The China Conundrum

[Karmah]

The wall is an ancient improvement, cities don't reach that fourth ring for a very long time unless you dump a lot of gold into it.

You don't seem to get where I'm heading. As long as the tile is on the fourth ring of any of your cities, you'd get this tile and any currently free adjacent tile that is in at least the third ring of any of your cities

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

They all went to building wonders. And a Great Wall to the east.

Also is replanting forests really worth it? I usually don't research conservation for a long time and usually by then the game is more or less over so I stop caring.

In game terms, yes it is Worth it since the chop probably pay for atleast half the builder while forest + lumber mill give the tile +5 in the end which is 200 production in 40 turns without any modifiers. So with 6 charges you can get 400 immediate production and 400 more in 40 turns. However if you already had the lumber mills, you would only get the immediate production which can still be Worth it since builders often act as a way for developed cities to help out less developed ones. Forested tiles also give one appeal to all tiles next to it which can be quite helpful.

Farms is perhaps even stronger than any other regular tile improvement if placed optimally since it can produce +7 food and 0.5 housing with the food being enough to support 3.5 specialist for 9 yield as well as 1.5 science and 0.9 Culture with the obvious issue being the need for housing. A long line of farms with farms on each side of it (common on floodplains since there is not much else to use them for) will give a line of farms that have +7 food and a double line which have two inside lines will give twice as many +7 food farms and these are shared between several cities which make it easy to grow them very quickly after which they can be handed over to Another city since sustainment need alot less food than growth.

A large city with just farms and district is still pretty productive, district have the best tile yields and 3 specialist probably produce more resources (not counting food here) than a single worker would produce, all in all, a large cities with alot of districts have very high productivity per tile and more food means you can pack more large cities close to each other which lead to even higher productivity.

Now if it is Worth spending playtime doing so in a game that is won in all but name is Another question.

 

[Sostratus]

A large city with just farms and district is still pretty productive, district have the best tile yields and 3 specialist probably produce more resources (not counting food here) than a single worker would produce, all in all, a large cities with alot of districts have very high productivity per tile and more food means you can pack more large cities close to each other which lead to even higher productivity.

Extra population is nice now that you can do things like have shopping malls, aerodrome giving +8 production total, encampment giving something similar and resource stockpile... even if you only have farms, there's a lot of places where those districts can act as big sources of yield. With all the amenities late game I just don't see a reason to not leverage it.