Help in the Art of City Specialization

Hi, this would be my second thread on this site. Ive been a Civfanatics forums reader for probably a month, just reading pety things that Ive already known. I believe that i know most of the basics of Civ IV leaving out one exception: City Specialization.

I remember reading a post about this, but when i looked for it i couldn't find it. If anyone could post logical reasons to city specialize, please do. I don't understand why you would want a city producing a ton of food, or commerce, and only 2 production points... In the few games i have played, i usually settle where my city would get the most resources. Im not sure if i should go for city quality, or more cities. Should i place a city where it consumes all of the resources, or should i place it to where you can only work some of the resources, saving the rest for another city? If there's no resources i have a lot of trouble settling there, i feel its a waste of gold in city upkeep. Ill farm my corn, pasture my sheep, and mine my copper, but when there's no resource, i throw a cottage on it. Ill mine hills always, even if theres no resource.

If someone could show some screen shots of specialized city's id appreciate it, and please dont show something made in world builder. I need real examples!

jcbqain said:

I believe that i know most of the basics of Civ IV leaving out one exception: City Specialization.

Click to expand...

I hope that you will excuse me for saying this, but you don't know enough to know how much you don't know. Yet.

Specialization can be viewed simply as different cities having potential for different aims. A coastal city with good trade routes probably isn't gonna be your foremost center of production, no matter how many buildings or wonders you put in it. And that wilderness city with all those production resources (minerals etc) will never be your top producer of . This is why you would build Wall Street or Oxford University in the first one and Iron Works in the latter, right?

Also, you would build Market and Library first in the coastal city before Forge, and vice versa. It doesn't hurt to have all buildings in all cities, but if you do the math that can actually be somewhat wasteful. You could have produced Wonders or units instead. Or Wealth/Research/Culture.

Furthermore, as you already have all the modifiers in place for and , it makes sense to also add Scientist and Merchant specialists in the city. Thus in effect creating a specialized city. You could of course have several cities with different specializations science: / ). This specialization would dictate what buildings go in first and what national and other Wonders you put in them.

No one is forcing you to adapt any kind of specialization strategy though, but chances are that you're already doing some of this without realizing it at first. Because it simply makes sense. It can be a strength to build a more "solid" empire though, where all cities pretty much contribute to everything, and where no city is "invaluable". I don't think it will get you to the higher levels of difficulty, though. (If that's where you see yourself as a player in the future.)

jcbqain said:

If someone could show some screen shots of specialized city's id appreciate it, and please dont show something made in world builder. I need real examples!

Click to expand...

I laughed.

Read KotW for placement discussions on a constant map; read ALC for placement discussions on more generic map settings. Post your own screenshots and ask more specific questions if you want any real advice.

Haha your right Baldyr, I don't know enough to know what i don't know yet. And of course most of it is, like you said, common sense. of course im going to build ironworks in my leading Hammer producer (I don't know how to do the icons, im noob to this forum), and build observatories in my leading research producers first. And it just clicked with me, i completely forgot about specialist. I remember reading about them in my handbook, but i never got to apply them. I didn't play for a good 2 weeks and completely forgot about them. Could you explain how they work?

Once a city's BFC is fully worked, doesn't the city start producing specialist, instead of citizens?
Please inform me on how this works.. Also, When you said "Furthermore, you already have all the modifiers in place for (research) and (commerce).." How? I guess i did something right?

Read KotW for placement discussions on a constant map; read ALC for placement discussions on more generic map settings.

Click to expand...

Whats KotW and ALC stand for?

Thanks both of you for replying!

jcbqain,

For starters;

• King of the World

• All Leaders Challenge

Aside from the All Leaders Challenge series, Sisiutil has done some excellent guides. One with a few pages on city specialisation is; Sisiutil's Strategy Guide for Beginners, specifically Pages 15 - 17.

Specialist citizens

You can apply city specialists at any population, so your city's big fat cross need not be full before city specialists can contribute. Note that these citizens generally consume two food per turn like other citizens (occasionally you can get 'free' specialists through some factor such as building The Statue of Liberty or running the Mercantilism civic).

While they make differing contributions to science, cash, production, and/or espionage, specialists also contribute Great Person points to a city and therefore to that city's prospect of popping a Great Person.

For more info' on Specialists, perhaps see Page 13 of Sisiutil's Strategy Guide for Beginners.

Thanks Cam, Ill read them right now. I'll start up a game tonight then upload the save tomorrow, just to see if i specialize correctly.

jcbqain said:

..of course im going to build ironworks in my leading Hammer producer

Click to expand...

Absolutely. I use to mess up and build the wrong wonders in the wrong places, or have a wonder available but not a have an optimal city for it. Iron works is one of those expensive wonders where you really need some major production to get it set up within a reasonable amount of time.

So to take it one step further, you can find a good site for Iron Works first, and then build a city there. In this case you might scout around for a spot along a river with some forests, some hills, a food resource, and maybe some metal. When you find it, put a sign up for this, "Iron Works," then send a unit out there to hold it, and finally the settler. After the city is up, the sign stays there to help maintain focus, so that the land improvements and the buildings are all geared up around Iron Works, e.g., building workshops rather than cottages, a forge instead of a market, etc.

When I first started learning city specialization, leaving notes on screen really helped. (alt-s to put a note up) I would label them "milprod" (military production) or "cottages" or with the national wonders I planned for them. This is particularly important if you play long games on large maps - it's easy to chop the forests you planned as a National Epic/National Park city site if you pick up a game from a few days ago and don't recall that particular plan. Alternately, you can name your cities for what you want to do with them. Cottage1, Milprod1, Cottage2, IW/HE, NE/GT, etc. I don't like doing that, as it makes the game feel less aesthetically pleasing. Somehow building the Statue of Liberty in St Petersburg is more satisfying than building it in "IW/HE." But that's just me.

It's alt-s for the sign. control-s is for save.

Specialists are the next step from knowing how to manage your city's workforce. The basic course is to understand how you move around citizens on the map in the center of the City Screen. It works like this:

The white circles on the tiles are what is being worked on at the moment. The city will only get the yields (in terms of , and ) from those tiles and not from any other tiles. The number of tiles worked is the same as your city size. So each populations point corresponds to one "Citizen".

By clicking on the marked tiles (still inside the City Screen) you remove that Citizen from working the land. It has now become a specialist and can be found in the right side panel as a plain "Citizen" specialist. This isn't a very good specialist (with only a +1 ), so you should probably click on another tile to put him back to work on some tile instead.

But if you do have the option of assigning other more useful specialists - like Scientists or Merchants - you can make that Citizen into a proper specialist by clicking on the "+" symbol associated with the type of specialist you wanna employ.

You could remove all citizens from working the fields and make them into specialist (even plain Citizen ones if you lack other options) if you wanted. This would, however, starve your city down to size 1 and this way you'd end up with only one specialist in the end. So don't even consider this as any kind of option!

One thing you also have to understand is food production food. The collected from the tiles your citizens are working is stored in the Food Bar at the top of the City Screen. But firstly you have to feed your populous and every population point requires 2 per turn - otherwise the city will starve. This is why the surplus per turn is shown in the City Screen - can you find it?

So, its actually the surplus that gets stored every turn and when the Food Bar is full the city grows by one population point. The Granary building effectively cuts this time in half by storing half of this amount every time the city grows. Otherwise its all gone and you'd have to fill it up again from nothing.

If all this doesn't make any sense to you, then you need to take a step back and figure it out by trial and error. It's not Rocket Science but you need to figure it out before attempting anything like city specialization. Or playing at any higher level than you are currently.

I've said this many, many times before but I do believe that every Civ player needs to understand everything happening in the City Screen. You could make this into a personal challenge, as it will double your skill as a player.

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/cityspecialization.php

This is a good guide.

Another way to think of specializations is to look at what the land gives you. if you have a nice site with a food bonus or two, gold and gems, that pretty much screams commerce city - cottage everything else. A site with a lake, pigs, corn and rice and flat land sounds like a GP farm - lots of food, not a lot of base commerce. A site with 4 or 5 hills, river, iron and some food sounds like a wonder/general production site. a site with hills, food and maybe no river might be a really good heroic epic site. A coastal city with clams, a couple of hills and a bunch of water tiles might be a good coastal production site, especially with moai statues, whereas a coastal site with no food bonuses might be best as a commerce city that spends all it's limited hammers on research bonuses.

Thanks Baldyr, and everyone else for the great posts.
City optimization is my weakest area at the moment.
I wonder a lot about how all the different things works, and interact with one another.
I am off to read Sisutils guide.
I am particularly focusing on this subject tonight. Gotta try to figure this out.
-G.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Specializing is about NOT building everything you can. Throw up a library, or a barracks, then build more settlers/workers/attackers and get more cities.