[vanilla] Tiles, Resources and Improvements - A guide to explaining Yields

[feelotraveller]

Any tile next to a lake or river counts as having fresh water for the purpose of having a farm on it and Civil Service.

Oasis also counts as a source of fresh water.

Thanx for the write-up.

 

[Olleus]

Fixed biology and added Oasis as source of fresh water.

Also updated the OP to include information about the city tile itself.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

FYI, Manufactory gives +3 production as listed and it will remove a forest tile. I had no wonders to rush for at least 30 turns when I got my first GE so I thought I'd invest in the production. I'm getting a great merchant soon in another town so I'll check if they remove forest.

 

[Martin Alvito]

I think depth is about creating meaningful choices. Should I put my city here, where it gets the cattle, or there, where it gets the incense?

Precise positioning matters a great deal to defense. I had the (same) AI civ spam cities three tiles east and west of one of my border cities during BC on Deity. It became impossible to defend that city. The AI could hit every tile I had with city bombardment, leaving me to try to defend it with a lone bowman in the city. That didn't work so well.

The placement tradeoffs in this version are like deciding in Civ 4 whether to settle on a hill in an inferior resource position or in a flat area to pick up that last resource. You may not notice below Immortal if you play a quality builder strategy, because you can get a lead and keep it. Even on Immortal, you can usually just maximize productivity and let defense be a secondary concern.

Most of the complaints about depth seem to result from playing at too low a difficulty level. The difficulties don't scale well. There are a large number of imbalanced strategies that can dominate Emperor. Those approaches start to work less well on Immortal, but they still work. But no build order and gold usage strategy is going to level the playing field on Deity.

Deity forces you to play the game the way it was meant to be played. You can't maintain many cities, you can't rush up the tech tree for Medieval (getting dominant early game defense as a bonus) when playing most civs, and you have to settle the best city sites early and often before the AI does. This approach puts you way behind, and the only hope is to outgeneral the AI badly enough to level out the production disparity. That implies keeping the fighting to one adversary at a time, which in turn implies having a strong enough defense that you can choose your wars rather than having them chosen for you by the AI.

If the AIs smell blood in the water, they will all pounce. This makes sense; if one AI DoW's you, and the others think you're hopelessly outmatched, then the best response is to dogpile and try to get some of your territory before it all goes to the rival.

It looks like the winning strategy is to fight a defensive war (you need the city support - think of it as free hammers), grind down the AI's forces, build up a counterattacking force in reserve, and unleash it once the AI is hurting and out of position.

You're right that rivers are overly emphasized. The Civil Service bonus is obviously OP. It comes way too early. Biology mid-Industrial was fine. That same bonus six techs in is not.

 

[Ahriman]

Am I the only person who thinks its lame that lumbermills dominate mines? How come mines don't get a bonus at, say, dynamite?

 

[LedHead]

Jungle lists as -1 H in the manual.

Is that correct and if so how does it apply since there isn't anything to minus since features doesn't stack on terrain? Oil and uranium are the only + hammers that can spawn on jungle so that's barely worth worrying about.

 

[SirTurtle]

This is a very useful list Lord Olleus.

One thing you may want to add is what terrain types resources can occur on. This is listed in Civolopedia, but we shouldn't assume that is correct. Also in some cases Civolopedia is confusing, e.g. as far as I have observed sheep occur only on hills, but the Civilopedia entry says "grassland, plains, desert, hills, hills". The rules may change depending on map script and resource settings.

 

[photophor]

The difficulties don't scale well. There are a large number of imbalanced strategies that can dominate Emperor. Those approaches start to work less well on Immortal, but they still work. But no build order and gold usage strategy is going to level the playing field on Deity.

I think this could be the most useful comment I have read in these forums. In CivIV I got stuck on the 'Warlord' level of play. Things started to go wrong as soon as I tried to move up to the 'Prince' level; all of my killer ideas crumbled.

Maybe my idea of treating the lower levels of play as training levels was completely mistaken.

 

[Diadem82]

So the basic permutations of terrain are 2/0/0 for grassland, 1/1/0 for plains and forest and 0/2/0 for hills. Mines always give only one hammer. But lumbermills give 2 hammers late-game and farms give 2 food early game next to river and late-game otherwise.

In other words mines are now inferior to both farms and lumbermills. However hammers are vastly superior to food. Food is easy to get in this game, hammers are much more problematic.

So the best tiles are hills and forests. Especially river-hills are awesome since you can choose to either build a mine if you have too much food or farms if you lack food.

 

[SirBeegus]

Chopping everything in sight is no longer an optimal strategy. In fact, with hammers being much rare, forests are actually very useful to keep. So are jungles but for different reasons.

I know this thread is about tile stats, but I think the combat strategy of V also factors into how you may want to manipulate the terrain, particularly where forests are concerned. Forests provide a significant combat advantage, and if you're the Iroquois, that advantage is even greater.

Back to the theme of the thread - I think it's appropriate that a tundra hex is useless without forest.

I think it's a bit odd that you can't replant forest like you could in III.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I know this thread is about tile stats, but I think the combat strategy of V also factors into how you may want to manipulate the terrain, particularly where forests are concerned. Forests provide a significant combat advantage, and if you're the Iroquois, that advantage is even greater.

Back to the theme of the thread - I think it's appropriate that a tundra hex is useless without forest.

I think it's a bit odd that you can't replant forest like you could in III.

Well that's because Forest
1. Gives a benefit when chopped
2. is the BEST production terrain.
(Just like Jungle is the Best Science Terrain)

 

[Methos]

Excellent article. Subscription added.

 

[Bhruic]

Could be worth mentioning that jungle gives +2 research if the nearby city has a university.

Bh

 

[Trickster7135]

I think it's a bit odd that you can't replant forest like you could in III.

Couldn't do that in Civ4 either, but what I really find odd is that forests don't grow over empty tiles anymore. Made the world feel so alive.

 

[HannibalBarka]

if I understand you correctly, a Bananas Plantation on grassland by a river will yield 5 F 0H 1G

2F 0H 1G (for grassland by river)
and
1F 0H 0G (for banana)
and
2F -1H 0G (for the plantation)

 

[Olleus]

if I understand you correctly, a Bananas Plantation on grassland by a river will yield 5 F 0H 1G

2F 0H 1G (for grassland by river)
and
1F 0H 0G (for banana)
and
2F -1H 0G (for the plantation)

Your logic is correct, apart that a banana plantation can ONLY be on top of plains and not grassland, because that is the terrain you get when you chop a jungle. Therefore, a banana plantation by a river gives 4F 0H 1G.

Will add the effect of buildings in the OP when I have the time.

 

[jwallstone]

One minor addendum: settling on an Oasis does NOT give 3 food on the base city tile. Strange.

Edit: Actually, for that matter, neither does settling on flood plains with a food resource (I tried Wheat on both flood plains and desert). If you hover over the city tile, it in fact appears that settling on either flood plains or desert destroys the feature, resulting in bare desert.

I guess that sort of is consistent with removing forests/jungle. But it's kind of interesting as this would constitute a difference between flood plains and grassland.

Edit 2: Looking at the world builder, it appears that hills are not actually a "feature", per se, but an additional layer that can be called "height" or something. In fact, each tile can have a base terrain type - grassland, plains, desert, etc; then a height - flat, hills, or mountain; then finally a feature - forest, jungle, oasis, floodplain, natural wonder. I think if you organize your guide this way, it becomes clearer and is more in line with the game mechanics. Settling a tile always removes the feature, but not the base terrain nor the height. This is why oases and floodplains are removed - they are just like forest and jungle.

This also allows interesting things in the world builder that may not show up normally in auto-generated maps - for example, one may place a natural wonder on top of a mountain on top of a desert. The tile's yield is the natural wonder's, but it allows a city built next to it to build both Solar Plants and Observatories.

 

[beancounter]

Good article. However, I am only getting 1 Science from Trading Posts with Free Thought.

 

[jwallstone]

Yeah that is a bug. It's already on the list of known issues.

 

[Tomice]

If you hover over the city tile, it in fact appears that settling on either flood plains or desert destroys the feature, resulting in bare desert.

Weird. If you have the choice between barren wasteland and an oasis, it's better to place the city in the middle of nowhere...