a weak improvement, not by it self but because of what you're missing (cottage vs watermill is a 5C vs 2H + 1F(by the way thanks for the correction, it was a typo(writing and eating at the same time = bad move))), and I only use them in Hammer-weak cities that need to do some infrastructure. But I'm a CE player and CE players normally only see cottages...

SE is strong early, and early game matters most. Also GPP points are extremely critical early on, but I just came out of a thread talking about this and don't to repeat myself. It is misleading to count long-term cottages when they begin the as +1 commerce tiles and take a long time to grow to towns. Also, hammers are king if the game drag on long enough. Once you get close to Future Tech, how fast you can crank out spaceship parts or bombers or whatever matters more. Sure you can try to buy it all with UniSuff but that seems rather inefficient to me.