What do I do with this tile?

[EternalSpark]

I've been trying to improve my Civ4 play lately (I've never been really good), and I've come across a situation or two that I''m often in, but I just kinda wing it. I suspect that I'm doing something wrong, but I dunno.

I should know that I realize that it all depends on the Civ / playstyle, but here goes:

1) Tiles next to rivers that are 3food/1Coin. I find myself just randomly putting down farms/cottages on it. I've always been food-obsessed in Civ games, and I fear that if there's a bunch of these tiles, I'm quickly growing too fast, leaving me with an unhappy/unhealthy population. Is the better play on these tiles to put cottages on them, hoping that (assuming three of these tiles) 9 food+ commerce is better than 12 food and no commerce?

2) Whenever I try placing a base with an desire for it to be hammer-heavy, I find that my bases stagnate at a size of 3/4. How do I handle these bases, knowing that they would do better with 5/6 people, or more? Like I said, I'm growth-obsessed.

[Foxhawk]

1. cottages cottages cottages. floodplains = colleges as far as I know

2. my hammer towns are as many hammer square as possible, then as few mega food squares as possible to support the town (plus an extra mega food square or two when I want the town to go into growth mode). for these mega food squares it obviously helps to have a corn or some other food resource. worst case, farm a square when necessary.

[Jaybe]

If you are obsessed with growth, then when you hit your happy-limit convert most of your excess food tiles to cottages.

If NOT obsessed with growth, build cottages in the first place. This will lead to faster research, more gold, and less bashing into the happiness barrier.

[Velociryx]

A good rule of thumb is...unless you need the food for something, put a cottage there.

Ideally, you'll be building your cities around food intensive spots (food specials...wheat, rice, pigs, cows, etc), such that these will supply MOST of your food needs, at least to the early happy caps. Flood Plains are nearly as good as food specials, in that all by themselves, they feed their assigned worker and give you a bit of food left over....that's a good thing.

When in doubt, cottage. You can always go back later and selectively farm over the unused and un-grown cottages if you got carried away.

-=Vel=-
(sometimes, I even cottage the hills....)

[MasterDave]

Cottage cheese FTW. The beautiful thing about flood plains is that they still create net growth even if you go the cottage route AND you get one (or two if you are financial) bonus commerces from the cottage for being next to a river.

[LDiCesare]

Cottages. The only exception is if you have a city which looks like you'll want to use it as a great people farm, in which case you may do some farming.

[couerdelion]

What they said

Except putting cottages on hills

Food is the important resource to aim for. It's no good finding a hammer rich site if there is no food to support working the hammer heavy tiles.