Settler production - bug/exploit

When settlers are being made the city is put on STAGNATION and all excess food is wasted. Or so I thought.
Turns out the food balance is set to 0 during settler training regardless of its value - be it positive - or NEGATIVE. Even with all the population working production tiles - as long as you're building settlers no one will starve ...

To best exploit this - improve enough production tiles for each pop you have before starting settler production.

Carefull, when the last settler you want to buid is down to 1 turn - redistribute the population to generate enough food - otherwise as soon as the settler production is done, the badly implemented forced STAGNATION - 0 food is repalced by starvation and you will lose pop.

Nice bug heh? Here is an old thread about this :

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=425275

If you choose production focus it's possible that the allocation is not optimal. Just manually change some tiles to get maximum hammers.

For example i have a horse tile and 2 hills and i have a pop. 3 capital. Production focus will work horse, a hill and a wheat tile but not the second hill. Just switch wheat for hill manually to get extra hammers.

You can finish the settler before switching. It's the turn after you begin to lose food(pop).

I pretty much always manualy lock tiles for every in every city (sick ). Thats how I stumbled upon the bug. I was shifting to production tiles and was expecting the Starvation status to come up. Hover over the food status -
base food -2
total food 0

So i've investigated further ...

Hadn't noticed the negative thing; but the thing is I generally I already have the most productive hammer tiles already locked.

So, when I do build a settler and check, I often find things like:

Like workers alone (and waste food) = 3 turns
Change workers to not waste food = still 3 turns (just more hammer overflow but at the cost of gold per turn)

This is with Collective Rule; I'm founding my second city early (free CR settler), but then building a Libary in the capital,cash rushing one in the CR, and then waiting for the NC to complete before building a 3rd, by which time the capital is already now at a 3 turn pace.

Collective Rule enables you to get the most out of this bug. Since Collective Rule multiplies only , going into the negative on and working as many Hills, Sheep and Plains Horses as possible yields the shortest build times on Settlers. It's worth a few extra turns of production in the early stages, and that matters.

Martin Alvito said:

Collective Rule enables you to get the most out of this bug. Since Collective Rule multiplies only , going into the negative on and working as many Hills, Sheep and Plains Horses as possible yields the shortest build times on Settlers. It's worth a few extra turns of production in the early stages, and that matters.

Click to expand...

Yeah i like to wait for a pop 5 or 6 capital before pumping settlers with CR. I can throw 20+ hammers per turn and build them in 3-4 turns(quick speed). For mid expansion in mp it's nice. You can build units in time(with some overflow).