Want to get better

I'm not a hardcore player, I'm just too busy. But I want to improve my game and the area I think I should do that most urgently is city micromanagement. I gather that most better players assign their population to workable tiles or specialist slots manually. Now my question is how you do that.

1. At the beginning you get notified every time your population increases, but that ends after pop 5 I think. So how do you notice when you population has grown? Do you click through your cities every turn or do you let your governor decide and only correct his decisions from time to time?
2. How much per turn do you consider enough to assign a specialist or a mine worker? I realize that city growth is good because it will give you and provide you with new workers for new tiles/slots, bit when do you slow your potential growth for ////?

I know this forum and I don't expect a consensus , but please enlighten me with your reasoning.

boghog said:

I'm not a hardcore player, I'm just too busy. But I want to improve my game and the area I think I should do that most urgently is city micromanagement. I gather that most better players assign their population to workable tiles or specialist slots manually. Now my question is how you do that.

1. At the beginning you get notified every time your population increases, but that ends after pop 5 I think. So how do you notice when you population has grown? Do you click through your cities every turn or do you let your governor decide and only correct his decisions from time to time?
2. How much per turn do you consider enough to assign a specialist or a mine worker? I realize that city growth is good because it will give you and provide you with new workers for new tiles/slots, bit when do you slow your potential growth for ////?

I know this forum and I don't expect a consensus , but please enlighten me with your reasoning.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't rely on the governor. The governor's default default choices are way too anti-growth and the governor tends to fill up merchant specialist slots, which are a total waste unless you're Venice or you have no alternatives. My priorities in the early game are food and science specialists. Grow, grow, grow, and then fill up your university slots to get an early academy. The academy gives 12 with the NC, which is a ton in the early game. It gives even more in the late game.

In the mid game I continue to fill up science specialist slots and may also fill engineer slots for a GP specialist city if there are wonders that I really want (Forbidden Palace is really popular with the AI, so getting a GE at this point could be handy). The artist/writer/musician slots are also necessary for cultural victories and often handy for other victories (they don't mess up your GP counter), but I wouldn't favor these specialists over high food tiles unless I really needed tourism. As noted, the merchant slots are garbage. They are garbage from Turn 1 to the end of the game. I guess they might be usable if you have a bunch of specialist boosting policies and/or are playing Korea, but the last thing a non-Venice player wants is for some dumb Great Merchant to sabotage Great Scientist production. The main reason I hate the governor is that it tends to create awful Great Merchants.

yes plz I need the green notification for cities above 5 pop.

My take (play on immortal, occasionally deity):

1) From the map overview, you can see number of city population and there's a small number next to it that indicates how many turn until the next citizen is born. In the beginning of the game you'll want to prioritize population with production. If you let the city be on default, if you have a tile which has +2 gold, +1 food, and +1 hammer, the city will select that instead of say, +2 food and +1 hammer tile which is much better. So if you want to maximize your efficiency, you'd need to select tiles on your own.
2) Specialist-wise it depends on the situation. I try to time my great engineer for wonder rush, alternating between GA, GW, GM depending on whether I have available great work slots for the respective GP or not. Usually in early game though I would only assign culture-related specialists mainly to reach my next social policy. I'd minimally assign specialists, mainly basing on current need, until:
a) I'm running out of good tiles to work from
b) the city has a lot of positive modifiers - secularism, adopting aesthetics, garden, Leaning Tower of Pisa, arts or sciences funding from world congress, ideological tenants that boost great person generation (Freedom and Order)
c) when you adopt certain tenants like Freedom's civil society (Specialists consume only half the normal amount of Food), Universal Suffrage: Unhappiness from Specialists is halved.
When I don't need to grow my city any longer, I often assign citizens for tiles with overall more than +5 combined yields (of any type), then the rest I'd just assign them as specialists. If there's a food problem, assign food internal trade route. I assign great merchant the least, but if you have problem with gold per turn maybe it's worth investing a couple points (more priority if you're playing Venice).

boghog said:

[*]How much per turn do you consider enough to assign a specialist[...]

Click to expand...

I'm also always struggling with this, what are the rules of thumb, if any?

boghog said:

I'm not a hardcore player, I'm just too busy. But I want to improve my game and the area I think I should do that most urgently is city micromanagement. I gather that most better players assign their population to workable tiles or specialist slots manually. Now my question is how you do that.

1. At the beginning you get notified every time your population increases, but that ends after pop 5 I think. So how do you notice when you population has grown? Do you click through your cities every turn or do you let your governor decide and only correct his decisions from time to time?
2. How much per turn do you consider enough to assign a specialist or a mine worker? I realize that city growth is good because it will give you and provide you with new workers for new tiles/slots, bit when do you slow your potential growth for ////?

I know this forum and I don't expect a consensus , but please enlighten me with your reasoning.

Click to expand...

1. Use F2 to go to the screen where you see the list of all your cities and both how many turns are left when a new citizen is born as well as when will the next thing be produced is displayed. So before you end your turn simply click F2 to quickly enter and exit this screen to see the situation with growth. Memorize the cities (when there is more than one of course) and when the next turn rolls see these cities first and then go for other things you need to do that turn. Of course use this option late game when you have more cities, early on you can follow it just by looking on the map.
2. I always go for 10 population. Until 10 pop (better to say 12) I only assign citizens to work on the field. Then I go: Citizen number 11,13,15,17 etc. go to the field, citizen number 12,14,16,18 etc. go to be specialists. Of course if I run out of specialist slots I will assign them to field. As for food, I don't know I thing than in newer (''lesser") cities food of 2-3 (maybe 4) is pretty good and gives you a nice growth, I also look to keep it on this number or to get it higher with food producing buildings, smaller than that I assign it to some food producing tile. I do expect that my older and bigger cities have a much higher food per turn than this, of course. Also use internal Trade routes as much as you can, it helps food (and production) quite a lot.

These are my tactics not sure if they are for the better, but hope it helps. Doing things manually does require more time and is a little bit more tiring, but it is ultimately rewarding as it gives you more control over your Empire. On difficulties Prince or above it is important to play the game more slower, in the end this is a turn-based strategy so you got all the time in the world. . I always did things manually in Civ V even on lesser difficulties, always assigning my citizen, manually moving my workers and improving tiles, I don't even put my soldiers to move for more turns always move them every turn. Since I also don't have quite a lot of time, because of this my civ games tend to last for weeks . The longer it lasts, the more you'll enjoy it, so they say..

You can let your governor decide for the most part early game (just make sure to do the production focus trick every time a city is one turn away from growth); midgame or so your governor will work those stupid plantation/camp tiles for gold rather than the grassland river farm so you need to correct him once in a while.

Specialists? (in your satellites there is no need to work them at all even until late game)
In your cap you should always work at least the science slots regardless of food; you can work the guild/engineer slots too if you like, but be warned, until civil society from Freedom tenet, they will slow down the growth a lot. (if possible send food caravans to cap)

Glassmage said:

yes plz I need the green notification for cities above 5 pop.

Click to expand...

I really want that too.

Let's start from the very beginning.
If you play on king or below, you do not have to manually assign your . Only from time to time you should change governor's focus. I can easily win king games doing just that. With emperor and above you will have to pay much closer attention to worked tiles. I usually stick to emperor because I'm too lazy to do everything manually

Since BNW, default governor seems to like much more than he used to. It's especially problematic in early game, because as it was already said, 1/1/2 is more useful for him than 2/1. The lower is the speed of your game, the more ridiculous it sounds. Pay special attention to cities with plantations for they the are the worst griefers now.

It's impossible to tell when it's time for specialists. I'm following two general rules:
1) it's always time for artists;
2) universities must always be full.

The 1st one is an absolute must, because BNW's buildings were stripped of and got slots for instead. It means that in early game, i.e. before universities, artists are an extremely important source of . So are their since they provide 2 and can be swapped to cities that need a little boost.

The 2nd rule is caused by the fact that at the point of the game when universities emerge, boost from scientist is really significant and great scientists are still very cheap. You can get your first one in no time and boost from academies is fantastic.

There can ofc be some situations when you need that extra or extra for a moment and you deviate from both of these rules, but I stick to them whenever possible.

It gets harder later on. If you are playing a wide empire, seldom happens in BNW, you can use all and slots when they become available. You won't be able to do anything more useful with them and that +1 after 30 turns won't save you anyway. Great engineer might be useful, though. Nevertheless, you'll have to balance the need for great people generation accompanied by some direct bonuses from specialist, with sustainable growth and some extra . When I play tall, I usually want all +4 and above tiles worked before going for specialists (keep in mind rules 1 and 2 ). specialists almost always have priority over specialists. It's said that there are also specialist, but I don't remember ever getting one.


PS.
In shiny posts we trust.