Begone Dave and your cottage spamming blasphemy!
Hello? Did you not read the same post where he claims that Citizens used as Specialists create unhealth and unhappiness, but those who work Cottages do not? I even quoted it for you.
TheDS, so I'm getting mixed input here. My slider is still not at 30%, so I have money to spare. Therefore cottages at my capital aren't needed, since the farms will make it easier to assign scientists and/or pump out settlers / workers, whipped or not. Is this true? Or is it because I'm gonna need the developed cottages later on, when I get 8-10 cities?
First, let me be clear about my own preferences. I find Cottages to be a waste of time and effort in the early game, except as fillers when you've got idle time and idle space.
I am instead propounding what's loosely known as a Food Economy. The point of it is to grow your cities rapidly, then whip them to get things built in half the time. By doing this, it is possible to build things with Food AND Hammers, and use them both at the same time.
However, whipping causes unhappiness, and you must arrest your growth to keep from exceeding your happiness cap. While waiting for the unhappiness to go away, your choices of action include- building Workers/Settlers, assigning farmers to mines, and yes, even clicking on the HALT GROWTH button when you have too much food coming in. You'll have to micromanage that button, because the whipping unhappiness disappears little by little (10 turns after the whipping, IIRC) and as one goes away, it's possible to allow growth again, and then you have to stop it again when you've reached the new cap.
If you assign people to working Cottages, you can't whip because not only does your population grow slowly, but all those people are needed to keep doing what they're doing. Additionally, you're not working Hammers, so you're not building anything, and you're not working Food, so you don't get a boost to Settler/Worker production.
Once you've got some cities and you're over the initial rush to get stuff built, it's okay to tear up Farms and plant Cottages, and you'll even have the population in place to work them. I rarely do it myself, because I prefer to leverage extra Food into Specialists or Hammers, which can be used to get Markets and Libraries and stuff built, so you don't need so many Cottages. I tech well enough, but by Rifling, I am outproducing everyone put together in every area. (England is a perfect fit for me.)
About fishing... Do you mean when I have a coastal city with a fish resource, or simply working water tiles?
Harvest the bounties of the water. Plain water tiles tend to be useless, HOWEVER, you don't have to build anything on them and they're worth 2 Commerce, and with a Lighthouse, they're food-neutral, just like Cottages. Throw in Financial or Colossus and they're even better!
But really, what I'm talking about are the resources. If you can get 1 or 2 of those, a city will grow fast, supporting Mines or Cottages or Specialists. Fish itself is worth 6 Food with a Lighthouse - that's 2 Specialists or 2-4 Mines!
And to all of you posting well into 2nd page, are you mocking that he said cottages should not have priority, or are you agreeing with him and fooling around?
When I went from Prince to Noble (4th to 5th, think that is the names) I was told to cottage a lot, when I had enough food etc. Has this rule of thumb changed?
I believe the quote in question was intentionally misrepresented, so that my preference for Food and Hammers could be taken WAY out of context and mocked. I pity the fool, as you saw. (Now where's the smiley with a Mohawk and three tons of gold chains?)
And another question! Should I skip roads until later (unless it is connection resources to my city network) as the build time is better spent on improving the first 2-4 tiles in a city, or should I build the roads as it saves me time later on when moving around?
As Russia doesn't really beg for a total Water Economy, I would build roads. Rome (the real Rome) conquered the world because they could get their troops where they were needed quickly. Without roads, you need 2-3 defenders per border city, plus a larger and more thorough fog-busting force, and then you'll need an army for each section of the frontier. MUCH cheaper to just connect every city with roads and have 1-2 reactionary forces in total (3-6 units each), 1 defender per city (unless expecting trouble from somewhere), then divert the saved Hammers into useful buildings or Settlers.
This approach does carry some risk, of course, but if you spend the first half of your game building just units, you'll kill yourself, and the best you can hope for is to sweep across the land, pillaging and razing before anyone can stop you, while trying desperately to get a real economy into place.
A little about me (if you care):
I am a builder. I like to have everything everywhere. In other games, I'm a min-maxer, so I can specialize decently, I just can't resist building things. My two favorite buildings are Forge and Factory, and 3GD is my favorite Wonder. I've not yet played as Roosevelt, because I haven't gotten around to him yet, but I'm sure I'll like him.
I tend to be a creature of habit, but I try to do something different in each game. My first games were all about having the best troops, so I liked Agg, Pro, and Cha a lot. Then I got into whipping after learning the value of it. I figured out how to get a Settler out the door before 1000BC. I learned how to draft. I am trying to figure out how to cottage excessively without tanking, but I can't figure it out. I just can't comprehend early cottages. At the core of it all, though, has always been my desire to maximize production, and I have fights with the auto-citizen thing, because it usually wants to grow the population instead, but it HAS taught me that rapid population growth is the key to everything else.
My most recent games, I've been trying to get into early rushing, and I'm using the whip and the draft less. I also try to stay away from Fin and Phi because I feel they make it too easy on me; I don't want the crutch, I want to run. I've never played a game at less than Noble, and only recently decided to start moving up the diffs. I played part of Snaaty's Deity game and at the time he stopped in 1070AD with a Rifle invasion of his neighbors, I JUST got Astronomy and with it, tech parity, but my military isn't strong enough, and I know the tech situation is going to deteriorate soon, but I had to detour to feed an urge to find out what a Warrior rush was like, so I should be getting back to that game any day now.
and 1
from having too many citizens.
, not the source of 
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