Game just told me to replace farms with neighborhoods

[eobet]

Maybe I clicked that dialogue away to fast, but why should I do this? Don't I still need the food from the farms? Neighborhoods doesn't provide any food, do they?

 

[Promethian]

In fact most of the game housing limits your growth more than food does. Add that as you advance farms get adjacency bonuses that make them silly strong and neighborhoods become a godsend when you unlock them.

 

[Kozmos]

I always built mine far away from my city center. Enjoy the long drive suckers.

 

[TruthfulCake]

Breathtaking neighborhoods ftw. They are usually where you won't be building many farms anyway, since a lot of the breathtaking tiles are isolated. Farms are best when clustered.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

There are two reasons to build farms.

• For extra food
• Working a farm only cost 0.5 housing

In the early game before neighbourhoods, the low housing cost of working farms are very valuable and you can double your housing if all your citizens work all farms. Food become more plentiful as farms get better and housing become more accessible so the value of farms decrease as the game moves along.

 

[Browd]

Housing isn't really a "cost" concept. You need sufficient housing to enable your city's population to keep growing. Farms (and pastures, plantations, etc.) all provide housing for your city, whether or not you have any citizens working those farm (or pasture, plantation, etc.) tiles. So, if builders had unlimited charges, it would be perfectly rational to spam housing-providing improvements (farms, pastures, etc.) everywhere. Of course, builders do not have unlimited charges, so you have to be selective about their use -- am I better off improving (or harvesting) that copper tile, or dropping a farm on that other tile to increase my housing (even though I don't have any plans to work either tile right now)?

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

You must work the tile to recive the housing, effectivly working a farm only cost 1/2 housing.

 

[Browd]

No, you don't. Give it a try. Spam a bunch of farms in a city and alternatively work the farms and not work the farms -- housing doesn't change.

 

[King Jason]

You must work the tile to recive the housing, effectivly working a farm only cost 1/2 housing.

No you don't. Improvements give housing whether they're worked or not.

To the op's question, Promethian nailed it; Say you have a city that generates 12 food per turn but it's at the housing cap. That means you're growing at 75%, which means that 12 food is actually 3 food. You place a neighborhood down but you need to delete a farm that's generating 3 food to do it. Your housing normalizes, you lost 3 food, but now you're generating 9 food per turn total.

 

[ExemplarVoss]

There are two reasons to build farms.

• For extra food
• Working a farm only cost 0.5 housing

In the early game before neighbourhoods, the low housing cost of working farms are very valuable and you can double your housing if all your citizens work all farms. Food become more plentiful as farms get better and housing become more accessible so the value of farms decrease as the game moves along.

This is entirely wrong. Housing happens if you work or not. The value of farms also goes up as the game moves along, as they are the most reliable form of food production, and adjacency makes them better.
Without enough farms it's quite easy to run out of growth in the teens, regardless of whether you have multiple neighborhoods to provide 20+ housing.

Replacing farms with neighborhoods is a terrible plan, as you can decrease your available food by 5-10 points. Good Neighborhoods go on the outskirts of cities, or in pockets that don't provide a lot of adjacency bonuses.

I've gotten cities to 26 pop with only a single neighborhood in the tundra. The fact it was at the housing cap at that point didn't really matter. The farms and sugar plantations in the interior mattered a lot.

 

[indradiva]

There's a good reason to replace farms with neighborhoods due to the Public Transport card that gives you 50xAppeal Gold when doing so. Can be quite profitable!

 

[redwings1340]

You want a balance, basically you want enough neighborhoods so that you aren't at the housing limit, and have farms otherwise. It's pretty intuitive from what I played, you don't want to spam neighborhoods, just build one when you approach the housing limit, and if you replace a farm doing so, that doesn't really matter.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I find that food is more or less not a problem, housing to me feels like the true limiter on growth as housing tends to be harder to get especially early in the game. Farms are not all that great either, it is very tricky to turn food into production and late game farms compete with production oriented improvements even on flatland (wood + lumbermill). I could even see it possible to fuel cities with trade routes alone, especially a late game production core which have zero farms and use trade routes to get all its food.

Each citizen get more and more expensive and after you have capped out your district limit the value of extra citizens decrease pretty hefty.