Cottage/farms combo vs pure cottages

[Strategist83]

Assume a city on all grasslands with access to fresh water. What is the best way to maximize commerce in a such city? Is it better to mix cottages and farms for lower commerce but faster growth, or should one stick to cottages only, yielding more commerce but slower growth?

Bring forth the math!

[Nacht]

Built some farms, cottage the rest, if you've not reached your health/happy cap set the city on emphasize food. If it does reach a cap put all workers on cottages and one specialist. Once the city reaches 20 make cottages on those farms.

If you want to micromanage that much.

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by Nacht
Built some farms, cottage the rest, if you've not reached your health/happy cap set the city on emphasize food. If it does reach a cap put all workers on cottages and one specialist. Once the city reaches 20 make cottages on those farms.

If you want to micromanage that much.

Once the city reaches 20 ???? Oh for a game in which I had a city that big!

RJM at Sleeper's

[Nacht]

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers


Once the city reaches 20 ???? Oh for a game in which I had a city that big!

RJM at Sleeper's

Likely because in a real game you don't often have cities with a pure grassland fat cross.

[fed1943]

And what about hammer produting tiles?
Without that data,I cannot count the food,so I'm not able to decide.
Best regards,

[Strategist83]

Blake? Vel? Anyone?

Do I really need to get my calculator out?

[Shaka II]

I think it depends on each city.

Some cities are commerce heavy cities, while some are production heavy cities. In order to support several mines, you need several farms to supply food. These production cities can't afford many cottages, otherwise they just won't grow.

Other cities are commerce rich, they have less production potential and the food excess is best used to support many cottages. But even in these cities, there has to be sufficient production potential to build improvements, like markets, universities, and banks, so there still has to be a mine or two. In that light, there is never a purely commercial city, but there can be close to a pure production city, with almost no commerce. These are the cities that get forges first, and later factories.

A nice feature is the ability to switch emphasis from food and commerce to food and production. Try tp keep the cities growing, but when you need to make an important building, you need to emphasize production, at the expense of commerce. Plenty of opportunities for micromanagement.

I like to keep +2 food surplus to keep growth going, sometimes going to +1 or even 0 growth in key situations. Other times, a giant surplus may be used to pump growth, possibly to create specialists.

[MadDjinn]

I always count the amount of food needed to work all tiles in the cross...

if all grasslands, then +2 food for all tiles. so you won't over/under populate the city by cottaging everything in sight.

if you've got a grasslands hill, but no farms/food resource, then you should likely windmill it, rather than mine.

[Ijuin]

Most of my cities reach size 25 or so by the end of the game. I try to grow them as large and as fast as the happiness and health caps will allow.

[N35t0r]

I tend to heavily cottage in general, with production-heavy cities, due to prod. specials or a lot of plain hills (grass hills might get windmilled) getting farms to counter the lack of food from the hills and mines (rather than the usual windmills)

I've yet to build lots of workshops (for -1 +3 I'd rather irrigate and put the extra 2 pop as engineers), and I've built very few specialist-heavy cities (though marathon game speed has a lot to do, since GP's are hell to get, in GPP terms)

[Swiss Pauli]

I don't think a city should be considered as there's too many variables, but looking at the tile in isolation a cottage would be the default choice. Its yield increases over time, regardless of the tech/civics situation, so it will become 2/0/5 whereas the farm will still be 3/0/1.

Supporting specialists on +1 farms is not so good cos you need two farms to maintain +2 growth and you can probably get the specialist benefits - GPPs aside - elsewhere (cottages/mines) at better value.

I farm a 2/0/1 tile in order to work a mine, or to chain irrigation to a crop special/plains tile (post-CS).

[Blake]

The calculation for this will be painful, because of the fact cottages grow as they are worked.

My intuition says you should grow to the happy/health cap (whichever is lower) ASAP then work all cottages while minimizing food surplus, this is min-maxing . So what you'd want to do, given abundant worker time and land, is create a couple of farms and work them whenever the city needs to grow, switching over to cottages when it has hit caps. Once the city entirely runs out of workable tiles, replace farms with cottages as further growth will not be beneficial.

When you want a city to grow I consider +3 or +4 food to be about ideal, +2 is a bit too slow, and +1 is much too slow. Since cities on grassland start at +2 food, you only need 1 or 2 farms. Better would be a food resoure (pigs, bananas etc) which can be shared with another city.

[joncnunn]

Reduce from 20 if there are tiles in the city raidus that this city is never going to work. (Mountain Peaks, desert, and overlaped tiles permenantly worked by other cities)

Originally posted by Nacht
Built some farms, cottage the rest, if you've not reached your health/happy cap set the city on emphasize food. If it does reach a cap put all workers on cottages and one specialist. Once the city reaches 20 make cottages on those farms.

If you want to micromanage that much.

[MadDjinn]

and don't forget biology gives another +1 food to those farms, so each farm at that point is supporting one other full tile or specialist (knowing that hitting a very high pop will only likely occur around the time you hit biology anyways). also the only way to shoot past just tile development if you have no food resources.

[Urban Ranger]

I will try to max out pop growth until health/happiness cap is reached.

What I usually do for tiles with no specials:

Flood plains - farms
Plains on rivers - watermills
Plains - workshops
Grasslands on rivers - watermills
Grasslands - swing