What improvement should I build on plains?

[jnebbe]

Right now I mainly build cottages on grasslands that don't have fresh water so that I fulfill the needed 2 food for the citizen I put there while also getting commerce. And I guess I should build workshops on plains since there's already since it already gets a hammer?

 

[krikav]

When you first start a game, you start by working the very best tiles, often only resource tiles.
As the game progresses, you use more and more tiles and then you use the best ones first and save the worst ones for very last.

Circumstances may vary, and not all cities are equal, but the rough prio order is:
resource tiles -> floodplains -> riverside grassland -> normal grassland -> riverside plains -> plains. And after that ofcourse you have tundra, riverside ice etc...
So generally, plains tiles are ignored for much of the game.

IOften pretty much up untill 1000Ad - 1500 Ad mark or when you start to get guilds+chemistry+caste system workshops on plains tiles start to look OK in food dense cities.
With state property workshops on plains tiles are good in most cities.

It's pretty rare, but sometimes a stray cottage on a plains tile makes sense, but the key element is that you must really be completely deprived of other more useful things for your workers to do before resoring to such actions.

 

[earthy]

@krikav I cry a bit when I take an AI city and have to work a plains town

but yeah I agree with krikav. If it's on a river I might cottage it, but otherwise I just try to work specialists or whip those tiles instead of working them.

 

[krikav]

I do that too! Quite irrational of us really, as a plain town is a wonderful tile. It's the path toward that town that makes it worthless, but when an AI has done all the work for us we should be happy.
Still I think it's annoying.

Even worse is to capture a food deprived plains-hell of a city, and every single tile has a cottage on it, even though the city could even in theory work at maximum 4 of them.
AIs....

 

[rah]

Up until SP I'll only work one if I need a single food to stabilize a city in terms of growth because I'm at war and I don't want the city growing into more unhappiness and I'm way to busy warring to micro cities at that point. (that lack of micro is why I play IMM instead of Deity)

 

[krikav]

@earthy Thats one kick-ass of a avatar btw!
Go Ragnar Lodbrok!

 

[Harv]

This question made me think of my last Earth game, where I was told how pointless this city was.

Spoiler :

It was grinding its way bigger with a food surplus of 3 - and at some point, I made the mistake of doing a four-pop whip, just because I was at the end of a whip cycle.

Basically, I was told that building things like an Aqueduct and a Marketplace to have another couple of +1h, +1c tiles is pretty pointless. Eventually, I had to look at the cost of the buildings involved to understand a bit better.