Farms vs. Cottages: a simple simulation

[RemoWilliams]

Think about it : every turn you're not working a cottage is a turn where it's not growing. At high difficulty levels, you'll quickly find yourself out-teched and out-gunned by the AI if you go with farms instead of cottages.

Like i said, your way works at low difficulties, but it's extremely sub-optimal at higher levels.

Zombie, I know you are a good player, and the likelyhood is that you are already reaching a good balance with your tiles, and this thread isn't helpful to you.

I'm not suggesting farms instead of cottages. A lot of folks out there think that they should just put a cottage on every tile. Often this means that some of their cottages never even get worked for one turn.

If you're constantly at you happiness cap, or near it, of course you should be working cottages/towns/villages with your available pop.

 

[Naismith]

The point is that when you have a big happiness surplus, you will make more commerce by getting your population up, and then working the cottages, than you will by working the cottages and growing slowly. The whole point of this article is to point out that sometimes you max your commerce by maxing population first.

Would you rather work 1 village for 30 turns, or 3 hamlets? That's what this thread is about.

You may not be able to tell, but you have affected my previous ideas on farms vs. cottages somewhat. I'm especially interested in seeing if I can apply it more to conquered cities.

 

[malekithe]

Just to sort of distill what's been said recently... Your main point seems to be:

Unused happiness cap isn't doing you any good. Therefore, you should have surplus food in order to work more tiles as quickly as possible.

The only "fuzzy" notion in that statement is: How much surplus food is enough to grow "quickly" and maximize your happiness cap? Answering that question is a very good topic for a strategy guide. Right now, I'm firmly in the "it depends" camp. In most games I play, I don't think the answer involves much farming (on non-bonus tiles). There are many things to consider: The current happiness "gap", available worker turns, and short-term needs to name a few. This simulation showed that, with near unlimited worker turns, no short-term needs, and a 9 point happiness gap, throwing down quite a few farms was the way to go. I'd like to see a methodical approach at other scenarios.

 

[UncleJJ]

This is a very interesting thread and I agree with others that say it is highly situational. But my intuition tells me that some farms are good early on to boost the growth and productivity of the city. Although I only play on Prince at present that will still hold to some extent at higher levels depending on how you want to play and where the city is with regard to enemies.

I want my newly founded science cities to contribute to the whole economy and they need buildings besides a library and granary to do that. You can chop some buildings and use the residual hammers from your food source and city square but later on you really need to use slavery. Maybe I need them to help in a war or to make an extra worker... and pure cottages won't help much there.

In the end the analysis of farms versus cottages boils down to trading food (and hence productivity) against commerce since early on a farm gives +1 food and a cottage gives +1 commerce that grows to +4 when it's a town. And how much that benefits you depends on the other food sources in the city radius. If you already have an excess of 5 food the need for farms is less than if it's only 2.

Another factor is how many religious buildings you will want to build and how many religions you have access to (or expect in the future). Monasteries give a nice +10% science boost as well as consolidating your cultural output. Temples raise that all-important happiness limit and help towards the cathedral restrictions. A largely cottage based economy will not be able to build these useful buildings as fast as one that makes use of extra food (via slavery) so the actual science output from the city could be lower despite having more commerce. Obviously more farms also mean that Universities and Observatories can be built much faster as well.

It seems to me that pure science city based almost exclusively on cottages will be less useful to the rest of the economy than a slightly lower output one that is able to build other buildings faster and which can respond to emergencies without seriously harming commerce output for a long time. Having said all that it really all depends on the surplus food output and not farms versus cottages.

 

[RemoWilliams]

Very well put, UncleJJ! You basically summed up my feelings on the subject. However:

Having said all that it really all depends on the surplus food output and not farms versus cottages.

The title of the thread is based around the question: "Is it better to always work cottages, or to sometimes work food instead until a certain level of population?" So, in that sense, it is farms vs cottages. I suppose it should maybe be "Farms and Pastures vs cottages," but the simulation I ran only had farms, thus the title.

I've figured out that Zombie is an extreme micromanagement player, which is probably why he is so anti-farm. He gets a lot more out of slavery than I do, but next game I'm going to try out some of his slavery mm tips.