Irrigation

[Strategist83]

The Civilopedia states that a farm provides + 1 food with irrigation - which in my mind makes 2 food - but in fact it provides only one. Is Civil Service bugged and produces less food than it should or have i misinterpreted something?

[MasterDave]

Civil service does not make farms produce more food, what it does is it allows you to "daisy chain" farm tiles. Meaning that if you have a farm next to a river, once you learn Civil Service you can irrigate the tiles next to the farm, even if the new tiles are not themsleves next to the fresh water source.

Biology is the tech at adds an additional food production to each farmed tile.

[Arrian]

The confusion I've seen so far on this stems from the fact that Biology adds +1 to farms and allows farms to be built without access to fresh water (without being part of a chain of farms leading from a river or lake). The access to fresh water still matters, though.

Thus, with Biology, a farm on plains produces either 2 or 3 food, depending on whether or not it is connected to fresh water.

Civil Service will allow you to build a chain of farms. A farm on plains will be 2f/1h. On grass, 3f/0h.

The confusion begins when people start building farms post-biology that are not connected to fresh water.

-Arrian

[xxFlukexx]

Another source of confusion is that you can build farms on food resources(wheat, corn, and rice) that are not connected to irrigation. When connected to irrigation you gain another +1 food on those tiles.

Makes fresh water pretty important and cities filled with unirrigatable plains pretty useless until civil service or biology.

[Lord Avalon]

Yeah, I did think it odd that you can put a farm in a special food tile, but then can't put a farm next to it (not realizing it was because there was no fresh water source and original tile wouldn't have been farmable if it didn't have special food on it).