What to do with low production cities?

Sclb said:

I dunno, I would personally never go for hammer trade routes, as the return is pretty bad. Rather just food grow that city so that more tiles can be worked to make up the deficit. As a last result, at least the unemployed citizen can contribute to hammer. Every cities should have some mines, if there are none, don't bother planting a city there anyway. You have to work a certain number of production tiles. If there aren't production tiles, even if you can rush buy workshop there, the city will still be behind as it's not going to support renaissance buildings without rush buys. If you're playing tradition at a high enough difficulty, it doesn't matter as long as you can rush buy science buildings, the city doesn't need to build anything else. In some of my games, I had cities that don't build anything meaningful until I discovered Coal/Oil during industrial era.

Click to expand...

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think having multiple mines are entirely a necessity. As long as there is 1-2 although I'm not talking about the capital, a city such as this can probably be placed last when you have more trade-routes to speed it along.
Regardless a city working jungle will be a mid-game powerhouse in science in gold.

If I have a poor production city that produces 10 hammers per turn it will take me 16 turns to build a University.

If I route 2 cargo ships with hammers to it I'm getting about 26 hammers per turn and I'll have my university built in 7 turns. This means I'll be able to work those specialists 9 turns earlier which will grant me an extra 54 GS points. So it certainly does make a difference.

Once your universities and a few other essential buildings are up switch the cargo ships to food or other jobs and let the city work all the science from the jungle.

Redaxe said:

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think having multiple mines are entirely a necessity. As long as there is 1-2 although I'm not talking about the capital, a city such as this can probably be placed last when you have more trade-routes to speed it along.
Regardless a city working jungle will be a mid-game powerhouse in science in gold.

If I have a poor production city that produces 10 hammers per turn it will take me 16 turns to build a University.

If I route 2 cargo ships with hammers to it I'm getting about 26 hammers per turn and I'll have my university built in 7 turns. This means I'll be able to work those specialists 9 turns earlier which will grant me an extra 54 GS points. So it certainly does make a difference.

Once your universities and a few other essential buildings are up switch the cargo ships to food or other jobs and let the city work all the science from the jungle.

Click to expand...

Obviously, you can do a lot with Caravans/Cargo Ships.

At the same time, while you're pumping that city with production, you aren't feeding another city that probably needs it more. Yes, you'll get the benefits that you are mentioning in this post, but you didn't mention the counter-effects of making this move.

You're either removing a good trade route for gold/science/religion/diplomacy/tourism, or you're not overfeeding your capital or another city that needs it.

It also is not obviously possible to always do this, but people should be taking things like this into account and settling with a total lack of production only as a last resort and not as a common occurrence.

The game I was playing the other day I had 2 25 gold trade routes going, in your scenario I just cost myself 50g per turn to crush cargo hammers into a city I maybe shouldn't have settled...

It is great that you have the option to support a "mediocre" city that needs it -- just make sure you consider the other side of the equation before making the move.

This is why I love plains/rivers. These cities naturally get production as you grow fast. I hate flat grassland river areas. Creates huge cities that can build nothing and frequently have marshes xD. If I have large grassland flats I usually arrange the cities to at least get hills or some forest in range so I have a few developable hammer tiles.

The same idea goes for jungle. The payoff on jungle is not till after education, so it's always better to arrange your early cities so that they get some jungle (that they won't work early) and some productive terrain. If you have to settle in massive expanses of jungle I usually settle on a jungle hill, pick a riversite, and cut the jungle off a few hills near rivers to farm for 2f2h early tiles. It is time consuming though so you need extra workers to get these cities up to shape.