Is Agriculture too strong?

[Nikis-Knight]

A poll to go with the economy thread.

(Disclaimer: Non-binding in anyway. This is not a democracy. Even if changes are made, they may not be permanent. etc.)

 

[Sureshot]

I picked "Yes, but I like it that way" because it makes the specialist route more viable, before these changes cottages were the optimal improvement. Wish there were more viable options, both in this poll ("Maybe, but I like it this way") and civics (like not having the best food civic in the same category as the best way to use food civic).

Without surplus amounts of food the specialist route is only a boost early on, since its a diminishing results as the thresholds increases make it best to switch back to cottages after a few Great People.

As for changes, the only decent idea I've seen was to add a production % penalty for cities, rather than the nearly pointless -1 that merely makes farming plains less useful.

Edit:
-%GPP and +%maintenance are also decent ideas.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Wish there were more viable options, both in this poll ("Maybe, but I like it this way")

I didn't want to split too many hairs; that's what responses are for.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

I picked "Yes, but I like it that way" because it makes the specialist route more viable, before these changes cottages were the optimal improvement. Wish there were more viable options, both in this poll ("Maybe, but I like it this way") and civics (like not having the best food civic in the same category as the best way to use food civic).

Without surplus amounts of food the specialist route is only a boost early on, since its a diminishing results as the thresholds increases make it best to switch back to cottages after a few Great People.

As for changes, the only decent idea I've seen was to add a production % penalty for cities, rather than the nearly pointless -1 that merely makes farming plains less useful.

Edit:
-%GPP and +%maintenance are also decent ideas.

Keep in mind that the specialist strategy doesn't necessarily give diminishing returns with the Altar of the Luonnotar victory condition. It's certainly gets a bit tougher to complete each step, but the return is guaranteed victory.

 

[R0GERSHRUBBER]

I have to agree that the -1H penalty is too easy to circumvent to be meaningful.

A percentage penalty to hammers would accomplish the same effect, although the penalty to production would not scale with the presence or absence of farm improvements.

I agree that the specialist strategy should be as viable as a cottage spam strategy, but it shouldn't necessarily be tied to one civic or one victory type.

Another alternative to weakening Agriculture is to improve the other civics in that category to make them worth considering.

 

[Polycrates]

I think a one food bonus would be ideal. (Also medium upkeep and maybe a slightly later tech required)

My thoughts on agriculture are here

Two food is just such a massive bonus that you'll still want it every now and then regardless of the associated penalty, and so it'd be ideal to switch back and forth to it all the time as your empire need sudden bursts of growth. Seems like unnecessary micromanagement to me.

One food wouldn't make a specialist economy non-viable, since there's still oodles of food around (especially since sanitation comes relatively early), it's just that you may only be able to support 60% specialists per city rather than 80%. As it is, a specialist economy absolutely walks all over an equivalent cottage economy at pretty much every point in the game.

Has anyone made a "one food agriculture" mod? I'd love to try it.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Has anyone made a "one food agriculture" mod? I'd love to try it.

You reminded me how easy this is, maybe I'll try it myself before advocating a changed.
Just change cell "W 97" in the FfH editor civics tab and export. (Must have excel, enable macros, etc.)

 

[QES]

I liked the last option.

It fits with my view of democracy (which i know this is not)

Vote early - Vote often.
-Qes

 

[Gamestation]

Yeah it's overpowered. When you can make farms better than the actual improvement that is supposed to go on the resource (pigs, bananas) then I would say something is definitely wrong there. I would actually also like to see a (admittedly strange) change to farms in general: give them +1 . It would make the -1 less pointless and effectively gives every other economy choice a boost somewhat because those will be s that agriculture will not be taking advantage of. Of course I know this idea isn't going to fly too well since it makes almost no sense at all why a farm would produce a .

 

[Polycrates]

You reminded me how easy this is, maybe I'll try it myself before advocating a changed.
Just change cell "W 97" in the FfH editor civics tab and export. (Must have excel, enable macros, etc.)

Could someone who makes this change please post the changed file? I don't have excel (or a clue)

Yeah it's overpowered. When you can make farms better than the actual improvement that is supposed to go on the resource (pigs, bananas) then I would say something is definitely wrong there. I would actually also like to see a (admittedly strange) change to farms in general: give them +1 . It would make the -1 less pointless and effectively gives every other economy choice a boost somewhat because those will be s that agriculture will not be taking advantage of. Of course I know this idea isn't going to fly too well since it makes almost no sense at all why a farm would produce a .

But it already gets rid of the hammer from the plains farm. The only thing is that currently the two food in exchange more than makes up for it. With one less food (and sure, a plains farm still ends up with 4 food anyway), it becomes less of a given that farming that plains is a good thing (vs a cottage, or an ancient forest or whatever). So grassland vs plains is more distinguished that way, which to me is a good thing.

I agree on the non-grain specials too - it would be nice if they could get a boost from another civic (eg fish from the foreign trade civic, animals from the nomadism civic that's been in some mods) to really make them worthwhile. Of course, the health benefits become more important anyway when there's less food, but it'd be nice to see them more on par with grain resources.

 

[Gamestation]

Could someone who makes this change please post the changed file? I don't have excel (or a clue)

It really isn't too difficult to change the xml files, even without excel.
1. Find the file that contains the aspect that you wish to change (probably the most difficult step if you don't know your way around the files). For the change to agriculture, you want the CIV4CivicInfos file located in C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods\Fall from Heaven 2 022\Assets\xml\gameinfo. (this is the path I use to get to the folder, it may need to be changed a bit to match your system)
2. You should find the CIV4CivicInfos file. Open it with notepad.
3. Use notepad's search function to find agriculture. Scroll down until you find the following:

<ImprovementYieldChanges>
<ImprovementYieldChange>
<ImprovementType>IMPROVEMENT_FARM</ImprovementType>
<ImprovementYields>
<iYield>2</iYield>
<iYield>-1</iYield>
<iYield>0</iYield>
</ImprovementYields>
</ImprovementYieldChange>
</ImprovementYieldChanges>

4. Change the 2 to 1 and save. Now farms in the game will give +1 instead of +2 when you adopt agriculture.

But it already gets rid of the hammer from the plains farm. The only thing is that currently the two food in exchange more than makes up for it. With one less food (and sure, a plains farm still ends up with 4 food anyway), it becomes less of a given that farming that plains is a good thing (vs a cottage, or an ancient forest or whatever). So grassland vs plains is more distinguished that way, which to me is a good thing.

Could always change the -1 to -2 and keep the distinction. I want to see a real opportunity cost for using agriculture to build farms on floodplains/grasslands.

 

[[NWO]_Valis]

I just edited my entry for 0.22 so it gives -25&#37; GPP, will see if it works. Firstly I was thinking +1 food instead of +2 but then it would make the civc to boring. [and I started my first game as Grigori I must be a masochist )

I would like to point out that its power comes not only from specialists but also it is also a great tool in the hands of Calabim and has a great synergy with Sacrifice the Weak.

The Calabim synergy makes them IMBA the way fiesting is now so a change from +2 to +1 may be needed :/

 

[it-ogo]

Agriculture is overpowered. I never change it even with Sacrifice the weak. But it is inside all strategies and I don't like to make Agr. weaker. Prefer to improve concurent civics.

 

[TheBoatman]

As for changes, the only decent idea I've seen was to add a production &#37; penalty for cities, rather than the nearly pointless -1 that merely makes farming plains less useful.

Please, keep in mind that %penalties are rounded down. Basically -10% penalty subtracts one hammer until ten hammers, two hamers until twenty, etc.

This would cripple early economies.

I voted for 1F idea -- it makes agri-ari combination much weaker, slows down specialist boom yet leaves occasions when agriculture is handy.

 

[Polycrates]

It really isn't too difficult to change the xml files, even without excel.
1. Find the file that contains the aspect that you wish to change (probably the most difficult step if you don't know your way around the files). For the change to agriculture, you want the CIV4CivicInfos file located in C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods\Fall from Heaven 2 022\Assets\xml\gameinfo. (this is the path I use to get to the folder, it may need to be changed a bit to match your system)
2. You should find the CIV4CivicInfos file. Open it with notepad.
3. Use notepad's search function to find agriculture. Scroll down until you find the following:
4. Change the 2 to 1 and save. Now farms in the game will give +1 instead of +2 when you adopt agriculture.

Thanks for that. Just been playing the first 150 turns of a game with +1 food agriculture, and WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT! Gameplay is just so much smoother, it's unbelievable. It takes a little bit of time to actually reach happy caps, you need more than just one or two farms to supply the whole city, so much of the tedious micromanagement is gone, you can't just automatically race to huge happy heights when you get a religion, cottages are much more viable vs elder councils, and food resources are actually useful!
Settlers and workers are still very cheap, but they take enough extra time that it detracts from other production, and so REXing is significantly reduced (even by the AI). As a result, there's more unsettled land, barbarians are a bigger threat (and for much longer), and it's not just a race to pop out the most settlers possible.
Right now, I am absolutely loving the difference it makes. I still feel as though I would probably stick to it as the default option (at least until sanitation), but that's something that could be helped by beefing up the other civics. And it would be nice to try moving it back a tech or two (not sure where I'd move it to though), or giving it some associated penalty. But it improves the flow of the early game so much that I'm convinced that the reduction in food bonus is a very good thing.

 

[slowcar]

personally i know nobody that does not stay in agriculture for the whole game. i like the boni it provides but it should have some drawbacks.
in general i like the idea of a realmwide production penalty of 10&#37;, 15% or something similar. it is the whole society that is agricultural, not only some farmers.

problem with the -1 production per tile is that in most cases you don't have to farm over plains but have grassland and maybe floodplains available -> you get +2 food for free. there has to be a tradeoff.

only +1 food would, on the other hand, make all cities without grassland or floodplains unable to run farms as you would trade 1P to 1F, without slavery avaiable (to all) this is a bad tradeoff.

 

[Gutus]

My idea would be to diminish the gpp rate, as Valis did, but i think -25&#37; is too much. Also I think the penalty should not go into income, it should affect science. If your people are focusing on farming, they wont focus on science. A typical agricultural nation would not be also too happy with wars, as wars are bad for crops.

Summarizing my idea is:
1. remove the -1 production thing
2. Leave +2 food, +1 health bonus
3. Add a 20% penalty for beakers/turn
4. Add a 25% penalty for great people production (or -20% for military units production)
5. Add a 25% penalty for war

This in my opinion would better reflect a calm, agricultural civilization, focused rather on growth, than on wars, science. Also I think the -1 hammer is not really that painfull, in fact it never even affected any of my games. For me there is no difference between having this penalty or not.

Also this setting still serves its role, when stacked with aristocracy, where the poor peasants must sell some of their crop yields, to pay the rent.

I also think that may be all the civics code should be reworked a bit, so that some illogical combinations won't be possible (Like Pacifism + military state - in this combination you can maintain a decent number of units, still having the great people thing boosted, just throw in aristocracy, agriculture and military discipline and you have a very good mid-game combination, still totally illogical for me).

 

[Polycrates]

only +1 food would, on the other hand, make all cities without grassland or floodplains unable to run farms as you would trade 1P to 1F, without slavery avaiable (to all) this is a bad tradeoff.

There's still a +2 food bonus when you build a farm (vs unimproved), so you're getting 3 food for a plains farm (and 4 food after sanitation), which is still pretty good and definitely worthwhile.

I could see an argument for +1 food, with no per-square hammer penalty but a civ-wide penalty or something.

 

[Uberness]

I wouldn't want to see it get such harsh penaltys that it would change your entire gameplay to work around the penalty or cripple somebody, instead would just like some mild penaltys like to great people or civic cost or maintenace cost for exemple:

1 food -1 production for elven farms -25% gpp and/or 10-20% city maintenace /or/ medium/high civic cost.

And poly good to hear it improved your gameplay experience by lowering it by 1.

Need to remember biology in vanilla civ comes rather late and is such a huge boost and allows cities to be planted and become productive where they would only be wastelands before without a special food resource, and that was only with +1.

 

[onedreamer]

Whatever is done to balance it, please don't apply the penalty to the total production of cities. A production malus should stay on farms IMO, other malus could be civ-wide, but I'm not totally convinced, I would prefer if it stays tied to the actual use of farms.