Improvements... cottages... farms... workshops...

[AppleTheMan]

I'm slowly learning to use my workers properly. I have to say it is very long giving orders to every worker every turn, and once the game is rolling and I have many of them, I just can't help automating them all. (I make sure they leave the old improvements though).

I've been learning that it is best to "designate" certain cities for commerce, and then others for production. For the commerce I do cottages.

What is the best way to work efficiently? I am guessing that there are different strategies... I recall reading years back about people liking the watermill and workshop combined with state property. What I really question is where are farms necessary? I used to just put farms EVERYWHERE. A bit like egypt. I'm learning not that this is not the best.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages to everything, and what is the best way to play?

Also... what's the deal with forests? I notice that they don't give as much hammers as they used to in vanilla. Is it really necessary to keep forests around?

[couerdelion]

There are different stages where you will want to do different things but some broad rules apply.

Early game, your focus is on getting that second city out so concentrate on the food/production improvements. Principally, this will involve improvements to resources within your cities radius. Priority should be given to food about production since slavery can always provide the hammers if your city can provide population. That’s generally why farms tend to be worth more than cottages. In fact, cottages tend to work well when you already have enough food for the city. For basic production, mines are cheap and easy and provide +2 hammers towards the building or workers and settlers.

The switch to windmills, watermills and workshops probably starts in the late mediaeval age (windmills first) because these suddenly start become useful in the Renaissance era with the discovery of replaceable parts and chemistry. Communism then turns Watermills and workshops into strong basic tiles.

One other factor to bear in mind is that improvements will vary from one city to the next. There is no single “best” improvement. A strong civ will have cities specialising so that some a specialised unit buildings (land, sea and mounted) while others want to focus on commerce. A simple 50:50 split is not a bad rule of thumb.

On top of this, you will have one uber-city for each of science, gold and GPP. Science cities tend to be ones where you have cottages while GPP cities will tend to focus on farms to support more specialists (unless they have more than 3 food specials).

[snoopy369]

Specializing cities, as you say, is by far the best strategy. That way you only build the appropriate buildings in that city; a marketplace in a city with all hammers and only 4 commerce is a waste.

Farms are useful in cities that need food Either cities where you want to run specialists, or cities that need the food to run other citizen types (mines, usually). They're also good at the start of a city, even if you will wipe them out shortly, just to get a city up to size ASAP.

Cottages are often used on most tiles, in the 'cottage spam' strategy; this strategy is weaker now than it was, not because it's worse but now others (specialist, for example) are better in BtS. It's still a powerful strategy, having 60-70% of your cities have basically nothing but cottages (once they've grown to size), and the rest hammer producers (for your military), and then just tech up up up... Windmills work well with this strat because they give you some hammers while still getting food and commerce, especially once they've been boosted by techs.

It's always good to have one city that specializes in specialists, ie has at least 5-6 specialists if not more, for the purpose of GP generating; in BtS, golden ages are REALLY nice, and easy to grab.

[AppleTheMan]

Hey thanks guys! I'm starting to get it...

So here are good options:

1. Cottage cities and workshop cities + Emancipation, Universal suffrage, etc
2. Workshop and watermill cities + State property etc
3. Big farm cities + caste system, representation (maybe also pacifism?)
4. Farm cities + slavery (maybe also monarchy)

How is that?

[snoopy369]

Pacifism is not even a maybe if you are running many specialist cities

[joncnunn]

Uh, I would say Pacifism is more or less independent of SE everywhere. It's desirably is much more depedent how much your army cost is under it and the savings from no civic cost.
A large army makes Pacifism cost too much to run while a small army makes it worthwhile.
The doubling of GP points is secondary and is confined to your GP farms.

Originally posted by snoopy369
Pacifism is not even a maybe if you are running many specialist cities

[Hauptman]

Are you stacking workers?

If i was giving orders to 30 individual workers I would go insane.... But 5 stacks of 6 workers, is easy to do.

For marathon, it takes 6 worker-turns to build a road (then railroads). So I stack them 6 high for 1 turn roads, 2 turn cottages, 3 turn farms. I do loose available worker efficiency (as it only takes 15 worker-turns to farm, so 3 stand around idle on the last turn), but it is MUCH more managable, and have NEVER been tempted to automate.

As for what to build... well there are no rules, try em all see what works best where. Rivered hills with a finacial civ just scream windmills, but what if you have no other hammer sources? If you build 20 cottages on all that grassland, how are you going to build libraries and markets to take advantage of it? Mix it up, see what works best for you.