Building Improvements

[sportsfreaklgg]

What are some good strategies to use when making improvements with your works?
In a Science city, what should the cottage to farm ratio be?
Also, what improvements (besides mines, obviously) should I build for production cities?
Overall advice would help too. Thanks.

[TriMiro]

My advice:

In specialist economy city: no-cottages, just farms for specialists.

In cottage economy city: Just enough farms to be able to work all the tiles surrounding the city, everything else should have cottages.

In production city: just enough farms to work all the tiles and everything else should be mines and limber-mills.

I almost never build wind-mills, water-wheels and workshops. They are compromises between food/hammer/coins, so IMHO they are only useful to "balance" a city (i.e. get it to produce even amount of food). Exception is perhaps the case of Caste System (workshops) and State Property (workshops/windmills). I only use CS with specialist economy and almost never SP.

In general, IMHO, the key thing is to plan ahead. I read someone was using markers (Alt+S) to mark what should be chopped/mined/cottages and so on. Plan for techs such as Biology and Replaceable Parts. It makes no sense to have 12 improvements around a city of size 6 and no improvements around a city of size 4. Spread the improvements throughout the empire and have some global picture of the future in your head.

[Theben]

Note: watermills benefit from State Property, not Windmills.

It depends on what your overall plan is. World domination almost requires you to run Caste System and State Property, although if too many people have Emancipation you'll likely need that just to stave off unhappiness.

If you want just a small peaceful science civ, I'd do pretty much as above except that after Replaceable Parts I'd switch my mines to Windmills. It's a small loss of hammers but you'll get extra food AND extra which you will likely need in order to compete. Plus with the extra food you can work additional tiles or have some specialists, so even then you often don't lose . Put cottages everywhere and you can and run Uni Suff for the bonus to towns.

[okblacke]

Why caste?

[Blaupanzer]

Caste system permits unlimited numbers of science, artistic, and merchant specialists. In an SE economy, this permits the creation of cities that specialize in science or commerce by building lots of farms, then use the surplus folks as the appropriate specialists before (and even after) you've built the buildings that permit them. If going for a culture win, those artists really turn the tide as well. Artists help in new cities (especially the newly conquered) to expand and establish control of the surrounding tiles.

As for state property, not paying distance or colony maintenance is a big help for large empires, especially if going for dominance.

[okblacke]

Ah, I see. I've missed some of the discussions where the merits of a specialist economy is discussed. And why you have to have a "specialist economy" versus, say, a "specialist city".

But, certainly, State Property is a boon to the "plus-sized" empire.

[Blaupanzer]

Specialist economy (SE) is a huge boon to philosophical civs.