Grassland Wheat - Irrigate or Mine?

[Jaguar]

This question plagues me. I can never make up my mind. Is there a good rule of thumb?

[Krill]

just irrigate all bonus food resources from the start of the game, and you will always get the extra food. Except for sugar.


As someone once said "Stupid sugar..."


Basic early game strategy can be found here. Credit where it is due, Cracker (of CFC) is a good teacher.

[Jaguar]

Link doesn't work, but I've seen that article before.

I always feel that a square producing no sheilds is kind of wasteful. The value of a wheat square with four food instead of three (in despotism) is that it can contribute to feed another worker who will gain shields. However, each added laborer adds one unhappy ciitzen.

Is sugar only a plains thing? I've never seen it on grassland.

Lastly, do you even irrigate wines?

[Blake]

The main reason to irrigate food bonuses is to get the magical +5 food which allows for serious worker pumpage.

Irrigate Wines on grassland + Cattle/Wheat on grassland = +5 Food.

If it's not going to help you get +5 food, I think just mine it so you get +2 under a GA... unless you need the food because of like a mountain w/ gold or something.

[Jon Shafer]

I irrigate all bonus food.

Why?

Read my "Case for Food" article linked in my sig.

[Theseus]

My answer would be... it depends.

+5 food for a Pump doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have some shields to back it up... although, that depends ( ) on if you can poprush to make up for it. But then, happiness, prolly from luxuries early in the game, might make a difference... so it depends ( ) on what size town/city you can sustain for the Pump. Then again, given terrain, you may be REXing or not, or going for an early Rush of some kind, or trying to nail an early GW... it depends ( ).



[Edit: On reading my own post... boy, was that annnoying!! ]

[Jon Shafer]

Saying "it depends" helps nobody. Just tell the n00bz to irrigate everything and they'll learn eventually on their own.

[Jaguar]

I'm not a n00b. I am quite good at this game. I simply have obsessive-compulsive issues, such as irrigating too many shielded grasslands and mining grassland wheat in despotism which make me not quite as good as I should be.

[Jon Shafer]

Answer: irrigate all bonus food.

You should have enough Workers to irrigate bonus grass and mine wheat and such later on during Republic before your GA or mobilization without it hurting you much.

[Dominae]

"Irrigate all Bonus Food" is not really helpful if you do not know what to do with extra (unhappy) population. You can easily have too much population, but rarely do you have too many Workers.

So might I suggest: "Irrigate all Bonus Food, make Workers when your pop gets too high".

[Jaguar]

Making workers

I've been paying a lot more attention to workers and their functions, and concluded that it's impossible to have too many workers in the early game. Every square you have laborers working on should be fully improved.

[Jon Shafer]

In my games I seek to have at least 2x the number of Workers as I have cities.

[Aeson]

A vague answer is better than a misleading one. The only "always" is to adjust your approach to the situation.

I mine Grassland Wheat about 1/3-1/2 the time. Once you've switched governments, if you need +1 food to get to the desired fpt (+5) and can irrigate a Wheat or a BG, it's better to irrigate the BG and mine the Wheat. Then in your GA or Mobilization you'll get 4 spt instead of 3.

The exception is when another city can use the tile as well, then exceeding +5 fpt can make sense if you are willing to put up with swapping tiles virtually every turn.

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by Trip
In my games I seek to have at least 2x the number of Workers as I have cities.

That number depends on how tight your city placement is. But you should always have at least one per city until all your tiles are roaded and irrigated or mined. It's hard to have too many.

[gunkulator]

You can get away with a 1.5/1 worker to city ratio with industrious civs. Not creating enough workers and too wide spacing were the things that kept me stuck at Monarch for ages.