farm improvement

[Yosho]

Originally posted by player1


This is good point.

But on average windmill (only enough to have food, rest can be mines) plus cottages option seems better.

(nods) Yeah, that is usually what I do for most of my cities. In some cities, you would much rather have the hammers, though; and if you want a city to be a production center, like your heroic epic city for example, farms+mines are usually better then windmill+workshop.

Also, cities I found or conquer later in the game, I usually have them focus on hammers instead of commerse, both because I don't want to wait forever for the cottages to grow into towns and because i don't want to wait forever for the city to build the buildings it'll need to be really productive; also, I like producing a lot of surplus food in those cities, again so it'll become productive quickly. For a city like that, my goal is to make it so it's doing something useful ASAP. So for those cities, I usually build some combination of farms, mines, workshops, and windmills.

Anyway, on some maps (like Great Plains, or Highlands) you end up having to build mostly farm improvements anyway.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Nacht
Before biology you need two farms to keep a plains/hills mine in production. After you need only one farm.

Only if it is irrigated grassland.

[Amarsir]

Equating food to hammers for comparison's sake is very valid. For instance, say you have a city that is at it's max population, and has 4 farms. Then you learn biology, and now have 4 surplus food. Now you can afford to destroy two farms and in their place build 2 workshops (assuming you're running state property). You just gained 6 hammers.

It's valid to compare food to hammers, but equating them is inaccurate as there is a one-directional dependency. Although the thread and its ideas so far are interesting, I'd want to establish some yardstick for seeing just how big the biology improvement already is. So I'm just going to use the Farm/Workshop model and a simplified but realistic region.

Consider 12 workable simple grass/plains tiles, yielding an average of 1.5 food each (plus some hammers/commerce we can ignore since they're static). No biology yet, so farms are only +1. We can't go all workshops, or there wouldn't be enough food to work them all, hence the dependency. Each workshop requires a farm supporting it. So we make 6 workshop, 6 farm, the food is balanced and we net 18 hammers.

Enter biology. Now one farm can support itself plus three workshops, so we change our ratio to 9 workshop, 3 farm. Net 27 hammers, a 50% improvement for the entire city. If you want to compare food/hammers, there's your key. Adding one food to each of 3 farms netted 9 hammers, or 1 food = 3 hammers.

If you use towns instead, that's 1 food = 7 commerce + 1 hammer. Either way, that's some effective food. Given that, if you wanted to add one more coin to the output of a farm, that's kind of a drop in the bucket given what you're gaining by being more food efficient.

I should note, if we're talking in terms of land replacement here (and it seems that we are), there's a diminishing marginal return. A third food per farm would be only be worth 1.5 hammers, since we're running out of places to build. But that's not the only way to value food.

If you want to try food valuation via specialist, you have to consider the hard-to-value GP contribution. Just for a value lets use +1 GP rate = 1 culture, which I'm pretty comfortable saying is a conservative estimate. I won't even consider the Sistene Chapel or Angkor Wat, but should assume Representation.

Engineer: +2 Ham +3 Gold +3 GP = 2 Hammer, 6 Commerce
Merchant: +3 Gold +3 Sci +3 GP = 9 Commerce
Artist: +4 Sci +4 Cul +3 GP = 11 Commerce
Scientist: +6 Sci +3 GP = 9 Commerce
Priest: +1 Ham +1 Gold +3 Sci +3 GP = 1 Hammer, 7 Commerce

Each roughly equivalent to a well-developed square, but with less (different) restrictions. So despite the details listed I'll just roughly say 1 specialist = 1 town = 1 workshop = "one improvement" (all dependent on, not equivalent to farms).

As I said earlier using the land replacement method, adding a third food to farms takes you from 9/3 to 10/2 in balance, not a big increase. But if you make 12 farms at 3 food per, now you can support fifteen specialists. And every additional food increase is six more.

(Yes, I know you'd have trouble getting that many specialists without resorting to sub-par workers, but that's irrelevant - this is a simplified model for establishing equivalence rates.)

See what I'm saying? Just to be clear, with the farm setting exactly the way it is now, you can go 3 farms and support 9 town/workshop/whatever. Or you can go all farm, and support 9 specialists. Either way you get 12 tiles worked and 9 non-farm improvements. That sounds like balance to me.

So in conclusion, I think farms are just fine the way they are. If you would like to add a commerce I don't think that'd do any harm. But if you add more food values you're asking for an imbalance via specialists.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Amarsir
Consider 12 workable simple grass/plains tiles, yielding an average of 1.5 food each (plus some hammers/commerce we can ignore since they're static). No biology yet, so farms are only +1. We can't go all workshops, or there wouldn't be enough food to work them all, hence the dependency. Each workshop requires a farm supporting it. So we make 6 workshop, 6 farm, the food is balanced and we net 18 hammers.

Lets say you have Civil Service so you can chain farms. Lets also make life simple by assuming you make farms on grassland tiles and workshops on plains tiles.

6 grassland tiles with farms will give you 18 food, which is insufficient to support 6 workshops. You can only support 3 workshops. Also each worksop is only +1 hammer at this point. So you are netting only 3x2 = 6 hammers.

At this point in the game the only tiles with farm that can support another tile are flood plains.

Note: you cannot do this the other way around. Building farms on plains tiles give them 2f each, which means they are self-sufficient. However, building workshops on grassland tiles means they now produce 1f/1h. Now not only they cannot produce surplus food they require external support as well.

Originally posted by Amarsir
Enter biology. Now one farm can support itself plus three workshops, so we change our ratio to 9 workshop, 3 farm. Net 27 hammers, a 50% improvement for the entire city. If you want to compare food/hammers, there's your key. Adding one food to each of 3 farms netted 9 hammers, or 1 food = 3 hammers.

After biology each irrigated grassland farm can support a workshop each. Now you can have 6 worksops. Each workshop might produce a max of 3 hammers depending on your path, but you should net a minimum of 2 hammers.

Now, if you give farms an additional food, grassland farms can produce a max of 5f. So two of these can support 3 workshops.

[Amarsir]

6 grassland tiles with farms will give you 18 food, which is insufficient to support 6 workshops. You can only support 3 workshops. Also each worksop is only +1 hammer at this point. So you are netting only 3x2 = 6 hammers.

I was using Gilfan's example, for which he was already assuming guilds, chemistry, and civil service. If you want to speak about an earlier point that's fine, but the early weakness of workshops isn't much of an indictment against farms.