Arathorn said:
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LotR18: No Cottage Challenge
Difficulty: Prince (up to negotiation, but "feels" right to me)
Map type: Custom -- continents with random number -- pretty random
Civ: TBD -- see discussion below
Map size: Standard
Game speed: Standard
Variant: We may never work a tile with a cottage improvement -- no cottages, hamlets, villages, or towns. This will make commerce challenging, to be sure. We can never build them with our workers. If we capture land, we must be sure to pillage the improvements so our new cities can not work cottages.
I feel that this is hardly a variant, because I am developing the same strategy in my solo immortal game.
Assuming equivalent usefulness of engineer and scientist, we can deduce that 1 hammer is worth 1.5 gold. With representation from pyramids, a specialist is worth 6 beakers or 2 hammers + 3 beakers, generally 6 gold. A pop needs 2 food, so 1 food is worth 3 gold. Therefore, if a tile generates f food, h hammer, and c commerce, its value is 3*f+1.5*h+c gold. To determine whether we want a citizen to work the tile, we compare this value with the 6 gold and 3 GPP from a specialist (without considering happiness and health issues). The conclusions are:
1. A tile with >=3 food is always worthy to work.
2. A resource tile with approriate improvement is in most cases worthy to work, but not always. For example, a fur on tundra generates nothing but 4 gold, which is too few.
3. A normal (no resource) tile with 0 or 1 food is in most cases not worth working.
4. A normal tile with 2 food becomes interesting. It can sustain a citizen by itself, so would we like to put a citizen there and let city grow faster, or let city grow slower or be stagnant and get 3 GPP? My current idea is: if besides the 2 food, the tile generates just 1 gold or 1 hammer (e.g., ocean, grassland forest), then it's not as useful as 3 GPP. Otherwise, working the tile is better.
Therefore, some general ideas about strategies:
1. Early on, farm every riverside tile. After learning civil service, farm non-river grassland tiles.
2. If a city exceeds its happiness or health limit, do pop rush. Pop rush becomes amazingly efficient in civ 4, because it only makes 1 unhappiness. For this purpose, expansive trait is nice thankful to cheap granary.
3. Build watermill after it's available, just note to keep the fresh water network for inland farms. This makes financial trait still useful for no cottage, since waterwill and sea tiles generate 2 gold. Even not financial, the 2 gold and 2 hammer from watermill is still nice.
4. State property? A non-river non-tree flatland tile can only have 2 improvements: cottage and workshop. Since cottage is no-no, the only option is workshop. With best techs, it makes 3 hammers but -1 food. However, under state property, the -1 food is recovered, therefore a workshop is as good as a lumbermill (both +3 hammer). State property also adds 1 food for watermill, and eliminates distance maintenance, and has no upkeep, -- just too cool! Well, pity for the free specialist from mercantillism ...
5. If you really want to stay at mercantillism, then you should keep most non-river trees for future lumbermills.
All in all, I think that emphasizing specialist and pop rush over cottage is a very viable strategy. Well, if you insist zero cottage, that's a bit variant, but probably not too much.
hey this is unfair, influencing our decision when I wanted Alex 
