Does anyone use windmills?

[[to_xp]Gekko]

that would be too powerful, the mines' affinity for earth is balanced because it's not a yield increase but a small chance of a bonus. having stackable empire-wide yield increases would lead to crazy economies. but I do agree it sucks to no longer have watermills, they are still in FF and I'm pretty sure they are in Orbis, more choice in the tile improvements department is always welcome. cottage farm mine only gets boring after a while. the attention to economy is one of the strongest points of FFH compared to other great fantasy-based TBS games like Age of Wonders 2 ( loved that game, but too much focus on individual unit, shallow city development and tactical battles getting boring after a while take it down a notch or two. the magic system was definitely awesome though )

 

[readercolin]

the only time I ever used windmills was playing as the jotnar, but they get a bonus of like 1 commerce and 1 food (maybe? don't remember) to windmills. That being said, even then there was still a balance between windmills and mines - more commerce usually falls to the wayside of more hammers, simply because a windmill in no way competes with cottages or aristofarms. Though, now that I think about it, windmills would be nice to go with the calibam. Personally however, windmills just cometoo late to really be useful IMO.

-Colin

 

[Worm4life]

Questionable? I consider any tech that gives a free Great Person a priority. If I don't need the Great Person then I'm still denying it to my opponents by researching the tech first.

Does a great engineer really make that much of a difference at that point in the game? Is the game even going to last long enough for his benefits to pay off the cost of machinery?

Some civs don't have access to arquebusiers, and so for them Blasting Powder isn't as useful an investment. For those civs Machinery might be a better choice, and replacing mines with windmills might be worthwhile.

There's a bunch of much more useful techs at that point than machinery. Personally I think the only reason to bother with the engineering path is to get +1 road movement.

It's not like workers have anything better to do at that point

Correct. But in that case you're better off just disbanding them to save upkeep costs. Disband a worker, immediately save 1-2 gold per turn. I only keep one or two workers around total in the late game in case stuff gets destroyed.

Windmills are not a specialized improvement, since they provide distributed bonuses. If you always specialize your cities then specialized improvements will naturally be a better choice. They are useful with a more generalized improvement strategy, which is favorable when you are running a 50% / 50% economy.

Specializing cities is always the better choice. I'm confused what difference the science slider setting would make. Commerce is commerce, and cottages = commerce.

I'm also confused why windmills would be a good strategy for Sidar. Working a windmill tile is never going to give you a net gain in food, so why not skip working that hill tile and make it a specialist?

I'm curious what difficulty setting windmill players are on. They don't cut it on higher difficulties, and on lower difficulties if you can afford to take the time to convert everything, you've probably already won.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

What would people think of adding an Air spell that could only be cast on a workable windmill plot and gave free 's to the nearest city?

 

[Randolph]

While we're on the topic of windmills, I'd like to point out that I'm incredibly skeptical that even an elf could build and effective wind farm in a forest.

 

[Randolph]

What would people think of adding an Air spell that could only be cast on a workable windmill plot and gave free 's to the nearest city?

A cool idea, but with obvious micromanagement issues. My gut is that the cool < MM in this case.

Have you been updating the public version of your mod MC? I recall it having a lot of great stuff.

 

[JFSebastian]

[to_xp]Gekko and Emptiness have already covered most of what I'd say.

There are primarily two reasons for me that windmills trump mines in most of my games. The main one is that food trumps both hammers and commerce. One food is equivalent to half a specialist. Half a specialist can be a lot, especially if you are using any of the specialist enhancing civics/wonders. It also allows you to grow a bit more in those food starved cities that were planted to capture resources early in the game. Instead of a plains/mine, you could be working two plains/windmills.

The other, lesser reason, which I admit is a fringe case, is that having at least one hammer and one commerce on all your working tiles, creates more potent golden ages. Its more a symptom of my obsessive compulsive nature while improving my cities than any sort of game strategy, but I really like to see all those extra hammers AND commerce blanketing my fat cross.

 

[JFSebastian]

To start, I'm not meaning to argue against your points or to pick on you specifically Worm4life, but you put up some good points I'd like to comment on.

Does a great engineer really make that much of a difference at that point in the game? Is the game even going to last long enough for his benefits to pay off the cost of machinery?

I agree with you here, the utility of a great engineer late in the game is going to be very situational, but in the right situations he can be quite useful. Rushing a wonder in a production starved border city, a late game golden age, beating another civ to a contested wonder; these could all be game changing depending on what kind of victory you are aiming for. Considering the cost of machinery and its prerequisite, bowyers, its definitely doggy though. Machinery needs something extra and/or a cheaper/more common prerequisite than bowyers. Perhaps it should give the Strong promotion to siege weapons and have its prerequisite reduced to archery.

Correct. But in that case you're better off just disbanding them to save upkeep costs. Disband a worker, immediately save 1-2 gold per turn. I only keep one or two workers around total in the late game in case stuff gets destroyed.

Good advice, but even a couple workers can switch a lot of mines over to windmills in their spare time. I can see a lot of folks wanting to hold onto a fair number of workers if they are taking over a lot of pillaged/barbarian cities, in which case the workers may have some spare time between wars.

I'm also confused why windmills would be a good strategy for Sidar. Working a windmill tile is never going to give you a net gain in food, so why not skip working that hill tile and make it a specialist?

While a windmill tile will not increase your food surplus, it will increase the carrying capacity of the city. Larger cities can be important for score (high to low, final five, time), domestic trade (trade route economy in a large multi-continent empire), and trade missions (larger capital = larger great merchant trade missions). The problem of course is that it takes time to reap the benefits since a large city near its growth limit takes a while to add population. An aggressive, fast paced military conquest game might not be worried too much about squeezing in a couple more population into the core cities.

I think your points highlight the perils of playing on higher difficulties, that you are playing against a more technologically advanced opponent who has already beaten you to most of the wonders and most of the free great people. Blasting powder still looks kind of interesting against a foe with lots of walls, but how on earth is a canon's 25% withdraw superior to a catapult's 80%? The techs are also not on any of the victory condition paths. They definitely feel weak.

That said, I still like windmills more than mines for everything other than the most extremely specialized production cities.

 

[Emptiness]

Questionable? I consider any tech that gives a free Great Person a priority. If I don't need the Great Person then I'm still denying it to my opponents by researching the tech first.

Does a great engineer really make that much of a difference at that point in the game? Is the game even going to last long enough for his benefits to pay off the cost of machinery?

Probably not if you're going after a Conquest or Domination victory. For an Altar or Tower victory it can shave off some time. It also depends on when you get the Great Engineer. If I'm planning on using windmills, or if I have some good chokepoints to garrison with Crossbowmen then Machinery tends to be a midgame* tech for me, so there's plenty of time to get use out of the GE.

(* I prefer to build Guild of Hammers rather than building individual forges, and like to defend my cities with Longbowmen or Nightwatch, so Machinery usually isn't much of a detour.)

Windmills are not a specialized improvement, since they provide distributed bonuses. If you always specialize your cities then specialized improvements will naturally be a better choice. They are useful with a more generalized improvement strategy, which is favorable when you are running a 50% / 50% economy.

Specializing cities is always the better choice. I'm confused what difference the science slider setting would make. Commerce is commerce, and cottages = commerce.

A specialized city is going to have as few buildings as possible. That means that cities not producing significant commerce (most likely production centers) won't have any +% or +% buildings. Specialized cities tends to work best with a specialized economy, so you are probably either aiming for 100% or 100%. So, your cities that do produce significant commerce will have only one or the other type of commerce-enhancing building: if you are running a 100% economy then they will have +% buildings, or if you are running a 100% economy then they will have +% buildings.

If you aren't using specialized cities then all of your cities will have a decent amount of commerce output. Examples of this include Aristograrian farmspam or Elven cottagespam. Although it is possible to run a specialized economy in this situation, I tend to run a balanced economy with approximately 50%/50%. Since every city is splitting between and it is beneficial to build both +% or +% buildings in every city (not including new cities with limited commerce output, of course). Once you've invested in several commerce-enhancing buildings in a city the extra commerce from replacing a mine with a windmill becomes attractive. Naturally a Town would provide more commerce, but at a cost of more and requiring time to mature. As a late-game improvement change mine->windmill makes more sense than mine->cottage. Of course you could have just built a cottage there to begin with, but for Aristograrian farmspam and Elven cottagespam the from the mine are more desirable in the early- and mid-game, because all your non-hill tiles are providing commerce but probably not a lot of (especially in Aristograrian). Once the city has finished constructing buildings and is just a unit factory the loss of may be less important (depending on how the game is going militarily) and so the shift of to commerce by retooling for windmills can be done to give your economy a boost to help tackle the pricier techs.

Now, with that background out of the way, to the point: the difference the science slider makes is that a gold or science specialized economy needs to produce maximum commerce yield in the cities that are specialized for commerce output (because the production cities contribute very little commerce) - and so cottages (or Aristograrian farms + cottaged hills + specialists if working with a specialist economy) are the best choice for those cities. Production cities that don't require extra could adopt + improvements, but the yield will be limited because they have no +% or +% buildings. In a balanced economy, however, cities need to produce hammers and commerce, and so an improvement that yields both, plus extra as well, is the best choice. Since all cities have both +% and +% buildings, the full benefit of + improvements is actualized. The result is that hybrid improvements, such as the windmill, are better in a balanced economy than in a specialized one.

If you always specialize your cities then you may never see a situation in which replacing mines or towns with windmills will be useful. It is the nature of situational things to appear worthless if their "situation" never arises. Responding to that apparent worthlessness by making windmills strictly superior to mines would be unbalancing.

 

[Thrar]

Currently playing as the Doviello (final part in a High to Low), I've good some very good use out of windmills. They have a hero at Machinery, so there was an additional incentive of researching it. Additionally, they don't get Arquebus, which means Blasting Powder has a very low priority for me.
In the current end-game situation, windmills give me 2F 3H 2C, while mines (and lumbermills) only provide 1F 3H. I've been busily converting mines to windmills ever since I got Machinery.
Keep in mind that even with Blasting Powder, it will be 2F 3H 2C vs 1F 4H, so you're trading one hammer for food and 2 commerce. I value food over hammers for most cities already, so considering the added commerce, I don't think I would even consider converting any of those mills back to mines at that point.

Previous to Machinery, I presume for most regular cities it would be farms+mines/cottages, but those windmills are still very useful for food-poor regions like cities founded in areas with mostly plains (or worse, tundra) around them. Farm a plains tile and put a windmill on a hill and you have two tiles that balance each other food-wise after sanitation, while you would be hard-pressed to get much growth out of your city using mines.

Obviously, Arete changes that equation, given that it's available considerably earlier. But if I was in RoK running Arete, I would have to use quite a different overall game approach than I'm doing now with CoE. Arete is a special civic that additionally requires one particular religion, so it really shouldn't be considered when trying to compare windmills to mines on a general basis.

 

[Worm4life]

Well, if the civ you're playing gets their hero at machinery...then yeah.

 

[Daverd]

Whether or not Machinery is a good investment in general is kind of a side argument here.

The general point of the thread is that for a very large chunk of the game, windmills are too weak to be useful, and even then there's apparently some debate as to whether they're worth it. Up until Machinery, does anyone use windmills? I definitely don't, and even after Machinery, they're still questionable. In the absense of Blasting Powder and Machinery, many of the same arguments would apply on both sides except windmills are down a . With the lack of watermills, there's already not much strategy around improvements, and taking windmills out of the equation until the very late game makes the game that much more bland. It's just mines, farms, and cottages.

Some of the prior argument revolved around the specific suggestion that I made to tweak them, but it was just a suggestion. There are other things that could be done.

Maybe they need to have their base yield reduced by a and then give the +1 bonus per Air Mana, making them worse if you have no Air Mana, exactly as good as they are now if you have 1, and then exploitable if you have 2+. This would make them more dependent on the players' civ/strategy.

Maybe the Machinery bonus needs to be removed and put into an earlier tech instead, making the choice between mines and windmills come earlier. Maybe the +1 bonus can stay where it is, and the +1 can move to an earlier tech. Maybe vice versa.

Maybe the Fair Winds spell (Air level 1) can be used to permanently improve a windmill improvement by 1 (by turning it into a "strong windmill" or something), but only once per windmill. (This may take more than 1 turn to cast). This might help mitigate the earlier micromanagement complaint but still keep the flavor of the idea. (Thanks MagisterCultuum!) It would also make them more of a pillaging target, making them something you try to guard, the way you do with towns. Maybe "strong windmills" cannot be within X squares of one another, the way the Lanun pirate coves cannot be within 3 squares of one another. This would encourage a mix of mines and windmills, provide the additional optimization strategy of where to put the windmills, and reduce the micromanagement aspect even further, since you'd be casting it a lot less. If this restriction were added, the Fair Winds bonus could be made more powerful.

Maybe windmills could level up the same way cottages/forts do, up until some maximum. This would make them distinct from mines in a more meaningful way. They would be an investment (and a pillage target) like cottages, with an eventual payoff that's higher than it is now, but with an investment period where they are yielding less than usual. If this were the case, windmills could be made available earlier in the tech tree, since a number of turns would have to be spent just getting them built up. The more Air Mana you have, the quicker the upgrade process goes, adding the flavor that I'm looking for. Maybe the upgrade process does not happen unless you have any Air Mana at all.

All I'm saying is that there's a huge opportunity here to make windmills a little more exciting, because I don't think it can be fairly said that windmills are adding as much fun to FfH2 as they possibly can.

 

[Worm4life]

Here's another question: does anybody ever use workshops?

I never see the point. By that point in the game, you have high enough happiness and health levels to support large populations built on lots of farms. There isn't a single flat tile that doesn't provide a food, so why would you sacrifice a food to get hammers instead of just putting mines on hills and sacrificing nothing? If the city doesn't have enough hills to make it an industry center, why would you try to make an industry center out of it in the first place?

Infernals/Mercurians are the only reason I can see getting workshops, and even then I think I'd want a cottage.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

infernals only. yeah, workshops are pretty much only useful for fallow civs, after guilds, or when you are really really desperate for hammers and there are no hills around.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Workshops with guilds are slightly better than mines with blasting powder (the workshop provides 1 more commerce, 2 for riverside financial) and guilds is way cheaper than BP and provides better benefits ignoring the improvement buffs, so with commerce rich, hammer poor starts I'll find myself rushing guilds and using flatland cities with plenty of farmable grassland for production. If I had enough traditional production cities before guilds though, I won't do this.

 

[Breez]

What would people think of adding an Air spell that could only be cast on a workable windmill plot and gave free 's to the nearest city?

Personally I would love something like that, but I would rather see it as a "hope" type city spell that the caster stays in the city to get effect from.

Could have the "building" created by the spell add 1 or even 1/2 per windmill worked. I think Fair Winds would be great and then could grant any boat in the city the Fair Winds promo like Hope grants Courage.

 

[Tielby]

Personally I would love something like that, but I would rather see it as a "hope" type city spell that the caster stays in the city to get effect from.

Could have the "building" created by the spell add 1 or even 1/2 per windmill worked. I think Fair Winds would be great and then could grant any boat in the city the Fair Winds promo like Hope grants Courage.

That's just too much from a level 1 spell.

 

[Verdian]

What would people think of adding an Air spell that could only be cast on a workable windmill plot and gave free 's to the nearest city?

Could you just make it so Fair Winds grants +1 to all tiles with a windmill in a +1 radius?

 

[arcticnightwolf]

on-topic: i use windmills on tundra-hill plot ...

 

[Theodorick]

What if you found a city where there are a lot of hills and a lack of food? I have used wind mills tons of times in those situations to build the city up to a reasonable size.