What tiles to build great person improvements on?

[GAGA Extrem]

My GP settling agenda:
(1) Always pick the tile with the highest yield, prioritize hammers.
(2) Avoid farmable river tiles.
(3) Prioritize strategic ressource tiles (a GP improvement connects those!).
(4) Settle on animal husbandary improvements (to use the +1 hammer from a stable) or plantation tiles (receives additional benefits quite late).
(5) Settle on forests to get an instant hammer boost or on jungle to clear the hex.

 

[lemming3k]

non-riverside grassland is ideal in many situations.

settling them on bad tiles is bad idea, it will make mediocre tile.

Surely having a mediocre tile is better than a bad one you don't want to work at all? If your city is large enough and has desert tiles then you're limited to gold production from them, or using a great person to improve them.
At the same time can't non-river grassland be improved? It might be viable for a GE in a low production city for example, but if you have good production tiles you might prefer food focus and specialists.

I'd say it's very situation dependant, the length of game, current time period, policies, city spaces available; they'd probably all come into play. The only thing I'm fairly certain of is returns diminish for GS and GA - late game the tech investment is better than +6pt, and the golden age from a GA would be more useful than the culture IMO.

 

[ggmoyang]

Most of time, you settle GPs in earlygame, and that's why non-riverside grassland is ideal - you need to grow city, so grassland. And since river tiles need to be farmed, non-riverside tile.

When your city is large enough, It's the time when you don't want to settle GP anymore.

 

[Louis8k8]

Well for wide civs, you want to build it on the juicy tiles So you get the benefit when having very limited population to work all 36 tiles. For tall ones, I prioritize the bad tiles that do not benefit from improvements.

Because I usually go tall and Freedom (more than half the time), I run out of space in my capital to put them down. I never put them on Jungle (Science), Fresh Water (Farm Bonus), Luxury (Happiness), Cattle/Sheep (Pastures for + Culture from initial Pantheon). Prioritize Marshes and Forests as it's instant clearing that would take a worker ages to build on.

I squeeze them into the capital as much as possible to benefit from the +% science/gold/culture bonus from buildings and wonders.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

...
(4) Settle on animal husbandary improvements (to use the +1 hammer from a stable) or plantation tiles (receives additional benefits quite late).
...

Are we sure that works? I built a manufactuary on a sheep tile and now the city has the stable grayed out and says it needs an improved sheep/horse/cattle. Maybe if I had built it first it would still work. I don't have enough GP to test out the combinations.

 

[Louis8k8]

Are we sure that works? I built a manufactuary on a sheep tile and now the city has the stable grayed out and says it needs an improved sheep/horse/cattle. Maybe if I had built it first it would still work. I don't have enough GP to test out the combinations.

You need a pasture improvement to build the stable. But once you have the stable, all the Great Improvements will receive a +1 Prod. For your case, all of your pastures (or your only pasture) was built into a manufactuary before you built your stable. So just build your Great Improvement elsewhere or get Worker -> Pasture -> Stable earlier.

 

[Halcyan2]

Are we sure that works? I built a manufactuary on a sheep tile and now the city has the stable grayed out and says it needs an improved sheep/horse/cattle. Maybe if I had built it first it would still work. I don't have enough GP to test out the combinations.

Manufactory will improve Horses (don't know if it provides Stables/Circuses) but definitely does *not* improve luxury resources of bonus resources (such as sheep/cattle).

 

[Halcyan2]

Another useful tactic when deciding GP improvement placement - if possible it is often advantageous to select a tile that is within the 3 tile range of more than one city. That gives you more options and allows the cities to "share" that tile. (For example, place a manufactory or two in a place so that more than one city can utilize it. Helps you spread the love for Reformation, culture bonus if city has world wonder, or if there are geographical limits to which city can build which wonders).

I know lots of people are against building GP improvements on river tiles. I agree that you should keep *some* riverside tiles available for farming (for the Civil Service to Fertilizer period). However, if you have plenty of food tiles, then actually building the manufactory on a river side (and working it) often nets you the extra riverside gold. IMHO it really depends on the size of the river and the availability of food in the surrounding area.

 

[Xile]

Surely having a mediocre tile is better than a bad one you don't want to work at all? If your city is large enough and has desert tiles then you're limited to gold production from them, or using a great person to improve them.
At the same time can't non-river grassland be improved? It might be viable for a GE in a low production city for example, but if you have good production tiles you might prefer food focus and specialists.

Well, your city has to grow to an impractical size(and probably too late for it to matter anyways) to work all of the tiles it can, especially since you're using specialists and so on.

The non-riverside vs riverside depends entirely on how many riverside grasslands(for the sake of simplicity) vs hills you have. As long as the ratio is greater than 1:2 it's worth planting great people on riverside tiles. That's the way I look at it, anyways.

Building manufactories becomes not worthwhile from turn 150-160 or so onwards, assuming you win the game at ~turn 300, it's not really worth it(the hammers you gain by settling a GE at turn 150-160 is about the same as a late industrial wonder). Unless you pick an engineer from liberty finisher you're probably better off with rushing wonders with them.

 

[Halcyan2]

Building manufactories becomes not worthwhile from turn 150-160 or so onwards, assuming you win the game at ~turn 300, it's not really worth it(the hammers you gain by settling a GE at turn 150-160 is about the same as a late industrial wonder). Unless you pick an engineer from liberty finisher you're probably better off with rushing wonders with them.

Manufactories do become progressively less useful in the later game (since you will benefit from them for fewer turns).

However:

1. Manufactories can help you speed up projects (most notably spaceship parts, also the Manhattan Project and Utopia). In G&K you might want to save one for Hubble but the same applies.

2. Your cities are relatively small. The hammer provided by the Hurry option is dependent on population size.

3. You need instant access to a strategic resource.

4. You plan to finish the Freedom SP. The extra tile yields make it much more worthwhile. A science/culture game filling out Freedom can really benefit from those extra hammers!

5. You're stacking lots of modifiers. Egypt + Marble + Religious Community, etc. If you have a lot of +X% modifiers you want to increase your base amount as much as possible.

6. You're ahead of the AI's comfortably and can afford to hard build all the current wonders.

7. You're Korea and get an additional science bonus to the manufactory.

 

[Xile]

1. Manufactories can help you speed up projects (most notably spaceship parts, also the Manhattan Project and Utopia). In G&K you might want to save one for Hubble but the same applies.

It helps with utopia, yeah. Not so much with SS parts, at least not in my games anyways, I usually have to pause between building the parts(getting to particle physics after nanotech takes longer than building the parts). Then again maybe I'm doing something wrong.

2. Your cities are relatively small. The hammer provided by the Hurry option is dependent on population size.
3. You need instant access to a strategic resource.

That's fair enough, I suppose.

4. You plan to finish the Freedom SP. The extra tile yields make it much more worthwhile. A science/culture game filling out Freedom can really benefit from those extra hammers!

Maybe I'm overlooking freedom, but I'd only take it, if I'm going for a culture win. Rationalism + Planned Economy in order seem too powerful to pass up.

5. You're stacking lots of modifiers. Egypt + Marble + Religious Community, etc. If you have a lot of +X% modifiers you want to increase your base amount as much as possible.

True for Egypt and Aristocracy. Getting a marble start will probably take some rerolling, though, and you can't really get a GE before religious community becomes useless.

6. You're ahead of the AI's comfortably and can afford to hard build all the current wonders.

Fair enough, but for that to happen you need to play on a difficulty that's too easy for you anyways.

7. You're Korea and get an additional science bonus to the manufactory.

Fair enough.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

You need a pasture improvement to build the stable. But once you have the stable, all the Great Improvements will receive a +1 Prod. For your case, all of your pastures (or your only pasture) was built into a manufactuary before you built your stable. So just build your Great Improvement elsewhere or get Worker -> Pasture -> Stable earlier.

This.

 

[anandus]

Okay, so the Great Person improvement doesn't count for the requirement for the stable, but the stable does grant the +1 prod for cattle on which a GP improvement is built? Cool

 

[Louis8k8]

GP on pasture-compatible tiles are is a waste if your pantheon is God of the Open Sky and/or you are playing as Attila.

I recall it's 4-hammer, 4-coin, 1 culture if you go attila + open sky. My last immortal game's capital had 6 pastures with standard resources (drools).

 

[MadDjinn]

Maybe I'm overlooking freedom, but I'd only take it, if I'm going for a culture win. Rationalism + Planned Economy in order seem too powerful to pass up.

Freedom means more great people spammed and the Academies/whatever else allow hyper speed teching once it's finished (you'll have 'more' overall, earlier and then +100% to the base yield).


Ofc, Order is better if you make it to communism (tech VC) as you have to make a hard switch from mass tech to mass hammers. So Freedom might get you there earlier, but if you don't have a few Manufactories around (or really good base hammers) then you'll take longer to finish.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

GP on pasture-compatible tiles are is a waste if your pantheon is God of the Open Sky and/or you are playing as Attila.

I recall it's 4-hammer, 4-coin, 1 culture if you go attila + open sky. My last immortal game's capital had 6 pastures with standard resources (drools).

Well, a quite situational arrangement, and even more so for a culture game (imho).

 

[Louis8k8]

How many turns does an SS part normally take? With the usual freedom -> Great tiles (manufactuaries) that I use, it's 3 turns per piece.

 

[lemming3k]

Building manufactories becomes not worthwhile from turn 150-160 or so onwards, assuming you win the game at ~turn 300, it's not really worth it(the hammers you gain by settling a GE at turn 150-160 is about the same as a late industrial wonder). Unless you pick an engineer from liberty finisher you're probably better off with rushing wonders with them.

What about on Marathon? Pretty sure I'm up to 700+ turns and still have a way to go. If I was on a harder difficulty it'd probably last even longer.

 

[Montov]

Okay, so the Great Person improvement doesn't count for the requirement for the stable, but the stable does grant the +1 prod for cattle on which a GP improvement is built? Cool

In fact, a stable provides +1 production for every sheep/cow/horse, with or without a pasture/GP tile.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

In fact, a stable provides +1 production for every sheep/cow/horse, with or without a pasture/GP tile.

Yeah it seems like one the stable is build it stamps the bonus right on the tiles and you can't get rid of it.