Workshops, Windmills, and Watermills

[LzPrst]

state property is no problem to run, but Caste System? too much unhappiness...

i really dont like corporations...

[Yosho]

Windmills are great. They're a much better supply of food then farms are; you're better off having, say, 1 windmill+ 1 lumbermill instead of chopping the forest and having 1 farm + 1 mine.

[Pinchak]

I agree that on their own they're quite useless, but if you adapt your strategy to it, then suddenly they become very powerful.

Spot on. You need to gear your civ toward using these "oddball" (as I call them) improvments.

I follow a simple formula... if I am a Philo civ I go farms/mines. If I am a Fin civ I go cottages/mines. Of course I make exceptions all the time depending on the actual situation, but I stay away from the oddball improvments (windmills, watermills, workshops) because as stated before, you really have to dedicate yourself to them as far as civics and tech path.

I have been meaning to play a game where I use them extensively just to see if it is worth it.

(SE)... it's a bad idea in MP

Totally disagree. Specialist economys can create MONSTER production from the capital if you focus on priests and engineers, send all great people to the capital and run beaucracy. This strat actually tends to shine late game when you actually get to units that take 2 turns to build instead of one.

[Theben]

It would seem that the overall production from windmills out-performs the mines, plus any possible "bonus resource" that you're not likely to get often anyways. With BtS events you can still get popup resources. I'll mine early on, but late game the extra coin is too much to pass up, and I'll have lots of production anyways(and the extra food can get me another engineer).

+10% production bonus in all cities + +25% production bonus for buildings. It's pretty huge.

By that stage in the game, you should have built most of your city improvements that you'll need. Use theocracy or pacifism, depending on whether or not you're at war.

[mrp]

my civics are pre BTS
represent vassalage slavery merchantile organized religion
I like organized too because you get a 25% bonus on buildings and you can build missionaries anywhere to get the bonus and combat happy. temples work regardless of religion cathedrals you only get the die bump
BTS do to corporations. For whatever reason merchantile won't let you build corporations and the slavery event is annoying so
universal suffrage replaces represent and emancipation and free market. I sually play a normal game withe Germans as frederick now with corporations it might be interesting to use Lincoln

[Willem]

Originally posted by mrp
For whatever reason merchantile won't let you build corporations ...

Yes, there's a bug as of 3.13. If you get Bhruic's unofficial patch, he's fixed that one.

[joncnunn]

Also mrp, I think in the SP context here on the forum most people are going to assume BTS 3.13 + Bhruic's latest patch + (Solver's Military Academy fix if that isn't included in 3.13).
There's a few other bugs Bhruic fixes as well.

[Blaupanzer]

Workshops are a Godsend in cities with no hills. Farms offset them and you get some production. This supports my philosophy that almost all cities should be able to build effective military units reasonably quickly, when necessary. (I play on aggressive AI and always get dragged into wars one way or the other.) The exceptions might be a financial city and a GP farm if necessary. However I don't conciously avoid them having production either. I am often # 1 in manufacturing for most of the game. Windmills are useful on hills for cities with little or no food resources or grassland. Watermills are better than workshops if your hillless city has a good river.

Otherwise, a proper mix of mines, cottages and, eventually, farms is the way to go.

[Asmodeous]

Originally posted by LzPrst
state property is no problem to run, but Caste System? too much unhappiness...

i really dont like corporations...

Nah, not really.

There's a method to the madness here.

Caste System has two main functions, and you care about both of them.

The primary one you care about is +1H for Workshops.

The secondary thing you care about is the Unlimited Specialists!

Then you take into account you're Representation. So your top 6 cities get +5 happy, so they're set for the most part, as for the rest. . .

Culture!

Since you're going to have a couple extra specialists in your cities (preferrably Scientists, but you may need other ones) in order to limit overpop due to happy/unhappy and healthy caps, you're going to take advantage of the Representation bonus at a time when 1 scientist in a city gives another 30 beakers on his own.

So you can drop 1-2 points out of your science rate and put those into Culture and still be making as many, if not more, beakers.

Bearing in mind you've likely got Theatres and Collesseums in all of your cities, that 2 points of Culture = +3 happy per city. Once you add Radio Tower jobbies into the mix, that turns into +5 happy per city for every 2 points of culture.


Happiness isn't a problem, even when other civs start to emancipate.

Emancipation is over-rated. You can easily overcome the unhappy with some careful planning and a smidgen of micromanagement.

Me.

[LzPrst]

hmmm.... I'll take a look-see at your strategy next time i'm on Asmodeus. it sounds sound.

[Asmodeous]

You won't see it in the diplogame.

Me.

[smbakeresq]

It also depends on your map size and your viewpoint.

As to viewpoint, Farms, Mines and Cottages are 'specialist' imrovements. They improve one thing to a maximum in a tile, but nothing else. Watermills and windmills and lumber mills do a little of everything well, but nothing to its maximum. These improvements on grassland are always self sufficient, and on plains only require one food to run, and always give some trade.

If you play SP, large or huge, epic, then return on windmills and watermills and workshops is much higher even adjusting for scale since you have so many more cities. It takes alot of trade to get the later techs, so you need all the coins you can get. It is not unusal in my SP games to have 40-50 cities after wiping out 1-2 civs with approximately 120 -150 windmill squares 50-100 watermills.

As an example in a game once, try to beeline for machinery and then windmill and watermill as much as possible on your way replaceable parts and electricity. I think you will find that while each city is less specialized, you will have many large cities with good everything, since these improvements contribute in every way.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by Willem

So you're better off building Windmills over Mines any time, though of course you can't sacrifice the production of all Hills. That's why you leave the Plains Hills and Desert/Tundra Hills to Mines. With Grassland, at least the addition of a Windmill adds enough food to support a single citizen. You don't get that benefit with the other Hill types.

[/QUOTE]

If you're going to build a mix of windmills and mines in a given city's BFC, it really doesn't matter in the long run whether whether you build the windmills on the plains/desert hills or the grassland hills, though:

Plains hill mine + grassland windmill mine = 2 food
Plains hill windmill + grassland hill mine = 2 food

There is a benefit to preferentially building windmills on grassland hills if the city won't grow without that extra food. But it'll stagnate once the plains hill is worked.

[Jaybe]

I generally mine at every opportunity, though windmills are built occasionally. If a city isn't working a mine, a resource won't be discovered there. I often discover 3-5 new resources at my mines during a game. Of course, the type of games I play must be considered (see sig.).

[Seedle]

Originally posted by Willem
So you're better off building Windmills over Mines any time, though of course you can't sacrifice the production of all Hills. That's why you leave the Plains Hills and Desert/Tundra Hills to Mines. With Grassland, at least the addition of a Windmill adds enough food to support a single citizen. You don't get that benefit with the other Hill types.

I disagree. If you are building a pure production city, i.e. ironworks/heroic epic, mines are always better than windmills, unless you don't have the food to feed the mine.

Even in a trade city, or one built to be multi-purpose, I don't generally use windmills. If I don't use mines, I use cottages. If you run Universal Suffrage and Free Speech, which I nearly always do, you trade one food for , 5 trade? (I can never remember exactly how much trade towns produce.) This is civic dependent, and only works on grassland hills, but running a specialized improvement takes better advantage of building multipliers as opposed to windmills.