Micromanagement Sims/Planning

[Sullla]

This is pretty simple; it takes 22 turns to grow to size 2 at one food per turn working the horses. Now that we have a granary in place, we want to work the highest food tile possible. You generally want to grow beyond size 1 as quickly as possible, and even a 3/0/1 tile is superior to a 1/4/1 tile in this case.

[NobleHelium]

I doubt anyone simmed anything. We need to grow the city at some point, and you need food for that. Every resource has diminishing returns, food the most, and commerce the least. But by the same token, the difference between some food and little food matters a lot more than some commerce and little commerce. The general rules of thumb of the relative worth of each resource are just that, rules of thumb. Would you work a mined gold tile forever at size 1, or flood plains so that you can actually grow at some point to work other tiles? This is less extreme, as the horse does get us 1f that will let us grow eventually, but it would still be painfully slow. And I assume you would swap over to the wheat once it's farmed.

I think the crux of the matter is something I've observed only somewhat recently - too often we follow the "work only improved tiles" mantra too rigidly without thinking about it. I bet you would feel less bad about working the flood plains had it been a farmed grassland, despite it being the same exact tile yield.

[SevenSpirits]

When writing the plan, I calculated the yields we would get working FP vs horse (and then improved wheat to grow, after, which is clearly better than horse). IIRC the horse-first plan only actually worked the horse for a turn or two more than the FP-first plan, since the former adds the horse-working pop point a few turns more quickly, and it was not enough to make up for the additional food/commerce we get from FP-first, even though horse is a better tile in a vacuum and the wheat can be improved fairly quickly.

One advantage of the FP plan is we don't need to be in as much of a hurry to farm the wheat, so we can do the winery first, which is more efficient for our workers and also gives us extra happy room everywhere.

The major consideration you may not have thought of is our hanging gardens plan. Working the FP allows us to grow the city to size 2 just in time for the HG boost, which means we get the boost to take us from 2 to 3 immediately. Since we'll have 3 improved tiles to work, this is pretty great. If the HG had been due a turn or two sooner, it might have been best to work the horse until HG took the city to size 2.

In general, one thing to keep in mind is that food's effectiveness is multiplied quite a bit if you are still growing onto resource tiles, which are extremely powerful. In this case, that was only a minor consideration due to the wheat tile being available so soon, so it was necessary to directly compare the different options.

[Merovech]

Thanks for explaining, guys. I was thinking along the lines of "What would we work with the additional population that we get from growing quicker? The horse tile. Why not just work it now until the wheat gets into play?" I thought about the granary and did a very simplistic 3*1.5 = 4.5 < 5.5 = (4 + 1 *1.5) calculation, but obviously that doesn't take into account a variety of things, including the multiplicative food being delayed and food in general being stronger than production (and able to be turned back into production, should the need arise). A more in depth but still theoretical calculation, not taking maintenance, the wheat, or improving the floodplains into consideration because I am not sure when those will factor in here and also assuming no production of economic buildings, would be:

Fake Edit: This whole calculation became kind of redundant with Seven's post, if it wasn't already because of the disregard of the improvement of the wheat, etc. but I'll leave it here anyway.
Actual Edit: C'mon, really? I spent like 5 minutes formatting that with spaces because tab won't work and it just ignores them?

Work Horses First

Turn Food Hammers Commerce
1 1 5 2
2 2 10 4
3 3 15 6
4 4 20 8
... ... ... ...
21 21 105 42
22* 12 110 45
*grow onto floodplains
23 14 115 48
24 16 120 51
... ... ... ...
30 22 150 69

Work Floodplains First

Turn Food Hammers Commerce
1 3 1 2
2 6 2 4
3 9 3 6
4 12 4 8
... ... ... ...
7 21 7 14
8* 13 12 17
*grow onto horses
9 15 17 20
...
12 21 32 29
13 23 37 32
14* 13 43 35
*grow onto unimproved wheat
15 15 49 38
16 17 55 41
... ... ... ...
20 25 79 53

About to grow again, already ahead in commerce, slowly catching up in production; floodplains appears better even without taking into account the ability to work 3 strong tiles at 3 pop.

As for stagnating on a gold tile versus growing on floodplains, I would probably, depending on the situation elsewhere, of course,
work the gold until I could improve a floodplain, unless I had a specific plan for the population.

I bet you would feel less bad about working the flood plains had it been a farmed grassland, despite it being the same exact tile yield.

No, I would feel the same, because I have an irrational hate for farmed riverside grassland, especially when financial. I do not run a very good specialist economy. I prefer to have one national epic city produce the majority of my great people because specialist yields are so excruciatingly weak without the pyramids and not exactly great with them, excepting the first academy; consequently, I tend to generate my subsequent great people very late in the game. Dealing with great people in general is definitely a weakness of my game.

When I said "sim," I probably should have said "consider."

[novice]

Another rule of thumb that could affect your decision making is that your food surplus counts double when you have a granary. So +1f+4h is really +2f+4h, and +3f0h is actually +6f0h. So the typical way to develop a city like this is to work the hammer tile until your granary completes, and then switch to the food tile.

[NobleHelium]

Thanks for explaining, guys. I was thinking along the lines of "What would we work with the additional population that we get from growing quicker? The horse tile. Why not just work it now until the wheat gets into play?"

This is good logic, and one that I agree with often. I don't really like vanilla farms either.

Specialists are strong primarily because of the effect of the eventual GP, not because of their innate yield. I think luddite (as well as Seven) attempted the calculations at some point in the general Civ forum, but I didn't pay that much attention to it.

[Fintourist]

Another rule of thumb that could affect your decision making is that your food surplus counts double when you have a granary. So +1f+4h is really +2f+4h, and +3f0h is actually +6f0h. So the typical way to develop a city like this is to work the hammer tile until your granary completes, and then switch to the food tile.

I would actually say that at size 1 (and you chop granary in early) the better approximation for 3/0 tile is 4.5/0 since your granary box is still empty and only half of the food goes on average into the storage. Of course you can think that you work 3/0 tile until you reach 11/22 food and afterwards you have a 6/0 tile. These values are somewhat dependent on how everyone wants to think about it (and e.g. if one allocates granary bonus to the city tile as well etc.)

When you are past size one, have full granary box and consider additional tiles: 3/0 becomes at least in my calculations a 4/0 tile since only the surplus is of doubled value.

I'm not lecturing here, I'm 100 % certain that novice and others master these things perfectly, but from the above post you kind of get the feeling that every piece of food gets a doubled value, while this is almost never the case.

[SevenSpirits]

Another rule of thumb that could affect your decision making is that your food surplus counts double when you have a granary. So +1f+4h is really +2f+4h, and +3f0h is actually +6f0h. So the typical way to develop a city like this is to work the hammer tile until your granary completes, and then switch to the food tile.

I would actually say that at size 1 (and you chop granary in early) the better approximation for 3/0 tile is 4.5/0 since your granary box is still empty and only half of the food goes on average into the storage. Of course you can think that you work 3/0 tile until you reach 11/22 food and afterwards you have a 6/0 tile. These values are somewhat dependent on how everyone wants to think about it (and e.g. if one allocates granary bonus to the city tile as well etc.)

When you are past size one, have full granary box and consider additional tiles: 3/0 becomes at least in my calculations a 4/0 tile since only the surplus is of doubled value.

I'm not lecturing here, I'm 100 % certain that novice and others master these things perfectly, but from the above post you kind of get the feeling that every piece of food gets a doubled value, while this is almost never the case.

The marginal value of food is always worth double. Your system ends up being extremely confusing (and/or wrong). For example, a 1f tile calculating it your way would be 2 + (-1 * 2) = 0f, which just starts to get really misleading. It would be better to just also multiply the food cost of pop by two: e.g. think of a 3/0/0 tile as being 6/0/0, but each pop point as eating 4f.

But it's way simpler to just assume granaries as the default state of things. In other words don't mess around with your food output values, but consider the cost of growth to go 22, 13, 14, 15, etc. And then for cities that don't have a granary yet, just take into account that your food surplus is being approximately halved, since this is a much rarer case.

[Fintourist]

This is what I mean by saying everyone has their own way of thinking

The marginal value of food is always worth double. Your system ends up being extremely confusing (and/or wrong). For example, a 1f tile calculating it your way would be 2 + (-1 * 2) = 0f, which just starts to get really misleading.

Nah, I would not say it's wrong. Assume you are working 2-food city tile, 3/0 and 1/0 tiles at size 2. You have 2 food surplus and 4 when you take the granary effect into calculations. Now with my adjustments the tiles become 6/0 (first tile is pure surplus) and 0/0 (as you calculated above). Together with the city tile you end up again with granary-adjusted surplus of 4.

I don't actually ever calculate these things out in this way. In most cases it's simply enough to know that more food the better and understand the doubled value of surplus..

It would be better to just also multiply the food cost of pop by two: e.g. think of a 3/0/0 tile as being 6/0/0, but each pop point as eating 4f.

But it's way simpler to just assume granaries as the default state of things. In other words don't mess around with your food output values, but consider the cost of growth to go 22, 13, 14, 15, etc. And then for cities that don't have a granary yet, just take into account that your food surplus is being approximately halved, since this is a much rarer case.

I definitely agree that these are viable ways to approach these problems!

[zakalwe]

I agree there are many ways to think about these things and you can arrive at the same answers through different ways of reasoning. Personally I don't understand the distinction between food and surplus food. In my mind, each unit of food is equal to any other unit of food. Usually you have some food in the box too, so you are only loosely constrained by how much food you need to avoid starvation.

Edit - though I guess you can construct scenarios where, for granary purposes, running a food deficit on one turn followed by a large surplus on the next is actually better than running a smaller surplus on both turns. So that would kind of violate the "a food is a food" principle. Once the granary is in place and filled, though, I don't think this should come up.