Are the farm bonus tiles useless?

Unless there's some major difference between ToA and the other versions of the game, you're not missing anything. The 300% tile is a recipe for disaster. The 100% bonus tile can on occasion be useful, particularly if the planet in question has a bonus approval tile but even then you need to be very careful when using it.

Morale and the "base morale" penalty associated with a planets population have been tweaked to death over many iterations. In the days of DL v1.2 it was actually possible to achieve populations approaching the 100B per planet maximum limit. This was by no means an easy thing to do and it took a fair amount of skill as well as quite a long time to achieve these populations.

In my mind this allowed a greater variation in play style while still being able to post high scoring games. It was a legitimate trade off between high pop versus high income strategies, but both were equally effective.

However for some reason this was deemed as "unbalanced", most likely because the Ai was incapable of doing the same thing and the high populations essentially made your planets impervious to invasion. But whatever the reason, morale was significantly nerfed in DL versions beyond v1.2 and even more nerfed in DA. How morale in ToA compares to that of DA I wouldn't know but I would expect it's pretty much stayed the same.

In any case the 300% tile used to be something that could be used with care however for the last two years it's been nothing but an albatross.

Actually there are a few limited cases where you can safely use the 300% tile. Since there is a limit to the population a planet will achieve by growth the 300% tile can be safely be used on planets whose PQ is such that the end population is within a normal range of control.

Specifically this really only applies to planets between PQ7 and PQ9. Also you need to be sure that you've reached the limit of all possible planetary PQ improvement. However with these caveats the following are the maximium populations achievable by growth. So for example if you can tolerate the approval that results from having a pop of 20B then its safe to use a 300% tile on a PQ9. If you can only tolerate a pop of about 15B then you should only use a 300% tile on a PQ8 or PQ7.

PQ7 limit = 10.2B
PQ8 limit = 14.6B
PQ9 limit = 20.0B

These are from the Wiki Population article.


Hmm... Funny, I couldn't edit my first reply to add this later info but I can seem to edit my second reply. Very Strange.

Thanks for the help guys!

Actually one more point and that is you should check out the Approval vs morale ? thread because it points out a subtle but important distinction between the two that you might be missing.

That "base morale" is a killer. A planet doesn't have low morale it has low approval. Morale is an ability that improves approval based on a formula listed in the referenced Wiki article. The importance is that a 40% morale bonus doesn't improve your approval by 40% but by something far less.

From what I've seen, the edit ability is time based. After about 10 minutes (or if someone else has posted) you can no longer edit.

No this was immediate. Clearly no one else replied between my two responses and the time between them was about 13 minutes which was mostly taken up by getting the link to the Wiki pop article. I attempted to add the point about low PQ planets no more than one minute after my first reply but there was simply no edit button.

There are forums where you can't edit any reply like the GalCiv Dev Journals and the GalCiv II News. At first I just assumed that the same might be true of the Twilight of the Arnor forum but then after my 2nd reply there was the edit button.

Anyway, no big deal, but I think I'll keep an eye out for this behavior next time I get a chance to be first responder, it doesn't actually happen all that often.

Ah... my opportunity came quickly once I knew to look for it.

I just made the 1st response in the What's the point of advanced governments? thread. In this case it's directly in the GalCiv II forum as opposed to a subforum of the GalCiv II forum.

Immediately after posting the response I checked for the edit button on the 1st reply and it was not present although it was and at this moment still is present after the 2nd reply although so far it's only been 2 minutes since I posted that reply.

I think I'll wait to see how long it takes for the edit button to go away. Of course the times are approximate since forum time and the time on my PC don't precisely match.

4 minutes and the edit button is still there.

5 minutes and the edit button is still there.

7 minutes and the edit button is still there in fact I actually edited the post wondering if this extends the window of editablilty.

8 minutes and the edit button is still there.

9 minutes and the edit button is still there.

11 minutes and the edit button is still there and I edited it again just for yuks.

13 minutes and the edit button is still there but I tire of this game. I'll check back a little later but I won't wait to post this reply.

[edit]

16 minutes and the edit button is still present. Also the time of this reply allowed me to correlate my PC time to forum time and all the times listed above are actually 2 minutes behind so it's actually been 18 minutes since my reply that it has remained editable. Of course anyone else replying would kill the ability as well.

23 minutes (by corrected count) and the reply is still editable.

Hmm... beyond the half hour point now and still editable.

So in conclusion the OP is *always* editable, Reply #1 is *never* editable and any later replies are editable until someone posts a later reply with no obvious time limit (up to 40 minutes at the moment).

[Final edit]

It's close to 6 hours after I posted this reply and I can still edit it so I doubt that there is any time limit on editing a reply other than someone else replying to the thread after you.

Also editable is not a real word but I'm sure you get the drift. I suppose to be technically proper it should be edit-able but that looks too funny.

I wouldn't write them off in entirety. Some race's are more suited to high populations like the Torians for example. Toss their stock Harvester on the food tile and their 50% morale building on a morale tile and you're set. Those frogs just love to be happy...

For the majority of the races though, I only ignore those tiles when I'm NOT placing a farm. Whatever you do...and I mean WHATEVER you do, don't place the Thalan's Hyperian Matrix on a food tile. That +8 food portion of the building is bad enough the way it is. Making Thala a 40b max world is just wrong...I made this mistake ONCE. I'm use to placing factories on my farm tiles and managed to forget about the food portion of that building. Eh, at least it stops itself from maxing out in population lol.

the tiles should give a bonus: they should increase the possible population before the approval flips.
It would make them as worthy as other tiles imho.

Part of the risk with those bonuses is the default farming techs and the auto-upgrade option for improvements. In TA, if you're playing a civ like the Iconians with tech trading off, it is easier to make sure you don't get into trouble with a food bonus because they have only the +3 Robotic Farm.

Aye, that's why I mentioned the Torians. Their Harvester they start the game with is an ok choice for a farm tile.

The 300% population tile can be useful as a tile-saver. So for example if you want to take a world up to a max population of 20B from 8B, just put an Enhanced Xeno Farm there and turn off auto-upgrades. Without the bonus tile you'd need two Intensive Farming improvements.

Since I routinely turn off upgrades at colonisation, I find the tiles to be handy at times. Not as handy as a Precursor Library right enough, but they free up tiles for something else.

Good point. I hadn't thought of not upgrading an early farm on a +300% tile. I suppose on tiny maps it could make some sort of difference.

A fat & happy world can be a swell thing on the largest of maps. Anywhere in your empire, they should bring bigger bucks and add influence. They can also be good transport producers and/or troop sources for empty transports, which can be very handy in a contested region of a tight cluster, gigantic or immense map.

Aye, sometimes a Breeder/Econ planet is a great pairing to a normal pop pure manufacturing planet. Pop out 1 troop transports and send them to get filled elsewhere. Save the tiles from a farm and morale for more factories on the production planets.