Watermills

[Vindicator7]

I love this thing. I think it is great that they added something for your workers to do in the late game besides building railroads and cleaning up pollution (civ III).

Combined with the State Property civic they are are hugely beneficial. That late in the game, my cottage squares add grown fully already so I didn't want to replace them with watermills, but any square that I had a farm in next to a river I replaced it with a watermill. Before it was producing 3-4 food and 1 commerce. After it was producing 1-2 food with 2 shields and 4 commerce (financial trait). Adding State Property bumped the food from 1-2 to 2-3. So I lost 1 food in favor of adding 2 shields and 2 commerce. Plus, the State Property civic elliminated the distance penelty of cities which helped a lot since by that time in the game my empire was rather large.

I still haven't toyed around with using workshops though. Any good strategies for them?

Edit: I forgot to mention that if you research biology you get +1 from farms so the tradeoff would be a loss of 2 food instead of 1. But you stil get +2 shields and +2 commerce.

 

[MyOtherName]

So far, the only time I've used a workshop is in a fishing village on an island -- the workshop was the city's only source of hammers (aside from the one under the city). In my normal cities, if I have a lot of hills, I mine them for my hammers and make farms to support working the hills. (And cottage / watermill the rest) If I don't have a lot of hills, I'll use the city to make money, so again I don't really need workshops.

I can't say I'm an expert at this stuff yet, so take it with a grain of salt. =)

 

[R3dKnight]

when ur at war , with state property civic, workshop is just extra hammers with no food penalty. but before that, it's pure rubbish.

 

[Jazz_Newton]

Workshops have their niche. A couple of times I've had border cities located on coasts or peninsulas with few or no hills. The coastal squares (and fishing resources in most of those occurences) gave me ample food and commerce, so I dropped workshops on most of my land tiles because I needed extra production to crank out some defenses and cultural buildings.

The best thing about this game is that even 'less useful' things like workshops have occasions where they're the only thing that can do the job that you need done.

 

[Samson]

Edit: I forgot to mention that if you research biology you get +1 from farms so the tradeoff would be a loss of 2 food instead of 1. But you stil get +2 shields and +2 commerce.

The way I look at it is like the mine / irigation balance in previous civs. Once you have state property and electricity, workshops and watermills produce 5 hammers + food. Irrigation produces 4. So to maximise the production of a city you want to have all the watermills you can, then as many workshops so as to not starve.

There is a similar calculation with mines / windmills. Mines are 5, windmills are 4. So the more mines and the fewer irrigation you have the more productive your city is. This is another reason watermills are so good, as they have "power" 5, but a significant amount of food. The commerce is of course also good.