Rivers - how important for cities?

[grandad1982]

I would say that settling near a river is more important and on a river is just a bonus. Early on you may want the water wheel but its not a deal breaker if I'm giving up some resources or setting up a block or one of the many other things a city might be about.

I'll only tend to build the gardens in one city so this will have been planned as a GP city and placed on a river accordingly.

As for hydro..... I have better uses for the aluminium 90% of the time!

Having said this lots of my cities end uip on a river (civ4 hangover I guess).

 

[lilnev]

There's two different questions here. (1) How important/useful is it to be on a river for certain buildings -- watermill, garden, hydro, ... any others? (2) How important/useful is it to be able to work riverside tiles -- 1 gpt, good farms at Civil Service?

I only place about 3-5 cities, typically, and conquer a bunch of others. I look for, in roughly descending order: Luxuries that can be sold. Strategics, especially Iron (Horses usually get sold; later, I'll have tons of both from CSs, but early on Iron is important and/or it sells well). Good long-term production potential (pasteurizable animals, food and hills, preferably, or else forests). Access to good river tiles is probably more important to me than the riverside buildings. Watermills and sometimes Gardens are nice, but not essential. I'm a warmonger, so I generally block the top part of the tree -- hydro plants come very late, if ever. I like to have at least one coastal city. Being next to a mountain or jungles is minorly nice for the capital, but most of my tech comes from RAs and Scholasticism, not cities.

So, yeah, rivers are in the middle of the list -- good, but not as high as some other priorities.

 

[Bibor]

A watermill is basically a 4 production building. 1 from the mill itself and 3 from the hill you can work with the extra food.

 

[neopara]

I like watermills, but I always seemed to have something more important to build. When I do end up with the time, I usually have enough food to not worry about it.

What kind of priority do you guys put on production buildings? I always feel like I should build them first, but always having trouble giving them a higher priority in my build queue.

 

[Agent Cooper]

I like watermills, but I always seemed to have something more important to build. When I do end up with the time, I usually have enough food to not worry about it.

What kind of priority do you guys put on production buildings? I always feel like I should build them first, but always having trouble giving them a higher priority in my build queue.

If the food resources around my capitol are not of the kind that gets bonus increased by a granary, I usually don't built it at all, but wait for the watermill to be available instead.

But yeah, as yourself hint at, if you don't build the watermill early, it looses it's impact and you might not bother to get it built at all.

A general characteristic of civ V compared with the earlier versions, is weak production up until the modern era and even when in that era, many modern buildings and units are ridiculously expensive in hammers.

To boost growth and production early in the capitol, you could ally with a couple of maritime city states and leave it to them to supply the surplus food needed for growth, while assigning citizens in general to production tiles.

 

[lilnev]

A watermill is basically a 4 production building. 1 from the mill itself and 3 from the hill you can work with the extra food.

By the midgame, sometimes earlier, I'm working all my hills. My production is terrain-constrained, not food-constrained.

More generally, claiming 2 food = 3 hammers is magicking an extra citizen into existence. A fairer comparison would be switching an existing citizen from a 3F farm to a 1F+2H lumbermill. So 2 food = 2 hammer (that's pre-Civil Service; after CS, food is even less convertible to hammers until Chemistry).

Food is only worth more than hammers while happiness is unconstrained -- the very early game, sometimes the early midgame.

 

[joncnunn]

Actually a watermill is always my first building built after I have the tech for it with the possible exception of a Monument.

If it's not the capital, I find that watermill + another building builds faster that that other building directly from the additional hammers brought in by the watermill alone.

Hammer buildings have high places in general in my queues. Bascially unless the hammer building costs > 33% more than the non hammer producing building I'm considering, I'm building the hammer building.

I like watermills, but I always seemed to have something more important to build. When I do end up with the time, I usually have enough food to not worry about it.

What kind of priority do you guys put on production buildings? I always feel like I should build them first, but always having trouble giving them a higher priority in my build queue.

 

[Deau]

By the midgame, sometimes earlier, I'm working all my hills. My production is terrain-constrained, not food-constrained.

More generally, claiming 2 food = 3 hammers is magicking an extra citizen into existence. A fairer comparison would be switching an existing citizen from a 3F farm to a 1F+2H lumbermill. So 2 food = 2 hammer (that's pre-Civil Service; after CS, food is even less convertible to hammers until Chemistry).

Food is only worth more than hammers while happiness is unconstrained -- the very early game, sometimes the early midgame.

Food is a whole lot more than this. Food is very, very versatile. If you don't have hammer tiles left, the 2 food can be converted in an engineer specialist. Already filled? trade it for science or gold. Happiness is not capped? Why not grow faster than without the mill to increase your BPT.

Don't get me wrong, it does lose value as the game goes on especially as you ally more maritime CSs but both it and the granary are very strong early game buildings that can compensate various awful starts. As an example, I posted an ottoman's janissary rush for deity in some thread. It is doable to field by turn 120 but it requires your capital to have considerable early growth to have enough beakers to lock all of the proper trees in time. A later game in which I had an awful start food-wise, I had to delay all the way until turn 135...Had I built granary&watermill very early, I would've probably cut 10 turns on that. In that amazing rush, 10 turns is like 2 cities that's a significant return value for 4 food from buildings...

Their arguably best use though is with a very forested riverside start as Iawatha. You can get such insane early game production between spam working forests and lining LE+Gran+WM w/ UB...but that's a different topic.

All in all though I have been nearly always settling atop a lux on deity since .275 but the rare exception is when there are no riverside luxuries in which case I settle a riverside hill for the +1 hammer/city defense because I like to leave the riverside for the WM and arguably less to give AIs' early rushes a significantly lower chance to succeed due to the amphibious penalty on attack. Beyond my capital, I'm not anywhere as worried about riverside settlement though for so long as I can catch riverside tiles for the 1gpt to work in range.

 

[Civsassin]

A general characteristic of civ V compared with the earlier versions, is weak production up until the modern era and even when in that era, many modern buildings and units are ridiculously expensive in hammers.

I disagree with this statement. You can get significant early game production. I typically use watermills, stables, granaries, forges, and workshops early to get my production moving in my capital. After b-lining to the techs needed to work my lands, I go straight for metal casting to get access to early workshops. This is a typical opening strategy. I can put an army together quickly with this production power. The other thing that gives you production was stated in an earlier post, get maritime CS and grow, grow, grow. The more population, the more production tiles you can work. I can manage happiness; I need production.

 

[joncnunn]

The weak production early on was mostly resolved in a patch back in March:

The one in which:
1. Water Mill went from 2f to 2f & 1h
2. Stables made certain resources produce 1 more hammer per tile and added a resource to the list.
3. Wind Mills & Workshops got additional flat bonuses.
4. One building that previously needed local Iron and was only good for building military units got a boost that applies to everything.
5. Granary produces more food on certain resources (indirectly increases hammer production as the city will grow more and/or you relocate some workers to more productive tiles)

 

[Tabarnak]

Sometimes my cities are so productive, combined with a particular tech path and/or no need of some buildings like coliseums, that i don't have other things to build except units(half of all wonders are useless for me).

In modern era, with right gameplay, everything should be needed to get a specific victory from industrial era buildings or before.

I agree that the march patch really revitalized the game.

 

[KevinMiles90000]

Granaries with river tile wheat is the best thing ever in civ 5. 6 food plz.

 

[M_Sparkle]

Granaries with river tile wheat is the best thing ever in civ 5. 6 food plz.

Yeah its so good when you get it... one of 6 food = 3 citizens amazing