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

[acluewithout]

Enjoyed reading the above posts. I will admit that i have cut down(heh) on my chopping since the introduction of magnus. I dont move him around as much to make use of it, and i chop less than i did before in general. The changes to improvements helped, but i also feel a bit guilty exploiting it to such a degree that it removes the challenge.

Remarking on the pic above of the persons large empire, we went from one extreme to other with civ v to civ vi. We went from largely nothing outside of farms, trading posts and mines outside of cities to nearly everything being moved out. I think in Civ 7, if they moved more stuff(not all) back into the city, including buildings, district(s) and wonders, that it would be a better balance. Right now, you want as much room as possible for your cities to build districts, wonders, and a few key improvements. This issue is one reason why i dont like coastal cities with a little land. Even if they make more things to stick out in the water, it doesn't solve the clutter issue on land. I barely have farms in the late game. I mainly try to avoid removing mines or other production sources because you need lots of hammers in the late game. Especially when the production to tech rate is still off imo.(tech too fast compared to what it takes to build stuff) Late game empires start to turn into Judge Dredd style maps.

Personally, I like where we are currently with districts, wonders outside cities.

For me, the key things missing are just (1) I’d like Cities to sprawl outside their core tile more visually, (2) I think City Centres themselves could use a few more buildings (and a few existing ones, eg sewers, made more relevant, (3) a few more district buildings like the encampment’s barracks v stable where you have to choose between different building options[0], (4) Neighbourhoods to be more relevant, and (5) for the reasons stated in the OP, Farms to be more relevant generally (or at least as relevant as Mines).

[0] Not including the government plaza, the only other examples are Encampment Barracks and Stable (already mentioned), Theatre Square Art Museum and Archeology Museum, IZ Power Stations and Neighbourhood Shopping Mall and Market. I guess Entertainment Complex and Waterpark is another example, but that’s at a district level. I think maybe Harbours and Commercial Hubs could use an alt building as their level 2 or 3 building. That would probably do me.

 

[The googles do nothing]

Buildings. Built locally and most effects are local. Can be bought with global yields (gold and faith) and some Buildings have regional or global effects.

I tried to make a mod with alternative Workshop buildings that change the value trade routes based on the resources in the origin city. For example a city with fish could send a trade route to a city with a cannery would get more food. Unfortunately the modifiers don't exist to do that. I think that would be a good way to move buildings from the local category to global.

 

[Larsen]

Food is a bit too easy to get without farms. As long as you have about 2 food on average across your tiles, you'll grow just fine. So many different resources and tile configurations give 3 or even 4 food without any improvements, so farms are very rarely necessary. It also doesn't help that it takes absolutely forever before you can build farms on hills, so getting triangles is often impossible until so late that it doesn't matter anymore. Farms are pretty useless without triangles and that's really what's wrong with them. It never feels good to just put down one farm. If you haven't got a spot for a triangle, you might as well not bother.

 

[cvb]

Food is a bit too easy to get without farms. As long as you have about 2 food on average across your tiles, you'll grow just fine. So many different resources and tile configurations give 3 or even 4 food without any improvements, so farms are very rarely necessary.

So far I can follow: there is a profusion of food available. Some feel they don't need to build as many farms as they would like or think to be right.

Farms are pretty useless without triangles and that's really what's wrong with them. It never feels good to just put down one farm. If you haven't got a spot for a triangle, you might as well not bother.

You can easily give the single farm improvement 2 instead of 1 food. It is then comparable vigorous as the other food producers.

But is adding more food, in an environment in which is already too much available, a solution in making farms more important (in order to build more farms)?

How can any fix to "what's really wrong with them" lead to more farms on the map?

.

 

[Sostratus]

I tried to make a mod with alternative Workshop buildings that change the value trade routes based on the resources in the origin city. For example a city with fish could send a trade route to a city with a cannery would get more food. Unfortunately the modifiers don't exist to do that. I think that would be a good way to move buildings from the local category to global.

You can definitely make “each fish resource gives more food to trade route” etc type modifiers. And you can check for a building in a city. Hmm... as long as the modifier is attached to the city that contains the building and then you set the route bonus to the sender instead of the destination. Like a combo of how magnus growth ability works and poundmaker’s LUA.
I was thinking about making a 3rd leader for my custom civ with a mechanically similar ability, is why I ask.
No bueno?

 

[acluewithout]

You can definitely make “each fish resource gives more food to trade route” etc type modifiers. And you can check for a building in a city. Hmm... as long as the modifier is attached to the city that contains the building and then you set the route bonus to the sender instead of the destination. Like a combo of how magnus growth ability works and poundmaker’s LUA.

I think tying something like this to a City Centre building would be the way forward. So, flat land / food heavy cities are still useless, but if you gold purchase the right building, then they can be an engine for growth. It would also be a nice soft incentive to not chop every bonus food resource.

If you did that though, you'd have to then rework trade yields a little. I guess internal trade routes wouldn't give food based on districts any more.

 

[Mahi]

You didn't really build that many farms in Civ IV and V.. As I recall you built a hell of alot cottages in Civ IV instead of farms and in Civ V you built trading posts as food was never really a problem in Civ V.

 

[Jkchart]

I like farms - I like big cities, and I like how they look.

But dangit I AGREE that we should be able to move that food production with trade routes.

 

[Smity2k1]

Really liking this balance discussion going on and some interesting points about grass mines being self supportive. I only logged a few hundred hours in Civ5 before Beyond Earth and Civ6 came out and never realized that mines had some drawbacks in Civ5. It is very strange that in every way hills are better than flatland in Civ6. For that matter any tile with a feature is better than any other tile without a feature. I suppose there are some very minor drawbacks such as - slower movement, no farms (early), and lower appeal in certain cases.

I like the suggestion someone had that a neighborhood allows you to build a 2nd copy of a district. It sort of makes sense if you think of a neighborhood as a 2nd city center. Give some reason to build a larger pop city instead of just spreading everything out. Maybe the 2nd copy of a district would need to be adjacent to the neighborhood?

Also I disagree with the other poster who things the map in Civ6 is ugly. I think it looks great, though I do agree the ski resort spam is a bit much. I think ski resorts should maybe need more conditions to be a valid placement and then buff the output accordingly.

Finally, when it comes to chopping, I think the yields do need to be reduced a bit. Maybe knock another 25% or so off the output of chopping.

The last few patches have done a lot to balance production to science and culture and boost water tiles, but I think FXS still needs to look at production vs. food as well as tall vs. wide.

 

[steveg700]

You didn't really build that many farms in Civ IV and V.. As I recall you built a hell of alot cottages in Civ IV instead of farms and in Civ V you built trading posts as food was never really a problem in Civ V.

Well, trade routes as we think of them now didn't exist for a good chunk of Civ V. Tacked on via by the BNW expansion, and certainly still feels tacked-on. There was no policy to add +2 food to trade routes with allies in that edition, so getting food from trade meant sticking to internal trade routes.

In V, farms got built near fresh water sources. You could farm in the desert or tundra as long as there was fresh water. Again, the introduction of housing in Civ VI steals the thunder from farms.

 

[Sostratus]

You didn't really build that many farms in Civ IV and V.. As I recall you built a hell of alot cottages in Civ IV instead of farms and in Civ V you built trading posts as food was never really a problem in Civ V.

You wanted to have really high pop in cities in civ5- especially after BNW- because then you only paid the cost for a library, uni, public school etc once. Specialists were quite strong as well with great people.
A grassland tile with a farm would provide up to 4 food. That’s 2 pop worth. Hills gave 0. So every mine needed to be supported by a farm. Every specialist needed a farm or some 3 food+ tile to support it. Growth was also a lot slower.

It wasn’t anything like civ6 where you can have +8 food farm tiles and mines can be self sufficient. I will concede though, that the incredible incentive to settle on coast near sea resources was a big deal- a few fishing boats just dumped food on you and were regarded as one of the best ways to get a city going. But everyone else needed farms, or a lot of deer camps, or something like that.

This is if you were playing to the meta- Pre BNW it was different since no trade routes meant the main source of gold was tiles, and river tiles gave gold... and religion (ceremonial burial especially) meant you could have unlimited expansion from a happiness perspective.
Edit: spamming TP under rationalism for the +1 science was also a thing, but having several really big cities was still critical to the early-mod game because all your science came from pop. Understand that even when a trading post gives 1 science, the pop working that tile is already giving 2 (1+0.5 library x 1.33 university.)

 

[The googles do nothing]

I was thinking about making a 3rd leader for my custom civ with a mechanically similar ability, is why I ask.
No bueno?

For leader it would work because the modifier gets applied to all the player's cities. When I tried adding to the BuildingModifers the effect was still applied to all cities not just the city with the building.

EffectType="EFFECT_ADJUST_PLAYER_TRADE_ROUTE_YIELD_PER_IMPROVEMENT_IN_TARGET_CITY"

 

[Sostratus]

For leader it would work because the modifier gets applied to all the player's cities. When I tried adding to the BuildingModifers the effect was still applied to all cities not just the city with the building.

EffectType="EFFECT_ADJUST_PLAYER_TRADE_ROUTE_YIELD_PER_IMPROVEMENT_IN_TARGET_CITY"

You might have already tried this...
It's probably because the scope of the effect is "COLLECTION_PLAYER_CITIES" when it should be "COLLECTION_OWNER". You'd need to make a new Dynamic Modifier that specifies a custom modifier type with the appropriate collection type for the effect type.
As a quick example, I recycled the R&F Democracy government effect that gave +production per district in the city onto a building. The existing modifier applies to all of a player's cities, but by making a dynamic modifier with the smaller scope collection type, it only applies to its city.

I don't recall if effect_adjust_player_xxx type effects inherently scope to all a player's objects or not, though.

 

[Pure24]

I think the way Civ is so focused on “Local” (ie Cities)[0] is what then makes it hard for the game to transition from feeling like you’re managing a bunch of Greek city states to managing an empire.

Civ is wired to be local at its most basic game loop - settle cities, then use city to build things to get more cities (settlers or military units). I mean, you literally spend the whole game having each City build one thing at a time. No multiple cities building the one thing (Hey Paris, I see you building those Pyramids. Would you like some help? We have Stone, a few Cows and some Bananas that grow actual gold for so,e reason!).

I'm actually working on a suggestion for improving late-game Civ (if I had any programing skill whatsoever I'd make a mod for it). The idea is based on not changing any mechanics, just tweaking what's there to improve the late-game.

Two particular problems that kept coming up are (1). That dang micromanagement (2). late-game decisions just aren't important. Or more accurately, they don't FEEL important. Losing an Ancient Wonder stings. Losing an Atomic Era Wonder is 'meh', other than personal pride.

In my solution, a summary would be to basically make everything global. Like the way the World Congress works, once the game hits the Modern Era, mechanics should change. And all of the sudden, you're playing a game that feels totally different because you're now dealing with an empire rather than a collection of cities. But choices that came before matter, and so the early game remains important, while the late-game has real consequences for choices and making most of the things global vastly reduces micromanagement.

...

As for the farms issue, I like the idea of cities contributing +food to all cities they share neighbouring tiles with when they have more than +2 food excess (doesn't affect city growth), boosted to the entire empire once a specific technology is researched (Replaceable Parts?). May make building farms important.

The trade route idea is really good. Make bonus food tied to how many farms one has in their city. Could make a super-mega +10 food city per trade route to feed the nation!