A Guide to City Specialization and Land Improvements

Thanks Excl, great thread, very interesting & lots of new ideas to try out, including two completely new concepts for me - VoiceOfUnreason's "Merchant Specialist" Gold City and Qitai's Enslaved Globe Theatre city (with a granary and lots of farms of course!)

Re: "Excess" population
Can't the excess population (beyond the 20 labourers) be useful as specialists? Not for the GPPs, but simply the commerce/beakers/production etc they generate. Or does the food cost mean that this is not usually worthwhile?

Re: "Stretched Culture" effect:

Zombie69 said:
This was true in Civ 3, but is no longer the case in Civ 4.

Just tested this quickly, as I thought I'd noticed it happening too.

But it looks like there is no stretched culture effect in Civ 4, or at least not with two new (low culture) cities. :old:
 

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Excl - Great article.

I agree with Dave McW, it is not always necessary to run at 10% (or more) gold. I like to run at 100% science when possible. I generate my income by selling techs and resources to the AI, so banks and Wall Street are not priorities.

Qitai - A Whipping city, I like that idea, I'll try that as soon as possible.
 
Can't take credit for the idea. It was first discussed in some other thread. I pick it up from there. Tried it and it works great for me (too good in fact as I was really trying to play a peaceful game initially in the game I use it).

Also, even without the Heroic-epic, it is good enough to whip up almost any troop in two turns but in this case, there may be too much food and growth.
 
Yehbo said:
Can't the excess population (beyond the 20 labourers) be useful as specialists? Not for the GPPs, but simply the commerce/beakers/production etc they generate. Or does the food cost mean that this is not usually worthwhile?
The food cost means that this is not usually worthwhile. Consider this - by giving up a specialist, you can replace at least one farm with something else. Say, a cottage or perhaps even a workshop. And a developed town will handily outproduce a specialist (unless you have specialist-friendly and town-unfriendly civics).

If you don't have time to develop a cottage, and don't want to use a workshop, then in that case farming for a specialist can be the most productive option available. But in general it won't be.
 
One quick question concerning cottage and farm placement:

On most of the maps I've played so far I've had a lot of plains and grassland combos. Whenever I found a city there, I'm unsure where to place the farm and where to place the cottage. I usually place the cottages on the grassland areas since they are "self-supporting" with the +2F of the grassland, and then farm the plains for a +2F +1P (+1C adjacent to river) tile to support the worker there.

Is that okay or should I adjust this ? And what to do with those tundra tiles ? I usually build a workshop on it, but +1P is not really overwhelming (okay, with State Property you get +1F either, but still...)

Regards,

Lord Timon
 
Re: "Stretched Culture" effect:

Just tested this quickly, as I thought I'd noticed it happening too.

But it looks like there is no stretched culture effect in Civ 4, or at least not with two new (low culture) cities. :old:

That's what I figured. I kind of thought my example itself was wrong, but I think this might still work with higher culture cities though. If you have one maybe at "level 3" culture or higher, and build a city just outside the reach of the culture, it might span. I'm almost sure I saw it once, but I have no proof of it. :D
 
Timon of Athens said:
One quick question concerning cottage and farm placement:

On most of the maps I've played so far I've had a lot of plains and grassland combos. Whenever I found a city there, I'm unsure where to place the farm and where to place the cottage. I usually place the cottages on the grassland areas since they are "self-supporting" with the +2F of the grassland, and then farm the plains for a +2F +1P (+1C adjacent to river) tile to support the worker there.

Is that okay or should I adjust this ? And what to do with those tundra tiles ? I usually build a workshop on it, but +1P is not really overwhelming (okay, with State Property you get +1F either, but still...)

Well considering that if you build a farm on a grassland, and a cottage on a plain ... it will work out exactly the same as cottage on grassland, and farm on a plain. I'm not sure of the micro-advantages though. If you were to build a farm on grassland ... the city might grow a little faster,and you'd get an extra production hammer every other growth, but you wouldn't be working most of your cottages until later. If you build cottages on grassland first, then you are getting your cottages worked early on but you will grow a little slower, and won't be getting production early on.

What you are talking about here is your typical hybrid city. I usually just go with grassland cottages and farmed plains. This way, everything works out to have 2F. If you need emergency prodution, you can switch over to all your plains tiles, and not have to worry about pairing them up with a grassland tile.
 
Excl said:
That's what I figured. I kind of thought my example itself was wrong, but I think this might still work with higher culture cities though. If you have one maybe at "level 3" culture or higher, and build a city just outside the reach of the culture, it might span. I'm almost sure I saw it once, but I have no proof of it. :D

Yeah I thought I'd seen it too but I can't reproduce it now. I'm thinking maybe I just wasn't paying careful enough attention ... :crazyeye:

This new screenshot shows 4 cities, each 1 culture point under the next culture expansion. These were placed using WorldBuilder. There's still no "span" happening.
 

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Yehbo said:
Re: "Excess" population
Can't the excess population (beyond the 20 labourers) be useful as specialists? Not for the GPPs, but simply the commerce/beakers/production etc they generate. Or does the food cost mean that this is not usually worthwhile?
:

Yeah: the food cost (2) can be recovered by replacing a farm (2 with bio)with a cottage... which will eventually be 7 commerce and a hammer with the right civics, a specialist will only be 6 commerce with the right civics.

Now if you are running Pyramid type representation (pre-Free Speech/pre-biology pre-Printing Press)
then the specialist 6 commerce (2 farms) trades off with 2 cottages (up to 8 commerce)

It really is only worthwhile if you have Biology, Representation civic and no Free Speech civic (or no Bureaucracy in this city) so Representation-Vassalage/Nationhood or Representation-Bureaucracy in all non-capital cities
 
Yehbo said:
Yeah I thought I'd seen it too but I can't reproduce it now. I'm thinking maybe I just wasn't paying careful enough attention ... :crazyeye:

This new screenshot shows 4 cities, each 1 culture point under the next culture expansion. These were placed using WorldBuilder. There's still no "span" happening.
What happens if you take the city on the right and move it down and over so that it's top left-hand corner is that grove of trees? Would it span the spot next to it? I think it was a scenerio similar to that where I thought I saw it. I had a resource where that desert square is, and thought, well I'll have to expand to get this one, but when I built the city, it reached anyway. Maybe I was just accidently smoking crack at that time. :D
 
Krikkitone said:
Yeah: the food cost (2) can be recovered by replacing a farm (2 with bio)with a cottage... which will eventually be 7 commerce and a hammer with the right civics, a specialist will only be 6 commerce with the right civics.

Now if you are running Pyramid type representation (pre-Free Speech/pre-biology pre-Printing Press)
then the specialist 6 commerce (2 farms) trades off with 2 cottages (up to 8 commerce)

It really is only worthwhile if you have Biology, Representation civic and no Free Speech civic (or no Bureaucracy in this city) so Representation-Vassalage/Nationhood or Representation-Bureaucracy in all non-capital cities
The only time I would use specialists would be if the land dictates that I can go over my max city size of 20. Which would mean I would have to have a lot of floodplains and grassland and almost no hills or plains. It's possible, but pretty rare. And like you are saying, you are wasting land by throwing up a farm rather than a cottage to get that extra scientist. Remember, you will need TWO farms to get the +2F needed to support one extra population past 20, which is a big waste in my opinion. You are better off just aiming towards breaking even at 20, and then getting the food bonuses later when you get biology.
 
Re: "Excess" population

Thanks for all the comments on this. :)

Re: "Stretched Culture" effect:

Excl said:
What happens if you take the city on the right and move it down and over so that it's top left-hand corner is that grove of trees? Would it span the spot next to it? I think it was a scenerio similar to that where I thought I saw it. I had a resource where that desert square is, and thought, well I'll have to expand to get this one, but when I built the city, it reached anyway. Maybe I was just accidently smoking crack at that time. :D

I hadn't saved that map, but it was quick enough to make a new one. I think Red 3 is the tile you were thinking of?

It turned out a bit strange. And after I'd done city placements in WorldBuilder I passed a turn just to make sure that this didn't make a difference. But of course having Cyrus and all cities set to 1 culture point below an expansion, all the borders expanded. Doh.

So, I went back to WorldBuilder, reduced all the culture points again - low enough to allow me to pass a turn without an expansion - but strangely, a culture "stretch" remained with the SouthWest city (Red 1)!

To test it wasn't because of the end turn, I placed a NorthWest city after this as a test, and ended another turn - and no culture "stretch" appeared (Red 2).

So it seems a culture stretch is possible, but it's not clear when (if ever) it would happen in an ordinary game (in this case it seems to have happened because of using WorldBuilder to REDUCE a city's culture).

(EDIT: See my next post, the anomaly caused by using WorldBuilder actually seems to be Red 2. Red 1 seems to be the usual result in a game.)
 

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I have noticed in conflicts that cultural borders don't always adjust immediately upon a change. (e.g. I take a city, and the borders of that civ's nearby cities take several turns before they expand out)

Did you only advance to end of turn once, or did you try it several times?
 
MyOtherName said:
I have noticed in conflicts that cultural borders don't always adjust immediately upon a change. (e.g. I take a city, and the borders of that civ's nearby cities take several turns before they expand out)

Did you only advance to end of turn once, or did you try it several times?

Good point. I only did "end turn" once after WorldBuilder.

Well, I tried again, used WorldBuilder to give me some extra settlers so I didn't have to wait so long for them to build, but otherwise played as normal. Built Stonehenge in the capital for natural cultural expansions.

A stretch equivalent to Red 1 (previous screenshot) happened as soon as the capital was >=100 culture and the outlying cities >=10. (Normal speed.) So there is at least one example of culture stretch that happens in the game.

(Edit)
Two extra points:
- I also had an equivalent to Red 3, and passing multiple turns did not change the border shape, it stayed exactly as it was in the screenshot above, ie, without a culture stretch.
- Globe view "culture" layer showed the Red 1 square as having no culture (even passing 20+ turns), but on the normal view it was shown as within my borders.
 
I just happen to have an example in my game where there is a stretch where one city has zero culture and the other 15 culture. In this case, it is a tile bordered by 5 of my tiles and 3 edge tile (lake map - GOTM3).

The percuilar thing which I find consistent in having a culture stretch in CIV so far is that it is border by a high number of my tiles usually at least 5 or more I think. Also, in this case, the tile concern has 0% Japanese although it belongs to me.
 
So it looks like some aspects of "spanning" are present, but it's not really as noticable as it was in Civ 3.
 
Maybe a better way to think of it is not so much "spanning" as much as border expansion. If you watch how the AI builds cities, it regularly builds cities with overlapping fat crosses. I believe it does this specifically because doing so is the fastest way to expand a civ's borders while maintaining a contiguous empire (assuming you have the settlers to do it).

For example, assuming you have a capital city which has undergone two border expansions (fat cross + another expansion), if you move a settler to the edge of your borders and lay down a city, I believe that your borders will expand contiguously, and the new city will be able to work the one side of the fat cross that falls within the expanded borders (but will have to wait for a culture expansion before working the rest).

When you think of it like border expansion that also happens to expand your cities, it makes a little more sense (well, to me anyway). It also helps to explain the AI's behavior and almost pathological unwillingness to let cities "backfill" territory via better city placement and cultural expansion.

As a side issue, how do you guys feel about the capital city? The location you're given is usually an extremely versatile location -- good food, good production potential, etc. When faced with that, what do you usually do with the capital? Or will you have it specialize in one aspect for a while, then shift later in the game?
 
Beamup said:
You don't need to place such a high priority on avoiding unhealthiness. In fact, you should place a very low priority on it. Remember, the only penalty for unhealthiness is 1 food per point. It's not like unhappiness where you get nothing for the excess population - they just cost 3 food to feed instead of 2.

The short version is, if you have enough food to grow past your health limit, you should do so (if you don't, it isn't an issue because you can't get unhealthy). Currently, you emphasize avoiding unhealthiness even more than avoiding unhappiness. Which is quite backwards - unhealthiness isn't even something to concern yourself with very much at all.

I know this is a very old post, but I think it's important to point out that, as with anything else in civ4, this is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In your GP farm, each extra unhealthiness loses you .5 specialists, unless you have an unworked 3+ food tile left (meaning all your other tiles are also 3+, because if they aren't, you should switch to them).

As an example, say you have 12 pop, and by working the biggest food tiles, you can support exactly 4 specialists (meaning you have 8 pop working farms/specials, who produce an excess 8 food). If your healthiness cap is at 12, and you grow to 13, you work a new 2f tile, you now can't support that 4th specialist, your city will start dying unless you remove a specialist and send him to the fields.

After biology this is hardly ever a problem, but before then, it can be.

This doesn't just apply to GP farms either. Basically, if you have a 3f tile unworked, you can grow past unhealthiness and it will be a "wash". If you have an unworked 4f tile, you'll gain 1 food, meaning you can work that mine on a grassland hill, or the cottage on the plains.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this analysis?
 
RemoWilliams said:
I know this is a very old post, but I think it's important to point out that, as with anything else in civ4, this is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In your GP farm, each extra unhealthiness loses you .5 specialists, unless you have an unworked 3+ food tile left (meaning all your other tiles are also 3+, because if they aren't, you should switch to them).

As an example, say you have 12 pop, and by working the biggest food tiles, you can support exactly 4 specialists (meaning you have 8 pop working farms/specials, who produce an excess 8 food). If your healthiness cap is at 12, and you grow to 13, you work a new 2f tile, you now can't support that 4th specialist, your city will start dying unless you remove a specialist and send him to the fields.

After biology this is hardly ever a problem, but before then, it can be.

This doesn't just apply to GP farms either. Basically, if you have a 3f tile unworked, you can grow past unhealthiness and it will be a "wash". If you have an unworked 4f tile, you'll gain 1 food, meaning you can work that mine on a grassland hill, or the cottage on the plains.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this analysis?

Well other than the fact that if you have 4 specialists and +8F surplus, you wouldn't be able to grow anyway? :D

If you're at 12 pop with just enough food to support 4 specialist, then you probably shouldn't be growing anyway ... 12 is likely max for the time being. If you go to 13 pop, you can still support that 4th specialist, you will just have negative population growth for a few turns (provided that you have a granary). Which may also be better too, since you would have added production or commerce for a few turns before you go back to 12.

I usually just grow until I reach my happiness limit or unhealtiness takes away enough food for me to stop growing.
 
Excl said:
Well other than the fact that if you have 4 specialists and +8F surplus, you wouldn't be able to grow anyway? :D

Well, I should have been more clear, thanks for pointing this out: the point is you could move a specialist to work a tile to grow, but then when you grow you won't be able to move him back, if all you have is 2f tiles left.

My point was just that growing for the sake of growing isn't necessarily optimal. You are correct that you can run deficit food for awhile, and this might be a good idea in some situations.

Also, I didn't mention slavery, which may be a good reason to grow beyond health limits too, or even max grow in your GP farm for awhile, removing ALL specialists. It depends highly on the situation, and merely saying "don't worry about health," is imprecise.
 
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