I may have this wrong but it appears that grain is basically pointless until the end-game. And researching grain techs is a waste of time until you need them. The main problem being that most of the food research techs are at the start of the tree right when you don't need them.
If grain's role in the game is to simply provide population potential and you generate about 1 population counter per turn you don't need enhancements until hundreds of turns into the game.
It would be better if grain also boosted population growth so cities with high grain factors also grew faster.
Perhaps cities could grow at grain/2.
I agree that the amount of Food available in the mid-game is rather overwhelming.
I have to agree......the food tech in general gets kinda nuts WAY before you can even FATHOM getting a decent growth potential.
There needs to be more ways to up faction prestige or growth directly IMO...that would:
1) Make the grain techs and civics in general a bit more strong
2) Make it even more powerful to concentrate on a few cities instead of spam (those few cities would level up even faster giving you good rewards)
Maybe grain or farms should give growth in addition to grain?
I suggested in another thread that some of the current +x growth buildings should instead give +y*excess food growth. So, inn for example could give 0.5% of excess food in growth. If you have 200 extra food you would get +1 growth, if you have only 50 you would get +0.25 growth.
There should not be too many buildings which give this type of bonus, as otherwise city spamming will be too effective. Although in the beginning you will not have too much extra food available. In the early game this could actually limit growth somewhat. Founding cities would be a good tactic when you have enough +10 food per grain techs. In the late game new cities would get a kick-start because if you have 5 grain and 100 food per grain the city would get +2.5 growth from the inn alone.
Anyways, I agree something should be done to make food more important.
I must be doing something wrong. Food was scarce for me in 0.77 and it's scarce for me in 0.86.
I think this depends on the world type you are playing...Try Swamp or desert
Anything that makes city spamming a good idea is bad. Right now, additional cities are great because:
The counter argument is that cities level up and gain bonuses. The best one is gallows, that increases everything 10%. However, looking at 3. a little closer, the +growth heavily outweighs the level up bonus. For instance, I have a game where I have 4.5 prestige and 12 cities. 4.5/12 = .375 growth. Stick just an inn in each city for .5 growth, and I'm already more than doubling my overall population growth.
If something like grain/2 was added into the fomula, I'd have .375 from prestige, .5 for inn, .5 for pub, and then 2 from 4 grain. So anything +growth needs to be heavily controlled.
If you stay at just one city and specialize in prestige, you need lots of grain in the early game. People who expand quickly should be looking for materials.
That said, +.25 Prestige per Grain would not go amiss.
What does grain give you in the early game though? From what I've noticed all it does is set the size limit for the city. I could be wrong but it doesn't appear to boost anything - including population rate (avoiding the word 'growth' because that is a different mechanic). I love some of the suggestions here where left-over grain can be used by other buildings to enhance other resources.
Grain is a long term payoff and Material is a short term payoff. It is a good balance IMO. If you are leveling a city correctly and teching in Civilization, you need food pretty constantly. Having only one city, I use up 5 grain in the early game. Keep in mind that grain gives food, which increases population. Population increases gold, research, production, and city level.
Personally I think it is fine. If you are aiming for a megatropolis in the early game you need to concentrate on civics, you can otherwise focus your research in other areas. Perhaps there should be another mechanic in place for reducing the effects of city-spam, but most 4x games encourage populating the map, this isn't anything new.
On top of this the world is often dangerous and filled with opposition that will slow this sort of city spam until you can tech high enough to rid them from the map. However the notion of improving the effects of city spam by granting + prestige or growth to those cities is ludicrous. Being able to use a litttle slider on the city for the ammount of prestige it uses might make expanding immediately less important.
I just finished a large map, challenging game and had been limited to 2 cities early-on due to quite a poor starting location. The faster city growth definitely helped.
Same here. Maybe it's because I'm doing everything I can to increase my city growth rate and population. In .77 I had lots of towns hit their population cap because of lack of food.
I must be really missing the point here, sorry.
As far as I can see, Growth is the rate the border increases - not the population growth rate. Or have I got this completely wrong?
Grain has no bearing on Growth as such. So the civ techs that give growth have no bearing on how fast the population grows and so has no benefit on the tax rate etc until the city gets to its maximum population. If a city population increases at 1 per turn you have a good 100 turns at least before you need to look at increasing the population limit.
You are incorrect. Population numbers decide when your influence increases.
I'm unsure how to fix this, but the issue where it's more effective to spam cities everywhere than try to develop a small number to large size needs addressing. Also, exactly what is the growth mechanic and everything that goes into it? Game does not explain the rules behind it from what I can see.
Growth mechanic currently is based on four things:
Faction prestige is divided by number of cities. Thus, 5 faction prestige, 2 cities results in +2.5 growth per city. (The prestige is global growth bonus divided equally to all your cities). Each +x growth building gives additional city growth for the city it is located in. So, if you have inn in one of the two cities, its growth will be 3 (2.5 + 0.5 from the inn). Finally food is hard limit: if you have 180 available food for a city, you can not grow past 180. The only meaning food currently has is this hard limit.
I still think it is a good idea to have +x * excess food type of buildings. In the above example if the city size is 80 you will get the +3 growth (2.5 from prestige, +0.5% * 100 = 0.5 from the inn). If the city size is 170, you will only have 2.55 growth (only 0.05 from the inn). The effect would be that small cities grow faster, large cities slower. In the end game, when you have lots of excess food for small cities, they will grow really fast.
I can see the problem: it is easier to get cities going, as they grows faster when they are small. So, this might encourage city spamming. On the other hand, if you can get all the available food resources linked to your main city, it will grow really fast. Say, you get 5 additional grain for your main city, it will easily get over +5 growth from the extra food in the late game.
Interesting about Prestige being divided by number of cities ... I like this
?!??!?!? That.. wasn't a suggestion. That's the way the game currently works. Where have you been?
No. I meant I like that as the current mechanic
It was a compliment to the Devs
--> I think that this could be expanded upon somewhat, for further vertical development opportunity. Just not sure, other than national buildings, how to best implement it.
Food is one of my two big problems with the current FE game mechanics (the other being gold production, see https://forums.elementalgame.com/418589)
Grain/food is one of the things the game indicates you should take into account when settling your cities and is a key bonus of a number of early techs too. So early on the game makes it seem like food is something you should be paying close attention to.
And yet food makes no difference at all for a hundred turns or more on a standard map. This is confusing (particularly for new players) and I believe bad design.
Materials/production is a much better mechanic where the benefits of investing are clear and immediate.
Making 1% (or whatever percentage seems balanced) of a cities excess food (ie after deducting current population) to growth would both make sense and give the player an early game reason to care.
I wonder if the seeming excess food problem depends on your approach to the game. I tend to stick to just a few cities, or just one early on, and never thought excess food was an issue. I always want more. More prestige, more food, more growth. I guess I tend to fall into the "builder" camp. If wonder if this is an issue for the expander/war mongers, who never reach the pop cap (I'm constantly running into it, and trying to get past it).
yea. Adding a % of extra food to growth is a nice idea.
Maybe have a national building that adds to this % bonus to growth as well.
I think the food mechanics are ok, not great but ok - it does a good job of limiting infinite city sprawl and removes much of the incentive to grab alot of AI cities, That said, I do think that if you have a food near a city it should give +1 growth to that one city. I'm also unclear about the tile yeilds when you are about to settle a new village - does the settlement use all tiles within your border or just the one tile you built on? I thought it would be all of them but when my village borders expand I don't see any change - tbh it's a little confusing.
I also think the economy model as a whole is pretty screwy - all the rest of the game is heading in the right direction and I can see big improvements across the betas which is really pleasing - however the economic model leaves me cold unfortunately. One thing they did in WoM was to have skilled citizens as a building requirement for buildings and soldiers, one of the benefits of that was it prevented spamming of low cost weak units. This was mentioned in another thread, but you can actually spam 2 units of weedy club guys a turn from each city and they have no maintenance. These units are incredibly weak and I tend to just use them to pad out my garrisons and in the early game but it seems silly churning out hordes of these kamikaze peasants when they are being drawn from small communities.
I refrain from doing it on any difficulty except ridiculous, where the AI has such huge starting bonuses that the free troops become necessary. Incidentally you could do something very similar with cheap fighters in Galciv2.
Sorry about drifting off topic from food to the wider economy btw
I have never tired the Megapolis strategy yet, what do you look for in a starting location? Just lots of grain?
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