Cottages and Trading Posts

[beestar]

Maybe it's intentional - a well-cottaged city extends the visual size of your city, clearly showing it to be a sprawling metropolis.

I think the Civ 4 designers intended us to run cottage economies - notice how the cottage-boosting civics appear in the late game. Kudos to the invention of all the other economies that challenged that assumption!

 

[BjoernLars]

Here is something that may change your view on discussion of trading post vs. cottages.

Later in the game, for those who would adopt the Rationalism social policy, you can further unlock the sub policy of Free Thought

Free Thought: Adds +2 Science points for each Trading Post (requires Secularism).

For me, I think the OP had a good argument, that Trading Posts allow more flexibility in the game since you can replace them later in the game without great loss.

On a personal note, I think the name and the visuals of the Trading Posts are a bit asinine. I think the benefits are good, but some aesthetic changes are called for.

 

[lemmy101]

In Civ 5 the population size of cities matters massively more, not only so they can work the tiles, but since it's intrinsic to the amount of science a city produces, as well as this cottages improved over time, and Civ 4 also had a ton of civics that improved towns massively later in the game (Civ 5 only has the one AFAIK). So if you TP spam you'll just end up with crap science and production empirewide where in Civ 4 all you would have is slightly smaller cities by cottage spamming yet get awesome science AND gold from it. Because there's no slider in this it means you're getting what you get, plain and simple. They give you cash, but that's all, and it's not just transferable into science or culture or espionage at a whim.

Also consider that great people buildings are now improvements, hills will tempt mines, resource improvements, and farms next to fresh water are desirable, and trading posts don't improve over time... it's not going to be desirable to just spam trading posts everywhere.

also re:

Free Thought: Adds +2 Science points for each Trading Post (requires Secularism).

Consider that Rationalism comes well late into the game. You simply couldn't prosper before then if all you had was trading posts. And by the time you do convert everything to posts, your citizens will probably starve if there are farms everywhere. Also I'm sure later ages will have different graphics for trading posts to fit the era.

 

[Fin]

The only thing that bothers me much about this change is the appearance of trading posts. I would much prefer actual buildings over tents but that is bound to be modded soon after the release of civilization 5 anyway.

If I knew how, I would do it myself. I think maybe a good alternative would be changing the name to a "Town" and perhaps just making it look like a mini-city. A bundle of the smaller buildings seen in the main cities, but small enough so that they can't really confuse anyone on what they are. Just an idea, though. Too bad I don't know how to do that stuff and I'm too lazy to learn.

 

[jaldaen]

A better mechanic in Civ4 (and maybe even 5) would be to build "suburbs" that decrease unhappiness. It would not be worked as such but it would "grow" as a function of the total number of suburbs and the size of the attached city. Once it gets beyond a certain size it could not be "undone" but would begin to provide gold/commerce.

You know what... someone should mod this into the game... I like the idea of creating "happiness" improvements. Of course this would need to be playtested to make sure it wasn't abusable, but it might be an interesting option. Although it might need a name that could translate throughout the ages... perhaps:

precincts (which has the double meaning of being a subdivision of a city and also implies police jurisdiction).

Or

communities (which has a nice happy name)

Hmmm... I might have to make a mod thread about this.