A Guide to City Specialization and Land Improvements

[dutchfire]

This.

The concept of growing a city to exactly size 20 is completely obsolete, it's way better to build Improvements on what a city currently needs or focusses on, and in Domination / Conquest games, it's often enough if a city has something like 6-8 tiles it can work, because that are the sizes where 3pop and 4pop whips are available. If early in the game, even size 4 can be optimal, because only 2 pop whips are needed.
In Space Races ofc, cities want to become bigger, but even then, it doesn't matter if a city i. e. only has 15 tiles to work but grows to size 22, because then, it can simply hire some Specialists, which have an awesome efficiency once REP is available.

The better concept is to learn, which tiles are worth working and which aren't. In general it can be said, that every Special Ressource is worth working. Grasslands are good to grow on and then whip them away. Sometimes, working more Grasslands is worth it, like when one needs maximum research. Plains are never worth being worked before one gets Biology and / or State Property (Communism) . With Biology and a Farm, they're actually quite ok, but most Domination / Conquest games end earlier than that. Floodplains otoh should almost always be worked, they're almost like Special Resources, because they give Food.

As basic advice one also can say, that the capital should always be cottaged to the max because of Bureacracy, while all other cities can either be farmed (Domination / Conquest) or also be Cottaged (Space Race) .

Sticking to those rules will get you a lot better in the game, as if you would try to grow every city to size 20. Those rules are actually very close to how I really play, after having over 50 Deity-wins under HoF standards and when evaluating every improvement in single.

Are plains cottages in the Bureaucracy capital okay to work? You won't be whipping there [or not as much], so food is less necessary.

 

[Kallikrates]

There is nothing wrong with (preferably riverside) plains cottages if one has enough food (floodplains or food resources). With a Financial leader a riverside plains cottage is already better than a non-rep priest. people are building cottages on grass hills and with the plains there is not much else one can do with it until late in the game (as opposed to the hill).

 

[Seraiel]

Are plains cottages in the Bureaucracy capital okay to work? You won't be whipping there [or not as much], so food is less necessary.

The Buro capital is the only place, where working a riverside Plains Cottage theoretically is useful. It's at the edge, it gives but costs production, so when is everything, one might wanna go for it. Usually, production is more valuable though.

 

[Kallikrates]

But one can get often far earlier a decent bureaucratic capital with villages or even towns on those plains than watermills (with at least the replaceable parts bonus. Or what do you mean with "costs production"? Or did this only refer to non-capital-cities.

 

[Seraiel]

But one can get often far earlier a decent bureaucratic capital with villages or even towns on those plains than watermills (with at least the replaceable parts bonus. Or what do you mean with "costs production"? Or did this only refer to non-capital-cities.

A Plains Cottage gives only 1 but costs 1 . 1 is up to 2 via the whip, so a Plains Cottage is actually costing 1 . Ofc, the larger the capital, the smaller the loss so the more attractive Plains Cottagea become because the whip gets less effective at large sizes, so the / ratio changes.

That's actually very similar to wHy Plains Mines only make sense, when controlling a city to be happy is not possible. I did maths on that in “Replay #8“ . City was size 15 or something, and working a Plains Mine would have costed me 1 , because the whip still was more effective, even at that size.

 

[Kallikrates]

I find this confusing. By building cottages one has already decided "against" production and for trade in that particular city. Does it make sense to compare a cottage (trade yield) with the yield of certain whippings? In this case a grass cottage also "loses production" because it could be a farm. If one builds cottages one wants to maximize trade, independent of some intervalls when the city might have to whip some buildings/units.
So a plains riverside cottage should be compared to other cottages/trade yielding tiles. If I have a few floodplains cottages I can run a few brown plains cottages and still be "food neutral" but yield some hammers instead (in case of bureau cap these will also get 50% multiplier). Late in the game a riverside plains town yields often something like 2-3 hammers (levee) and 7-8 trade. Sure it is still short of food but so is a gold mine or a fur camp.
Money and beakers cannot be whipped so I do not understand the comparison with the very different goal of maximal production by whipping.

(If the other calculations are right, that's another indication that whipping is way overpowered. If whipping is almost always better than almost every other means of production, there is something seriously wrong in the design. Maybe 20 hammers for one pop point would have been better.)

 

[Seraiel]

Commerce and production are linked together, just not directly. With food / hammers, you can conquer cities, and additional cities also raise Commerce. Instead of losing Hammers because of working Plains, one can also take those Hammers and conquer a neighbour.
Also: Gold can be whipped, i. e. via whipping more than the allowed number of Missionaries or Execs, which get transformed into Gold on the next turn, when one finishes the 3 or 5 allowed units but still has those units with lots of hammers in the buildqueue of other cities.

If you say “Plains-Towns are worth it“ I agree. Just the 30T that are needed to make them at least to villages are a drain and production would better. Also, PP is required. Many games can be won mostly before even having Towns.