What Tile Improvements Do You Use?

[Alsark]

I'm new to Rise of Mankind, and as such, I often get pretty confused as to what to build when it comes to tile improvements. Heck, I'd get confused in regular BtS (I lie somewhere between noble and prince in difficulty), and often just spam cottages everywhere. Now with SO many different tile improvements, I never know what to build.

In BtS, I often hear that the best strategy is to "specialize" your cities. So you'll have a production city or two, several commerce cities, and then a specialist city for great people. In normal BtS it's pretty obvious what to build for specialist cities: spam farms and windmills; for commerce cities spam cottages; and for production cities build mines, lumbermills, watermills, and workshops (with enough food to sustain the city, of course).

With RoM, I am totally lost. So here are my key questions:

1) Which are better, cottages or trade centers? I'm confused since they both seem to compete for the commerce role. Adding up the coin icons in the civilopedia, the cottage seems better when you factor in the boost it gives to production (seeing as how it seems to also give almost equal commerce).

2) With mines now being able to be built on forests, are lumbermills ever worth building?

3) Do workshops essentially become obsolete once you can create industry tile improvements?

4) Are tree farms/wind traps any good? Wind traps seem almost identical to windmills in terms of yields. As for tree farms, it seems like they'd be good on hills (replacing windmills) for specialist cities once you can plant trees - is this correct?

5) Are jungles ever worth keeping? I could see keeping a distant one as a source of fresh water, but that's about it. It seems pretty obvious that they're not worth keeping, but then I have to wonder why some of the more modern technologies bother improving the jungle camp.

6) Is the safari worth building over camps with elephants?

 

[vincentz]

1) Which are better, cottages or trade centers? I'm confused since they both seem to compete for the commerce role. Adding up the coin icons in the civilopedia, the cottage seems better when you factor in the boost it gives to production (seeing as how it seems to also give almost equal commerce).

2) With mines now being able to be built on forests, are lumbermills ever worth building?

3) Do workshops essentially become obsolete once you can create industry tile improvements?

4) Are tree farms/wind traps any good? Wind traps seem almost identical to windmills in terms of yields. As for tree farms, it seems like they'd be good on hills (replacing windmills) for specialist cities once you can plant trees - is this correct?

5) Are jungles ever worth keeping? I could see keeping a distant one as a source of fresh water, but that's about it. It seems pretty obvious that they're not worth keeping, but then I have to wonder why some of the more modern technologies bother improving the jungle camp.

6) Is the safari worth building over camps with elephants?

I'm in the process of testing/balancing the improvements, and trust me, its not an easy task.

I changed the tradecenters to be able to be build on plantation resources and outside borders, however they'll not harvest the resource for inter-/national use, but simply sell it locally (Good commerce but no resource collection).
I also changed the cottage-town to a more overall improvement that will get 1 if close to fresh water. So build cottages close to water with forests on instead of farms, which are better on floodplains and grassland as they'll recieve a -1 (Not much production at farmland)

2) I'll also introduce a new improvement : Forest Cabin (or Hunters Cabin) +1 To help out those cities that start without water or food resource but a lot of forest. It also helps keeping the AI spamming of mines down. (Maybe it's because I'm from a country without any mountains/hills) but I seriously don't think that every hill was mined). It will hopefully also keep some of the forest alive a bit longer plus give a chance of discovering deer & fur. I'm considering removing 1 from mines, making lumbermill a middle alternative between Cabin and Mine.

3) Unfortunately there doesnt seem a way to obsolete improvements, so they'll still be buildable even with industry around.

4) Dono, I've never gotten that far in RoM.

5) Well, there's always a chance that a resource will grow in the jungles so having 2 around instead of 1 for the irrigation could be a good idea.

6) good question. I think most improvements are better than camp in modern era.

 

[os79]

I don't specialize my cities. So my workers on auto do fairly well. Not the best but with Afforess' tweak to make my city governor similar to regular AI, it is doing great compared to before. What I do for my cities are construct food and production buildings first, then go ahead with my other buildings. I have my own order but you may want to experiment with your order of buildings after food and production buildings.

 

[biship]

... Not the best but with Afforess' tweak ....

Which tweak is that?

 

[os79]

Which tweak is that?

For specifics, you need to wait for Afforess to answer if he bothers to do so. But basically he applies the same logic as the AI has for other civ players to human's city governor.

 

[biship]

For specifics, you need to wait for Afforess to answer if he bothers to do so. But basically he applies the same logic as the AI has for other civ players to human's city governor.

Sounds neat, is there a download somewhere?

 

[os79]

Sounds neat, is there a download somewhere?

A New Dawn is in sub-forum here. Go look for yourself . It is easy to find.

 

[JanissaryRush]

You'll definitely want to specialize a city for GP to build national epic. A military city for heroic epic. Those two are essential. Its also really nice to have at least another strong production city to build wonders and troops in between.

The thing about commerce cities is you really want to have some production for those cities to build all of those commerce improvements. Whereas GP cities production isn't too important as you don't have many buildings to get. So if a city has hardly any hills its much better to have it be farms and GP than cottages.

 

[StormLord-711-]

I've also been confused between cottages and trade centers. As far as I can tell, in the new version, cottages are more of an improvement that adds a little of everything, whereas trade centers only add at the price of . The trade center upgrade line seem to yield something like almost twice as much as the cottage line now, especially with the right civics.

 

[Zorn]

I build mines on every mineral and hill.

On flat land, farms or cottages depending on what kind of economy I run.

On forest next to rivers I like to build sawmills, it`s a pretty decent tile early. On non river forerst only occasionally if the city has no or very few mines.

Once industry becomes available, I spam as much of those as the city can afford. All flatland forest die now. Cottages survive.

On every resource I build the appropriate building (even if the ressource is obsolete and another improvement would yield more), just for style.

I never bother with workshops or mills.