Making the Food Market worthwhile.

[darkace77450]

It is my humble opinion that the Neighborhood's Food Market is rather lackluster. It comes at a stage in the game where 3 food isn't really that impactful and it comes at the opportunity cost of building a Shopping Mall, whose amenity bonus is useful to anyone building Neighborhoods in the first place.

If the Food Market provided 3 food plus additional food for every farm being worked by the city or it it provided a citizen slot that produced 4 or so food when worked then we start to approaching something with a worthwhile return on investment. I'm sure there are other ideas for making this particular building a bit more appealing to players, but I do think it warrants another look from the developers.

 

[Sostratus]

In Civ5 we had very powerful buildings - the hospital and medical lab- to boost city growth in the late game. I see where they were coming from with the food market.
Unfortunately, people build neighborhoods (which take production and land!) because they have a lot of food and therefore citizens, not the other way around. The decision I cannot understand is why they made these neighborhood build buildings go into neighborhoods themselves but then make them mutually exclusive- you can't have a food market and shopping mall even if you have two neighborhoods. That restriction needs to be lifted. I suspect a coding limitation is the reason its like this now.

I think there's two ways this could go:
-Buff the food market quite a bit. Perhaps 2 food + 1 food per housing of the neighborhood. This gets sticky because we can't control what neighborhood it goes in if we have more than one, at least the way things are now. If we could, it would be neat if the shopping mall got a +gold effect operating the same way.
-Make it give food yield to every neighborhood in the city. I much prefer this approach. There's a lot of potential in neighborhood / city center buildings that boost each neighborhood- the primary difference between large and small cities late game in that the big ones have neighborhoods, and if we create buildings to buff all of a city's neighborhoods, then larger cities get better return on investment.

That said, this issue is very sidestepped because Democracy gives so much housing (especially with the legacy card) that it just obsoletes neighborhoods in the modern era. 2 housing per district, when a district takes effectively 3 population to build, is just way too good. Hopefully the spring patch addresses this. I find myself building 0-1 neighborhoods in my biggest cities, and occasionally 1 neighborhood for kicks in the smaller ones just to collect that shopping mall amenity later. I won't dive into that further, but I feel like they should have thematically swapped democracy and communism's major bonuses. I don't think there were many 'suburbs' in the USSR. (Historians, feel free to correct me, I just always see pictures of planned higher density tenements instead of sprawl. To me, districts giving housing is like building 'workers barracks' etc near those specialized centers.)