Farms vs cottages

[DigitalBoy]

If you ask me, farming non-resource tiles with the intention of running specialists with the surplus is a waste, unless you're in Representation or it's in your GP farm. Specialists are best run using food resources.

Running extra specialists by running farms also exacerbates happiness/health caps.

PS: Plains cottages are totally underrated.

 

[TCMIV]

Now I'm far less depedant on cottages than I was before.
If I can I cottage the capital for Bureau, maybe I found another commerce city in the BC.

But late cities with a lot of grassland and river, wich I used to intensively cottage, now I leave for watermills and workshop, then I stay as long as possible in caste and in SP forever. A lot of hammers, a lot of soldiers, few pillage problems. Since I started to play emperor, I look more and more for flexible strategies (cottage is a life-commitment).
Maybe, when (and if) I get better I can come back to all the cottages that I liked.

This is pretty much what I've started doing. Having 4-5 good production cities with caste/state property workshops makes prepping wars much easier than letting a heroic epic city carry most of the weight. Unless you're planning solely on rush-buying your units, in which case loads of mature cottages will be a better option.

 

[Thor7]

This topic has been definitively solved for balancing cottages with farms (and the answer isn't always cottage a commerce city). http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=266397
It should probably be war academied.

Obviously towns don't help much with production.

Yep I remember reading that thread looong ago, thanks for the refresher.

 

[cabert]

I cottage plains often, because they are golden age happy this way
(1hammer + 1 commerce => 2 hammers + 2 commerce). I almost never work them outside of golden ages though
on rivers, I tend to farm them except if I have the really crazy food surplus you'd use for a GP farm, but already have more than 1 GP farm.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

--And personally I dont have the patience for cottages. And its just darn annoying when I do build lots of cottages KNOWING that my ONLY source of oil/uranium is gonna be RIGHT under some town I spent hundreds of turns growing. So I TRY to avoid making them if I can.

I just discovered Scientific Method and wouldn't you know it KatyieKat, both my oil sources are beneath towns.

 

[Tristan_C]

If you ask me, farming non-resource tiles with the intention of running specialists with the surplus is a waste, unless you're in Representation or it's in your GP farm. Specialists are best run using food resources.

Running extra specialists by running farms also exacerbates happiness/health caps.

PS: Plains cottages are totally underrated.

True on all points, but the importance of specialists can't be overemphasized in anyone's early economy.

A specialist in the city where you intend to pop your first GP is essentially giving you 40+ beakers a turn. A serious payoff. The rewards go down from there and we'll only want 1-3 such cities. Ah well, agonizing decisions await.

 

[vicawoo]

You don't make grassland farms to run half a specialist, you make them to grow (transition) faster to the size where you can work the desired number of specialists.

Example, you have 2 fish, you can run 5 specialists off them and the food surplus. But if you're say size 3, you can still only run 2 specialists, so you want to grow to size 7, and grassland farms will save time.

If you say wanted to run an additional specialist (say 6 specialists) supported by 2 grassland farms, you have to grow 3 population, 2 for the farm and 1 for the specialist itself (so size 10). Note that every 2 food could have gone into a turn of running a specialist (so without considering the additional food you get at sizes 8 or 9), so you're losing about (17+18+19)/2=54/2=27 turns of specialists, or 81 GPP x multiplier. It will take 27 turns to break even in GPP. So especially the larger your city, the greater your food costs are and the less worthwhile it is to grow 3 sizes to run one more specialist.