Is growing cities too easy?

[Snipergw]

I think it's important in Civ that yields mainly come from tiles, not buildings (or worse, ethereal sources like policies or instant yields). There's many reasons for this - satisfaction is higher when you can see yields, it's easier to play around and plan for, I think it feels more immersive, and most importantly, it plays best in war. Pillaged farms ought to see a City starve, pillaged manufactories and mines cripple its production. VP shoving so much of an empires yields into cities feels pretty bad imo, but that's out of scope for the conversation here.

Specifically Farms I think is where this issue stands out the most. Farms feel terrible. They give so little food. And even a breadbasket city is incomparable to the ethereal sources of food later on. With policies buffing ITRs, you can send 80(!?) or more Food per turn to a city of your choice, regardless of the actual Food output of source city. That's like 10 pops all working perfectly positioned Wheat farms!

I think the ideal approach would be neutering off-map sources of Food to make actually settling fertile locations feel better, and heavily scaling the Food ITRs send based on the actual Food output (ideally worked Food from tiles, not percentage modifiers) of the source city. This would encourage settling breadbaskets and sending ITRs from them to feed the empire - strategically interesting, historically flavorful.

 

[azum4roll]

This would encourage settling breadbaskets and sending ITRs from them to feed the empire

No, that would discourage using ITRs at all.

 

[msw1]

What if, instead of giving straight food increases, granaries and aqueducts gave additional food to farms? In real life granaries and aqueducts don’t produce food by themselves, they increase the efficiency of agriculture. You still need farms to actually produce the food.

Agreed. If farms are useless because buildings already provide so much food, moving that food from the buildings to the farms seems like a natural thing to do. Granary losing its current effect in favor of +1 food to farms would also be a nice complement to forge adding +1 production to mines.

 

[looorg]

ok so if the problem is too many non-farm food sources early on, lets look at the general list:

Granaries, Herbalist, Food CS, ITRs, progress policy (remind me did that just get nerfed?), aqueducts (I think), watermill, well.

So take a look at those and suggests some nerfs. I think ITRs are fine since its such a heavy cost to go a food ITR or external or production routes, so its a lot of benefit but you do pay a high price. I could see maybe the well and watermill get a food nerf in favor or just keeping their production (or add a gold if they need something).

You could lower the instant food on the granary, or lower the food maintained by the granary and aqueduct.

So I would start with some discussiosn there.

I'm somewhat split on the idea. From some kind of historical aspect yes humans settled to farm, but a lot of early settlements might also have been about other food gathering and animal herding or fishing etc. I can understand that a granary should boost farming, but what will boost the fishing, the pastures and the deer -- I guess it's the lighthouse, the stable and the herbalist/smokehouse but those are all further down the tech tree compared to the granary so it become a bit weird I guess. We might be driving settlements to farming to hard. But something should probably boost farm yields more, but it's a balance thing. Also that Flooding event just needs to be scaled back cause it's ridiculously horrific and overpowered and to common (even tho that might just be bias since you only recall it when it happens).

Still you would want a lot of buildings that make farming more efficient over the ages to in the end create an absolute abundance of food. That would seem natural.

Personally I am fine with the food traderoutes as is. There is a risk/reward thing with barbarians and such. It's usually only ludicrous amounts in the end of the game and nothing much matters then. Early on, or as early as you get trade routes an internal food traderoute doesn't shave to many turns of the growth. You would need to devote a significant effort and amount of them to it for it be really altering things. So it's player interaction rewarding if you do like so many micromanagement things. Even if they are a bit of set and forget.

If you lower the food maintenance/level or whatever we should refer to it as on buildings the game might become a lot slower since population growth could slow down by quite a lot. Having some food storage on pop growth is good as a mechanic. Starting at zero again each pop growth is bad since it could lead to instant starvation, which is very bad and annoying in that regard. So there has to, or should be, a buffer of sorts. It might just not have to be as large as it currently is. With most of the buildings that provide one you keep a very large amount of food. Which might make sense in some regard but it really boosts growth early in perhaps an unnatural sense.

 

[Stalker0]

Remove the +1 food from granaries and aqueducts also, they already give a bunch of food bonuses. Nerf lighthouse bonus food gained from ITR by -1 (so it's +3). Nerf gurdwara and monastery raw food yields by -1 (so it's +2)

I would not nerf the religious buildings personally. you are taking a very specific play to food with those (and you have sacrificed other choices). this isn't like a general building you can build everywhere. I would focus on the general stuff.

 

[CrazyG]

I think food and growth are pretty good. I like the food for followers religious belief often, and the food per city of tradition or progress is a very good bonus.

I think the 2% extra growth for each point of happiness should be looked at. Any building that lowers unhappiness is effectively producing food. Its why you can focus production, neglect food, and still grow. Each time you grow, not only does the new guy eat 2 food, he eats 2% growth for each unhappy (I usually get more than one unhappy for a new citizen anywhere but my capital).

This feature might be better as a social policy or religious belief, instead of something that always exists by default.

I do think farms are pretty weak, but most tiles not on resources are weak.

 

[Snipergw]

Speaking of percentages, that could be a way to make Farms scale better, even if it's rather inelegant. 1 or 2% or maybe 5% extra growth in a City for each worked Farm, either as an innate bonus or from some not-too-lategame building. I don't really like this kind of bonus, since its unsatisfying invisible power, but it could help encourage making and keeping Farms around. Civ isn't a history simulator, but it has a lot of historical themes, and sprawling farms in fertile areas hasn't really changed from 2000 BCE to today. I think Farms ought to still be present on the map by the end, and this being desirable. Especially adjacency farms - nothing feels worse than breaking up a triangle (or even a double triangle or a full hex adjacency) of farms because a GPTI and a trading post just gives better yields.

 

[Zerazar]

It's interesting to see how little agreement there is as to what the problem/goal is or what the solution would be.

 

[CppMaster]

Yeah, it's possible that the solution depends on the problem