Feeding The Masses

[Mr. President]

I tend to have problems with food when I get into the AD era. What are some strategies that you use for kick-starting city growth? Does the problem lie with the initial placement of the cities? Do you, for example, recommend pre-irrigating city locations?

[Carolus Rex]

Just a quick reply to the last question. No, I never pre-irrigate before founding a city. IMHO irrigating takes too much time to do it in advance (assuming you don't have a zillion engineers and can pull the Xin Yu trick), and when the city is small it is not needed anyway.

However, I do try to prepare cities before WLTLD-induced pop growth.

Carolus

[ramses II.]

I pre-irrigate only when I settle on poor terrain (desert/tundra/mountain/glacier), if it's a location with at least 3 specials.

[War4ever]

i never pre irrrigate...i tend to only irrrigate after an initial expansion period..or unless i too am preping for WLTCD's

[Caesar the Great]

sometimes i'll irrigate buffalos, otherwise i don't start irrigating until i get engineers especially in MP with 2x

[Marquis de Sodaq]

I never irrigate anything except a buffalo before settling. It's better to just plop the city down and worry about improving terrain later. In the meantime, the new city can be producing for your empire. Soon enough, you can have excess settlers running about, irrigating and mining.

As a very general rule, it is a good idea to irrigate when you are going to put one of the city's citizens on any 1-food tile (mine or special). For every one of these, you'll need one citizen working a 3+ food tile to make up the difference.

[rah]

The only time I will irrigate early is if I'm trying to use the settler from capital before size two loophole. And only if I already have a few searchers out looking for city sites. Most likely if I have gotten money and a unit from huts and I built my capital on gold. I will irrigate a square waiting for the settler to pop.

RAH

[geofelt]

Until monarchy, I think the only irrigation that will do any good is on wheat or oasis. I try to build my first 4 cities on grass to get a good start on building settlers. After that, I rarely irrigate. In a sense, the settler that builds is doing an automatic irrigation on the square that he settles.

[Scouse Gits]

Yes geofelt - I like to settle on Buffalo - Ok you only get a single special, but it will become a nice production city. It can be interesting to settle on a Musk ox? (cow thing on tundra) this is quite viable and sometimes a cool strategic move...

SG[1]