I go this game about 3 weeks ago, and discovered it is highly addictive. I have been doing a lot of reading to discovery new stratagies that will allow me to manage my world a bit better. I am discovering that there is one very important strat. that I countinually foul up - city specilization. I have been reading bout how you need a great people generator, a production city, and a commerce city. But I can not seem to create stability in my cities if I over specialize. This leads me to my questions/issues that I need help with.

1. I understand a great people generator needs food. So i general find a flat land near water with lots of food and mass produce farms. By mid game I discover that I am losing population because I am overcrowded. No matter what I build to counter this I seem to reach a point where I constantly battle between starvation and no growth. How do I fix this?

2. What is a good balance between food and production for a GP generator?

3. In my production city I have a similar problem. I over spec. in production and reach a point of no growth or starvation. This in turn damages my production as my labor force tells me to stuff it. Help!?

4. For the commerce city I seem to do okay, but I realize I don't understand why. So, that leaves me with a general question - what sort of improvments seem best to imporvements are best for increasing commerce and money generation?

5. In my commerce city I have also discovered that I struggle between buildign cottages and farms. Is there a balance I should strike?

I seem to do best when I make all my citites general in nature, but then I discover the AI seems to catch up with me in end game.

Any help or general tips would be appreciated as would info on city placement.

Welcome to CFC :wavey:
Moved to Strategy & Tips - its asking for suggestions, rather than being a strategy article.

Hey bro. welcome

you should try more cottages at an early era, they will pump out money. also remember that a big empire is much more expensive that it was in civ3, so limit building new cities unless you can put courthouses in them.

to build a badass great person city, build wonders {especially the parthenon,which i build instead of pyramids} that increase the numbers of Great P. points. you can even tailor this but selecting which type of Great person points to add to a city. and specialists help with this BTW

anyways, i suck. hopefully someone who is good will give you better advice LOL :D

I go this game about 3 weeks ago, and discovered it is highly addictive. I have been doing a lot of reading to discovery new stratagies that will allow me to manage my world a bit better. I am discovering that there is one very important strat. that I countinually foul up - city specilization. I have been reading bout how you need a great people generator, a production city, and a commerce city. But I can not seem to create stability in my cities if I over specialize. This leads me to my questions/issues that I need help with.

1. I understand a great people generator needs food. So i general find a flat land near water with lots of food and mass produce farms. By mid game I discover that I am losing population because I am overcrowded. No matter what I build to counter this I seem to reach a point where I constantly battle between starvation and no growth. How do I fix this?

2. What is a good balance between food and production for a GP generator?

3. In my production city I have a similar problem. I over spec. in production and reach a point of no growth or starvation. This in turn damages my production as my labor force tells me to stuff it. Help!?

4. For the commerce city I seem to do okay, but I realize I don't understand why. So, that leaves me with a general question - what sort of improvments seem best to imporvements are best for increasing commerce and money generation?

5. In my commerce city I have also discovered that I struggle between buildign cottages and farms. Is there a balance I should strike?

I seem to do best when I make all my citites general in nature, but then I discover the AI seems to catch up with me in end game.

Any help or general tips would be appreciated as would info on city placement.
1) If you want the city to grow more, make sure it has enough health bonuses in it and put some more farms around it. Keep in mind though that there's a finite amount of food that can be generated by even the best terrain, so sooner or later, even the most well-fed city will stop growing.


2) I'm pretty bad at GP cities, so I'll leave this to somebody else


3) Build enough farms to feed everything. What I do is go through the tiles around a city counting how much excess food it generates. That in turn tells me whether I need more Farms, or if I can afford to build more Workshops/Watermills/etc. I count:
--Food resources = final value-2 (i.e. Cows on Grassland total 4 food, so they count as +2, and Fish total 6 food, so they count as +4)
--City tile = +2
--Flood Plains = +1
--Tundra and Plains Flatland, Grass Hills = -1
--Ice, all non-grass Hills = -2
--Everything else = 0

If I come up with a negative number, that's how many farms/windmills I need to feed everything. If I come up with a positive number, that's how many Workshops I can put down or farms/windmills I can destroy before I start losing workable tiles.


4) Cottages. Cottages cottages cottages cottages cottages. A Commerce city is almost always dedicated to A) working cottages, and B) increasing how much you actually get out of said cottages (via Libraries and Banks and such). You can also get some Commerce out of:
--Mines on Gold, Silver, Gems, and Uranium
--Plantations on Silks and Dyes (though some people just Cottage them)
--Camps on Furs
--Windmills on Hills (if you have enough hammers from other tiles to let you not need a Mine there).


5) Feeding commerce cities is a lot like how I described feeding production cities, with the exception that you try to feed a bunch of cash tiles instead of hammer tiles. If you don't have enough food to feed everything, build Farms and Windmills until you do. If you have more than enough food, swap out a couple Farms in favor of Cottages.