Farming communities

[Juggler_Bob]

Sometimes in the course of city building, (esp. with Adv Tribe huts), a small area of valuable terrain (river/shield, etc.) or specials (whale, grain, etc.) lies between two cities. The free space is smaller than a full city radius (sharing squares with one or more neighboring cities).

I often build a limited size city (keeping the pop down to 3 or 4) and caravan/freight out food to larger cities nearby). I am aware of the cheat allowing you to continuously set up additional routes to the same city while only counting as one route, but I do not use it. Instead, if I need to send more than one food per turn to the same city, I set up a route to another city, and then have that city send its own caravan to the needy city in question.

It seems to have both positive and negative attributes. While extra food is always nice, esp. to high shield production cities (or a SSC), the AI seems to recognize the inherent weakness of these cities, and seems to attack them when possible (esp. on a coastline). In order to prevent the farming community from being captured militarily, I usually don't build city walls and station as many troops there as there is populace (1 for 1). That way, if the enemy defeats all of the troops, the city is destroyed rather than being a staging point for further enemy activity.

My question is:
Do any of you use this technique? Does it seem worthwhile?

[Blaupanzer]

Bob,

Generally no, as you describe it. I do use such squares to dump settlers/engineers at the end of the game to run up population points. Not sure what the advantage of circuitous routing of the food caravans is. Does this allow you to feed more food to selected cities?

[Juggler_Bob]

The purpose of routing caravans through intermediary cities is to avoid the 'cheat'. Normally, if you continue to set up food routes between cities with an existing food route, the originating city is only charged for the first route, while the receiving city gains the benefits of all of the routes (I think... I know that it continues to fill the food box).
To avoid that, if I need more than one food route to a city, I will send it to a different city which then establishes its own route to the needy city (at no food cost to itself)

At any rate, I only set up a farming community if I have one or more food poor cities and a piece of prime real estate (specials) that is not large enough for a city proper.