[GS] Why I don’t build Farms [Are Farms and Food too Local?]

[steveg700]

Feudalism is one of the first items in either tree that I gave up on boosting.

 

[Tabarnak]

It costs a lot of worker charges to put enough farms for post feudalism. But wait...we need feudalism to boost charges....o well. That's why it's a bit ankward to speed up them before that tech.

If devs can balance more the Tall vs Wide strategies(Tall more powerful) they need to let the player build bigger cities with more amenity options(local mainly) so the damn farms can be really useful.

 

[konokono]

Anyone remember Master of Orion 2? That had a sensible local/global food dichotomy. Food was local, but could be transported if you built freighter fleets, which cost production (to build) and gold (to maintain). There was no micromanagement, you just had to have enough freighters for your transportation needs. Local cities (planets) could get blockaded, in which case they wouldn't be able to receive food from outside and could only use their locally grown food.

Seems entirely sensible without adding any complicated game mechanics

 

[steveg700]

Trade is the same tacked-on system it was in V. You've not actually trading anything that a city produces. It just comes out of the either based on districts, and districts are generic. So, desert cities can feed snow cities and vice-versa.

It definitely would be nice to build farmbelts that can feed the rest of the empire.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I think it would be interesting if there was a way to adjust Food distribution. So that a percent of food produced is always local, but some is also empire-wide. And certain civics, government types, districts, buildings, and the introduction of new technology can allow it to lean more towards empire-wide.

 

[shaglio]

I think it would be interesting if there was a way to adjust Food distribution. So that a percent of food produced is always local, but some is also empire-wide. And certain civics, government types, districts, buildings, and the introduction of new technology can allow it to lean more towards empire-wide.

Are you, sir, suggesting the idea of a Food Slider? But on a per-city scale, not an empire-wide slider like in Civs 1-4.

Something like: If you build a Grain Silo in a city, you could adjust that city's slider to how much food you want used locally and the rest gets thrown into a communal pool to be shared among the cities that haven't built Grain Silos.

 

[King of Prussia]

I agree with the state of farms. I would say it is ~33% of the time i boost feudalism. Mainly from capturing enemy cities or having a lot of wheat/rice. Food gets wasted if you dont have the housing for it. You can't move the food elsewhere. It kinda only becomes worth it after feudal and the infantry tech(spacing my mind, replacement parts?). Amenities are not plentiful unless you have a lot of trade partners, or on several different continents. Most of the entertainment buildings are in the mid and mainly late game.(starting with the zoo in the latter part of the mid game) This means going tall can be painful.

You could have districts provide adjacency bonuses. One of the major colleges in my state is well known for going around and helping farmers with making the most of their land. You can make them different based on the district.(science, prod or even gold)

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Are you, sir, suggesting the idea of a Food Slider? But on a per-city scale, not an empire-wide slider like in Civs 1-4.

Something like: If you build a Grain Silo in a city, you could adjust that city's slider to how much food you want used locally and the rest gets thrown into a communal pool to be shared among the cities that haven't built Grain Silos.

I don't think a slider per se. But there should be a empire-wide factor built into things like Harbors, Collectivization, Free Market, Steam Engine tech, Refrigeration tech, etc that causes a greater portion of Food to go from the city's yields into a bucket where they are redistributed empire-wide either equally or based on population.

Also, you should be able to barter a percentage from your empire-wide bucket in diplomacy.

Also, early and mid game, there could be a distance from center of mass penalty to accessing the empire-wide bucket to restrict excessive spreading.

 

[steveg700]

Maybe there could be an early policy that makes farms only use half a builder charge?

Of course, you could also have some different types of builders--farmer, (farms,plantations), woodsman (mills, camps), miner (quarries, mines). Give them more than 3 charges, but purpose-specific. Yeah, I know. Too complicated.

 

[kaspergm]

Maybe there could be an early policy that makes farms only use half a builder charge?

Of course, you could also have some different types of builders--farmer, (farms,plantations), woodsman (mills, camps), miner (quarries, mines). Give them more than 3 charges, but purpose-specific. Yeah, I know. Too complicated.

I don't really see the need. Imo. farms are fine as they are. Yes, it's generally not worth it to spam them early, and the 6 required for Feudalism may be too high (or maybe not, maybe not all eurekas and inspirations should come without an effort, and maybe it's the other ones that are generally too low), but from midgame where workers relatively speaking get cheaper and adjacency bonuses start to stack up, farms are fine.

When competitive people don't use farms, it's not because there's a farm problem imo., it's because there is a district problem - most notably the fact that a Campus district doesn't scale very well with population (and not at all once you cross the pop 10 threshold), plus you can put down campuses in each city for linearly increasing effect.

 

[Sostratus]

I don’t know how you people deal with plains heavy starts, maybe you eat the prairie sod.
@kaspergm has it right that farms aren’t bad- they are the best they have ever been- but specialist pops suck.

Now, you could also consider that farms are held back by their uninspired, 2 dimensional techniques. Trapped to the surface of the earth like beetles. When you could have the glorious TERRACE FARMS with 50% more dimensions of agriculture.
But, perhaps they simply need more pizazz- beyond earth had a plethora of extra yield types farms could give, and I made a modded building that gives 1 production to farms and related improvements, which really gives them more punch. Just like Terrace farms.

 

[ShakaKhan]

Anyone remember Master of Orion 2?

Thread made me immediately think of MOO as well.

As for the OP, I enjoy much of the content you share with us (many other members as well, thanks to all.) This particular OP I felt you made some very interesting observations and ideas that lost momentum due to humor that didn't stick the landing. Sorry, my opinion only.
Regarding farms in gameplay, I also follow Lily's philosophy of a few farm triangles, preferably that can be split among multiple cities. My approach, in which I have a serious micromanagement addiction problem, is as follows: Yes, excess food is less valuable then lesser total yields of other resources. But POP/2 is where city growth stagnates. And cities grow faster at lower pop levels.So while a size 2 city running two 5F tiles isn't as effective as that city running two 1F/4P tiles, the latter will never be able to grow (save alternate food sourced from TR, granary, etc.) into the size 10 city running two 5F tiles and eight 1F/4P tiles. And since lower pop cities gain pop points faster than larger ones, particularly when the lower pop cities have a huge food abundance, I'll lock in those two 5F tiles (the "work" tiles) to support the eight 1F/4P tiles (the "paycheck" tiles) later.
Regarding farms from role-play perspective, it has always bothered me that the localization of food creates a paradigm with extremely high population agricultural centers and extremely low population commercial and industrial centers, which is completely the opposite of the real world, and there are very simple and logical reasons why the real world operates that way.
Regarding cities disallowed from pooling resources for important societal projects, this is one where I agree and it really breaks the role-playing suspension of disbelief. Let's say, in the real world, a certain narcissistic leader of a civilization wants to build a great wall with the stated intention of improving security while his only real motivation is to have a wonder of the world with his name on it (I'll stop there, not trying to de-rail.) The resources allocated to this project would not be only from the cities at the site (who in this game, can't even pool their own collective resources) but rather every city within the civilization would make contributions to it. Being able to implement this could really change the game - instead of "I'd like Pyramids and Artemis, so I'll build Pyramids in my highest production city and Artemis in my second-highest production city." It would be "Pyramids are very high priority, so I'll focus ALL city production to it. After that, Artemis would be nice, I'll allocate two cities to it and have the rest of my empire focus back on expansion and unit production to make up for my wonder side-tracking." It would also mean that in every game, even Deity (well, maybe except the very early ones as they start with so many more cities) If you REALLY want a certain wonder, you can get it, in almost every game... at a cost.
But that concept has me thinking of a different problem. In the real world, if one civilization creates a wonder of the world, other civilizations don't just throw in the towel and start working on something else - they finish what they started and it becomes a different wonder. There are pyramids in Egypt and different pyramids in South America. But then this means that each wonder needs to have sub-wonders, and should the player be able to pick from a series of names and effects for each wonder created and... now I'm starting to dig myself a logic hole that I can't climb out of.
Apologies. My job has me working overnights last night and tonight. It's unpleasant.

 

[acluewithout]

...humor that didn't stick the landing...

Fair enough.

Regarding cities disallowed from pooling resources...

Currently the only way Cities can “pool” resources is (1) each City creates Global yields (eg Gold). Projects are good for that. (2) Adjacencies (City A builds an IZ, City B builds the Aqueduct and Dam) and (3) Internal Trade Routes.

Internal Trade Routes really do let you pool resources, just in a really counter-intuitive way. City A has all the hammers and is building Pyramids. City B shares resources by creating a trade route (commercial hub), building the trader, and then City A sends the trader to City B and gets yields based on Districts.

I actually think that model for sharing works pretty well. Cities can share hammers, but it requires some set up, and you’re limited to how much production you can concentrate in one City.

My point is just there isn’t an equivalent way to share food, which is part of why flat land cities with lots of farms aren’t a thing.

One solution would be for Food Yields for Trade Routes depended on the number of Farms at the destination.

But I think what would be a better solution would be for Food to just be more of a Global Yield. Maybe something a bit like how Amenities get allocated amongst your various Cities.

 

[Sostratus]

But I think what would be a better solution would be for Food to just be more of a Global Yield. Maybe something a bit like how Amenities get allocated amongst your various Cities.

I know the devs have seen the suggestions around this, but it's always tough because when do you implement such a system - it doesn't really make that much sense turn one, but as time goes on it does. What if I built all these farms so the city with them would grow instead of shipping them out to some overcrowded pit? There aren't a lot of elegant solutions to cover 6,000 years of historical context. In like a Beyond Earth it would make a lot of sense though. I could see this being something unlocked by a civic and then requiring something along the lines of an opt in building + city connection to capital (that way you can cut it and starve out the enemy in war) to handle the edge cases.

If internal routes were more limited - like you can only pull from a given city so many times - then that might be the most drop in method. Otherwise I'll make "farmtopia" in the corner and then all my cities will send 1 route there.

 

[The googles do nothing]

I liked your post. Laughed out loud in the parlance of our times.

I do like the idea of farms feeding a pool of food that goes to trade routes. I like the idea of more complex trade routes in general and getting rid of leader screen trading.

Side note... Part of the reason not to build farms is that mines are unrealistically good. Same with forests. The one thing you absolutely need to win at higher difficulty's - is an Army. Which is made exclusively with with what you get out of mines. Sometimes you can use faith magic but you see where i'm going. You can work a mine from 2000 BC until the end of time and it will magically get more productive as technology improves.

If there was a cap on how much production and strategics could be mined from a tile... it would be an interesting experiment but I don't know if it would make the game better. You get 30 hammers per era cumulative. Chopping gives you half of that instantly.

 

[acluewithout]

I don’t know how you people deal with plains heavy starts, maybe you eat the prairie sod.
@kaspergm has it right that farms aren’t bad- they are the best they have ever been- but specialist pops suck.

Now, you could also consider that farms are held back by their uninspired, 2 dimensional techniques. Trapped to the surface of the earth like beetles. When you could have the glorious TERRACE FARMS with 50% more dimensions of agriculture.
But, perhaps they simply need more pizazz- beyond earth had a plethora of extra yield types farms could give, and I made a modded building that gives 1 production to farms and related improvements, which really gives them more punch. Just like Terrace farms.

I know the devs have seen the suggestions around this, but it's always tough because when do you implement such a system - it doesn't really make that much sense turn one, but as time goes on it does. What if I built all these farms so the city with them would grow instead of shipping them out to some overcrowded pit? There aren't a lot of elegant solutions to cover 6,000 years of historical context. In like a Beyond Earth it would make a lot of sense though. I could see this being something unlocked by a civic and then requiring something along the lines of an opt in building + city connection to capital (that way you can cut it and starve out the enemy in war) to handle the edge cases.

If internal routes were more limited - like you can only pull from a given city so many times - then that might be the most drop in method. Otherwise I'll make "farmtopia" in the corner and then all my cities will send 1 route there.

I find Cities with lots of flat land, particularly plains, hard to work with. The changes to IZs do give you some options, because these sorts of Cities are often on rivers. But it’s a pain, because they often lack the production to build the infrastructure needed for a good IZ.

So, I mostly end up just putting down a City, building whatever minimal infrastructure it needs and ignoring it. I’m certainly not building Farms. It feels a real shame.

Sometimes I go a bit @Victoria and just build Pop because it’s fun and flavourful. When I do, I notice I often end up loyalty flipping a tonne of surrounding Cities which is sort of cool. But I don’t see much other use.

Standing back a bit, I feel like overall the economy of Civ is a bit of a mess. Tile yields are crazy now - I’m often swimming in hammers and food. There’s heaps of gold and nothing to spend it on, because maintenance is so low. Housing is rarely a problem, although getting Pop 10 in some Cities can be fiddly. And if you get Divine Goddess or whatever it’s called, you’re swimming in Faith too.

And while the yields are bananas (and, in particular, banana yields really bananas) the game still goes so fast. I’m basically done by turn 200 - either actually done because I was speed playing, or effectively done because I’m so far ahead no one can catchup.

At the same time, I like most of the changes made in the last few patches buffing Coastals, IZs and improvements. I like where Specialists are currently and don’t really want to see them buffed, but I get they’re not very strong. I really don’t know what the solution is overall. Maybe things like more Gold maintenance/ less Gold would help, or pushing back Trade Routes more, or just making Culture and Science harder to get overall (which would make Specialists more useful indirectly).

Or maybe all this stuff gets filed under “fine tuning, to be tackled once the game is complete” or it’s stuff best left to modders who have the luxury of time to play around with fine tuning.

Anyway. Global Food. No idea how that would work. Maybe Cities could generate a certain amount of “Surplus” Food, and then any City with a Granary could dip into that surplus based on available housing. You’d need to think quite carefully about where you out Granaries then, because if you put them in too many Cities, you’ll spread the surplus too thin. Maybe you’d also need the option to remove Granaries, just so you had some sort of control too.

Or maybe you have a District or Building that goes in the City with all the Farms that boosts Food Yields for Trade Routes based on how many Farms it has.

Or maybe we do need a Project that somehow leverages how much Food the City produces to boost other Cities. You’d need to teach the AI to use that of course.

I really don’t know. I really don’t want to see a whole bunch of mechanics around Food. But I do think having Food / Farms be strictly local is really limiting. It really needs to be a bit more “quasi-global” like Production.

Side note... Part of the reason not to build farms is that mines are unrealistically good. Same with forests. The one this you absolutely need to win, at higher difficulty's - is an Army. Which is made exclusively with with what you get out of mines. Sometimes you can use faith magic but you see where i'm going. You can work a mine from 2000 BC until the end of time and it will magically get more productive as technology improves.

If there was a cap on how much production and strategics could be mined from a tile... it would be an interesting experiment but I don't know if it would make the game better. You get 30 hammers per era cumulative. Chopping gives you half of that instantly.

Yeah. I agree Mines etc. are way too powerful. Particularly once Volcanos get involved.

I wouldn’t like to see Mines etc. having a life span. I get where you’re going, but I’d be worried there would be too much micro.

Honestly, they way yields work currently, you could almost get rid of Hill Mines and just have Mines on resources + Quarries and Lumbermills. But that would be such a big shift to the game that I think too many wouldn’t like that - any maybe it wouldn’t work anyway.

At a minimum, I think there’s something to be said for Mines maybe not scaling over time. That way, early game, you’d still want Hill Mines. But as the game progresses, you need to find better sources of production. As the game stands currently, Hill Mines are often still the backbone of my economy, with the result that things like Industrial Zones etc just not being worth the investment because they’re just not adding much for their production costs versus just working Hill Mines.

Or alternatively, maybe Mines should have a bit more of a negative. They lower appeal, but that’s pretty meaningless most or all of the game unless you have Divine Goddess or whatever (faith from appeal) or you’re Australia. Maybe appeal should be more important? I’ve always though Campus adjacency might work better being based on Appeal rather than Mountains and Jungles and Reefs. Indeed, it would kind of work out the same because you’d still get adjacencies from Mountains and Coasts because they’re high appeal, you’d just also get adjacencies from Wonders and Woods and would lose adjacencies from Jungle. Or maybe that would actually be terrible, because you’d just have +5 Campuses everywhere...

Maybe Mines could just lower happiness - say -0.5 per Mine. Or mash these together a bit, and have a City’s overall Happiness adjusted based on Appeal of the City (+Happiness for every high appeal time, -Happiness for every low appeal tile, capped at +/- 2 either way).

Hmm. I seem to have strayed a long way from just talking about Farms... Oh well.

 

[steveg700]

Side note... Part of the reason not to build farms is that mines are unrealistically good. Same with forests. The one this you absolutely need to win, at higher difficulty's - is an Army. Which is made exclusively with with what you get out of mines. Sometimes you can use faith magic but you see where i'm going. You can work a mine from 2000 BC until the end of time and it will magically get more productive as technology improves.

I'm not sure if I see where you're going. It's not magic. It's abstraction, of which Civ makes rather liberal usage.

Mines and quarries in actually do not provide any production in and of themselves, they simply retrieve raw materials. They provide input, not output. The older civ games removed the other links in the chain. Now we have IZ's, which correspond to where things get produced, but they are also highly abstracted.

But more to the point, how does the abstract nature of mines correlates to not wanting to build farms? If you have a mine on anything but grasslands, your mining pops will be starving as they need two food.

If there was a cap on how much production and strategics could be mined from a tile... it would be an interesting experiment but I don't know if it would make the game better.

Even in terms of simulation, I don't see how it would. Sure, individual mines get played out, but you look around that same mineral-rich area for another mine. And as tech improves, you can survey better and dig deeper. Civ simply represents the process with a single mine per tile.

Of course, once a city becomes a metropolis, it tends to stop being a place with lots of mines and farms. We don't have any representation in Civ of the various hinterlands and outposts that exist in the real world. You have to be able to found a city just to erect an oil rig.

 

[montalaar]

i do build farms. but sure less than in previous games. still, 3-4 farm patches do their job good. like cows or sheep they have their roles - at the begining of game, two hill sheeps can can rocket new city high fast. later remove them. same with farms.
to me, at least some trade routes, share city production in a some way, that newly founded cities in later eras firstly make trade route to capital to get +6 food and +4 production.
then there is that cree guy, who prospers from pastures with trade routes.

 

[darkace77450]

While we're on the subject of food, I'd like to see them lean into the concept of an army marching on its stomach in Civ7. If the number of military units you can support was tied to the amount of food you produce then it would shake up the way players approach warmongering (especially early-game rushes). I particularly think food could be an organic way to allow stacks of doom while throttling how big said stacks can get before they starve themselves out of existence.

 

[acluewithout]

I think another option would be maybe internal trade routes only ever provide +1 food, and then maybe gain +1 Food for each Improved Bonus Food Resource in the destination City (provided it has a Watermill or a Granary or something). Or would that end up too fiddly?

Maybe something similar for Coastal Cities with lots of Fish?

Maybe Railroads should also have some passive bonus (again, to help Cities feel more connected less local).

So, I guess summarising my scatter-brained thoughts, what I’d like to see is:

• Food and or Farms becoming a bit more quasi-Global like Production is, instead of being completely Local or becoming purely Global like Gold, Faith etc.

• Mines having a slightly more meaningful negative impact, so just throwing mines down on every hill isn’t such a no-brainer.

• Railways having some passive bonus that makes connecting your Cities more important.

• Just a general once over for economic balance, focusing on Housing, Gold and Faith and Maintenance, the value of Population generally (including Specialists), and Happiness and Loyalty.

Well. That sounds easy. I’m sure FXS can have that sorted by the end of the week.

Anyway. Overall, I’m mostly okay with Civ’s balance. Most of my balance issues are solved by @Sostratus ’s excellent balance mod and a few other very narrow mods. And it’s not like I’m throwing my keyboard across the room because God Damn It the game just doesn’t support my Farm and Sheep based Domination Strategy.

But I do think something around Food, Growth, Happiness and Economy needs a bit more work, even if I’m struggling a bit to really tease out the problem (or maybe multiple small problems).