The "build any improvement anywhere"-thingy

Lemminkäinen

Warlord
Joined
Mar 3, 2008
Messages
111
I'm not sure I get the reasons or the implications of this.

My first reaction was negative, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. So could someone enlighten me and maybe I'd see the light, too.

A couple of questions:
1) Why?
2) Does the AI handle it well?
3) Can I really build plantations over my empty plains and will it be wise in some situations?
 
The main reason is they can spread resources. Say, you have one Silk resource. Build a plantation on the Silk, and now your other plantations are able to discover Silk resources.

The AI seems to handle it fine, as the improvements tend to be better defined by yield now. Mine = :hammers:, Plantation = :commerce:, Town = Hybrid of the two, Farm = :food:. Other improvements tend to by hyrbids, like the town.

Yes, you can, and yes, it can be. Plantations provide more commerce than a Town if you have a resource... And resources spread relatively commonly, IF you already have a sample of the resource. Inorganic resources (Metals, so on) are discovered normally, they do not require you to have the resource first.
 
1) and 3) Several of the improvements have a chance to 'discover' new resources, the same way mines do in vanilla BTS. So if you don't have salt nearby and desperately want it, you can build several quarries and have a chance of it popping up.

2)The base improvements all give bonuses in as balanced a way as tile output is already, and the discovery effect is random so it happens whether the AI knows to plan for it or not.
 
Or, what he said. I didn't know you needed a prior copy of organic resources.
 
I have no clue as to the why or how the AI deals with it, although they seem to do fine economically in my games. In the case of how useful building some off resource improvements are, I can give my experience with it. I only find the feature useful in the very early turns of the game (like first 50-70 in a normal speed game) and only in certain situations. For example, not researching mining and getting AH for resources. This leaves me without a true hammer improvement, but pastures give +1 :food: and +1 :hammers:, so it lets me get by till then.

In my opinion, pastures are the best out of the group (pastures, wineries, plantations) because of the 1 :food: and 1 :hammers, while plantations (2 :commerce:) are useful if you are slow to get education, but worthless afterwords since a 10 turn cottage gives that and a hammer.

These things let me guess a why, but I don't know the actual intent. My guess is that letting you build these gives some flexibility without forcing people to get education for commerce (plantation alternative), mining for hammers, etc. while having some weak hybrid improvements (winery, pasture) early for those who like them before they move onto the stronger hybrid improvements like windmills,watermills, and lumbermills.

Edit: Ninja'd by 3 posts, wow I'm slow

Edit2: I'm a little confused on resource spreading. So you need an improvement with a resource and another of the same improvement in an adjacent tile without a resource, or do you just need an empty plot adjacent to the initial improvement?
 
as far as i undestand it a resource can spread to any tile with a compatible improvment (ie. plantation for silk), regardless of distance. Provided you allready have one or more of the resource.
 
My personal favorite part about it is the ability to build quarries (almost) anywhere. It allows you to build on a mostly or even completely flat are and not have the city be completely starved for production. More importantly, though, that ability allows other civs (ie Amurites) to be able to have any hope of competing with the production of a well played and placed Scion city (Which I have seen get in excess of 300 production per turn before, compared to my (before the improvement tweaks) highest of 30 or so, at about the same population (and exact same tech level, due to being on the same team).

On a side note, anyone who tries to tell me the Scions are too weak is in for a bashing.

Having farms be more productive is also useful, enabling cities to actually thrive in tougher conditions. Being able to spread resources is just icing on that cake.

Overall the AI has seemed to be fairly effective with its improvements, at least from my lack of study. To be fair, most of the time I burn cities and relocate them a tile or two over in a more effective location regardless of the builder (Sometimes even trying/wishing to do that with my own cities), so I can't say quite how effective the AI is with it.

As to why, I don't see much reason why they shouldn't be able to be built anywhere: A farm can be placed anywhere in reality, though the effectiveness may (and even does in-game) vary. Mines can be placed anywhere that has metal even not on hills. Quarries go wherever usable rock is (which is, well, quite a lot of places), as opposed to only where a stone resource is, which is nice. Plantations? Southern USA. There were plantations all over the place and they didn't have naturally growing cotton in all of those places.
 
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