Cottage Spamming

[Gryman]

They give commerce actually.

Even if they did give money, they'd help research by allowing you to run a higher % tech rate.

very old thread but I'll answer the new question. Cottages provide raw commerce points to the city that is working them. The sliders (science, wealth, culture) turn this into , and respectively. In a Cottage Economy the idea is to run the science slider as high as can be afforded to maximize beakers. e.g. If your total commerce from all cities is 1000 and your total city maintenance and expenses equal 200 you could run the science slider at 80%, wealth slider at 20% and culture at 0% to produce 800 base a turn with no treasury deficit.

 

[Captffej]

Thanks. That is the best simple explanation of a CE that I have seen on the Forum.

 

[sophie]

The problem I tend to have in a CE is deciding when to farm a resource, when to cottage it. Usually I end up panicking that my city will be food deficient, and it hurts me in the long run.

I'm sure there is another thread for this, but what do you guys do for CE? Do you put farms on tiles with a food deficiency (i.e. 1 food, like on plains) or do you cottage everything regardless?

 

[Monsterzuma]

Plains tiles should be largely avoided until very late in the game. My favorite thing to do with plains is to cottage in a city with a food surplus sufficiently high to support. Most of the time, though, the plains just remain unworked.

Post-biology, plains can be farmed for a +1 surplus in food. Pre-biology, farmed plains is whip fodder, not to mention wasted worker turns (what's worst is that farming is a worker-turn costly operation).

 

[sophie]

That makes sense; don't build something on a tile that you ain't gonna use, there's no penalty, as it means simply that you won't get the extra pop to work the tile.

 

[Gliese 581]

There's nothing inherent in the definition of a CE to maximize science output, the term just refers to the foundation of your economy, which in this case is dependant on working cottages.