Farms vs cottages

[Thor7]

I know, I know, the whole se vs ce vs hybrid has been beaten to death, and those terms quite theoretical. But how do you personally decide when to build a farm and run a scientist versus cottaging the tile?

I generally just run specialists off food resources. To decide what to farm I count all the tiles in my bfc that I want to work, usually my goal is to work all of them but sometimes I'll skip a plains away from water for example. Then I count the food adding any tiles output over 2 to my total, and subtracting any tiles output under 2 from the total. For example, an unimproved grassland yeilds 2 food so I add 0 to the total. A mined plains hills has zero food so I subtract 2. Resources I count what they'd be improved so an irrigated wheat farm adds 4. Any difference under zero means I'll need to increase my food output with a farm. Other than that I always cottage.

Like I said I will run specialists off food resources, especially early when happiness can be an issue and maintainence can kill my science output before I get CoL. I also play a custom map script that has about double the resources of a normal map so food is not hard to come by. But I am wondering if I might fair better farming some of those grasslands and running a specialist. It just seems to take a lot of planning while cottaging requires pretty much no thought. Just plop em down and work em.

How do you choose where your farms go?

 

[Ray Patterson]

I don't do SE. It may work but it's too much fuss for me (so far). I build farms only in production cities, GP farm and some plains if there isn't much food in the city. Generally speaking my cottages far outnumber my farms. I do none of the calculations you make. Perhaps I should.

I find it interesting how the AI has also turned spectacularly towards a cottage economy in BTS. In Vanilla AI-built cottages were rare. Now they build them all over the place. To me that's a sign that Firaxis realized cottages are easier to manage than farm/specialists. And AI needs easy strategies. Still, some people claim that when push comes to shove SE is very good. Oh but that's not the discussion you wanted to have... sorry.

 

[budweiser]

If you were running Representation (from Mids or you researched it), and you hired a merchant, you would get 3 gold and 3 beakers. Thats the same as 6 commerce at 50% slider. 6 commerce is like what a fully developed cottage gives you, not counting GP points!

On top of that, you have free GPs from Mercantilism and also some wonders that add bonuses to great people.

Cottages get a hammer from democracy and grow 50% faster with emancipation or something, so thay are good in the late game.

 

[Sportyatuncw06]

I am not great with the se economy. I feel that in its nature the key to success in Civ is to grow cities fast as possible and big as possible, but I realize the advantages of SE espically on higher levels. Noble and below I wouldn't even mess with SE excepct special circumstance (say to prevent growth or you are at war or tech backwards and can't build wonders and need some GP points, or going for culture victory, or when using a philo leader) I have begun to use slavery and whipping more and more to enhance production and control growth. I build very few farms. Only when cities are lacking food or to grow them quickly, then switch to cottages. SE is more time consuming and difficult to run so I will leave more advanced players to explain how to utilize it effectively.

 

[Etheric]

cottages (well villages and towns) get +1 commerce from printing press
Towns get +2 from free speech

Emancipation gives double growth rate.
As you said democracy gets +1 hammer.

Specialists "just" get the +3 beakers from representation, so late game cottages (particularly if they have grown into towns) win easily. early game it does depend more I think.

You should always have one city (with good food specials and the national epic) blasting out great people.

For a city with few food specials then you should be cottaging as you need the food. THe +1 commerce for riverside helps a lot too.

The best advice I saw a while back was do it on a city by city basis, depending on how many food specials you have in the bfc. If you don't have representation (meaning the pyramids early game) then you should probably do cottages everywhere appart from 1 city. If you have representation then run specialists in cities with lots of food specials and cottage cities with less. The one extra food from farming a grassland tile is never going to cut it compared to a town unless you need the food to run production tiles etc, so in general straight grasdsland in a commerce town should be cottages I think.

Hmm that was a lot of rambling to say it depends lol.

 

[kossin]

Cottage vs. farm: pick the city specialization and then decide.
Obviously, commerce cities will want to have a few farms/mines for whipping/building commerce multipliers and to assure a decent food surplus (6+, but depends on happy cap)

Non-commerce cities don't get cottages.

The end.

 

[Woodreaux]

I agree with Kossin. City specialization is key. My commerce cities end up with cottages and windmills, while production cities end up with mines and a mixture of farms and workshops (depending on whether the flatland tiles are grassland).

However, I almost almost always start with farms to facilitate growth. As the city approaches the caps, I change the farms into what the city's role calls for.

 

[Riot]

Always farm early anyway to grow your cities, especially when they're first settled. Once you figure out what you want to do with them you can change it up.

For production cities you keep them as farms while you mine up the hills. If they're on a river, after Communism you watermill them for an extra hammer and an extra food (!!!!).

If you go commerce on them, you turn them into cottages. You can whip away the excess population, or starve it down via running a specialist, no big deal.

And yes, if you have Pyramids, you want to run as many Scientists as possible, because you're getting 100% out of your scientists than everyone else, a huge advantage. 6 beakers per scientist is huge.

edit: if your production city doesn't have hills uh well, it's probably not a good production city. just cottage it up on the grassland tiles so it can pay for itself, and queue up military units or something.

 

[Mutineer]

I tend to be very pragmatical about that.
First is what are my situation? When I am expect to warring?

If it is medeival war I expect to have max food at size 6. So, after special resources if there are not too mach food already there will be farm so I am at max food + at size 6.

Every city is potential source of whip and draft happiness, so some food + is good in order to use that resource.

But that are general cities, on to of them are specialized cities. If I plan to have GT in city it will have max farms. If it is PG farm, again more food, but why keeping max forests posible for health/preserves benefits.
So cities get specialization by terrain. If there no fresh water access I have no other choice but to build cottages.

after that it is end game state? what size of cities I want at end game? How fast I want to my cities to reach that state? that will dictate amount of food suppluzz I want to have from farms.

and then end game

 

[Rittmeyer]

If you were running Representation (from Mids or you researched it), and you hired a merchant, you would get 3 gold and 3 beakers. Thats the same as 6 commerce at 50% slider. 6 commerce is like what a fully developed cottage gives you, not counting GP points!

It's amazing how the debate is so old and yet people never learn. A farm does not give you a specialist, it gives half a specialist. Wich means you need 2 farms, losing 2 cottages to run a specialist pre-biology. So it's 12 commerce agains 3 gold and 3 beakers. Which means: you only gain more by farming "commerce" cities if you can use the GPP to bulb important techs.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

^^
Which is why you use food specials dawg.

 

[Rittmeyer]

^^
Which is why you use food specials dawg.

which should be used for the GP farm (only one) and production cities (3-4) while cottaged commerce cities may be settled in less then optimal terrain. if you can get all your cities in optimal sites and still get more then 8 of them, you are playing low levels. if you play low levels, stop wasting time discussing strategy, you don't need one. when you get to IMM, come back and we'll talk.

 

[Moroktonos]

Losing 2 cottages loses you 2 commerce.
Losing 2 towns loses you 8 commerce.
Losing 2 riverside towns in free speech after printing press as a fin civ loses you a whole lot of commerce.

Even if I'm fin, at least one of my cities will still be devoted to GP.
Even if I'm Phi, my capital (or the city to which I intend to move my capital) and maybe a few other cities will still probably have some growing cottages.

Only noble players run scientists for beakers instead of for great people (without representation, that is).
Only noble players don't build any farms in their heavily-cottaged cities and end up with pop. 6 cities in 1200 AD. One thing I do know is that until any city has a monument and a granary, farms are infinitely more important than cottages. After that, feel free to cottage to your hearts delight! Even then though, the faster a city grows the more cottages it can work (leading to the important lemma, the higher your happiness cap is, the more cottages you can work).

Don't get me wrong -- I love towns (even villages are okay; heck, even riverside cottages built on dye/spices have their place), but the ability to use farms/slavery (NOT National epics and caste system) is more often the mark of a really good player than knowing how to spam cottages effectively (not that I haven't become exponentially better at using cottages as I've moved up the levels).

 

[mirthadir]

Losing 2 cottages loses you 2 commerce.
Losing 2 towns loses you 8 commerce.
Losing 2 riverside towns in free speech after printing press as a fin civ loses you a whole lot of commerce.

Even if I'm fin, at least one of my cities will still be devoted to GP.
Even if I'm Phi, my capital (or the city to which I intend to move my capital) and maybe a few other cities will still probably have some growing cottages.

Only noble players run scientists for beakers instead of for great people (without representation, that is).
Only noble players don't build any farms in their heavily-cottaged cities and end up with pop. 6 cities in 1200 AD. One thing I do know is that until any city has a monument and a granary, farms are infinitely more important than cottages. After that, feel free to cottage to your hearts delight! Even then though, the faster a city grows the more cottages it can work (leading to the important lemma, the higher your happiness cap is, the more cottages you can work).

Don't get me wrong -- I love towns (even villages are okay; heck, even riverside cottages built on dye/spices have their place), but the ability to use farms/slavery (NOT National epics and caste system) is more often the mark of a really good player than knowing how to spam cottages effectively (not that I haven't become exponentially better at using cottages as I've moved up the levels).

Riverside is irrelevant; both farms and cottages get the same bonus (with the only exception being for FIN cottages in their first 10 turns of use).

Pros run scientists for ... when they've REXed or rushed and their only recovery mechanism is scientists to get pottery, alpha, CoL, or currency. Yes I can normally mine efficiently than I can run scientists, but only if I have alphabet.

The mark of good cottage use is when you can consistently hit early banking/US and convert to full on cash based production; leverage a run to the Kremlin, and show that barring ICS type settling you can get massively more from cottaging than any other production mechanism.

Whipping is key, but not required; if you can build or take the mids then you need only build a MGB set in each city; these give better multipliers than just a forge and swapping over to rushbuy makes it trivial to get infra in any city.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you were running Representation (from Mids or you researched it), and you hired a merchant, you would get 3 gold and 3 beakers. Thats the same as 6 commerce at 50% slider. 6 commerce is like what a fully developed cottage gives you, not counting GP points!

On top of that, you have free GPs from Mercantilism and also some wonders that add bonuses to great people.

Cottages get a hammer from democracy and grow 50% faster with emancipation or something, so thay are good in the late game.

Nothing in the game is free in an economic sense, and it will help everyone's thinking if they realize that. Merc in particular has a very obvious opportunity cost. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea (sometimes it's easily your best civic, others it's arguable it gives you the best relative position, and others it's plainly stupid), but that "free" specialists make it sound misleading.

One thing you fail to mention here is that without resources, it takes *2* farms prior to biology to feed 1 specialist, and that requires 3 pop total. Without representation the returns on that are pretty sad, but even with it you're not running away, at least not quite yet.

Cottages own the hell out of specs on a pop efficiency basis. However, specs require less tiles to do their work. This effects everything you do if you choose to set up the empire with cities specialized one way predominantly. If you go heavy farms/specs, you want more, tightly packed cities. This takes advantage of the per-city bonuses, production potential that becomes available with different timing, and the post-biology ability to make even fairly trashy small cities strong contributors. Drafting and whipping look more attractive. Rushbuy and such look less.

The game balances between the two types of output more than people realize. For example, people like to blather how specialists are less dependent on the slider (only partially true, as trade routes and/or passive commerce often still makes up half of the non-GPP research in a lot of casis). However, such setups have to contend with emancipation and reliance on the whip, drafting, or workshops for production. Production can't be focused in random weak cities with extreme precision and tooling for non-project construction when one is heavily farmed isn't as simple as tuning down the slider. On the other hand, while cottage cities require less pop growth and therefore slider points/resources/whatever to grow cities to their max potential, getting hit by the culture slider losses at say war or something does hurt more. Both types of city/empire setup need to convert for pure if building space parts, although to experienced players it's reasonably trivial to get a couple good late-game hammer cities using spare workers.

In a real game, you have no choice but to look at the land you have available to you, and see whether you are plentiful or deficient in food/hammers/commerce, if there's a way to compensate, or if you want to go all-out one direction (and can afford to do so diplomatically or otherwise).

Keep in mind that using farms for specs is not the only way to use farms. They are a key element in growing cities for other purposes, too. Ultimately you are going to specialize on a city by city basis, with as much an over-arching long-term empire goal/plan as you can manage. Is that easy? Of course it isn't or we'd see more elite players. Choosing what each individual city builds and diplo complicate things further...but this can all be handled and there are examples exist all over the forum .

 

[mirthadir]

Oh and as far as the OP. That depends. How is the city being specialized? Is it at or near a cap? Will I be drafting this city? Do I need it to quickly complete an expensive whip to open other buildings (like Oxford, WS, or RC)? Am I FIN? Bio or not? Which civics am I running and does diplomacy allow me to run? So on and so forth.

 

[Thor7]

Good replies all. This thread was not meant to be specialists vs cottage commerce, it was cottages vs farms. Like I said I never farm unless I know I cannot meet my desired pop cap.

From the replies it looks like I'm doing fine, cottages are easier to manage and better in many circumstances, but for quicker growth I may consider farms -> then cottages at a later time. Also more food -> more whipping -> faster infrastructure. Something to keep in mind.

 

[Riot]

Good replies all. This thread was not meant to be specialists vs cottage commerce, it was cottages vs farms. Like I said I never farm unless I know I cannot meet my desired pop cap.

From the replies it looks like I'm doing fine, cottages are easier to manage and better in many circumstances, but for quicker growth I may consider farms -> then cottages at a later time. Also more food -> more whipping -> faster infrastructure. Something to keep in mind.

Yep, as I and many others have said:

Food is the most important resource. Food grows your cities faster.

City growth is good. More (readRODUCTIVE) citizens is always better. More pop = more whipping. More pop = more lucrative trade routes. More pop = more flexibility in running specialists.

Grow your cities up to their max pop ASAP!

 

[Tristan_C]

I tried the strategy recently of building farms and then overwriting them once the population is high, but I didn't like it very much. You have to build far more workers than otherwise, and workers are themselves foregone hammers and food, with maintenance to consider as well.

 

[Dr.Null]

I tried the strategy recently of building farms and then overwriting them once the population is high, but I didn't like it very much. You have to build far more workers than otherwise, and workers are themselves foregone hammers and food, with maintenance to consider as well.

Sometimes I try this when I've captured a lot of Workers.