specialization of cities?

[Heroes]

In civ3, it's a good idea to seperate your cities into several classes: food rich ones, granary, settler, worker; shield rich ones, barracks, units, or artilleries; fully corrupt ones, specialist farmer ...

Now in civ4, I am thinking that there is some similar principle.

1. Food rich: fish, clam, cow ... Run as many specialists as possible for great people farming, build national epic (+100% GPP), sacrifice production and commerce for food (farmer instead of workshop, mills, cottage, ...). Especially useful if leader if philosophical. More than 1 such city seems wasteful, because national epic can only be built once.

2. Emphasize production. That's the old way of civ3: maximize the sum of food and production for every tile. So build mines if there is a resource on the hill, windmill otherwise for food self sustainability, lumbermill in every forest tile, watermill if near river, workshop if you really have too many foods to spare ... This applies to most core cities. But what if leader is financial?

3. Emphasize commerce. If leader is financial, it's a must to get as many tiles having >= 2 base gold as possible. The only ways to achive this for a resourceless land tile are cottage and some mills if near river. Workshop is a no-no. Is it worthwhile to chop forest and build cottage? I'm wondering. With universal suffrage civic, a town can produce a hammer, so the loss of this is just 1 hammer (before railroad), the gain is 4 gold. However, rushing a hammer costs 5 gold ...

Any comment?

 

[MusicLaunch]

I think I understand what you're saying, but does it mean that I have to micro-manage? (I know you can specialize a city to be commerce/productive/etc, but do the workers have to not build a Workshop and only make cottages? == managing workers?)

 

[Heroes]

I think I understand what you're saying, but does it mean that I have to micro-manage? (I know you can specialize a city to be commerce/productive/etc, but do the workers have to not build a Workshop and only make cottages? == managing workers?)

Excuse me, but I don't exactly understand your question. I guess you are asking whether you need to plan for your workers. Well, absolutely yes for that ...

 

[logical_psycho]

This game is all about micromanagement, if that wouldn't be in the game, I probably wouldn't have bought it. I enjoy it, that's why I've been playing in the same game for over 2 days already... feeling proud of what I built up already!




By the way, how can you specialize a city? If it has a lot of food, you won't have a lot of production...? All my cities now have a little of everything and they're doing fine (as far as I can tell now, because I haven't tried otherwise).

 

[podraza]

Maybe you could elaborate on this for me. I've never been a micromanager before, but I'm trying to learn now with Civ 4.

Does your strategy require you to both manage the workers manually, but also to manage manually which tiles are worked? Turn the governor off completely?

Now lets say you've got a city that you want to use to emphasize production. Obviously not all tiles surrounding it can have production improvements built on them. But what you are saying is that anytime you can build either a production improvement or a commerce/food improvement, you should go with the production improvement? If this doesn't make sense, its because I've never played this way before.

 

[TreeFoot]

Actually the game isn't really about micromanagment, they've tried to get rid of micro-managment as much as possible, but still keep it around for guys like logical_psycho.

 

[podraza]

Would it do me any good to read some of the Civ 3 materials on micromanaging? I really want to learn, if only to understand the game a little better. But I sort of need some ground up instruction on what to do.

 

[Prince David]

Does your strategy require you to both manage the workers manually, but also to manage manually which tiles are worked? Turn the governor off completely?

Essentially, yes. Automating workers was just plain bad in III. It's supposed to be better in IV, but I suspect you'd just get good "jack-of-all-trades" type improvements if you did, and not the focused improvements you might want.

In III the governor would place citizens based on one of several goals that you might assign it, but it would never use specialists. If it's at all the same IV I would suggest you set it how you want, but check in often. In III you could place citizens where ypu wanted, but the govenor would always rearrange them any time something changed (pop increase, create a settler, etc).

Micromanging isn't technically hard, but it can be very confusing. I have a stack of index cards on my desk and use them to keep track of what I want to do in each city - a check list of buildings, tile improvements, etc. I also go through every city every couple of turns at look at what each citizen is doing and rearrange them as needed.

Of course, my copy of Civ IV is still on back order so I have NO experience with it, but the priciples should be the same.

 

[Heroes]

By the way, how can you specialize a city? If it has a lot of food, you won't have a lot of production...? All my cities now have a little of everything and they're doing fine (as far as I can tell now, because I haven't tried otherwise).

How? I am also trying and learning!

A food rich city could still have relatively high production because you can assign specialists as engineers, or even better, priests after a certain wonder makes them produce one more hammer. However, if you build workshops (-1 food, + several hammers depending on tech) around, you could gain higher production. What I'm thinking is that we'd better give up those workshops and more hammers for more GPP. The food rich city should reach the population limit of health. If there are too many citizens, one more citizen costs 3 food instead of 2, which is too much a waste. So the specialist farm should get as many health points as possible, and ideally it will reach such a state: food exactly match people's need ("stagnant"), and have as many specialists as possible.

My guess for production emphasizing city is: build mines (if connecting a resource), mills, cottages if neithe mine nor mill is available, but seldom farms, and never chop forests.

Gold emphasizing city ... I guess the principle is to make every tile produce at least 2 base commerce, therefore windmills and cottages.

For any city, production multiplier like forge (and later on, factory etc.) is the priority to build, for it makes getting other buildings shorter.

 

[Mr. Blonde]

Based on my experience (2 noble wins with space race) I would say the following:

Food early rich cities will run into a health problem as you wont´t have the buildings/ civics to use enough specialists. In this case it is better to build some cottages and work them temporarily.

Workshops are there to make a city with a lot of plains more productive, windmills achieve a large productive city with a lot of hills in its borders. I didn´t do the numbers but I think if you have a city with a hill/ plain mixture irrigations and mines are better especially as mines get +1 production from rails.

Keep some forests for later, 1 happy face in ecology and the improvement are worth it.

 

[Dairuka]

I'd put farms on every tile connecting Fresh Water, while putting Cottages on the tiles that don't connect Fresh Water. This helps you get a very fast growth boost, and allows you to still reap the benefits of towns later on in the game.

If you're experiencing problems with Health/Unhappiness. Simply put on Avoid Growth. Just because you're temporarily wasting food, doesn't mean you can't take advantage of it the moment you're capable of handling a quick growth spurt. {Say when you get Ecology and throw in a Recycling center in every city.}

After a few games, it's actually very easy to determine whats a healthy city population size, which will help you maximize your research/production rates, without suffering the annoyance of Unhealthiness/Unhappiness.

Just remember that you can ignore Unhealthiness so long as you have more food than the penalty. NEVER ignore Unhappiness, as it directly hurts your production.