The yields are fine (screenshots)

[Bibor]

I do think that people misunderstand the new city buildings, most notably:
Granary +2 food for 1 gold
Watermill +2 food for 2 gold
Hospital 50% food kept after growth (basically Granary from CiV4) for 3 gold.

2 or 4 food from granaries/watermills means faster growth and two more population.
Hospital means well needed faster population growth as well.

These, with added production boosting buildings (Stables, forge, workshop) that all replace the CIV4 Forge and should be split evenly in a "only one of these per city" fashion are mandatory as long as every city produces 10 or more raw hammers.

Money, that is, the question of upkeep can be solved in a myriad ways. The worst one of them being "I won't build anything because it costs upkeep money". This game is - after all - a simulation where investments started at turn X, made on turn Y start paying off at turn Z.

The only real difference between CIV4 and CIV5 is in city growth, that is, no buldings-equal-to-hospitals available from "turn one" AND lower food yields. Thus, in medieval ages cities are pop 10, in renaissance grow faster to 15 and then become 20 pop cities (or stagnate at around 15 due to otherwise food-poor land in modern ages).

A single maritime city state provides you enough food for an extra population number or two. Befrined three, and you virtually don't even have to work farms at all.

As someone said, the real limiter on growth is not availability of food (otherwise you could farm everything first and then trade post it; old trick from CIV4) but happiness. The same is true for building times. The real limiter on production times is the need for colloseums and circuses which steal 30-50 turns of your (early) game in every city.

The power of multiple happy resources (and Arab bazaar) is that it provides you with either income (9, 8 or 7 GPT per happy resource, depending on era) or more happy resources, thus eliminating the need for those production-crippling happiness buildings.

Once you set up the basics in every city (Granary, Library, Marketplace, Colloseum, Forge-replacement and possibly Circus), building times suddenly seem surprisingly much better.

EDIT/PS: I understand some people say game speed is important. Well, I don't know. Games on normal speed seem to last forever, so I'll probably never play CIV5 on epic or marathon. But I do understand that it can be very well the case that building speeds on slower speeds are so low that you outtech them. In that case it's a question of tuning down research speeds, rather than changing tile yields.

 

[keweedsmo]

All the complaining about production is fairly annoying. if you know what you're doing and you actually care about where you put your cities then you can easily have a few high production cities. I've never encountered the complaints people have about production. Surely it's slower in civ 5, but I think people are just trying to play civ 5 as if it was civ 4 and that's just completely wrong. This is Civ 5.

These screenshots are very typical in a game of civ 5 if you place your cities properly.

 

[King Jason]

I think the only case against Hospitals is that they come so late there's really no point building them. The increased output at such a late point in the game seems so marginal when you're already making 200 gpt or 500+ science, 500 cpt, or have an army that could blot out the sun.

The game is won. Granted that case could be made for all buildings, except for the fact that the return on something like a stock exchange or railroad is almost immediate. You feel it's effects in your cities the moment it's finished. The output increase granted from the hospital has to ramp up, as it comes from the gaining quicker citizens at a period in the game where it takes a lot of turns to gain them.

However, I myself find use for them due to the way I tech. Since the A.I. is absolutely Atrocious at warefare, I usually have Biology before I have, say, economics (and I'll still beat the a.i. to big ben.)

 

[skallben]

What is not being discussed is Mines.
We all know they suck, so for production we rather farm them so we can work more hills or lumber mills. Lumber mills especially after steam power.

This means:
1. Production is geography-based, you want forest in endgame. You want a river and/or lake with civil service, else your hills will be crap until Fertilizer (no pun intended).

2. Production is happiness based, since you want happiness to be able to grow your cities so you can work more production tiles.

3. Heavy warmongering gives you an indirect penalty by limiting growth via happiness.

4. Rivers not only give you gold, but they also give you growth, thus production. Unless you are on grasslands with no hills but that is obviously just a gold farm.

5. Some maps gives you very few good locations in starting vicinity for potential good cities.

My main objection is the extreme importance of getting good geography for expansion cities.

 

[Drago Askani]

All the complaining about production is fairly annoying. if you know what you're doing and you actually care about where you put your cities then you can easily have a few high production cities. I've never encountered the complaints people have about production. Surely it's slower in civ 5, but I think people are just trying to play civ 5 as if it was civ 4 and that's just completely wrong. This is Civ 5.

These screenshots are very typical in a game of civ 5 if you place your cities properly.

See I think you hit the nail on the head here. See I got bored with Civ 4 over a year ago and haven't touched it since. So I came into Civ 5 pretty fresh without having touched Civ in a long time it made me not really go for old habits. So far I find 1-2 production cities to be fine. A little micromanagement of your cities makes sure any time that you need to produce extra hammers to build important buildings like Stock Exchanges then you just assign the hammers manually. Problem solved most the time.

Sure if you let the city governor handle all the citizen assignments then yeah you are probably gonna have bad production. After all its assigning specialists to temples when I am telling it to focus on gold etc. Stupid manager, better off doing it yourself.

 

[Celevin]

All the complaining about production is fairly annoying. if you know what you're doing and you actually care about where you put your cities then you can easily have a few high production cities. I've never encountered the complaints people have about production. Surely it's slower in civ 5, but I think people are just trying to play civ 5 as if it was civ 4 and that's just completely wrong. This is Civ 5.

These screenshots are very typical in a game of civ 5 if you place your cities properly.

You sound like you regenerate your maps a fair bit. That is not a typical start. It's better than 80-90% of my starts easily.

It's entirely common to start without a big river, without many hills, and have only a couple tiles over 2 production. Secondly on Standard game speed there's not too many problems. Try playing Epic, and there's a big slowdown without a good start. Try playing on Marathon and it's unbearable, your jaw drops with every lost unit.



My biggest problem with Civ5 food-production-gold is this: Early game is too slow, and mid to end game COMPLETELY favours maritime city states and production/gold tiles. On Standard and higher map sizes, it's even moreso, with the ability to get 4+ maritime bonuses going at once. More than half your food in your capitol is run through these. Imagine playing with other people instead of coms that don't go for city states that often, where you can't get all the maritime city states on the map. You would be completely screwed.

You can place your bets on maritime city states getting a nerf, and when that happens everyone's going to complain of how their economy is completely shut down. It's very very hard to run a half decent economy without them.

 

[King Jason]

Isn't the point of the slower speeds to allow for a slower game?

I was one of the first people to modify the speed that eventually became "marathon" in civ4, because that game was too fast. Coming to civ5, standard seems just about the right pace, maybe epic. There's no way in hell I'd play marathon because it's insanely slow.

What I don't get is if you think a game is too fast, you try it slower... if you think a game is too slow... then try it faster. If anyone that is making these "too slow" complaints is playing on Marathon or epic, they should bump it up one. Just because it was the speed for them in civ4, that doesn't mean it's the speed for them in civ5.

However, in civ4 marathon, not all costs went up the same... units (and buildings?) weren't increased to the full 300, but rather 200 I believe. I don't know if a similar circumstance is replicated here.

and I agree with your edit. I think in my next game I'll either shut them off, or won't ally with them. The A.I. doesn't partake in the city-state system at all.

 

[Roxlimn]

Celevin:

Not getting that, either, but then again, I always play on Standard speed. Also played the same way in Civ IV.

If the early game is too slow, start with faster speeds. If you ask me, the early game is too fast. It's 1 AD almost always before I get to do anything really significant. I find it much harder to tech up to ridiculous leaps in Civ V at the moment, and I consider that a good thing. Rifles at 500 AD is just not a good historical game.

Mid to end game does not always favor City State funding and gold/production bonuses. Sure, they're cheap and they're great, but you don't have to do it that way, and it's not altogether sure that it's favored to do it that way.

In the mid game, you get Fertilizer, allowing you to do 4-food tiles without rivers. In fact, I beelined straight to this tech as Iroquoi because I didn't start with a long river or any maritime states in that game. The Freedom Policies also open up, allowing you to use Specialists for only 1 food per Specialist. As you go later, you get Statue of Liberty, which grants +1 hammer to every specialist, and Rationalism gives you +2 Science per Specialist.

In the latter part of the game, 2 food can buy you 2 hammers, 10 Science, and 6 GPP towards Great Scientist. That's hard for any tile to match, and it's very food intensive. At that point, it's better to work the farm to generate the 2 food surplus to allow you to work specialists.

I don't know how much food the Capital gets in Industrial Era per CS. It starts at +2 per, so should it be +4? Assuming you find 4 Maritime CSs, you get +16 food in the Capital for them. This is equivalent to only 4 tiles of farming, supporting only 8 citizens. If more than half the food in the capital is coming from the CSs, then it can't be a very big capital.

Given the bonuses on capital size from Trade Routes, I can't see this as being very advisable. Surely, it's better to farm as well as use the CS food. Using 8 Citizens for farming gets you 32 food + 16 from CSs, or 48 food for pop 24. (It would realistically actually be about 20-ish). This is conservative. I prefer a capital in the high 20s. IN my last Arabian game at Monarch, I got a capital of around size 32 or 33.

 

[King Jason]

Also, out of idle curiosity... since there's all this talk in this thread and others about the nature of start conditions and that we shouldn't make observations based upon good ones... should players looking for a more "standard" game restart if their start is too good?

I only ask because I too understand the nature of having a good start vs a bad start and I just rolled an incredibly good start in a game where I'm testing certain strategies and quite honestly I'm tempted to restart the map because of the seeming bias. 3 seafood in the capital, and two very lucrative rivers quite close by. Yeesh.

 

[skallben]

In the mid game, you get Fertilizer, allowing you to do 4-food tiles without rivers. In fact, I beelined straight to this tech as Iroquoi because I didn't start with a long river or any maritime states in that game. The Freedom Policies also open up, allowing you to use Specialists for only 1 food per Specialist. As you go later, you get Statue of Liberty, which grants +1 hammer to every specialist, and Rationalism gives you +2 Science per Specialist.

This and unhappiness limit on specialists you get from Freedom is probably unbalanced, I have not gotten a game that far yet but I aim to try it. You should be able to have humongous cities this way.

Citizen on a grassland/trading post feeds himself. 4 food citizen could support himself 2 specialists on reduced unhappiness. A merchant would net 2 gold, 2 science, 1 hammer. Not to mention great people. Trade posts pwned.

 

[King Jason]

This and unhappiness limit on specialists you get from Freedom is probably unbalanced, I have not gotten a game that far yet but I aim to try it. You should be able to have humongous cities this way.

Citizen on a grassland/trading post feeds himself. 4 food citizen could support himself 2 specialists on reduced unhappiness. A merchant would net 2 gold, 2 science, 1 hammer. Not to mention great people. Trade posts pwned.

Aha, and there's the SE.

 

[Roxlimn]

skallben:

I have already been able to do it. Size 32 city, as I mentioned. Could've gotten to size 40+, but won too fast. At those sizes, hospital and medical lab are both necessary or the time to the next citizen just gets too long, even with gratuitous excess food.

With the two buildings, you could get the time per citizen down to about 7-10 turns, which still takes you 40 turns to grow 4 population.

 

[Celevin]

It's not as simple as "try a faster speed". It's the number of turns taken to make a unit VS turns to research a tech. Even without a single library I see techs zoom by.

In a game I often reach the Industrial era before 1000 AD. I can get 2-3 techs before a worker. This transcends game speed because of it. I know I need to specialize my cities, I do it often, and I rely heavily on maritime city states because of it. City states completely dominate my strategies most of the time.

The other part of this is because of how dominant puppet states are. Get a number of puppets, supply your empire with city state maritimes, and you can get 500 gold per turn in the Renaissance. I'm no longer managing an empire because of this city state + puppet dominance. And yes, it goes back to tile yields because managing a regular empire with production does not compete at all.

 

[skallben]

skallben:

I have already been able to do it. Size 32 city, as I mentioned. Could've gotten to size 40+, but won too fast. At those sizes, hospital and medical lab are both necessary or the time to the next citizen just gets too long, even with gratuitous excess food.

With the two buildings, you could get the time per citizen down to about 7-10 turns, which still takes you 40 turns to grow 4 population.

Production is as good as in theory?
This pretty much requires statue of liberty though :O
Engineers are very lackluster.
I cant ever seem to get a good chance to try this out, there is allways some AI going amok requiring me to go military tech...

 

[Roxlimn]

Celevin:

It must be map dependent. On Continents, I don't often have enough enemies on the same continent to be able to puppet enough cities to even reach the Renaissance before 1000 AD. In fact, my experience is that the more puppets I have, the more my gold output plummets, especially if I have Maritimes. Since you don't manage puppet state whatsoever, I have to wonder what I can be doing to have such a disparity.

At the start of the game, you can research 2 or 3 techs before Worker. This is necessary because you need Mining, Pottery, and Calendar in order to improve a Forested Incense or Dye tile.

 

[Roxlimn]

Production is as good as in theory?
This pretty much requires statue of liberty though :O
Engineers are very lackluster.
I cant ever seem to get a good chance to try this out, there is allways some AI going amok requiring me to go military tech...

Better than I expected, actually. The production you get from SoL specialists is obscene. The bigger the city, the better it gets. It snowballs. Pretty soon, you're rushbuying Theatres just to keep your happiness up. Probably less of an issue with India.

Conservatively, you should have something like 6-8 Specialist slots, which you should be using as soon as they come up. Six is a bit on the low side, actually. With only six specialists, you're up +6 base production, +9 if three of them are Engineers (windmill, workshop, factory, etc.).

If your base city is working 6 base hammers (which is astoundingly bad), you end up with 12 to 15 base, which is at least workable.

A more normal city would have something like 12 to 15 hammers, which improves to 18 to 24 base, which is quite good. Windmill + Factory improves that further to 27 to 36-ish intermediate production, before situational bonuses.

I believe 30-ish production is sufficient to build most of the Industrial and Modern era improvements and units in good time.

With some focusing, I've been able to get hammer outputs in the 70s, outside of Golden Age.

 

[kaltorak]

Aren't you proving the oposite of what you say with those screenshots?

Riverside no resource tile: 4 food + 1 gold = 5
Riverside cow resource: 3 food + 1 prod + 1 gold = 5

Resources should be important. For my taste even very important. Not just to decorate the landscape.

 

[aimlessgun]

Aren't you proving the oposite of what you say with those screenshots?

Riverside no resource tile: 4 food + 1 gold = 5
Riverside cow resource: 3 food + 1 prod + 1 gold = 5

Resources should be important. For my taste even very important. Not just to decorate the landscape.

It is interesting, and something they definitely thought about. The food resources are useful early in the game, but when you get Civil Service and later Fertilizer they are almost worse then a wash because you can only put one type of improvement on them.

 

[Seanner]

City states completely dominate my strategies most of the time.

Isn't that the whole point of the new CSs?

If you have 4 militaristic CSs nearby, that's a lot of extra units. Kill someone.

If you have 4 martime, that's a lot of food. Combined with a beeline to hospital and you will have the fastest tech known man (notice that hospital is on the top of the tree along with science based techs...space race = get hospital).

Your CSs SHOULD determine your strategy. They SHOULD be powerful. Otherwise, they aren't, and the complaint becomes: what is the point of CSs? Why would I spend 500g when I could just get a granary, which is always available? Why don't I just kill them and take their luxuries? CSs are a joke! Etc..

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Response to yields:

The main complaints that I've seen revolve around an underlying "the game is not the way I want it" as opposed to "there is definitely something mathematically wrong". The fact that science is faster than production (relative to? ... oh civ 4!) just means that backfilling happens earlier..i.e. you tech more breadth-first now. E.g. if you don't have time to build a market/bank before you tech stock exchange, maybe you don't need to be teching stock exchange?

The only 2 imbalances that seems clear is the 300g per luxury right at the beginning. Combined with ease of taking cities with a handful of units (half produced, half bought for the initial luxuries..doesn't take long), it creates the dominant strategy of killing everyone for their luxuries to have a massive, upgraded super army in 100 turns. Also these extra cities give more tech, culture, and gold, happiness or not (the second imbalance). Instead of military causing you to fall behind in some categories, it puts you ahead in every category!

None of this has anything to do with whether you get an extra hammer or two off some tile somewhere... Changing hammer/science ratio doesn't make the game right or wrong, it just changes how much you can build. If you increase yields, you build more. How is that somehow more "correct"? It can probably be too high: once you CAN build all those buildings you wish you could build (no decision making), or when you reach deity levels of military aka there-aren't-enough-hexes-to-put-all-my-units.

 

[Celevin]

Isn't that the whole point of the new CSs?

If you have 4 militaristic CSs nearby, that's a lot of extra units. Kill someone.

If you have 4 martime, that's a lot of food. Combined with a beeline to hospital and you will have the fastest tech known man (notice that hospital is on the top of the tree along with science based techs...space race = get hospital).

Your CSs SHOULD determine your strategy. They SHOULD be powerful. Otherwise, they aren't, and the complaint becomes: what is the point of CSs? Why would I spend 500g when I could just get a granary, which is always available? Why don't I just kill them and take their luxuries? CSs are a joke! Etc..

I'm not saying they "are strong", or "are useful to my empire", I'm saying they are necessary. They give most of the food for my empire. There's a huge difference in considering and using them, and them completely changing how the game is played just through food yields and nothing else. Imagine if every com tried as hard for city states as you, and you only nabbed 1-3 of them rather than the usual every-one-on-the-map. Maritime city states are twice as good as cultural city states, which are twice as good as militaristic city states. Total up how much food the maritimes are giving your empire, and then see how much your cities make without.

The hospital is almost completely useless. Who cares about adding growth when your population is already completely bounded by happiness, and skyrockets the moment you get any additional happiness?

Lately, it's been impossible to say on these forums the difference between "this is useful", "this is completely dominant", and "hey, the game would be better without this".