Cities that specialize

jjochems78 said:

On the topic of commerce. Does it make sense to still build cottages in the early game before you're able to spread irrigation? Then just build farms over them once you have more options on what your workers can build?

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I can’t think of many reasons to build over mature cottages (villages/towns) with farms. Occasionally I’ll build watermills or Workshops over them when I don’t need research any more in the later game, and sometimes I’ll replace cottages/hamlets with other improvements in captured AI cities. Point being, a cottage is a lousy improvement, and so is a hamlet. You build cottages because they later become villages and towns... so why would you build a cottage and work it, and then get rid of it before it becomes useful?

More often, I replace farms with other improvements after the city has grown as big as I want it to be.

6K Man said:

I can’t think of many reasons to build over mature cottages (villages/towns) with farms. Occasionally I’ll build watermills or Workshops over them when I don’t need research any more in the later game, and sometimes I’ll replace cottages/hamlets with other improvements in captured AI cities. Point being, a cottage is a lousy improvement, and so is a hamlet. You build cottages because they later become villages and towns... so why would you build a cottage and work it, and then get rid of it before it becomes useful?

More often, I replace farms with other improvements after the city has grown as big as I want it to be.

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I'm usually not a fan of CE, I prefer SE. I prefer to use farms, workshops, and lumbermills but they aren't as accessible in the early game. Sometimes I feel like my best option early on is to build cottages and even though I hate to lose them after they've developed. So in your opinion, to lose a town is always going to be a waste? Do you focus on CE or SE or sometimes shift between them during a game?

Also is it a good idea to shift the improvements on a city often? Shifting the city from growth to production or commerce depending on what may be needed? Obviously this could use up too many workers if overdone but is this a practical way to handle improvements?

You got some very weird view of how to play CIV and especially how to run an economy. Plz forget terms like CE and SE, both are obsolete concepts that are far less effective than using the terrain thoughtfully. All good players nowadays use hybrid economies, where the capital is usually cottages and used with buro, other cities get either cottages to or work Farms / Mines, depending on the empire's need. Very much later come Workshops and Biology Farms. Lumbermills are completely counterproductive, because the Forest on which they are build would have been better chopped 1000y earlier.

And even the thought to rebuild the land on the needs of your empire, shows, that you build way too many Workers, something that greatly slows an empire down.

Plz also read this: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=546401

Those articles really need to get taken down, as many people get a little confused by it, I see. I was too when I started playing, and then couldn't figure out how to actually use SE, because early on you can only have two scientists, and the economy will basically crash.

A hybrid approach is far superior.

You specialise some cities, but most are hybrid; ie, they have both and

Capital: Cottages
Great People farm: Lots of food, farms, and buildings that open up more specialist slots. Run max specialists (including starving the city, but not so much it loses pop) during Golden Ages, with Caste System and Pacifism
Heroic Epic city: Lots of hammers, but also decent food so it can grow big. Later on you build workshops for more hammers. Produce military units non-stop

Those are really the only three cities you need to specialise. Everything else depends on what you want for the given map. More GP farms isn't a bad idea, and you may want a good food city to be specialised too, and build the Globe Theatre there, and whip and draft non-stop, because then happiness/whip/draft-anger doesn't matter.

If the game lasts long enough, you can start to transition into a hammer economy, where you build lots of workshops. You can also mix in watermills and windmills for more commerce.

It can also be a good idea to have some more commerce cities, where you basically spam cottages. If you have a city with some floodplains and normal food on top, this is a good candidate.

Oh yes, one more city you can specialise in the late game, is a National Park city. For this, you want many forests and/or jungles around it. Build forest preserves on all these spots, and build the National Park wonder in it. Then you get a free specialist for each forest preserve that is in the city's big fat cross. Sometimes you can get something like 15 free specialists in a city like this, which is great for late game golden ages.

That post Pangaea is exactly what I wrote about in CIV Illustrated #3.

If I only finally had my PC back, so I could work in the screenshots, and if the case of letting me / us re-organize the War Academy could get realiued faster.

I heard about CFC two years ago for the first time and I was spending hours and hours reading 'War academy' articles. It was tough time for me to understand all those abstractions. Later on I've started watching videos and looking (newer) forum threads where I've greatly improved my game by receiving maybe a fully opposite gameplay suggestions! I've learned to do things exactly the opposite!

"Specialist economy" is still a mystery for me. (...) I always asked myself how those players find time to wage wars at all, by doing all the staff...

There are still great articles there, but regarding many of them now I do things, not even closely to it but just oppositely of what they are suggesting. It seems the game evolved a lot since early days (even if great old guard thought they exhausted everything). Currently active pros like Seriael... are bringing new staff which blow my mind (even if I've got used to them now ) as they look different and illogical at first sight (isn't Civ4 illogical in itself?) but later you admit there's something in it.

So, I encourage all those willing to contribute to CFC with articles and guides. Even if I don't post much on CFC (for feedback) I constantly read this forum to get daily portion of hints to make my (often clueless ) games more efficient (currently playing on Emperor).

Also, it would be great if someone is willing and is allowed to make some improvements, additions and rearrangements in "War academy" sections.

@ Tuscarora:

Thx for that post . Alienware seems to have read it too, I just recieved a Tracking Number for UPS that says I'll have my PC back tomorrow evening .

Halleluja!

Great news! Hopefully it does arrive tomorrow evening, and they don't muck up anything.

jjochems78 said:

I'm usually not a fan of CE, I prefer SE. I prefer to use farms, workshops, and lumbermills but they aren't as accessible in the early game. Sometimes I feel like my best option early on is to build cottages and even though I hate to lose them after they've developed. So in your opinion, to lose a town is always going to be a waste? Do you focus on CE or SE or sometimes shift between them during a game?

Also is it a good idea to shift the improvements on a city often? Shifting the city from growth to production or commerce depending on what may be needed? Obviously this could use up too many workers if overdone but is this a practical way to handle improvements?

Click to expand...

“Always” is an overstatement. I suppose if you captured a city that was loaded with settled Generals and you wanted to turn that into a production city, you might bulldoze a Town there to put in a Workshop (or Farm, if you needed food to work other Workshops/Mines). Same if you captured an AI capital early on that would make a great GP farm, but the AI has built cottages around it.

Look at it this way: a Grassland Town with no other bonuses – no Financial, no Riverside, no Printing Press or Free Speech or Universal Suffrage – is 2Food, 4Commerce. If you build a Farm instead and run specialists, the tile is worth 3F (before Biology – but by the time you have Biology, you’ll have Printing Press and may be in FS or Suffrage), so you’re trading 4C for 1F. 1F supports ½ of a specialist. Half a specialist is not as good as 4C. Yes, specialists produce GPP and eventual Great People, but having 5 cities with specialists producing GPP won’t lead to 5 times as many GP per game as 1 dedicated GP farm would.

I don’t focus on either economy – I try to have one or two food-rich cities to produce GP and almost everything with rivers or flat grasslands/floodplains gets cottages, and everything else gets production improvements.

I’ll sometimes change improvements when I capture cities because I want the city to be productive right away. State Property Watermills and Workshops are great, and they’re great right away. Sometimes the game won’t last another 70 turns for that new Cottage to turn into a Town. And if I’m building spaceship parts, it sometimes makes sense to do away with all Farms/Cottages and just maximize production with Worskhops/Watermills in order to finish building a part a couple of turns sooner.

Additionally if you plunder them early enough (before being inside the own cultural borders) you get $$$ from towns cottages. The AI tends to cottage grass hills which could be often more useful with mines to get the infrastructure of the captured city back. It also tends to build cottages instead of chain irrigation and leavin some cities food-deficient. It all depends on which civics one runs and at what stage the city is captured and how far one still has to go: steamroll with current unit type, or only killing off this one enemy and later going for space or whatnot. Of course it also depends on if there are already towns or only cottages/hamlets.

Most annoying for me is if I have to raze a village or town to get oil or uranium.

Seraiel said:

You got some very weird view of how to play CIV and especially how to run an economy. Plz forget terms like CE and SE, both are obsolete concepts that are far less effective than using the terrain thoughtfully. All good players nowadays use hybrid economies, where the capital is usually cottages and used with buro, other cities get either cottages to or work Farms / Mines, depending on the empire's need. Very much later come Workshops and Biology Farms. Lumbermills are completely counterproductive, because the Forest on which they are build would have been better chopped 1000y earlier.

And even the thought to rebuild the land on the needs of your empire, shows, that you build way too many Workers, something that greatly slows an empire down.

Click to expand...

Can you expand on what you mean by greatly slowing an empire down? Aside for the amount of work that goes into making workers what are other ways they drag you down?

jjochems78 said:

Can you expand on what you mean by greatly slowing an empire down? Aside for the amount of work that goes into making workers what are other ways they drag you down?

Click to expand...

There aren't no others. Workers stopping the growth of cities + their high cost are already enough, to slow down an empire significantly. You'll notice this at most, when stealing Workers. With stealing some of them, it's even possible to outexpand a Deity AI.

6K Man said:

I can’t think of many reasons to build over mature cottages (villages/towns) with farms. Occasionally I’ll build watermills or Workshops over them when I don’t need research any more in the later game, and sometimes I’ll replace cottages/hamlets with other improvements in captured AI cities. Point being, a cottage is a lousy improvement, and so is a hamlet. You build cottages because they later become villages and towns... so why would you build a cottage and work it, and then get rid of it before it becomes useful?

More often, I replace farms with other improvements after the city has grown as big as I want it to be.

Click to expand...

I came across a possible reason: to get more out of the tile before you have the technology to develop a resource. In the game I was playing, I built a farm over a banana, but I've built a cottage on spice, for example, and built a plantation later on when I discovered calendar.

sydhe said:

I came across a possible reason: to get more out of the tile before you have the technology to develop a resource. In the game I was playing, I built a farm over a banana, but I've built a cottage on spice, for example, and built a plantation later on when I discovered calendar.

Click to expand...

Yes - mining Pigs or farming Bananas/Sugar is a good move, if you won't be getting Animal Husbandry or Calendar for a while.

I am of two minds about cottaging Spices/Sugar/etc. By the time you have Calendar, the cottage will likely have grown to be at least a hamlet, maybe a village. If you put up a Plantation then, you'll have spent ~30+ turns developing a cottage without the reward of having a village/town at the end of it. You could leave the cottage in place, but in a lot of games, you'll get more return out of trading an extra Calendar resource (c. 10-15 ) than you would from the cottage itself.

5-10 gold seems more realistic for an extra calendar resource, but still, even 4 gold is usually better than the difference between town and plantation. It depends also on how abundant the resource is etc. I still sometimes built a cottage especially on jungle terrain to avoid jungle coming back before the plantation. But this cottage will usually be razed later.
Often spice, dye, silk can also be farmed and give at least one token more than a grass farm. In this case no cottages will be lost.

In a recent game, the capital had enough food (seafood plus pig) but not very good production so I kept the pig mine till the end of the game.

Kallikrates said:

5-10 gold seems more realistic for an extra calendar resource, but still, even 4 gold is usually better than the difference between town and plantation.

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It also depends on the multiples being applied to the raw commerce from the town. The gold you get from a trade is 'net' - whereas +4 commerce from a Town might be a lot more beakers or gold if the city working the Town has an Academy, Bank, Oxford, etc.

6K Man said:

It also depends on the multiples being applied to the raw commerce from the town. The gold you get from a trade is 'net' - whereas +4 commerce from a Town might be a lot more beakers or gold if the city working the Town has an Academy, Bank, Oxford, etc.

Click to expand...

Technically the gold will most often also be pushed through research modifiers to become beakers. +4 gold/turn means that on average you can make 4 more commerce/turn into science through the slider. Unless you use the gold to upgrade units or buy something else.

If we are talking a cottage bureau capital and one has enough dye, it might be worth build that cottage and keep it. But typically calendar stuff is in the jungle in a later city. So it does not seem all that likely that the cottage will be more than a hamlet when calendar comes around. Then the plantation is immediately 2 or 3 commerce BETTER than the hamlet and the latter would have to be worked many, many turns until it beats the plantation.
Food calendar resources might be a different case, if one has abundant food in a city but they are usually not as plentiful als dye, spices, silk.

I published a guide on city-specialization yesterday.

Click "CIV Illustrated #3" in signature.