Vel's Strategy Thread, Volume III

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by tommynt
...u tech superfast in start...

No you don't. You tech faster by making loads of food and use Scientists, the Great Library, academies, and GS.

[sabrewolf]

and with only early cottages you don't have any productivity, no excess food... so you may have the maximal trade coins but you can't even produce libraries, monasteries and universities at a decent pace.

and cottage-heave cities will not grow fast, you don't have happiness and health improvements so they easily reach a cap... so basically they are pretty worthless for a very long time. a good balance is needed, imho

[smbakeresq]

With all cottages how do you make enough units to protect yourself? Also, how do you make librarys and monestaries and observatories and universities to boost research? Without those things, research takes to long deeper into the tree.

I am all for cottages, but having more than an average 4-5 per city at the most is not optimal since you wont be able to get any boost from improvements or wonders.

You have to balanced.

[tommynt]

guys sure i mine a hill and dont cattage a cow but build the thing to get it and dont worry i know very well how to spam unit and buildings - key is slaving at small sizes - so bsically u get at small sizes 2-6 all the buildings and stuff u need and after u let it grow to full size (like 12 or bigger and let it use all grasscottagetiles)

at small sizes u sually can grow every 2nd turn (on fast speed) and therefore slave evry 2nd turn -

at the time when for other watermills are available i ll be close to democrazy -
and i strongly doubt that great people outtech cottages in medium and long run and even in short they stop city grow - sure in very food heavy cities speciallsts are a nice adder

oh well and that great lib is a great wonder is nothing new

[tommynt]

x

[sabrewolf]

tommy: sure, slavery is a good way of getting units early on and i do use it frequently, especially in games with little happiness resources.

however... growth and whip every 2 turns??? at quick game speed and on standard map sizes you need around 4 turns to grow in an average food excess city, but especially you need 6 turns for slavery unhappiness bonus to take even longer! also, you cannot whip really decent units at that pace above swordsmen or so...

it is very obvious that you are a pureblooded multiplayer... because your analyses seem like something that you'll only meet at duel size maps...

and come on... water mills when democracy comes around the corner??? machinery is available reasonably early on. democracy on the other hand is far in the future on the end of a dead end research path! so unless you have pyramids, you are not going to see the +1 hammer close to watermills!


that being said: i do agree that watermills are quite useless early on. the +1h is little advantage, considering that you could have much more commerce or +1 food. it's only really with replaceable parts that i really enjoy mills (and only chemistry makes workshops interesting)

[Generaldoktor]

Sabrewolf:

[tommynt]

oh well nm how u argument - cottages are 5 times better then watermills in a game without turn limit

but arent way to win a 1-1 on duel map

[sabrewolf]

we never said they were not better. we are just trying to say that cottages only just does not work.

it's all about diversification. even specialised cities need that.
no commerce cities will want markets and grocers for health and happiness.
commerce-high cities will need at least some productivity to build stuff.
and all of them will want food to grow...

[Blake]

Actually pure cottages is perfectely fine as long as there is at least a +4 food surplus, like any food resource would do the trick. If there isn't such a food surplus I prefer to make a couple of grassland farms or such.

And if needed I WILL go pure cottage on pure grassland (no resources), ideally of course I'd make those couple of farms but sometimes there is no fresh water. A city can still be quite productive even without high multipliers.

[Bobby Chicken]

You guys talking about farms and granaries appear to not be playing on the upper difficulty levels. Extra food does very little good on the 3 happiness, 1 healthiness levels. The answer, if only between cottages and farms, is cottages almost every time. If your cities are not maxed out on happiness and in deficit healthwise, I have no clue what you did. Granted, a few situations (newly founded/ recently captured city in the mid or late game, gold mine you need to work, etc. will warrant farms, but the rest of the time cottages. I even had victory one game building cottages on everything except hills/plains (emperor level).

[smbakeresq]

Bobby Chicken

Well I find on large and huge maps you can end up with many happiness & healthiness improvements connected to my road/trade network, so you need the food and granaries to grow. Do you just leave you cities small and spam them? What if you are the only oone on an island?

Usually I have several size 10+ cities on any level, and need the growth and health from farms and granaries.

What level/speed/map size do you usually play on? On emperor with small maps, normal speed, I agree since you must conquer immeadiately and rarely reach upper growth levels. On marathon/huge, you might not see anyone for the first 50 - 100 turns.

[Elledge]

Cottages only really does work unless you have really strange land. Count up the things you need to build in a commerce city to be making as much commerce as you can:

Early game - Library, granary, probably an aqueduct.
Kinda later - Markets and grocers are nice but other than in your best city or two they can wait a few turns.
Little bit later - Bank, university, observatory.

Count that up. It's not a whole lot of hammers, seeing as it's over the majority of the game. You can definitely make all those buildings with zero hammers, through just slaving, if you have a single farm or two pushing the food surplus to 3 or 4. Add in a few hammers from plains tiles and maybe a single hill, add in maybe a few forest chops early on for the granary, and you're really in business.

For defensive units, you'll have one or more production specialized cities with a forge and barracks churning them out. Your commerce cities never need to build units until post-suffrage.

I'm not saying pure cottages in cities is the best strategy in the world, but it works damn well, and it's certainly possible with no great stretching.

[Blake]

Originally posted by Bobby Chicken
You guys talking about farms and granaries appear to not be playing on the upper difficulty levels. Extra food does very little good on the 3 happiness, 1 healthiness levels. The answer, if only between cottages and farms, is cottages almost every time. If your cities are not maxed out on happiness and in deficit healthwise, I have no clue what you did. Granted, a few situations (newly founded/ recently captured city in the mid or late game, gold mine you need to work, etc. will warrant farms, but the rest of the time cottages. I even had victory one game building cottages on everything except hills/plains (emperor level).

Exactly .

I build farms for precisely two reasons:
1) On top of grains resources, or as part of an irrigation chain to a grains resource.
2) At a pure-grassland city. In this case I'll have some farms to work to grow, these farms will usually be worked only some of the time (ie only to grow, once hitting the happy cap the city works cottages again).

I wont ever farm plains, the reason is that it's better to kill off population with whipping than have it working farmed plains.

At emperor+ there really is no slack, it's cottages or bust.
You can afford an excess of farms at the Heroic Epic city, otherwise they are a post-biology novelty.

Oh, the granaries, they are needed for whipping, health and quickly growing to new caps. Dunno how you can consider granaries non-essential.

[couerdelion]

I can think of a few occasions where farming plains can give a small benefit.

1) With production multipliers the extra hammer from the tile can be worth 2 (or more in production)
2) When a city is large, whipping start to lose its edge
3) When whipping out buildings, the 2/1/0 plains farm tile will net you a good deal more production than a 0/4/0 workshop - even if you only work the tile briefly before the whip cracks.

But you certainly have got me thinking, Blake. I recently played a game in which I found myself with lots of plains tiles and, somewhere in the early mediaeval period, discovered a series of barbarian cities between Lizzie and Freddie. Wanting to monopolise the ivory trade - trade probably not being an appropriate word - I sent over a group of Swordsmen (or Macemen) and Horse Archers and managed to take four of the cities.

One of the cities contained corn, copper, cows and three ivory while the remaining tiles were simple plains. With a respectable production (and some forests) I was able to build Versailles there and then plan the cultural assimilation of some of the nearby English cities – why I didn’t send over the Cossack hordes I don’t know. But I did end up farming almost all of the plains tiles and wonder if this was yet another error of judgment on my part in this game. Given that the city was set up as a local production centre, and biology was not far away by the time I stopped playing it, I think my logic was simply to maximise my growth and using the whip to supplement the respectable production from the specials (base 20 hammers with a windmill).

I guess it’s more of a basic rule that I follow when I decide how cities are to specialise. I tend to do this by reference to the available specials and, in this case all of them screamed for production. If those tiles were cottaged then I think the science and gold gain would have been negligible – compared to simply churning out Confucian missionaries every other turn. Having said that, some basic calculations show that, one cottage after 53 turns would be generating an extra 11 beakers/gold per turn (financial + free speech) while the additional production from a farm (let say it’s worth 2 hpt) would only be generating 1/25th of a missionary or 0.12 gpt.

Unless I have made some basic error, it would seem that the good old cottage ought still to be a strong investment in this city.