The 'hill' tiles in Civ5: Why no food?

BSPollux

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Imagine a city founded in an area full of hills, without a river. This city would only have the +2 food from its city square and no way to get any food from other tiles. So it would be limited to size one (just forget about the granary and hospital for now, please).

I ask myself what the 'hill' tile represents in civ5. You can generate production and trade goods there, but never any food. Remember that you can even get some food from desert and tundra. Seems like the civ5 hills are made of only barren rocks and some valuable minerals in between. Plus no animal live whatsoever. Is it like Mars or something?

From my point of view, there should be some way to allow hills to produce some food. Many regions in real life that would be best resembled by 'hills' in civ5 are producing quite some food. At least more then frozen ground or deserts.
 
No major ancient cities were built in hills without access to water. Unless you're the Incans, the concept makes no sense, and it's extremely unlikely that you would get such a start. If you are the Incans, you can build terrace farms.
 
I think it would be cool if later in the game (say after Fertilizer) you could plant farms on any tile including non-freshwater hills. But that's really a minor point; I don't mind not being able to get food out of hills unless they are next to a river as that's pretty historically accurate.

Honestly I have about 1000 bigger beefs with this game.
 
No major ancient cities were built in hills without access to water. Unless you're the Incans, the concept makes no sense, and it's extremely unlikely that you would get such a start. If you are the Incans, you can build terrace farms.

You have to take into concideration that each river or lake in civ5 is absolutely huge. You can be very sure that where theres hills and forrests and all there will be some small rivers and lakes as sources of fresh water.

In reallife there will be all kinds of ways go get food from terrain with hills. you can build fields there, you can grow fruits, you can hunt animals...

A tile with 3+ food means thats people living there will be able to produce so much food that they can give away some.
A tile with 2 food means that people there can survive on theire own with no need to ever import any food.
A tile with 1 food means that people can find some food there, but its either not enough or its season-depending (either very cold winters, or maybe dry periodes, whatever).
A tile with 0 food means every little bit of food has to be imported because nothing is growing there.

Now tell me, does the pic below look like zero food?

 
that pic looks like a stream of water, which the game requires for hills to have farms.

the way food is represented in Civ 5 (as far as I know) is each population is people numbered in the 1000's. The amount of food you could get from small game and random fruits/berries could only support growth for a number of people in the 2 or 3 digits (10+ up to maybe 100), maybe enough for small micro-communities but not enough to represent the definition of growth in civ5.

when in a game, you can go to the demographics screen to see things in larger numbers (population, manufactured goods, square miles of land, etc). but this thread, while old, isnt really outdated or terribly different after a few DLCs, expansion, and patches were released in how the game defines population.
 
that pic looks like a stream of water, which the game requires for hills to have farms.

Nice that you didnt read the part of my post wherein I say that the Civ5 worldmap only shows huge rivers and lakes. Or do you realy think that a world only holds like 20 rivers in total? We can without any doubt assume that smaller rivers and lakes exist everywhere else.
 
i did read that part. to me, it just wasnt worth addressing. there are lots of small lakes (1-3 tiles) and short rivers too, and not even depending on map terrain or non-standard weather settings. i see them frequently in standard maps with no setting adjustments.

im curious if you checked the thread showing what each population actually represents (and why the food gotten from small game and fruits/berries isnt enough for representing a food icon on a hill.)
 
Because game mechanics.
 
Nice that you didnt read the part of my post wherein I say that the Civ5 worldmap only shows huge rivers and lakes. Or do you realy think that a world only holds like 20 rivers in total? We can without any doubt assume that smaller rivers and lakes exist everywhere else.

True there isn't any such tile as hills/stream. But that picture doesn't show much, where do you think all that water is coming from. I expect a large fresh water source is somewhere nearby.
 
Name any ancient city built on a stream.

Cities were either built because the land was flat so they could grow things, or where there was enough water so they could grow things or for defence which by civ 5 standards, is a citadel/fort.

Here in the UK, London is on a river in flat land. Manchester is built on a river, in flat land. York was on a lake which has now shrunk to a river but the point stands. In contrast, there are very few people living in the Scottish highlands, the Welsh mountains and the Pennines, another mountain range.
Do you see where this is going?
 
Imagine a city founded in an area full of hills, without a river. This city would only have the +2 food from its city square and no way to get any food from other tiles. So it would be limited to size one (just forget about the granary and hospital for now, please).

I ask myself what the 'hill' tile represents in civ5. You can generate production and trade goods there, but never any food. Remember that you can even get some food from desert and tundra. Seems like the civ5 hills are made of only barren rocks and some valuable minerals in between. Plus no animal live whatsoever. Is it like Mars or something?

From my point of view, there should be some way to allow hills to produce some food. Many regions in real life that would be best resembled by 'hills' in civ5 are producing quite some food. At least more then frozen ground or deserts.

I have to admit, I probably laughed harder than I should have at the Mars comment. As for your arguments, however, I'm not sure I get them. It seems like you want to give hill tiles a food yield because cities that are purposefully founded in an area surrounded by hills with no access to a river or other water source can't grow (which isn't true in the first place as we would simply prioritize the food-producing buildings that you for some reason or other have asked us to pretend don't exist).

I don't find this persuasive in the least bit. Similar arguments could be made for adding X type of yield for any tile. "Hey guys, imagine a city surrounded by floodplains with no hills. Now I want you to forget about any workshops/other buildings with a production yield you could build. This city is not gonna be building things any time soon. Give them hammers!!!"

There are plenty of ways to prevent a city surrounded by hills from having stagnated growth - buildings, social policies, maritime city-states. More importantly however, since when does each terrain type en masse have to provide a balanced/favorable city location? If your city can't grow in that area then don't build it there. Problem solved. I for one like having certain clumps of land that are less optimal than other areas of the map. It facilitates genuine decision making and variety.

Lastly, in case it's more of a break from the real world that you're concerned about as opposed to the game mechanics I see no reason why this is any more offensive than having grassland be terrible at helping with the production of those stables and libraries, etc., or why you wouldn't be able to conceptualize the food-yielding buildings as the population's efforts at cultivating the overly-hilly landscape you plopped them down on. If this kind of abstraction is too much of a stretch then you might want to ask Washington (who's just built The Great Wall in Boston) what he's doing in the B.C.s or how Askia came to rule over the entirety of China.
 
Nice that you didnt read the part of my post wherein I say that the Civ5 worldmap only shows huge rivers and lakes. Or do you realy think that a world only holds like 20 rivers in total? We can without any doubt assume that smaller rivers and lakes exist everywhere else.

Nice where you missed the part where he said that each population in CiV is much more than one person. The equation for population in CiV is p^2.8*1000, where p is the population. Does that hilly area look like it could support a couple million people, which is what a single population is at the higher numbers?
 
The game mechanics are what they are, they aren't perfect analogies of the real world, but you deal with them or you don't play. That said, you just eyeball an area of hills, and if it doesn't appear to have enough deer, or forested hills to make lumbermills on (+1 food), or perhaps some forested grasslands or plains mixed in that can chop down and farm to provide a modicum of food to the city, then you shouldn't be building there, period. Especially if there is no luxury resource or other important strategic resource to be gained. If there is, then you can usually figure out a way to place a city somewhere near enough to it to both have enough food to survive, and still reach out to get the lux/resource out on the edge of its workable area.
 
The game mechanics are what they are, they aren't perfect analogies of the real world, but you deal with them or you don't play. That said, you just eyeball an area of hills, and if it doesn't appear to have enough deer, or forested hills to make lumbermills on (+1 food), or perhaps some forested grasslands or plains mixed in that can chop down and farm to provide a modicum of food to the city, then you shouldn't be building there, period.

Or, you're building there to cut off another civs growth/ostop you being penned in/a base to allow further expansion.
 
Or, you're building there to cut off another civs growth/ostop you being penned in/a base to allow further expansion.

I'd have to be pretty damn desperate to build a doomed foodless city for either of those reasons.
 
The argument works both ways: Why don't grasslands get production? Most industrial cities are build on flatlands.
 
I am saying its stupid to say you can grow food on tundra and in the desert but not on lush hills!

Common sense guys!

And btw I asked you to leave out the +x food buildings because they are independent from the terrain and rather abstract anyways (neither granarys nor hospitals produce any food!).

And the number of people thing: The citys in Civ5 are huge, they are bigger then some nations in the real world. They could span hundreds or even thousands of kilometers! Even with 5million people the city has a very low population density.

And about the small lakes/small rivers: The tiles in Civ are not small enough to show a small river or lake. Even a short civ river is hundreds of kilometers long. And the smallest lake would be one of the biggest on earth. If you would show every river on an earthmap, regions like central europe would have a river on every single tile. And most other places on earth as well.
 
And about the small lakes/small rivers: The tiles in Civ are not small enough to show a small river or lake. Even a short civ river is hundreds of kilometers long. And the smallest lake would be one of the biggest on earth. If you would show every river on an earthmap, regions like central europe would have a river on every single tile. And most other places on earth as well.

Do you expect the game to be an exact replica of the finest and minutest of real-life details? It's not, and it wasn't intended to be. It's a game, and it simplifies and takes liberties in order to play like a game, not a real-life world simulator. That would have been incredibly complex and unworkable (and unnecessary) to create for a game like this. Accept. Play. Next...
 
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