Early Micromanagement Guide - basics

Re: chopping...sometimes you have river forest in your capitol. These are ideal tiles to chop since you want to farm them and get 1 extra food once CS is researched.

A little tip to help the early game and that is to pay real attention to what tiles you work.
As an example, I'd settled on a hill with resources around and starting out I was getting 6 pp/t and +2 food/t. My scout costs 25 pp. If I shifted to a production tile I'd get 7 ppt and 0 extra food. Lets add 6+6+6+7=25 so I shifted for one turn only to squeeze out my scout one turn early. I think this certainly was worth slowing growth for one turn since that scout can find goodies.

A bit later that game I shifted again for a couple of turns to get my shrine built a turn quicker. But LOL Immortal level..in spite of finding a religious CS and getting 8 faith, I still got the 2nd pantheon :p.
 
beetle said:
I must have a mental block about this.



So, if a city is about to grow, what sort of tile do I want to have open and ready to work? Food or anything-but-food?

What is the net advantage of locking production versus just picking production focus? Default focus seems generally very good, so what are the mistakes the automated system is routinely making? I have noticed that it does not tend to work NW like I would, but otherwise seems to do pretty well, by picking tiles with the highest counts. I understand that locking tiles is important for maximizing benefits, but it really seems like a lot of bother for not much gain. It seems to me that advance player lock tiles that the governor is going to work anyway, so what is the real point? Please educate me about this!
Click to expand...

lets say your city is pop 3 with 28/30 food and you have 4 grassland tiles and 2 hills, and you are working 3 grass tiles, with +2 food, you are going to grow the next turn.

if you have food focus or default focus then by the next turn you will have made 4 production if you are not on a hill, and you will be pop 4, with 0 food.

if you have production focus, working the same 3 grassland tiles with 28/30 food, then by the next turn you will have made 6 production and you will be pop 4 with 0 food.

so it is strictly better to lock production focus, if you lock the tiles individually, in this case its 50% produciton bonus for 1 turn.
 
beetle said:
I must have a mental block about this.

So, if a city is about to grow, what sort of tile do I want to have open and ready to work? Food or anything-but-food?

What is the net advantage of locking production versus just picking production focus? Default focus seems generally very good, so what are the mistakes the automated system is routinely making? I have noticed that it does not tend to work NW like I would, but otherwise seems to do pretty well, by picking tiles with the highest counts. I understand that locking tiles is important for maximizing benefits, but it really seems like a lot of bother for not much gain. It seems to me that advance player lock tiles that the governor is going to work anyway, so what is the real point? Please educate me about this!
Click to expand...

Anything-but-food.

The main mistake the automated (default) governor does is to prioritize tiles based on overall yield, so it will work a 1 food/1 hammer/3 gold wine tile before it will work a 2 food/1 hammer plains wheat tile or a 3 food cow tile (assuming the city has at least enough food to feed its citizens).

When you are doing the "production focus/lock food tiles" bit, you want to make sure that you have an open hammer tile on the turn you go from pop n to pop n+1. As noted above, the game first checks food production. If you have produced enough food to generate a new citizen, it assigns that citizen to the best tile that is consistent with your chosen focus. It then computes all other yields for that city (hammers, gold, culture, etc.), but it does NOT recompute food for that turn (the food computation was already done). So, if your default governor assigns your new citizen to a food tile, that food is never counted and is forever lost. If your governor assigns your new citizen to a hammer tile (or a faith Natural Wonder tile, etc.), you will get those hammers (or faith, or whatever) for "free." You then promptly assign that new citizen to a desired food tile and repeat.

Now, how is that different from just leaving your city on production focus and never reassigning citizens to food tiles? Slow growth -- really, really slow growth -- and eventually potential stagnation. For the benefits of this approach, check this: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13082757&postcount=4
 
beetle said:
I must have a mental block about this.



So, if a city is about to grow, what sort of tile do I want to have open and ready to work? Food or anything-but-food?

What is the net advantage of locking production versus just picking production focus? Default focus seems generally very good, so what are the mistakes the automated system is routinely making? I have noticed that it does not tend to work NW like I would, but otherwise seems to do pretty well, by picking tiles with the highest counts. I understand that locking tiles is important for maximizing benefits, but it really seems like a lot of bother for not much gain. It seems to me that advance player lock tiles that the governor is going to work anyway, so what is the real point? Please educate me about this!
Click to expand...


If you really want to micro manage hard you want just enough food to grow on the next turn, by selecting production focus when the city grows the new citizen will work production and you'll get credit for the hammers then you lock down the tile on food to continuing growing, I hope that made sense.
 
Thanks so much Browd. I was totally missing this, despite having read any number of similar posts.

I would still like to see some comparisons between default focus and locking-food-while-production-focus, but I suppose I could do that myself!
 
It can be illuminating to experiment with it yourself. Just play the same map using the different approaches, and note when you hit various milestones and what your empire looks like at turn 75 or 100 or whatever.
 
Calouste said:
Ok, thanks for the correction, I couldn't remember exactly where the drop off started. That makes my comment not really relevant, as you usually have enough forest to chop in ring 1 and 2. Of course you still want to pay attention to which ring 2 forest you chop first to influence the cultural expansion.
Click to expand...

This might be because you had a unit in the tile. I notice that if I park a unit on one of the purple ring tiles, it often gets selected as the next expansion over the others.
 
kb27787 said:
Whoa... food doesn't spill over like hammers do? (I always thought it did) I never knew this! :lol:
Click to expand...

yeah it does, but you dont gain any immediate benefit from excess food, as you do from a few hammers required to shave a turn off your build.
 
klaskeren said:
yeah it does, but you dont gain any immediate benefit from excess food, as you do from a few hammers required to shave a turn off your build.
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Well, you don't get an immediate bonus from food on ANY turn but the ones when the city grows, so it's generally the best idea to get as much food as possible, so that the time until the next pop is born is as short as possible... if you lock the tiles in a way so that you just have as much food as is needed to grow hurts your population as much as it would if you did the same thing 5 turns earlier - you'll not lose anything on that turn, but you MIGHT need an additional turn to get the next pop-growth. I generally wouldn't recommend doing that every time a city is going to grow - it's a "fake-benefit".

There are exceptions of course. If you need some additional production, it's an easy way to squeeze out some hammers without unintentionally delaying the upcoming growth - and adjusting the values so that you get Collective rule + 1 pop + finish the last project on the same turn so you can start the settler asap can be somewhat helpful, but needs a lot of attention on the 3-10 turns before that.
 
Food does carry over, it isn't correct what Klaskeren posted. You should look in Browd's post #23 instead - the magical 'cheat' that you won't benefit from in default governor focus happens due to how food is calculated during turns with pop growth. Essentially, you will receive the benefit from the tile yields the newly born worker is producing on the same turn the city grows, but not if this worker is producing food. To be honest, this is a pretty bad bug that in fact requires you to micromanage every darn turn of pop-growth like a freak if you want to play optimally.

There was another full article posted on this phenomenon a while back that explained it well but I don't recall what the thread was called. Perhaps somebody can help with a link?

@ beetle, this trick also isn't the only reason you may want to avoid the default governor focus. Basically, the default governor prioritizes food over anything else. This makes sense since for very small cities, food is the most important yield (due to how little food is required to grow further - food becomes less important later as the amount required rises exponentially), but the food focus is too much. As an example, the governor can prefer working a a blank 2 food tile over a horse resource (1 food, 2 hammers). With BNW rules where unhappiness creates a production and gold deficit in addition to previous drawbacks, you ideally want to never dip into unhappiness at all. Therefore, the default governor that just grabs gobs and gobs of food could be counterproductive - if you are building a wide Liberty empire, for instance, you might actually want the cities to grow slowly/not at all so you have excess happy for building more cities (this new city being used to grab a new luxury being the typical example of this situation). In this scenario, working that horse resource would serve you much better, and the default governor won't do this.
 
Strategist83 said:
Food does carry over, it isn't correct what Klaskeren posted. You should look in Browd's post #23 instead - the magical 'cheat' that you won't benefit from in default governor focus happens due to how food is calculated during turns with pop growth. Essentially, you will receive the benefit from the tile yields the newly born worker is producing on the same turn the city grows, but not if this worker is producing food. To be honest, this is a pretty bad bug that in fact requires you to micromanage every darn turn of pop-growth like a freak if you want to play optimally.

There was another full article posted on this phenomenon a while back that explained it well but I don't recall what the thread was called. Perhaps somebody can help with a link?

@ beetle, this trick also isn't the only reason you may want to avoid the default governor focus. Basically, the default governor prioritizes food over anything else. This makes sense since for very small cities, food is the most important yield (due to how little food is required to grow further - food becomes less important later as the amount required rises exponentially), but the food focus is too much. As an example, the governor can prefer working a a blank 2 food tile over a horse resource (1 food, 2 hammers). With BNW rules where unhappiness creates a production and gold deficit in addition to previous drawbacks, you ideally want to never dip into unhappiness at all. Therefore, the default governor that just grabs gobs and gobs of food could be counterproductive - if you are building a wide Liberty empire, for instance, you might actually want the cities to grow slowly/not at all so you have excess happy for building more cities (this new city being used to grab a new luxury being the typical example of this situation). In this scenario, working that horse resource would serve you much better, and the default governor won't do this.
Click to expand...

hmm i dont think you understand what i'm saying.
 
beetle said:
Thanks so much Browd. I was totally missing this, despite having read any number of similar posts.

I would still like to see some comparisons between default focus and locking-food-while-production-focus, but I suppose I could do that myself!
Click to expand...

Well you can get around 100 hammers over the course of a whole game. Obviously getting 3 extra when building a 60 hammer building will be more important than getting 3 when building a 500 hammer wonder.

But in my experience the major benefit of doing that is indirect.
When you force yourself to put your city on production focus and then manually lock citizens on the real tile you want them to be, you're actually forcing yourself to do a very important task... which is to micromanage your citizens often and at least every time a new one is born.

I'm pretty sure someone that plays on default focus just ignores announcements of new citizens and just lock tiles once every hour when he wants to get a special wonder.

Playing with the production focus trick will force you to carefully click through every +1pop messages to reassign citizens. Because if you put production focus to use the trick and then forget to reassign the citizen you will end up harming yourself way more than it would help you :crazyeye:
 
Acken said:
Well you can get around 100 hammers over the course of a whole game.
Click to expand...

This matches my impression, a quarter hammer a turn. It seems like a lot of effort for not much payback. But maybe once I get used it, it takes hardly any extra time at all?

But in my experience the major benefit of doing that is indirect.
When you force yourself to put your city on production focus and then manually lock citizens on the real tile you want them to be, you're actually forcing yourself to do a very important task... which is to micromanage your citizens often and at least every time a new one is born.
Click to expand...

You may be onto something here, paying better attention.

I'm pretty sure someone that plays on default focus just ignores announcements of new citizens and just lock tiles once every hour when he wants to get a special wonder.
Click to expand...

That's about right. I switch to gold focus during years or if running a deficit. I only switch to production focus if a GE fails to instant build a wonder. Pretty much the only tiles I lock down are NW when the default focus fails to work them.

Playing with the production focus trick will force you to carefully click through every +1pop messages to reassign citizens. Because if you put production focus to use the trick and then forget to reassign the citizen you will end up harming yourself way more than it would help you.
Click to expand...

Failing to re-evaluate assignments was a real problem for me. Also, I think I was taking too much time. After each pop message, I would go into the city screen, reset tiles to default, lock down all the ones I agreed with (which was almost always all of them), and then set focus back to production for the next round of growth. This was taking a while, and left me with the clear understanding that the default governor was doing a fine job. I think I should try a game where I lock the tiles all the time, everywhere, but not make myself crazy spending too much time with it.
 
klaskeren said:
hmm i dont think you understand what i'm saying.
Click to expand...

It's a result of the order of operations on a new turn.

Food is calculated first, which triggers population growth, so now you have a new citizen. The city manager then puts that citizen on whichever tile best matches your focus settings. After that, production is calculated.

So if the new citizen starts on a tile without production, you get no yield from that citizen on that first turn after growth, because food has already been calculated for that turn.

The simple fix would be for new citizens to *always go to production tiles when they first spawn*, regardless of focus, and be automatically reassigned after that. Then micromanagement would not be necessary. But, oh well.
 
Cromagnus said:
So if the new citizen starts on a tile without production, you get no yield from that citizen on that first turn after growth, because food has already been calculated for that turn.
Click to expand...

But don’t you get gold/science/faith/culture? I.e., is it not food and only food that gets missed?
 
Cromagnus said:
It's a result of the order of operations on a new turn.

Food is calculated first, which triggers population growth, so now you have a new citizen. The city manager then puts that citizen on whichever tile best matches your focus settings. After that, production is calculated.

So if the new citizen starts on a tile without production, you get no yield from that citizen on that first turn after growth, because food has already been calculated for that turn.

The simple fix would be for new citizens to *always go to production tiles when they first spawn*, regardless of focus, and be automatically reassigned after that. Then micromanagement would not be necessary. But, oh well.
Click to expand...
You're the second person that didn't understand what he was talking about.

If you have 99 of 100 food, then changing a 2 food tile to a 1 food/1production-tile will get you an immediate benefit of +1 hammers without hurting growth immediately.

If you keep the 2 food, then you don't lose that 1 additional food, because food carries over, just like production does. However, the benefit you get from the +1 food comes with a delay (it's useful once the city is about to grow again), the +1 hammer on the other hand is an instant bonus.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with additional hammers from production focus and the info he gave in his post was absolutely correct.
 
Ryika said:
You're the second person that didn't understand what he was talking about.

If you have 99 of 100 food, then changing a 2 food tile to a 1 food/1production-tile will get you an immediate benefit of +1 hammers without hurting growth immediately.

If you keep the 2 food, then you don't lose that 1 additional food, because food carries over, just like production does. However, the benefit you get from the +1 food comes with a delay (it's useful once the city is about to grow again), the +1 hammer on the other hand is an instant bonus.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with additional hammers from production focus and the info he gave in his post was absolutely correct.
Click to expand...

No lol it's not that. I totally misread klaskeren's response as "Hmm *I* still don't understand what you're saying", not "Hmm *you* still don't understand what I'm saying"... my bad!
 
beetle said:
This matches my impression, a quarter hammer a turn. It seems like a lot of effort for not much payback. But maybe once I get used it, it takes hardly any extra time at all?
Click to expand...

You don't have to pay attention and keep using the production trick all the time. First 100 turns is usually when you get any real benefit, after that you'll be building items that cost over 100:c5production: so an extra 3:c5production: from time to time is negligible. At this point you may just lock worthwhile tiles, switch to production focus and check occasionally what tiles your citizens are working.

During mid and late game it's not a big deal if you forget about assigning new citizens and let them work :c5production: tiles for a while. You don't lose much if your city has 30:c5food: 36:c5production: instead of 36:c5food: 30:c5production: for a number of turns, which is not at all the case in the early game, when even the difference of 2:c5food: might mean you're either growing (slowly) or not growing at all.
 
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