Plains, Hills, Tundra - How do you use crappy land?

[ciel]

I think I have a pretty good handle on city specialization - GP farms, production cities, suburban sprawl, etc - but only as long as I have plenty of grasslands. I never know what to do when stuck with lots of plains and no water. This happens a lot when I play (unsurprisingly!) arid, rocky, or cold maps, but sometimes I just get a bad start.

So my question: How do you city specialize on bad land? (And what do you do with a capital surrounded by plains or hills?)

 

[mi6agent]

So my question: How do you city specialize on bad land? (And what do you do with a capital surrounded by plains or hills?)

There is a Regenerate button , isnt it

 

[PieceOfMind]

Ideally, I'd avoid settling in poor land in the first place.

If a city cannot grow beyond 2 or 3 population because it can only work crappy tiles, it's more likely a drain on your economy. Only reason I might build such a city is to secure a resource or some other strategic reason (e.g. a 1-tile-island near my enemy's continent).

If it's your capital, usually you should have at least a food resource or 2. If you can see the tiles in your capital are nearly all plains, consider the option of moving your capital in the direction of where you see more green.

 

[Zeiter]

If you are surrounded by plains, consider aiming for a religious economy, trade route economy (only works if you are not land-locked), or an espionage economy--something that will reward you with per-city bonuses coming from lots of smaller cities. This also means, in order to use more of the tiles, you'll have to have closer city spacing. This will help a little bit to compensate for your higher maintenance costs.

I find that plains are generally not a big problem early on. All it means is that you will not grow past your happy cap as fast, meaning that you have more of an incentive to give up slavery earlier and focus on cottaging some of those plains and growing those cottages earlier on. Plains hurt the most between the low happy cap phase and biology, where you finally have the happy faces to grow bigger, but can't because you don't have the food (meanwhile, your neighbors are growing bigger). Machinery can help you grow a bit. After machinery, plains hills become palatable, and with enough food specials, flat plains are great for cottages. Civil service can help as well, if you desperately feel the need to farm some plains for the extra food-neutral hammer (which I will usually only do in my hammer cities (such as heroic epic and possibly wonderspam cities). Once biology rolls around, plains suddenly become almost as good as grasslands (if we assume that 1 food = 2 hammers = 3 commerce, then biology grassland farms = 8 hammers, whereas biology plains farms = 7 hammers. Ratio of 7/8. Compared to pre-biology: 6 hammers vs. 5 hammers. Ratio 5/6. Much worse.

 

[Ghpstage]

Surviving in poor terrain is all about scraping up worthwhile yields
I'm assuming the worst of the worst now, tundra and icey lands. Other bad land types can use some of this stuff though.

First some general stuff for poor land survival.

-Have a food resource, its always important but doubly so here.
-Using farms and windmills to balance food is par for the course
-Tundra tiles can only be improved with farms, cottages, workshops etc if they are riverside! They can however chain irrigate non-tundra tiles
-Still on tundra, avoid chopping forests on non riverside tundra as you will never be able to replace the lost and health! Plus they can be lumbermilled later on.
-Watermills are the only yield improvment that can be built on riverside ice or riverside (non floodplain) deserts.
-Workers take longer building improvements on tundra, desert or ice. 50% for ice, 25% for desert/tundra, this includes roads and railroads
-Specialists provide the same yield regardless of terrain and most food resources will allow for 2 of them
-Trade resources, both for and away a lot more than you usually would, they are much more rare and can get a decent amount of GPT and 1 makes more difference if you cities are size 7 than if they're size 20!
-Shrine gold isn't affected by land

A lot of what I said above heavily favours a coastal, riverside empire, explained below with more reasons

-Roads take longer making sailing routes preferable
-Longer improvement times make coast tiles more attractive to work in the short term
-Commerce will be hard to come by, instant sailing to rival civs will help a lot
-Most of the places you can improve tiles well are riverside
-Coast tiles being food neutral will be pretty good in worst case starts and can be boosted by Maoi, Colossus and Financial
-The sea often has food

GP farms are the same to set up, just not quite as good.
Specialists themselves however, take on a much larger role if the land sucks. After all, they don't rely on tile yields outside of 1-2 initial food resources. If the land is exceptionally barren, they can provide a decent enough yield to justify a city but the guys will be popping up a lot throughout your empire.
Settling Great People will have a *much* bigger impact on cities with low outputs!
The Pyramids will perform miracles, but wil probably take a miracle to get

Commerce
Well you may be able to get a couple of cottages down, coast tiles are okayish and resources may exist, no point even mentioning windmills

Luckily trade routes are largely unnaffected by poor land, especially early on.
As such lot of your commerce on this type of map will come from trade routes. Foreign ones will be a great boost, but you can also create a lot yourself if you can settle other landmasses (even 1 tile islands), its suprising how much sometimes.
i.e. Say you have a 10 city empire on one single landmass, with 1 (domestic) route each for giving 1 commerce for a total of 10 . Settling a single city on a one tile island will provide a 2 route for every city on the other landmass, plus have a route itself. Settling this city will instantly provide a total of 12 , 2 from its own route, and add 1 to each of the other 10 cities.

To maximise routes like this you will need 1 city on a second (or more) landmass(es) for every route your cities allow, so 1 base, +1 at currency, +2 if you get GLH and so on. I did however ignore foreing trade here, but it does need to be taken into account.


Production
For the most part, same as standard maps. They'll just generally be worst thanks to less food

The common differences however will be,
-Forest being around for lumbermilling more often
-Watermills on ice tiles
-More emphasis on Engineers and Priests and maybe GPs or GEs
Building Research and Wealth is almost always worth doing at times, but more so in poor land.


On Specialisation
A problem does lie in that the city types will often not be very 'specialised' in tundra start type maps.
Commerce will largely be empire wide or on common tiles (coast),
Production may be specialist (swappable) or mixed improvements (windmills)
GPfarms may well be your production or science output cities

You can only go on what the individual city does best, but the difference between best and worst will be narrow when all the cities suck


And yes before you ask, the random map generator hates me

 

[Iranon]

Plains are perfectly fine if you have a few food resources nearby. 1 Fish and 6 plains cottages (work coast to grow first) gives you an awesome commerce city with enough production to build infrastructure.

With a lot of plains, I'd arrange my cities so that food resources outside my GP farm will feed plains tiles and make do without for whatever grassland / flood plains / etc I have. On hilly terrain, windmills can allow one to work a few semi-decent tiles at least.

*

In the caes of truly poor land, I will mostly focus on resources and specialists. A total lack of food is problematic and there's not much you can do about. If you can grow to 2 specialists and regrow from whipping with something like plains forests or coastal tiles, that's good enough though.