What's the best layout for farms + stepwell (India)?

[ElGuapoCiv]

For farms alone it's supposed to be the three-farm-triangle.
India though has this special improvement called "stepwell" which gives a bonus for farm adjacency and you can't build two stepwells next to each other.
So is it stepwell, farm, stepwell then? Or farm, stepwell, farm? Does the stepwell count towards the medieval farm-adjacency bonus or won't farms benefit from it?

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I would say you should take the farm "triangle" over the stepwell. If you have room you can add stepwells along the edges of that farm in order to further improve it.

A crude visualization where S is stepwell and F is farm (disregard the periods)

..S
.FF
SFS

 

[ElGuapoCiv]

I would say you should take the farm "triangle" over the stepwell. If you have room you can add stepwells along the edges of that farm in order to further improve it.

A crude visualization where S is stepwell and F is farm (disregard the periods)

..S
.FF
SFS

That's a good starting point for me to understand the mechanism better. It will require a vast territory of suitable tiles though. Most of the time you don't have so many suitable tiles in one place.

 

[Onii-chan]

Well you still need your farm triangles as usual for their adjacency bonuses, so the only logical answer (when possible) is to do exactly that but also with stepwells around the edges so that every stepwell touches two farms. If you want a bigger farm bulk then just do that and try to fit in stepwells as best you can in similar ways on the sides. Just don't put the stepwell in the middle of the whole thing, that'll just ruin all your farm adjacency bonuses

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Overall, the problem you'll face is that 9 tiles in a city dedicated to food (yes you get 3 housing, but you can get 4 from ONE tile) is a bit much later in the game. Add to that the difficulty of getting nine tiles without a conflict in general (resource, mountain, hill before hill farming, etc.), and I'd wager getting one stepwell per "triangle" is a better option than trying to get three.