Micromanaging specialist slots

[NKVD]

Hi. I'm a very long time user of civ. I'd consider myself a good player but I never micromanaged. I'd win without that. Now that I just won my first cultural victory on my first BNW with Poland i really loved the new artist/musician/writer thing.

I decided to start looking at it, looked into a couple of articles. I understand the principle of slots,GPP and everything except I dont understand which slots to manually activate or not. At which ratio to fill them. Do you fill them untill your city stagnate? One slot before it stagnate ? This is what articles dont explain.

 

[joncnunn]

OK: Guilds: The only point in building them is when you can fill the spots, so in practice these will always be filled.
If the city couldn't grow if it were running two more specialists don't build the guilds yet or consider adding a food cargo route.

Science slots: Should pretty much always be run no matter what.

Everything else: Unless playing Venice, avoid unless there really is nothing better to work.

 

[Halcyan2]

OK: Guilds: The only point in building them is when you can fill the spots, so in practice these will always be filled.
If the city couldn't grow if it were running two more specialists don't build the guilds yet or consider adding a food cargo route.

Well, the Guilds do generate a small number of points/turn on their own, so it can be useful to build them even if you are not ready to fill the slots yet.

Science slots: Should pretty much always be run no matter what.

There are occasions when you may be intentionally reducing your science (particularly when you want to avoid going to the next era).

Everything else: Unless playing Venice, avoid unless there really is nothing better to work.

Engineering slots are good. Hammers are essentially to growing cities. And being able to generate a Great Engineer is great throughout the game.

I rarely bother with Merchant slots though. You can usually get better yields working a tile (luxury or trade post). And Great Merchants are much worse than Great Scientists or Engineers, unless you are Venice.

 

[joncnunn]

The point of avoiding Great Merchants / Great Engineers is that each and every one of them naturally born represents one fewer Great Scientist due to sharing the total points needed.

 

[Halcyan2]

The point of avoiding Great Merchants / Great Engineers is that each and every one of them naturally born represents one fewer Great Scientist due to sharing the total points needed.

Not quite. Since the points are tracked separately but they share the same threshold (which increases each time any of them is naturally born), getting a Merchant / Engineer will delay your next scientist, but that's less of an impact than completely replacing a potential Scientist.

I agree that Scientists are very strong. But depending on your game and difficulty level, there may be cases where a Great Engineer can be just as useful, especially if it lets you obtain a key wonder. A GE getting you Petra, Pisa, the Forbidden Palace, PT, Hubble, or even a National College can be much better than having just a GS to begin with (and in many of those cases, you can still end up with a GS).

 

[NKVD]

All right but you guys are saying to always fill science slot even if this means to starve a city? I'm guessing yes until you bring a cargo?

Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk

 

[Doktor Vic Tim]

Make sure staffing specialist slot won't hurt your growth too much. Send a caravan (Or better a Cargo ship if city is coastal) to supply extra food.

 

[Primacide]

This is one of those issues that separates deity/immortal players and lesser humans like me. I rarely micromanage specialists, except on rare occasions when I am trying to generate a specific GP. I would never starve a city for a specialist. I want that city BIG. And apparently dumb.

 

[joncnunn]

All right but you guys are saying to always fill science slot even if this means to starve a city? I'm guessing yes until you bring a cargo?

If the city would literately starve if it worked all science spots (as opposed to simply stagnate) it means that 40 turns before then you should have been doing things to increase food.

 

[Halcyan2]

This is one of those issues that separates deity/immortal players and lesser humans like me. I rarely micromanage specialists, except on rare occasions when I am trying to generate a specific GP. I would never starve a city for a specialist. I want that city BIG. And apparently dumb.

Pre-BNW, micromanaging specialists was much more useful because you could spawn two (or more) different Great People at the same time (if they both reached the threshold on the same turn). That would essentially save you 100 great person points (on normal time scale).

However, with BNW, they changed the ordering of effects so that you can no longer get multiple spawning. As soon as the first one triggers, the threshold for the second increases before you get the second spawn.