Farms?

[Skibatized]

Can someone explain to me this whole farm deal?

I've never used this tactic, I'm playing Demigod and I think it might help me win.

I have never seen the industrial age at this point *mostly because 1 of the civs I'm playing against is a raging warmonger, and conquers most of the known continent*

That just ruins the fun for me.

Well how do you know when to make a city a specialist farm and at what point in age is it most useful?

Any one playing Demigod now have any tips for me?

btw Im playing civ complete.

 

[Aabraxan]

I'm nowhere near playing DG, but I'll tell you what I know about specialist farms. Specialist output isn't affected by corruption, so once you get so many towns or so far from your core that all your new ones are hopelessly corrupt, it no longer makes sense for them to build any improvements. They won't generate enough gold or shields for the improvements to do any good. So you just irrigate everything around them, and hire as many specialists as you can. There's a War Academy article on them here. The article was written for vanilla (IIRC), but specialists are actually more powerful in Conquests.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

In early cities, you could choose to make farms out of cities that have more than about 65% corruption under rep with FP. As the game progresses, you can decrease that depending on the present improvements to 50% or so. If you are far in the game, and the new city does not have the needed improvements for being productive, you could make them farms even at 50% corruption rather than spending 40 turns building whats needed.

Growing a city beyond size 6 often requires an aquaduct. At some point it will require a marketplace for happiness, and it would require culture to expand its borders if you want more than 8 tiles for your citizens to work.
Extra cities on the other hand provide you with more unit upkeep and with 1 shield production and one commerce even if it's completely corrupt. Therefore, it is better to have many small towns than 1 big one.

So you get about 20 productive cities in your core, and the rest of the world can be filled with small farm towns. 200 of them is not uncommon.

They are always usefull, in the beginning however they are mostly busy producing more settlers and workers (at 1 shield per turn since they are corrupt). These settlers and workers are needed to make more farms and irrigate all the ground around them. Cashrushing some settlers helps to get things going. This causes a kind of ever increasing avalange of settlers and workers. When you got this properly going and you are producing more settlers and workers than your army can capture ground for, you start shifting them to specialist farms.

Start to prepare your new lands for this as soon as you conquer them, this may even be in ancient age. In civ, you should mostly be trying to increase your number of citizens as much as you can, as soon as you can, so that as what you are doing with all the settlers, workers and irrigation while you conquer the lands. Without railroads, they towns are worthy, but as soon as you have railroads, they truly start to shine. When you get 200 of these farms, each providing 3 scientists, you have 2000 beakers per turn there already, enough to do any industrial age techs in 1 turn. They are so efficient that i prioritize on millitary to capture land for farming over building libraries until halfway trough the middle ages in a research game.

 

[AznWarlord]

I have never seen the industrial age at this point *mostly because 1 of the civs I'm playing against is a raging warmonger, and conquers most of the known continent*

That civ sounds like me. Personally, as a warmonger, I've never seen the Modern Age unless I play a mod, I've never seen the UN or a single Spaceship Part. I've tried being a builder only to get conquered. I've tried combining both only to lose in the end because both sides of my Empire are too weak. I've got to try more of these tactics such as farming or I may never get a chance to see the United Nations.

 

[Mao Zendog]

if you want to emphisise on both research and military, build 40 catapults, 10 spears, and a couple archers. Let the catapults do all the heavy work so your archers and spearmen can finnish the job. Because you will get into little actual combat, you will not need to worry about building lots of troops the entire game. Focus on spending as much money on reasearch, and as many hammers(production) on librarys as you can. Once you get a ton of money and are ahead in technology, uprgrade your stack of death!