Grassland
“The earth here is dark and rich. Plant a seed and it practically leaps from the ground.”
Grassland represents the most fertile terrain available, with lush vegetation and abundant rainfall producing excellent food yields. However, the soft soil and lack of hard materials mean grassland offers no natural production, forcing cities to look elsewhere for the raw materials of industry.
Yields
| Yield | Base Value |
|---|---|
| Food | 2 |
| Production | 0 |
| Gold | 0 |
Movement
| Movement Cost | 6 |
| Defence Bonus | None |
Valid Improvements
- Farm – +1 food (requires Agriculture)
- Road – Reduces movement cost to 2 (requires The Wheel)
Strategy
Grassland is the premier terrain for rapid city growth. With 2 base food per tile, a city surrounded by grassland will balloon in population far faster than one built on plains or tundra. This population advantage translates into more citizens working tiles, more specialists in buildings, and a larger tax base.
The critical weakness of grassland is its complete lack of production. A city ringed entirely by grassland will grow large but struggle to actually build anything – a frustrating combination of abundant mouths and idle hands. The solution is to ensure your grassland cities have access to at least a few hills for mines, or forests for lumber camps. Alternatively, trade routes from a production-heavy city can supplement a grassland city’s output. Farming grassland tiles pushes food yields to an impressive 3 per tile, enabling explosive early growth that can give you a decisive population lead.
Historical Background
The world’s most productive agricultural regions tend to be lowland areas with deep, fertile soil and reliable rainfall – the conditions that produce natural grassland. The great river valleys of antiquity – the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow River – were essentially grassland environments enriched by annual flooding, and it was in these regions that the earliest civilisations emerged. The connection between fertile land and the rise of complex societies is no coincidence: surplus food freed people from subsistence farming to become artisans, priests, soldiers, and rulers.