Affects of Cottage Locations on Research Times?

[Blake]

Well at present there is no +1 commerce on plains.

You should always place cottages on Grassland, if your city is food limited. If it has a lot of food from resources then plains cottages work okay.

The main thing is, to get more commerce from cottages, you should work more cottages, and grassland works much better for that.

Grassland is simply stronger than plains.

[nbarclay]

The advantage to grassland over plains for cottages is that grassland can feed itself and plains can't. If a city has a lot of food surplus after working the available hills and other high-production tiles, cottages on plains can absorb the food surplus to prevent unwanted growth while at the same time providing a hammer for each plains tile worked - and, of course, the commerce from the cottage. The down side is that using up excess food that way means having fewer specialists, and thus fewer great person points. But when a city doesn't have a strong food surplus, grassland and flood plains are definitely the best place to put cottages except to the extent that those tiles need to be irrigated in order to work hills or other low-food, high-production tiles (e.g. a copper mine in a desert).

Note that I'm a micromanager, so I can't really speak to the question of whether or how city governors might make a mess out of plans by working other tiles instead of cottages when a player wants the city to be working cottages.

[Blake]

I know the governer massively undervalues cottages. It is best to assign them to maximize Food+Commerce in a cottage city. Food+Hammer+Commerce also works better than the default in nearly every case, the logic it uses for assigning workers is extremely close to my mine.
The default governer with no priorities is simply braindead, I believe it over-priotitizes food at the expense of other things, since it also needs to find a way to assign specialists (F+H+C governor is basically "never assign specialists).

[Ijuin]

Essentially ALL Plain and Grassland terrain that does not have a farm (or special resource) on it should get a Cottage. Even if you plan on putting a farm somewhere after Civil Service, which allows you to "chain" irrigation, you will still benefit from putting down a cottage ASAP and then later changing it to a farm when necessary.

[CerberusIV]

Originally posted by Blake
The default governer with no priorities is simply braindead, I believe it over-priotitizes food at the expense of other things, since it also needs to find a way to assign specialists

I don't find the default governor does that once your cities reach a decent size. I regularly find the governor running cities with a couple of grassland farms unworked in favour of cottages in cities around size 9-10. Even below that the default governor doesn't usually push for more than a +3 food surplus - which you want to get the city up towards your health/happiness limits.

I play on Prince so maybe it is different on higher difficulty with lower health/happiness bonuses. The main thing is to keep an eye on your cities and turn off growth before they go over the health/happiness limits (except for slavery of course). I really wish there was a governor setting that would do that for me.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Ijuin
Even if you plan on putting a farm somewhere after Civil Service, which allows you to "chain" irrigation, you will still benefit from putting down a cottage ASAP and then later changing it to a farm when necessary.

While we're on the subject of temporary cottages, sugar and banana tiles can be good candidates for cottages that will be replaced once the appropriate technology is available.

[Solver]

Okay, I said I'm going to get confused with some numbers, these time I confused river-plains and plains... bah.

I employ temporary cottages occasionally on Calendar resources before I get Calendar, but not always - basically, I only do that if there's nothing else for the workers to do.