Great People Farms - When to start making it produce?

To improve my Cultural game I'm trying to learn how to use the Great People Farm concept. Once you have a couple of cities set up to generate great artists, when is the optimum time to start having it generate great people instead of growing? In other words, over the course of the game do you get more Great People by a balance between growth and production or do you wait until the city has achieved near max population and then force the max number of artists?

Work every tile that gives 3.
Stay below the limit.

It's a balance, but generally you always want to be working all 4food or better tiles. If your happy cap goes way up, you have to decide whether it is better to grow or keep working the specialists. Suppose you have a size 12 city, stagnating while running 5 specialists, and you have 5 irrigated grasslands you could work, and you have happy cap to grow to size 15. You will have to grow to size 15 before you can add another specialist without starvation. To find out what is best, figure out how long it will take to grow those 3 sizes and how many specialist turns you lose. That's how many turns it will be after you reassign the specialists until you get to the break even point and start getting more GPP than you would have by not growing. Then decide if it is worth it. On normal speed, the above example i think would take about 5 turns to grow to size 15 if you have a granary and send all the specialists into the fields. Thats 25 specialist turns ... so if you start growing, in 30 turns you will start seeing the benefit.

If you are going to grow a GP farm, it is best to do it immediately after getting a Great Person from that city. You don't want to be just a turn or 2 away and then fire your specialists to grow.

Here's an example of an attempt at a GP farm. The happy cap is no problem as you can see. At one extreme I can have 50 GPP with growth in 18 turns and the stupa complete in 27 turns. The other extreme (for max pop growth) is only 14 GPP with growth in 3 turns and stupa complete in 14 turns. Over the course of the game which is the better option? I guess the real question is - at what city pop do you turn on full great people points and have only marginal growth?

Do you have a way to raise the healthiness cap, or research biology, anytime soon? If not, then growth does not help, and you should rearrange your citizens so they're not wasted making surplus food. Even if so, it might be worth waiting until then to grow your city.

The real questions are:
(1) How much extra culture does the stupa give you?
(2) How much culture do you 'lose' by not running artists?
(3) Will 'losing' those great person points cost you a great artist?



If your city was not yet at the population cap and your goal is to maximize your usage of specialists, then you want to work every 3+ food tile you have available until you are at your desired size.

If you're trying to make Washington one of your legendary cities, you need to turn off artists and finish the Stupa ASAP.

Otherwise, just focus everything on GPP. Turn the 2 plains into 1 grassland farm and 1 artist. Build Wealth instead of the Stupa.

If your cap increases for some reason, add another citizen to work another farm.

oncable said:

In other words, over the course of the game do you get more Great People by a balance between growth and production or do you wait until the city has achieved near max population and then force the max number of artists?

Click to expand...

For the most part, I run all of my GP farms the same way: the goal is to produce the next great person as quickly as possible.

Artist farms in cultural games may be a little bit different. The artists that you are going to settle you still want as soon as you can get them, but those that are going to produce great works lack that urgency. So somewhere along the line the priority shifts from "get me the next one as soon as possible" to "maximize the total I get by year 1234".