FIN : Most overrated trait

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by wodan11

A FIN civ should not, a non-FIN should not, or any Civ should not?

And, that beggars the question... why?

Wodan

You should be growing your empire quickly in the early years, building either workers, settlers, or military (or vital buildings); every tile should be contributing to this, and to increasing your population in that city until it hits the happy cap.

Few cities except your capital will have any reason to use a cottage by 2000 bc. Even your capital probably doesn't need any at that point.

[Lord Avalon]

What if you've got a city with no fresh water for farming? Do you cottage then?

[Blake]

Cottages:

Each cottage slows the rate which you can crank out units which count.

But it's difficult to make hard and fast rules. The optimal terrain improvements depends on a number of factors.

If a city has an overabundance of food, it makes sense to cottage floodplains, and sometimes grasslands.

If you have grassland hills, or river plains hills (or of course, river grassland hills), these tend to be great mined. However a cottage'd river grassland, worked for slavery w/ a granary in the city, can beat out a boring old mined plains hill in terms of production...

1-3-0 tile, costs 1f (half feeds itself) and gives 3h
a 0-4-0 tile, costs 2f and gives 2h
A 2-0-x tile, operating on a food bar of width 30 (size 5), halved to 15 by granary, takes 7.5 turns to grow the pop, which can be killed for 30h, meaning costs 2f/turn gives 4h/turn - additionally there is the x commerce/turn, but also the unhappiness from whipping which takes away 1 tile from the city.
A 3-0-x tile, takes only 5 turns to grow: Costs 3f/turn, gives 6h/turn.

Basically the grassland hill, at 3h per 1f, reigns supreme for production.

If however you don't have grassland hills, things are not so clear-cut, a lot depends on how much happiness you have, if you have oodles of it, it can be more effective to cottage and whip. However you also need to consider adding a farm, which will effectively provide 2h/turn under those circumstances, IF you aren't already badly hampered by the happy cap (meaning: Grassland Farms are great if you can't maintain a 3f/turn surplus).

It's also worth noting you can't really build wonders with slavery, plains hills will tend to be a better deal, especially considering you aren't losing 1 pop to anger.

I tend to say, that Creative favors a production-heavy commerce-light improvement scheme, you can usually bag a bunch of commerce resources anyway just by maximizing horizontal expansion speed. Expansionist can do much better with some cottages, due to cheap granaries and chopping being a good idea, it's simply a no-brainer to pursue BW and Pottery and start clearcutting the riverbanks with all cities having a granary.

The real weakness of cottages is that the game tends to be won by military might, rather than commerce. This makes it a matter of figuring out where it "Doesn't hurt" to build cottages.

[Rockoon]

Originally posted by couerdelion


This is not a FREEDOM. It's a self-imposed restriction.

Bull.

Coastal lighthouse city under the hands of Financial:

Size 1: 4
Size 2: 7
Size 3: 10
Size 4: 13
Size 5: 16

Slider at 70%

11.2 4.8

Slider at 50%

8.0 8.0

Slider at 30%

4.8 11.2

Non-financial civs simply do not get this opportunity. They do not have the freedom to erect anything even close to similar on the early game board.

Add to this city fish, clams, or crabs, and this city is now a monster. (A) It can now produce all that commerce PLUS an additional 6 + 25% from specialists and a library. (B) it can now produce all that commerce PLUS it can whip out settlers, workers, units, and buildings.

Add to this the fact that this city doesnt even need to be micro-managed:

Tell the govenor to focus the citizens on commerce, and send your workers someplace else because this city doesnt need workers any time soon.

[Swiss Pauli]

Re: Re: Re: FIN : Most overrated trait

But did you not forget Gold? (Silver not usually so good a tile and Gems are normally hidden in jungle)

No, you'd already mentioned precious metals.

[nbarclay]

The Financial trait really starts to shine in situations where a civ reaches a point where money becomes a limiting factor on expansion. At that point, one of two things has to happen. Either the civ has to sacrifice food+hammers for income by working cottages and coast, or it has to stop expanding at least temporarily.

A Financial civ working two coast tiles and a forest can obtain the same income that a non-Financial civ would have to work three coast tiles to get. That type of tradeoff can turn the Financial trait's income advantage into a production advantage. Or a Financial civ can work the same number of income-oriented tiles that a non-Financial civ would and use its extra income to pay the costs created by building additional cities.

This ability to keep the initial REX phase from stalling out as soon is one of the biggest things I like about the Financial trait. Of course a lot of that probably has to do with the types of settings I normally play on.

[Kataphraktoi]

The optimal terrain management is river cottages, period

I dont get all the talk about CE lacking production and being bad at war. I have enough spare production to be mostly making econ and still have a vast army on agressive AI. Ussualy there are food specials so you can still work mines. The way i go over the city support\unit support limits i couldnt manage without massive cottages. And you cant go on a conquering spree without a solid econ base.

The Financial trait really starts to shine in situations where a civ reaches a point where money becomes a limiting factor on expansion. At that point, one of two things has to happen. Either the civ has to sacrifice food+hammers for income by working cottages and coast, or it has to stop expanding at least temporarily.

Exactly. I use a sort of super-rexing you could almost call ICS 2.0, i love it

[Blake]

Originally posted by nbarclay
The Financial trait really starts to shine in situations where a civ reaches a point where money becomes a limiting factor on expansion. At that point, one of two things has to happen. Either the civ has to sacrifice food+hammers for income by working cottages and coast, or it has to stop expanding at least temporarily.

Or they could invade their neighbor and sack cities for cash. It's a great use of the production vector.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
The optimal terrain management is river cottages, period

When trying to draw a discussion to a close, it is best to to avoid making a comment that is so obviously wrong. It’s like saying that windmills are optimal improvements for hills – which they are not prior to machinery. Or that watermills are superior to farms: they are inferior to farms before Replaceable Parts and even then, the irrigation benefits of farms could outweigh the production value of windmills.

Cottages are only occasionally optimal. In the earlier game, when expansion is the most important thing, farms are more important. I would even go so far to say that cottages are only useful on tiles which you can do much else with. When you have nothing better for your population to do, you might perhaps drop a cottage or two down for them to work on, while they are waiting for the whip. But in most case, the riverside plot will be put to better use as a farm.

The equation changes slightly for FIN civs because of the commerce bonus but not enough to offset the additional power that +1 food provides in many situations. Further, you might find it beneficial to promote cottages in commerce friendly sites in order to acquire the synergies that you get with the commerce improvements buildings that such cities would find beneficial.

When playing at a competitive level, the farming option tends to give better results. Cottages may improve your tech rate but if you have neighbours out for your blood, and strong enough to do anything about it, the extra commerce is less effective at keeping them at bay that the production benefits offered by farms.

[trev]

I personally like to have some cottages early, often very early, usually I will only farm food resource squares, cottaging all grassland and flood plains, as the commerce is essential to get an early tech lead or parity depending on level, so you can fight with the most advanced units possible and also have a headstart on important early wonders and a later religion. Having said this, I usually play philosophical, and imperialistic (Sulamein), these traits giving quick early cities, quick GG's when the wars come. The Philo trait give quick GP's. But the cottages are important in funding the early city expansion and I can understand why some would use financial for that benefit of funding quick early cities too. It is a useful trait, quite powerful, it is mainly because of a particular style of play I use that I now almost always play philo in preference to financial.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by trev
I personally like to have some cottages early, often very early, usually I will only farm food resource squares, cottaging all grassland and flood plains, as the commerce is essential to get an early tech lead or parity depending on level, so you can fight with the most advanced units possible and also have a headstart on important early wonders and a later religion. Having said this, I usually play philosophical, and imperialistic (Sulamein), these traits giving quick early cities, quick GG's when the wars come.

I guess, for IMP civs, the question of farms over cottages becomes a little less important if there are some decent food resource tiles (6f or 5f) and hills. The food gives rapid growth while the mines become especially critical for getting settlers built (along with the whip).

With PHI, however, your best route to tech parity will be through the early generation of GPs and a quick bee-line to Writing will do this. This has the added benefit of allowing Open Borders which gives higher value trade routes - usually a better source of commerce than the FIN bonus.

When it comes to fighting, tech parity is not always so important in the early stages (it's shortly after Gunpowder where you want to be ahead). Access to resources is the more important concern along with building the appropriate counter units for your likely rivals

[wodan11]

Originally posted by couerdelion
With PHI, however, your best route to tech parity will be through the early generation of GPs and a quick bee-line to Writing will do this. This has the added benefit of allowing Open Borders which gives higher value trade routes - usually a better source of commerce than the FIN bonus.

You're mixing things here. The FIN bonus and extra trade routes are not mutually exclusive.

PHI and FIN are to some extent mutually exclusive, but you're talking about lightbulbing (right?), the main source of which are Great Scientists, which GPP comes from Libraries, which is after Writing.

Earlier GPs tend to be Prophets, which can be used to lightbulb extra religions, which are good. I'm not sure I'd call that "tech parity" though... usually when people say "tech parity" they mean "something that helps me in the Liberalism race".

I could be putting a lot of words in your mouth through all this, in which case I apologize. Anyway, I don't disagree with all the posts and reasoning to support an early SE, I very much agree.

The only thing was this latest about trade routes. There's nothing stopping the FIN civ from going for Writing to get the good trade routes, and making cottages at the same time.

Wodan

[snoopy369]

He's talking about using Scientists to generate the majority of your science, which give you GSs which you generally settle (or use to generate golden ages in some strategies). This strategy is entirely useless for a FIN based strategy because it requires lots of farming instead of cottaging.

[Velociryx]

There are two things I've not seen brought up here yet with regards to cottages.

First is that they take time to develop and mature. Thus, the sooner you start, the sooner they start reaping benefits. Granted, the time to start is NOT when you're in full on expansion mode, but at some point (and probably fairly early on in the life of your civ), if you're wanting to reap the benefits of cottages, then you'd best get to planting them.

Second thing is the tech/hammer tradeoff. While it's certainly true that the farmer/miner is going to out-hammer you, it's also true that a technologically superior civ can win battles with a smaller force in terms of total number of units than a technologically inferior invader. This, coupled with the advantages inherent to the defender (intimate knowledge of the terrain, a well defined and developed road network, etc), can easily help the hammer-lite-but-tech-heavy civ carry the day against a more productive opponent.

Then there is the option of re-configuring cities in times of crisis. There's nothing on the earth that says you've got to leave your cities configured for optimal coin production...if you get invaded, or if you're planning an invasion, the very FIRST thing you should do is pay a little visit to all your cities, and (at least for the places you plan to crank troops out of), and optimize your hammer counts.

The long and the short of it is...it's not an "either-or" proposition. Only in the very late game are you faced with the situation of working all the tiles in a city's fat cross, and if you're really planning your cities, you'll develop far more tiles than any given city can work at one time (this, specifically so you can re-configure your cities on an as-needed basis). The advantage of doing so is that during times of peace, you can work those cottages, grow them, and reap the benefits of LOTS of coin, and when you're ready to get rowdy, you can easily reconfigure your cities to do just that, and with a vengeance.

-=Vel=-

[snoopy369]

Vel sighting

I generally agree that sometimes cottages are useful, and always some cottages are useful. I think a lot of why i'm arguing so strongly against the general usage of cottages, is that newer players tend to overuse them (disliking dropping the slider any), and thus it is preferable to me to encourage people to farm and mine as much as possible, assuming that they will not stop cottaging entirely, but hopefully will find a better balanace. Cottage-spam was such a prevalent strategy in SP for so long (and still is) that it's become the thing preventing players from improving from 'good' to 'great'.