Stuck in the brown zone

[CmdrGoob]

The brown zone is the region of the map that has an arid climate and has many plains and deserts. In a recent game on a continental map I started with the now dead JC, who died to an early choke on the capital and takedown with catapults, cheesy but necessary because of the terrain. I'm now the not-so-proud owner of a long east-west continent almost entirely in the arid zone, so it's dominated by plains. It's pretty stingy with the food resources, too. Basically, it sucks.

The other main continent is in the tropical and temperate zone, so they have tonnes of grassland cottages and grassland mines. It seems like for everything you might want to do, plains are far inferior. Commerce? Grassland cottages can be worked sustainably, plains cottages eat up any food surplus you have and your city grows slowly and then stagnates way too early. Specialists? You need food, sucka. Production? Who needs tiles that swap 1 for 1 when you can . Or you can work mines, but grassland hill mines are 50% more efficient on a per food basis than plains hill mines, and you need surplus food for either.

So I'm behind and getting further behind.

So how do you deal with being stuck in the brown zone? Is it pretty much the kiss of death I think it is? The best options for more food is biology (far away) or food corporations (far away and someone else will get them first), and they'll only help my land suck less, not make it as good as grasslands. Is there any way of keeping parity when stuck in the brown zone? If not, what's the best map script to get continents that don't have such large regions of suck?

 

[InvisibleStalke]

Food is king - and if you don't have enough food to work many tiles then your land is always going to be inferior.

Brown tiles aren't so bad if you have food specials - a city with two food specials could support several plains cottages and have decent income and OK production. But if you lack food specials and have brown / desert land then you simply aren't going to win - at least not on the level you are used to playing at.

 

[JTMacc99]

You could try setting the climate to "wet", although I can't remember exactly which maps and options allow you to do that. (You will get more grasslands, but you will also get more jungle.)

I find that I will be a lot more spread out when I get a starting spot with an excess of plains. (In other words, I will suck up the penalty of placing early cities relatively far away from the capital in order to get pick up the best food spots early.) Much, MUCH later in the game, I will usually backfill the plains in the middle with modest cities.

 

[CLST]

Not really much you can do but run some farms, and hope you can find greener pastures to settle to when the oceans open up

 

[Neal]

You could run some Merchant specialists in the hopes of getting a Great Merchant or two. That extra food can be a big difference. Not enough to save an entire civilization, but enough to make a city or two worthwhile. And all that ancillary cash is bound to come in handy.

 

[Polobo]

Key Technologies:
Civil Service - chain irrigation/bureaucracy
Currency - trade routes and building wealth
Metal Casting - forges to multiply built wealth/research
Machinery - windmills

Farm/Windmill everything

Expand vertically and horizontally until you cannot

Build wealth/research in your hybrid cities (you should have many of these)

Populate the coast.

Do NOT build libraries/markets - they do not multiply built research/wealth

If you have forests (or industrious/resource) then: Colossus, Great Lighthouse, Temple of Artemis, Great Library are all good wonders to target (especially Colossus since you want the coast and metal casting) The merchant GPP are good as well.

 

[CivCorpse]

Research "world builder"

 

[Polobo]

Depending on the terrain features in your "brown zone" maybe beeline (toilet)Paper...

 

[URSExelcior]

Depending on the terrain features in your "brown zone" maybe beeline (toilet)Paper...

 

[CmdrGoob]

I did manage to get the colossus, with metal casting from the oracle, so the commerce from water is okay. Another gambit I tried to help the economy was to fail wonder building - build not-so-good wonders I have the resource for and then swap them out of the build queue hoping that another civ would build them and give me a good cash pile (2 per , leveraging the 2X multiplier from the resource). That helped a bit, but I screwed up the micromanagement on a couple and accidentally finished them. Note to self: a good strategy for civ is to go to sleep and do it tomorrow I've got all of Polobo's key techs, including toilet paper , but I lost liberalism.

I also got two religions, from philosophy and code of laws. Maybe I could pull off a sneaky cultural victory with my best cities, hoping that the no one will be able to pull off an inter-continental invasion? I've never done that before, though. There's also a third continent with Sitting Bull on it, he's not so advanced, I could try to invade that. Even if it was successful, the maintenance would be pretty bad.