Quarries Seem OP

[Aluminum Elite Master]

I'm sure I'm late to the party on this one, but from a min-max perspective:

Quarries seem like the best basic improvement, when possible. Because 25% of production can be converted to gold, spamming quarries means getting buildings up fast and then, when waiting for something to build, having a lot of production to convert to gold.

Farms, on the standard settings, kind of fade in terms of usefulness because I can rarely have a clear area to fully expand around even in my throne city, and often just conquer cities that are close by to flesh-out the landscape.

Foresters are awful. I build them to get the armory building as an option, but 2 food and 3 production, while still coming to 5 total yield, just isn't as great as 5 production or 5 food.

I feel like the game still has some work in the city management/province improvement area. It's very, very simplistic right now, and in a lot of spots, maximizing production just feels like the better choice, because it speeds buildings, and then it can be converted to gold which can rush buy both units and buildings.

[daniel1vicentevieira]

I see no problem in this design. Production is the most important thing in pretty much all 4X games, you need it to get things done. You still need food to grow, you >can't< neglect farms just because production is somewhat better, if your cities don't grow you just wont ever have your lot of quarries. Foresters are a compromise, 5 foresters are just as good as 2 farms + 3 quarries, seems ok to me. Plus, when accounting for adjacency bonuses for special structures, figuring out the best choice becomes way more complex, for the sheer number of options if nothing else.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Originally posted by daniel1vicentevieira:

I see no problem in this design. Production is the most important thing in pretty much all 4X games, you need it to get things done. You still need food to grow, you >can't< neglect farms just because production is somewhat better, if your cities don't grow you just wont ever have your lot of quarries. Foresters are a compromise, 5 foresters are just as good as 2 farms + 3 quarries, seems ok to me. Plus, when accounting for adjacency bonuses for special structures, figuring out the best choice becomes way more complex, for the sheer number of options if nothing else.

I largely disagree.

Yes, food is still a need, but get two or three of the food resource nodes, and sometimes I can still build a quarry over a province that will give 10 food anyways. The pastures give 10 food regardless what I build on them, and usually there are at least two pastures right near the throne city.

Food in AoW4 is really too easy to get around. A bit of imperium here and there, and converting unit production to food, can let me expand largely without more than a farm or two. Since both imperium and unit production can give me food, the need to get food from provinces is actually fairly low.

Part of why I prefer quarries over foresters is that the food is the weakest piece... give me 5 production. I can't get production via much else, so it's a hot commodity. Meanwhile, the 2 food I can get easily by just not building a unit for a fraction of a turn, mathematically.

I slightly agree that adjacency for special improvements does mean foresters, farms, and mines can be useful. That part, yes, it does matter.

But I can get food a bunch of ways... production is the thing that's harder to get, compared to food, and unlike food, production can become gold and basically help to pay for everything else, eventually.

[daniel1vicentevieira]

I didn't take Pastures into account because such bonuses exist for production as well, there's an iron and a gold mine right next to the capital every game.

and I actually agree with you when you say production is the most important, after getting a good number of farms I usually start focusing completely in production. I just don't think this is flawed design, it seems just as it should be, to me.

[DesertRose92]

I usually start with a Farm as it reduces the cost of the Workshop, and reduces the time it takes to produce the next population by 1 (which also makes the Imperium cost to attract pop cheaper). The second tile improvement is often times another Farm to make StoneMason cheaper.
After that it depends. Usually I then go for Tier II so I can annex valuable provinces further away.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

I'm not saying so much that it's heavily flawed design. But it does seem a bit OP... if food had more ability to change into something else like production can, it would help balance things off a little more.

And I agree: I think I usually take a farm or two as the first two improvements. To me, that's about it, though... it's only more than that if I have no pastures or have a bunch of tiles that *only* can have farms.

And that's the one other issue I do sometimes find with the game design: map generation is so random, there are times where a farm (or even just a hut) is the only option. In those cases, I do tend to have more than 1 or 2 farms.

My one exception is if I have special improvements that get farm adjacency bonuses, though. Like you wrote earlier, there are certainly a few that give pretty nice benefits if they have 3 or 4 farms surrounding them.

[M0rgi]

Best improvements are those thats most required for specific strategy you use. Speeding up building progress with specific improvements is important for fast city growth

[Chthonic Guardian]

5 production is OP?!?!?!? lol.

[Spear Deer]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

I'm sure I'm late to the party on this one, but from a min-max perspective:

Quarries seem like the best basic improvement, when possible. Because 25% of production can be converted to gold, spamming quarries means getting buildings up fast and then, when waiting for something to build, having a lot of production to convert to gold.

Farms, on the standard settings, kind of fade in terms of usefulness because I can rarely have a clear area to fully expand around even in my throne city, and often just conquer cities that are close by to flesh-out the landscape.

Foresters are awful. I build them to get the armory building as an option, but 2 food and 3 production, while still coming to 5 total yield, just isn't as great as 5 production or 5 food.

I feel like the game still has some work in the city management/province improvement area. It's very, very simplistic right now, and in a lot of spots, maximizing production just feels like the better choice, because it speeds buildings, and then it can be converted to gold which can rush buy both units and buildings.

Hard disagree. The T2 Life perk makes farms give +5 food, and considering you can always just respec a province later, and by midgame half of your provinces should be special upgrades anyway, food is 100% the most important resource early. Once I get to population 10+, I'll start converting my provinces into other stuff (usually mana when possible, then production) but I find its pretty trivial to have enough gold to buy things out very regularly without much of a problem.

[CrUsHeR]

You get gold from several other sources. Clearing gold mines and some ancient wonders, or selling items (sometimes the AI players pay a lot).

Food, not so much.

The deal with province improvements:

1) You want to target for the "boost" to achieve an optimal build order at greatly reduced build time and cost

2) All building chains have hard requirements, like the T3 food building needs 2 farms etc.

3) There are way too few available cities for specialization. Also the higher tier buildings take way too long without boosts, production, AND enough food from provinces.

So you can't just annex 3 research posts and then build only research buildings for 48 turns, during that time you could have built a proper city producing everything at nominal output.

[Aranea]

food starts capping out of usefullness at some point i'll agree with that, but it ain't totally ignored, also by the end of the game unless i'm doing something extremely production oriented many of those quarries will end up turning into special improvements instead. If you totally ignore food at some point you will see yourself having your cities capped out by just plain impossibility to grow at a point that makes any sense. The only people that get somewhat close to max pop in my experience are nature lovers that focus super hard on that affinity and get the last improvement (-50% food for pop growth) out early, but even that can be dangerous to do, as the game is full of very useful other affinities that can show up earlier than that and this is basically a late game payoff that might just not matter in many games.

Really it's just a thing i'd do in games where magic victories were disabled and there's many opponents slowing down game progression

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Originally posted by Spear Deer:

Hard disagree. The T2 Life perk makes farms give +5 food, and considering you can always just respec a province later, and by midgame half of your provinces should be special upgrades anyway, food is 100% the most important resource early. Once I get to population 10+, I'll start converting my provinces into other stuff (usually mana when possible, then production) but I find its pretty trivial to have enough gold to buy things out very regularly without much of a problem.

I get the idea, but I'm not sure it plays out quite that way. Food is important early on, and becomes less so later, but this seems to exaggerate how important *farms* are. Pastures, and food gains from freebies or cleared nodes, can cover a lot of what is needed IMO. Imperium then can quick reach out to snipe important resource nodes in a pinch, too.

I often want production and unit production resources more than anything, because the faster I can both create units and build the structures that pay their upkeep, the faster I can just steam roll the map.

Again, I'm not saying early food isn't important. I'm more saying, I'd very quickly want quarries because they easily translate into building stuff and then into gold conversion... it makes it easy to field a larger-ish army pretty quickly, so that I can conquer or vassalize a lot of stuff and snowball the economy that way. And food/population can be gained via pastures, imperium, and other means without really demanding that I build more than just a couple farms all game. Throw in integrating a vassal, and really, a lot of population gain can be just off imperium even.

[Aunty Herbert]

I don't see the big upside to super fat cities. Without pushing any food production, they'll grow up to size 15-ish by turn 60 or so anyways. They'll still have production bonus from city moral, without having to dedicate tomes just to keep citizens happy, and the majority of production is generated by city structures, special province improvements, nodes, magic materials, wonders and such stuff anyways, not by bog standard normal provinces.

Maybe if you chose extra big maps things are different, but for the map sizes used on the "official" worlds, the requirements for expansion victory are way easier met with a strong focus on vassalization, and I just don't see how the bit of extra production from annexing every sad swamp in your vicinity makes up for all the costs you have to sink to get to it.

The currencies that keep your armies in shape are gold and mana, and I don't feel a lack of them in endgame, even without sidetracking through growing cabbage fields first to later maybe get to produce a bit more of the actual stuff.

Farms are cool for boosting structures, and growing an outpost towards city hall II or III, but after that I consider them pretty much a waste of space.