Micro management? What are the keys to growth and science?

[Janne]

Hey guys, after my recent struggles to win on immortal (continents/quick) it has been suggested that I need to grow my cities more and get more science out of them...

I can see the obvious keys to it (granary, aqueduct/library, university) also rather tradition than liberty...but what are the not so obvious keys?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Moodtastic]

Happiness.

If you can maintain positive happiness for the entire game you can grow as many tall cities as you want.

 

[The Pilgrim]

Maritime CS and CS in general. Try to fulfill their quests to save some money and ally/befriend as many as you can.
High culture for faster Tradition finisher and quicker Rationalism.
On continents you must beeline Astronomy to meet the rest of your opponents, and If you play for science/diplo beeline all science techs, build/buy scientific buildings immediately and staff them with specialists.
Also consider some RA's. Especially with distant civs, since these are less likely to backstab you.

For domination, if you clear you continent fast enough, Oxford bulb Navigation and get a foothold on other continent with Frigates. If you're lucky you might be able to end the game with them, but you need to be really quick to Navigation and frankly I have no idea how well this strategy works on quick speed. Probably well enough, since ships are relatively fast, you'll have to try this out yourself, I'm just guessing.

 

[guinsoo]

Build lots of workers, early. I like to get 3 workers by turn 45 and 6 by turn ~90 for 4-5 cities, if I expand to 6 cities I like to have 7-9 workers. It lets you get those farms up as soon as possible to enable growth. Any time I have a city working an unimproved tile, I feel like I either mismanaged my workers or don't have enough of them.

Don't neglect culture either for fast finish times. The good rationalism policies usually add 50-100 BPT depending on time. Getting those up quicker is a huge boost, as well as making sure you are able to finish Rationalism in time for a win. Had this happen in a game earlier today - I neglected culture until too late, so Rationalism finisher didn't kick in until after I had all the spaceship techs. Unfortunately that cost me my fastest time, I finished 7 turns slower and I'm certain 2 free techs would have sped it up at least 8 turns.

 

[Deau]

Build lots of workers, early

THIS is the most common detail overlooked by players. Once luxuries are improved, spam farms asap such that your cities work preferably only already improved tiles and especially, have enough food tiles improved to work all the citizens on. I often tend to purchase 3F tiles when settling new cities if none are available. The compound effects of shoving a few turns at every step ends up significant over the game.

Also:
Micromanage tiles, try to avoid going off the food tiles for hammers unless you are near happiness starve or have an immediate military need/strategy breaking wonder to build.

Beeline Civil Services and only detour for luxury techs or, in extreme rare cases for construction defensively (or if you play pacachuti). I must admit I don't always run by this, if I have DF starts I usually hit theology first for GMD.

If you can spare gold/time for CS quests, focus on maritime CSs. Since a very large share of your beakers come from capital, you can consider the arguably exploit pledge to protect+aesthetics perma friendship. This is only a viable option if you cannot time your policies to jump directly from Tradition into Rationalism. This will increase food in your capital by 2 per maritime CS on the map and is really broken with appropriate exploration.

Shift some focus to culture after unlocking rationalism to pop the 15% bonus and the +2 per specialist bonus ASAP.

 

[iconocast]

to answer the op's question

food and population.
building settlers will STOP THE CITY FROM GROWING.buildinig to manny workers will sap ur gold income, keep that in mind. u want to get at least 1 worker asap

a basic build order that will help u

scoutx2 - monument - worker

 

[marekb]

a basic build order that will help u

scoutx2 - monument - worker

Unless you are Spain or settled on luxury, the better building order (assuming you open Tradition) is, IMO, scout - worker - ... You need this worker to get early cash and to expand quickly.

If you play pangea building/buying second scout is a good idea, unless you have more important stuff to build (eg. an army of archers to capture capital of AI that is very close to your). On the other hand on Archipelago you can skip scout at all and on smaller continent second one is not necessary.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

i dont know if you leave cities on default tiles for citizens but micromanaging them or setting food as the default can help. (since you beat immortal ill guess you might do this but a lot has been said so far to help out.)

in the long run, if you have 3 pop but its only working food for no production outside of the base city tile its still good to get the next citizen in 6 turns vs 12 if you choose to exchange one of the 3 food tiles for a 1food 2 hammer tile to speed up the building by 3 turns. plus if you left it on default, rather than getting the next food tile it will go to the unimproved ivory for 1f/1h/2g instead of the 2f/1h or 3f tile. and when you hit -happiness even when its set to food it wont go to the best food tile so checking your cities almost every turn really helps.

this isnt 100% of the time as the game is largely big on timing. sometimes you want the library 3 turns faster to time the ability to get the natl college quicker but the general premise is think long-term growth. it can mean the difference in 3-5 pop at the end of the game which is 3-5 hammer tiles for the Project or SS part which translates to quicker turns for victory. it's a balance but it's the kind of micromanagement to pay attention to if you dont already.

 

[guinsoo]

i dont know if you leave cities on default tiles for citizens but micromanaging them or setting food as the default can help. (since you beat immortal ill guess you might do this but a lot has been said so far to help out.)

in the long run, if you have 3 pop but its only working food for no production outside of the base city tile its still good to get the next citizen in 6 turns vs 12 if you choose to exchange one of the 3 food tiles for a 1food 2 hammer tile to speed up the building by 3 turns. plus if you left it on default, rather than getting the next food tile it will go to the unimproved ivory for 1f/1h/2g instead of the 2f/1h or 3f tile. and when you hit -happiness even when its set to food it wont go to the best food tile so checking your cities almost every turn really helps.

this isnt 100% of the time as the game is largely big on timing. sometimes you want the library 3 turns faster to time the ability to get the natl college quicker but the general premise is think long-term growth. it can mean the difference in 3-5 pop at the end of the game which is 3-5 hammer tiles for the Project or SS part which translates to quicker turns for victory. it's a balance but it's the kind of micromanagement to pay attention to if you dont already.

Well there's actually an advantage to choosing production focus (or for example gold focus): when your city grows, it puts its new citizen on a new production tile and adds the production for that turn. This does not happen for food because it's already added food for the turn (when you grew).

So, you lock production focus and manually lock each citizen onto the tiles you want, mostly food tiles early in the game. This does require a lot more micromanagement because cities don't tell you when they grow above size 5 (unless there's an option for that that I never found?), so you have to watch for it and lock those new citizens in on the tile you want.

It's a slight management trick but it can add up to maybe an extra 50-100 hammers when it counts.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

@guinsoo, i know that but i was just illustrating a basic concept. i didnt want to jump into a slightly higher level of manipulation with a guy looking for what seemed like basic advice. when i first learned i could manage citizens i started just clicking on default stuff cuz i didnt like placing each and every citizen until much later when i'd played the game more.

 

[guinsoo]

@guinsoo, i know that but i was just illustrating a basic concept. i didnt want to jump into a slightly higher level of manipulation with a guy looking for what seemed like basic advice. when i first learned i could manage citizens i started just clicking on default stuff cuz i didnt like placing each and every citizen until much later when i'd played the game more.

Not sure if it's a great idea to teach him a habit he'll just have to unlearn again soon, but either way, now he knows and can make his own informed decision about to micromanage his cities. I mean, it's a "give me advice about how to micromanage" thread - I don't think this is too advanced.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

@guinsoo:

that's fine but im never sure what new posters' level of understanding is. things like that are not something someone obviously concludes from playing the game unless they approach it experimenting with every number they see. OP didnt strike me as such a person. im not even sure explaining the 'best' way would even reach them if they dont get other numeric relationships yet.

 

[guinsoo]

Fair enough. I suppose it's entirely possible that advice could be misconstrued or confused somehow. On the other hand if it's not, I'd feel bad about depriving them of useful information. Tough call i suppose.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

@guinsoo, i know that...

I didn't. Thanks guinsoo for pointing it

 

[Janne]

a lot of great suggestions, thanks for that....the current game I'm at is going quite ok...I play Ethiopia, had a quite a good start but couldn't expand early because France declared early war on my so I needed to build military units instead of workers/settlers...

I learned a lot about defensive warfare in this game because usually I go up the tech path in the direction of steel and physics to launch a counter attack but this time I quit after IW and focused on 1. civil service and 2. education with a side order of navigation to find the other civs...

micro management my cities to prioritise growth and manually control specialists (no merchants, no artists, engineers in only one city) worked very well, my only issues this game was money or the lack of it and happiness. As my only neighbor is at war with me I had to wait until navigation to find the rest of the civs to be able to trade lux for lux and at one point I even had to sell my only remaining lux off to be able to ally a city state to distract a french invasion that would have seriously crippled my empire...

I tried basically the following building order: 1. scientific, 2. food related 3. money/happiness 4. production 5. culture/faith...of course if there was a fast building (2 turn for temple) I would throw that in before going 8 turns for opera...

What I found is that if you focus on growth and science you will lack in other departments so on immortal it's kind of like a constant patchwork to fix the worst deficits you have...

but anyway it feels like I will win this game and that's all that counts...

 

[Deau]

As my only neighbor is at war with me I had to wait until navigation to find the rest of the civs to be able to trade lux for lux and at one point I even had to sell my only remaining lux off to be able to ally a city state to distract a french invasion that would have seriously crippled my empire...

Sometimes, it's wise to sacrifice some immediate gold to settle a war if it means you'll get it back from selling luxuries. Often, when a war lasts long, AIs get drawn out and will settle for basically all of your current gold and nothing more. Giving up a few hundred gold to peace will often get you to sell those luxuries back for 172-208 gold each, especially since by the time the AIs are drawn out, all of the diplomacy hits have already worn out so you will end the war with an enemy that's neutral or friendly.

 

[Gucumatz]

Also small trick, if an AI wants all of your gold for peace - WAIT until you can use most of your gold on buying buildings/units/luxuries/citystaes. Then check for peace again and you will see he will take what gold you have and if its not much, you lose little and you can easily make peace.

 

[Janne]

Thanks for all your great suggestions...it worked...I won scientific victory...first win in a long, long while...

 

[Chaosllama]

Happiness.

If you can maintain positive happiness for the entire game you can grow as many tall cities as you want.

I have only played a few matches on immortal - winning diplomatically each time - but this comment about happiness holds true. Once your growth is cut due to unhappiness, you have just lost your potential to get an edge over the enemy. With the potential of revolts happening and the lessened base happiness... Well, all the more reason to keep this in check.

 

[Janne]

plus if you go for science you loose the 15% science bonus when the empire is not happy...