Roads and Improvements

[Cosine]

I have a few questions about roads and improvements of sort.

For one, do you need to connect things like farms and mines to your cities?
I mean this in the basic sense, where the farms and mines aren't harvesting a resource. In that case, the roads obviously connect things like gems and wheat to your trade network.

Second, If you were to build a farm say between two cities, but not in either's fat cross, does the bonus get lost? What about when you put a pasture on horses or pigs or something, does the tile bonus go anywhere? Or does the only benifit end up being horses and pigs on your trade network?

Final thought.
To get the improvement bonus from whale, does the ocean tile have to occur in the fat cross of the city?

 

[ZippyRiver]

1. No, you do not have to connect farms to your city to get the food, you do have to have a citizen in the city window working that tile for any benefit.

2. If you have a bonus resource that is not in a city's fat-x, and you have the appropriate improvement on it. It is only beneficial as a trade resource. A lot of times my first iron is not inside a city window. I still get the benefits of iron, just not the hammers from the tile itself.

3. Same thing applies to sea based resources. You get the bonus resource because it's improved and in your cultural boundries, irrelevant of city a city's radius . You get the tile production when it is worked in a city window.

 

[jhas015]

In short if its not in the fat + your city can't directly use it (allocate a city worker).

If you create links to resources either via roads, rivers or oceans then they get added to the critical resource pools available to all your cities in your trade network.
eg Mined iron is outside your fat + but linked via a river to your capital you can build swordsman.

Farms and cottages don't need roads to be used to full effect. You may want to use farms outside your city usage areas though to spread irrigation to ares that wouldn't normally be able to irrigate.

 

[automator]

A) No. If you're not connecting a resource (cow/pig/wheat/etc), no need to road it. I do it anyway, though not as a first priority, to make the tile more easily defendable.

B) Which bonus? You'll still get the health bonus, but since your citizens can work the tile, there will be no bonus food production for that city.

C) Unsure here. To get hammers from working the whale tile, yes, it needs to be in the fat cross so your citizens can work the space. But you still get the happiness bonus even if it's not worked.

 

[Woodgar]

You only get the tile bonus if you actually work the tile, so in your example you would have access to horses and pigs but you would not get the increased food or hammers without a city worker being placed on the tile. The same is true for the whales. However, the tile doesn't have to be within the fat cross or worked for the resource to be added to the trade route.

Building a road on a "normal" farm or mine has no benefit other than the increase in movement across the tile.

Building a farm on a tile that is not within any cities fat cross won't provide you with any direct advantage but it is sometimes necessary to chain farms across from a fresh water source.

 

[Cosine]

Ok thanks everyone, makes sense now!