Help with farms please and their purpose.

[Callonia]

I've built plenty of farms in civ 3 and 4 but this series is the first time I've become stumped over their purpose. Mainly because of the limitations on happiness.

Now I should explain how i treat farms in my games of civ 5.

I tend to farm the wheat hex with no questions, mainly because i cannot build anything in there else short of great person improvements and forts. And, riverside hills tend to get themselves farmed in a heartbeat because thats 1 food, 2 hammer and 1 gold early game.

And anything else pretty much have me ignoring the farms, because i don't really see the incentive and benefit in it, but due to increased happiness cap in gods and kings i have started to consider maybe I should make use of farms once again.

But problem is, i don't understand and see the value in farmed grassland and plains hex and tundra even less so.

Because I don't want to hit the happiness cap too quickly before i'm ready and i like to fight alot. Only exception is the capital, i don't mind if it grows really big, its teh capital ya see.

And whenever I invade an opposing country, and I have complete military superiority to the point where i completely eclipse their troops i tend to go on a razing spree of their farmlands before i conquer their city because its annoying to have those cities grow too quick due to farms covering every single hex it have which would bump up my unhappiness while being unproductive at same time so conquered territory tend to have vast swathes of burnt ground before i send the workers in to convert them to trade posts.

Again, farms have to compete against tradeposts, but, for me the tradeposts win every single time with sole exceptions of riverside hills and wheats hex. Because those trade posts allow you to maintain bigger military than a farm would. I've gotten as high as 1.8k gpt >_>


However despite my ability to see the value in farmlands, I tend to build granaries and waterwheels in high production lands with bad lands for farming, because granaries and waterwheels allow me to conserve hexes for cash making and production making while keeping me from breaking into unhappiness too quickly..


But i've considered them for high science cities but then again,, i could easily just plop them down into a jungle and start using those jungles for science. Is farmed science city competitive with an jungle science city? Sure they will need to have gold spent to get the buildings built in reasonable amount of time but, i don't mind that.


help pwease.

 

[PhilBowles]

I've built plenty of farms in civ 3 and 4 but this series is the first time I've become stumped over their purpose. Mainly because of the limitations on happiness.

Now I should explain how i treat farms in my games of civ 5.

I tend to farm the wheat hex with no questions, mainly because i cannot build anything in there else short of great person improvements and forts. And, riverside hills tend to get themselves farmed in a heartbeat because thats 1 food, 2 hammer and 1 gold early game.

And anything else pretty much have me ignoring the farms, because i don't really see the incentive and benefit in it, but due to increased happiness cap in gods and kings i have started to consider maybe I should make use of farms once again.

But problem is, i don't understand and see the value in farmed grassland and plains hex and tundra even less so.

Because I don't want to hit the happiness cap too quickly before i'm ready and i like to fight alot. Only exception is the capital, i don't mind if it grows really big, its teh capital ya see.

And whenever I invade an opposing country, and I have complete military superiority to the point where i completely eclipse their troops i tend to go on a razing spree of their farmlands before i conquer their city because its annoying to have those cities grow too quick due to farms covering every single hex it have which would bump up my unhappiness while being unproductive at same time so conquered territory tend to have vast swathes of burnt ground before i send the workers in to convert them to trade posts.

Again, farms have to compete against tradeposts, but, for me the tradeposts win every single time with sole exceptions of riverside hills and wheats hex. Because those trade posts allow you to maintain bigger military than a farm would. I've gotten as high as 1.8k gpt >_>


However despite my ability to see the value in farmlands, I tend to build granaries and waterwheels in high production lands with bad lands for farming, because granaries and waterwheels allow me to conserve hexes for cash making and production making while keeping me from breaking into unhappiness too quickly..


But i've considered them for high science cities but then again,, i could easily just plop them down into a jungle and start using those jungles for science. Is farmed science city competitive with an jungle science city? Sure they will need to have gold spent to get the buildings built in reasonable amount of time but, i don't mind that.


help pwease.

Even for a wide, militaristic empire you want farms. Farms = specialists, and specialists = great people points. Warmongers need to keep up the tech race as much as anyone else; trust me, try a couple of games where you add specialists in the science buildings and concentrate the scientist-producing Wonders in the same city, and you'll see just how much of a difference it makes. Specialists also allow you to depress growth - so if your city's growing too fast, just take population off the farms to stick them in specialist buildings.

But if you don't have other farmed land, all your workers will be doing is paying for themselves (if that - a tundra tile with a trading post is a Bad Tile, unless it's by a river because it (a) doesn't pay for itself, and (b) doesn't give you anything goldwise that a more productive tile with a trading post doesn't. A farmed tundra tile will always at least pay for itself, and as you get benefits to food production from farms with later techs, tundra becomes moderately good for supporting food cities), not giving you the food surplus you need for specialists.

Beyond that, as you point out, early in the game you can't do much else. And early in the game you want your cities to grow rapidly, making farms very good. There's no reason at all you can't spam farms at the start of the game as your population works its tiles, and then replace the farms on those tiles with trading posts if needed once you reach Guilds. You don't have to improve a tile once and then never touch it again.

Personally I rarely farm plains without wheat, however grassland is exactly what you want to farm (not very surprisingly). If you have a grassland with a trading post, you get gold but you can't take any population off the tile - base grassland production is only enough to feed that population point. You want to specialise your hexes, so that some produce lots of excess food that you can use to support specialists or population working in the mines.

As for jungles, the issue there is that farming them for science is all you can do with them - there's no improvement that keeps jungle but improves its food output. So, again, no specialists - a university with two specialists gives +4 science and +6 great scientist points (and an additional +4 science with one early Rationalism policy). And if your city isn't growing fast - because you only have enough food to feed your existing population - you don't get very much benefit from the science buildings.

In Civ, more population is always better than less population - even if it leads to unhappiness (the major effect of unhappiness is, after all, to depress population growth, so if you're having trouble managing your population, anything below -10 happiness is not something to worry about- you'll lose the benefits of natural golden ages and some policies, but if you actually want to keep your pop low, unhappiness achieves it so why be paranoid about going into the red? So you want as much food as possible - and food buildings are few and far between (unless you're on a river, there are none between granaries and hospitals, and only one food storage building).

 

[Himmurabi]

I was under the impression that farms were for science. Not just specialists but in general, higher pop = more science from libraries and public schools.

 

[Harv72b]

PhilBowles pretty much covered it, but one thing which needs to be driven home is that every farmed grassland in the early game allows you to work a forested tile, or a horse pasture on plains, or any of a number of other possibilities which net +1 with strong and/or . Or rather, allows you to work those tiles without having to worry about building granaries or pumping money into maritime city states just yet. And that early increased production/gold = more units for conquest, more buildings for science or happiness, and faster wonder production. Then later on as you start to gain bonuses for farms, then you can get into specialists or working mines & still balance out on food.

That said...

Personally I rarely farm plains without wheat, however grassland is exactly what you want to farm (not very surprisingly).

I actually prefer to farm plains. Even without a river, for one improvement you gain a tile which nets 2 and 1 -- with a river tack on 1 as well. Especially if you didn't start with a lot of food resources around (which seems to happen to me a lot ) I find this is a pretty good way to get your production numbers up while still growing your cities, at least until later on when I'm getting my extra food from buildings & city states.

 

[Smokeybear]

I was under the impression that farms were for science. Not just specialists but in general, higher pop = more science from libraries and public schools.

And don't forget, each extra citizen adds science just by existing, too. Next time you see a civ maxing out science and going for the science win, you'll see their population balloon up incredibly... often they will have 2 or 3 times the population of my civs, even when they are smaller than me in land area. And when you go look at their improvements- farms, farms, farms! I usually don't get as overzealous about it as the AI does when I'm going science, but you get the idea.

 

[PhilBowles]

And don't forget, each extra citizen adds science just by existing, too. Next time you see a civ maxing out science and going for the science win, you'll see their population balloon up incredibly... often they will have 2 or 3 times the population of my civs, even when they are smaller than me in land area. And when you go look at their improvements- farms, farms, farms! I usually don't get as overzealous about it as the AI does when I'm going science, but you get the idea.

In my current game (EDIT: Emperor, Duel, Pachacuti) Beijing has had over 120 science since I started spying on it, substantially more than my capital had when I first started checking Wu's science progress, and without her having Rationalism or using specialists (whenever I look at AI city views, they never use specialists at all) - but then her city did have 31 pop while mine had 16.

EDIT: This game is also a testament to just how important (a) population is, and (b) just how important being able to compensate for the AI's happiness advantages (and consequently larger populations) with specialists/Great People is. By the late game I was popping GSes every few turns, and was still only level-pegging with the much larger Chinese empire (which must have had massive beaker per turn output, dwarfing the measly 850 bpt I was getting) - though I was always 1 in Literacy, past the early game I was never more than one or two techs ahead, and often even, despite having taken all the science Wonders and Wu having none (she didn't seem to have Oxford University either), and despite my rushing National College on one city (which I rarely do). Even with Tradition and terrace farms around a nicely-situated mountain range I couldn't keep up with her population, and had it not been for my frequent GSes (including a couple of faith-bought ones, but mostly "natural") I'd have fallen well behind in tech. As it was I didn't decisively get into the lead until I completed the Hubble, and even then she started to catch up (just not in time to produce the last two spaceship parts she needed before I teched to and built them).

 

[Lyoncet]

You're right that it's not always a no-brainier. But farms are still critically important. There are two major reasons to build them:

1) you want specialists and science - already covered in detail
2) you can grow to tiles that are worth the happy cost

#2 seems like it should be pretty obvious, but honestly it takes a lot of playing to figure out when and where it's best to grow in that way. That's because it depends on a ton of factors: city size, other cities, excess happiness, foreseeable incoming happiness, city specialization, surrounding tiles, empire focus, etc. Because of all those variables, there's no hard-and-fast rule. But there are some circumstances where it's easier to tell than in others. For example, in the middle of plains, with hills and a river? Farm up every plains/river/hill you've got - they'll support themselves with Civil Service, and net you 2 and 1 per, and give you a superb production city. And possibly when you're swimming in extra , farm the normal plains tiles and build food buildings for neutral growth 1 tiles that turn into positive growth tiles when you reach Fertilizer. Of course that part depends on if you have non-hill riverside plains, or food resources, or a few grassland thrown in, and how many high-hammer cities you have/need, and a bunch of other things, so there it turns back into "You've just gotta be able to size up the situation and make the right call."

Anyways, hope that helps/makes sense!

 

[Callonia]

Ok thank you guys very much, gonna start using farms if i spot the terrain for it. It helped put things into perspective for me, thank u guys again.

 

[Smokeybear]

EDIT: This game is also a testament to just how important (a) population is, and (b) just how important being able to compensate for the AI's happiness advantages (and consequently larger populations) with specialists/Great People is. By the late game I was popping GSes every few turns, and was still only level-pegging with the much larger Chinese empire (which must have had massive beaker per turn output, dwarfing the measly 850 bpt I was getting) - though I was always 1 in Literacy, past the early game I was never more than one or two techs ahead, and often even, despite having taken all the science Wonders and Wu having none (she didn't seem to have Oxford University either), and despite my rushing National College on one city (which I rarely do). Even with Tradition and terrace farms around a nicely-situated mountain range I couldn't keep up with her population, and had it not been for my frequent GSes (including a couple of faith-bought ones, but mostly "natural") I'd have fallen well behind in tech. As it was I didn't decisively get into the lead until I completed the Hubble, and even then she started to catch up (just not in time to produce the last two spaceship parts she needed before I teched to and built them).

Yep. Most of the runaways that clean my clock or force me to retire, ran away with science and techs due to large cities and/or expansion. Of course, once they get started, it's a snowball rolling to hell, with the more advance tech units helping them conquer even faster and grow ever larger and pump out even more science. I hate it when I'm cranking away on one continent (or one side of Pangaea), and by the time I encounter said civ, they are already sporting riflemen or WWI infantry to my longswordsmen