Need some help with the economy

[mboto]

Hi Guys, first time to the forum, but i've been playing Civ for a few years now on and off. Was better at Civ3 than Civ4 though, and the reason was i never bothered to understand the economy. Breezed Monarch on Civ3 and and succeed at Prince about 75% of the time in Civ4.

So i'm fed up now, i want to understand the mechanics more, rather than 'winging it'.

I've read though some of the other posts on Specialised Economies and Cottage Spamming which i gather is easier for people new to sorting out their economies, but the complexity of it is a little more difficult to follow. I want to try and get a feel for a situation.

So while there are no hard and fast rules to Civ4, i was wondering what improvements people would recommend using on Flood Plains, Hills, etc. Do you always build a pasture on a cow etc. Would you ever not build a cottage on a flood plain and build a workshop instead even though you reduce the food available.

Thanks in advance,

Mboto

 

[Joshua368]

Rather than looking at some sort of global economy like "cottage economy" or "specialist economy" or "protective arctic archer what?! economy", which is a pretty suboptimal way to run your empire, try to focus your empire on a city by city basis.

When you settle a city, pick a job for it. That job will help dictate what improvements you build around it, as well as what buildings the city itself builds.

For example, yes floodplains usually make great places for cottage sites, and if you found a city around a lot of them, you may want to make it a cottage city, with cottages everywhere. It's sole job in life is to work those cottages to support your empire, and build structures that help enhance them (library, university, market, etc)

Though if there are a lot of hills around some floodplains, it may make a better military city instead. So forget about cottages, forget about commerce buildings like universities and markets, just build enough farms to feed all the mines you can. Build barracks, stable, etc and then units units units. Heroic epic if possible. Settle some great generals there too.

Other basic city type is the GP farm... basically a spot with a lot of food. Here the regular improvements don't matter much, you just want megafood resources like corn or fish to feed specialists. Maybe some farms and mines but most of the time the city will keep its citizens off the fields and in the labs.

Note that the ratio of these cities aren't even. My empire usually needs just one GP farm, and I usually have 1 - 3 military cities depending on my size. Then the rest are usually cottages, cottages, cottages. Early game though I'll usually run specialists to keep up with the AI until the cottages become more profitable.

Also note that there are few key buildings you'll pretty much build in every city, regardless of role: granary, courthouse, and forge. Very few minor exceptions here, such as your capital may not needing a courthouse.

And as for resources like cows, you pretty much always build the nessecary improvement to hook them up. The tile yield usually is better than other improvements, plus without you'll miss out on the resource itself. You might want to farm calendar resources like sugar to dye early on to get better tile yield until you actually learn calendar.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

#1: Make sure cities you settle have enough food to grow and support their good tiles. No matter what. Every city. Sometimes marginal cities can be farmed post civil service, and you wait to settle those cities until then.

#2: City specialization: This allows cities to yield similar outputs to a city that builds every building, with FAR less investments in hammers in any given city. Three major kinds of cities:

- Commerce: You want things like riverside tiles, gold, gems, etc. Floodplains are excellent. You cottage these sites. Since commerce is affected by the slider, you put science buildings in if you anticipate running the slider high, and gold buildings if you anticipate running it lower for a while.

- Specialist/GP farm: Your highest food city. It uses food to run specialists. Once you get comfortable with the game, learn to bulb certain techs to get obscenely early power techs. For now, just use this city to run as many specialists as possible, and try to put the national epic in this city. Farms here after the food improvements, obviously.

- Hammer: Early on, these are limited to either cities you just whip units from, or if you have them hills you can work (IE with enough food to be able to in the city cross). Most spends time making units of some kind (workers, settlers, or military), although on occasion may build a wonder (try to get away from building too many until you understand their cost/benefits well). Heroic epic and ironworks in these. You want mines, workshops, or possibly farms if you intend to whip (IE few hills but a lot of food sites in your empire early on).

That's it. That's the 3 kinds of cities. Don't fool yourself into thinking CE or SE ----> the map will tell you which and how many of each city type is easy to attain. Note that the capitol, if it has rivers nearby, is very frequently used for commerce + the bureaucracy bonus in the middle game, and often gets oxford (oxford obviously goes in the highest science site, and it may be a specialist city or a cottage one depending on the game). Other capitols are very high food or production and can be used for one of the other specializations (you can still move the palace if you can do it fast enough to take advantage of a good commerce site).

Never forget that there is no "economy" per se' in civ, just how much you're getting in gold, beakers, espionage, units, etc. Try to make each site do something it's optimal for, and specialize that city so that it does what it has the best potential to do (although you might need to force one to fit your needs on occasion).

Also, welcome to the forums .

 

[mboto]

Thanks for that guys, its easy to get lost in the mist.

I'm trying micromanaging instead of worker auto, this should help loads.

 

[Supr49er]

It may seem like a pain to micro-manage, but you will learn the mechanics better. You will see the difference when you work a mine/lumbermill/farm/cottage etc. You will see how your city grows/stagnates with specialists, etc.

Welcome to the Forums mboto.

 

[Iranon]

The main limitations you are facing are land, food and happiness. A good layout is one that allows you to put all good land to use and have the amount of specialisation that benefits your play style (Infrastructure junkies will want a good mix and specialise only when it becomes a no-brainer - like in a super-science city with Oxford and an Academy. People who are more concerned with immediate gains will want heavy specialisation everywhere, accepting inferior multipliers for incidental yields).

Flood Plains often give you enough excess food to support specialists (possibly to be whipped away - this is generally better if your only alternative is to work desert hills) or hammer tiles while directly lowering your health cap. Farming them is likely to send you directly into trouble with your growth caps. Workshops can turn them into some of the most powerful production cities possible in the early game (food-neutral 3- tiles). However, unless the clump of flood plains is so large you couldn't work them all otherwise (growth caps) or you have very few workable hills, cottaging at least some of them is preferred.

Grassland can do pretty much anything - cottage it, farm it, workshop some if needed... it's hard to let a grassland-rich city go to waste unless your placement is off.
If you farm them and support specialists rather than cottaging them or work 1 farm per workshop, you are going to have 3 citizens per tile worked rather than 2. Trouble with growth caps or use of slavery (more efficient in smaller cities) suggests a tighter city placement for an all-farm layout.

Plains shine or suck depending on whether you have external food sources available. If you have to rely on non-resource farms to support them, all the tile does for you is give you an additional hammer (before Biology). Not worth it if you are in any way limited by health or happiness.
However, if you have plenty of spare food floating around, plains can be very useful... just 1 fish would allow one to work 6 plains cottages for a moderately powerful and balanced city.

I often find it most efficient to settle the grassland areas first, grow them to their cap and then divert the food resources to the second generation of cities to work the plains tiles as well. this reflects that generally 1 is worth more than 1 and therefore working grassland tiles is a higher priority without wasting perfectly useful land.

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Hills are boring because they're good for little other than production. Windmills are a good choice in food-poor areas where we couldn't work all hills otherwise and near rivers for Financial civs but mines will usually remain the norm.

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Not all resource-specific improvements are worth building. Silk, Fur and Elephants stand out for having yields so poor that a cottage/farm is often better if we already have the resource and don't want to trade them away to a rival.

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Something to also consider is overlap. While this won't be very common, a tile can be in the fat cross of 4 cities at once (if there is one 2 tiles in each cardinal direction). If that tile is a flood plain, each of these will take -0.4 which can make an otherwise great tile horrible. The same in reverse applies to forests and especially to forest preseves. +1 +0.5 in 4 cities can be worth more than another tile to cottage.


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I'd say that your chosen economy style becomes more pronounced towards the endgame. Boosted by everything there is to them, we have...

Towns for 17
Workshops for 4
Watermills for 122
Windmills for 114

All of these are awesome (the workshops slightly less so but I'd say the others are about equal). But even plain old boring farms can compete if they are supporting fully pimped-out priests for 2132. possibly to be whipped away periodically under the Kremlin or drafted 3 times a turn throughout your empire.

The problem is we can't have all this awesomeness at the same time because of conflicting civics.
There are a few reasons why wer're hearing more about awesome late-game cottage economies than other types:

First, cottages can be built on quite a lot of tiles - flatlands and grassland hills. If we're bending over backwards to make one improvement excellent we want it on almost every elegible tile.

Second, they allow either Free Market for efficient corporations (BTS only; high initial investment but with potentially ridiculous returns) or State Property (a sizable economic boost that doesn't require playing with yourself when you could push for something else).

Third, it's a smooth progression. You can start cottaging almost from the beginning of the game, and despite needing to mature they reach their point of utter awesomeness quite quickly. Farms and specialists suck after Great People generation ceases to matter much and before Biology enters the picture. When it finally does, the surge in food comes at a time when health is a big problem, making additional food less good than it could be.