Am I limited by how much food a city can have?

Sometimes I want to grow a city to a massive size, for increased Science for instance. I occasionally am able to reach a food surplus of +28 per turn on one city.

However, when I want to, say, change a citizen working on a Mine to a Farm, then it works (the Farm is locked down), BUT, another citizen on a Farm tile gets unlocked, and is moved back to the Mine tile when I exit the city screen.

Is this because there is a maximum of +30 food/turn on a city, or something like that? Or is it just a bug?

Nope, this normally happens because another city shares some tiles with this and is bugged, but it's nothing to do with the food surplus as far as I know. I managed to get a city up to +70 fpt in a recent game, and my tiles weren't unlocking as I didn't have any shared tiles between cities, but I've seen it before where tiles are often unlocked because of these shared tiles.

Also happens if another tile is blocked by a hostile military unit.
Sometimes it can be fixed by using food focus, but that will not always work.

I think if you reset tiles then reallocate them all you can get round this issue.

Forkandles said:

I think if you reset tiles then reallocate them all you can get round this issue.

Click to expand...

Yes that is how to fix this annoying issue.

Okay thanks, I guess it's just a bug. I notice it usually happens when a city is around 30 fpt, but it's not a fixed rule. I'm not so sure if it's related to shared tiles because I sometimes space my cities out quite far, and I know it's not related to military units because it happens a lot, especially in peacetime.

Either you have a tile that was switched from one city to the next or you simply didn't have your other citizens locked. The game will always rearrange unlocked citizens.

Tips to grow your cities:

• Settle on the coast if possible, even delaying a city until you know the lay of the land.
• Finish Tradition asap
• Build the Temple of Artemis(pre-eat)
• Build Petra and Colossus(for the trade routes)
• Once Education/Acoustics have been researched research Engineering, Compass, and Banking for 3 further trade routes. Then pretty much beeline Penicillin after Plastics for the Medical Lab.
• Send food cargo ships with all your routes until you run out of cities to send them to.
• Pick the 'Fertility Rites' as your pantheon, and 'Swords into Plowshares' as a follower belief and never go to war. These are post-eat benefits.
• Try to get as many 'We love the King' days as possible, even if it costs 720 gold. This is a post-eat benefit
• Ally or befriend as many maritime CS as possible. These benefits seem to get added to your cities base tile(the one in the center) so should be affected by the Temple of Artemis.

Understanding growth
When the game mentions the phrase 'growth' it means post-eat('Base' in the screenshot). The exception to this the Temple of Artemis which multiplies the food from terrain + food from buildings, but not food from trade routes.

Aqueduct & Medical Lab
These give %40 and %15 food carry(food required for the next citizen) over when a new citizen is born and don't affect the numbers except 'progress'.

It's not ever a "bug". It means the governor has something else in mind, knows you have plenty of food and is trying to work other things. So he is changing around the tiles you've left free to reflect that. Change to food focus and he'll help you out. Then lock the few things you want to stay worked (GP tiles, etc) that aren't good food. Occasionally, governor seems to be working suboptimally, often if you've locked a lot of tiles. Governor takes into account how important he thinks what the city is building is. For instance, I've noticed governors that are working on wonders will often not grow as fast as they can even with food emphasis checked, bc they want the wonder to finish at a decent time. usually, going against this behavior means the wonder will take an additional 10 turns or so and he's preventing a big production loss. At this point I might press "reset tiles" and do it again to micro and make sure the optimal tiles are being worked and find a better compromise.