Importance of Farms

[Thrak]

Depends really, I just spec 1-2 cities early on with all cottages - the rest I farm.

But I tend to do 3 things differently;

1. Grab pyramids and angor wat, this means I can have production cities with farms + mines, then when I reach happy/health cap I stick priest specialists on for more production.

2. My capital is normally the great people production center - so farms > all.

3. Use slavery/whipping a lot, so farms are brilliant combined with the fact you are minimising spare population for cottages.

If for some reason my capital isn't the GPP center, I still use farms in the early game to grow/produce settlers early.

I do need to spec more cities for cottaging to be honest so the balance is tipped the wrong way a little at the moment. But I think this is just a need to move them up the priority list more than anything. Stil trying to get the spiral minaret/university of sankore strat working better as well.

[Saurus]

I only build many farms around cities witch are supposed to have many specialist-citizens and are not otherwise producing enough food for this. I also most often build one or two farms per city in order to support growth, expecialy after the discovery of biology.

[MasterDave]

Originally posted by Zahathustra
in the early game when i have just put one or two cities on the ground , i focus on growth at least until i get to Pottery. How can a city take advantage of cottages while it is still too small? when i have one or two floodplains near the city i never sacrifice this precious food resource to build a cottage on them except when there are food resources like cows or sheep... after making sure of the growth i quickly build cottages now i have more workers to build them cz i did not sacrifice growth on the early game..... aany ideas regarding this?

I almost always build cottages on flood plains rather than farms UNLESS there are only one or two flood plains and no other decent tiles around for food growing. A tile that produces three food already promotes growth as it is, and you get a bonus commerce on your cottage from the river.

Almost all veteran multiplayer Civers do this also from what I have seen when invading other player's empires.