Atrebates
Prince
*This is a work in progress, I finally started my idea for a strategy thread very late at night and I'm not 100% happy with what my sleepy self did. Please leave any feedback on how to improve it*
HOW TO LOOK AT CITY PLACEMENT
First off, the principles of this article
1) Specialist cities are better than general cities, 2 cities with decent gold/hammers will eat up more upgrades (double libraries etc..) than great commerce +Great hammers in 2 seperate cities. The single great hammer city is much better at getting world wonders; and national wonders doubly reinforce then argument; you get one shot at doubling your gold output you want it to be a big fat o’ pile of gold.
2) Tiles/resources are USELESS if you can’t work them, whether it’s a lack of food to feed your citizens, not being able to get your fat cross or lacking a worker improvement.
3) There can be reasons to ignore best food/gold/hammers (F/G/H) to grab strategic resources.
SITE
Look at the entirety of the city site before sending a settler in ie. know what the fat cross will cover. Do NOT jump on 3 good tiles if the overall site is poor.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD SITE?
Generally, food is king. Each citizen takes up 2 food. Considering Hammers, good H tiles are invariably food deficient (ie. Mining a hill does not yield 2 food) therefore a good production city needs a food surplus from somewhere in order to work enough hills.
Similarly you need to feed citizens working cottages and specialists.
The way to think about food is to consider 2food/tile as your necessary average (there is free food from your city tile). Therefore a vanilla grass tile 2/0/0 will just supply for the citizen who works it, plains (1/1/0) need 1F from another tile to cover its worker, this means that 2 farmed grass (pre-biology) of 3F are needed to provide enough excess for 1specialist/1 plains mine/ 2grasshill mines.
As you may have noticed, this means a lot of grassland farms would be needed to support a mining city of any size. Given that getting a farming population of 4 to support 3 miners (circa 13 H for 7 population depending on city tile) is pretty rough we need another solution. Not in the least because pre-civil service tech you can only farm next to a river, so getting 4 farms in would be rare.
This solution comes in the form of high food tiles, flood plains and the pig/cow/corn/rice/fish/crab/clam resources. These give you single tiles with about 5F (in the early game before technologies give you a production boost) and are key to supporting cities.
FAT CROSS ERRORS
Very common mistake is to pick a site that is fantastic when it gets its second ring but rubbish before then (eg. all the resources 2 tiles out) AND THEN not be able to obtain your 10 culture fat cross quickly enough and have a dud city for anything up to 50 or 90 turns (1H build times for theatre/library). Solutions :
- Pick a creative leader (+2 cult/turn in all cities)
- Use culture slider (available post-music) to turn 50% hammers into culture.
- Build Stonehenge (free obelisk in all cities till Plantation tech)
- Use Caste system to run an artist specialist.
- Get state religion into the city (+1cult/turn), this is good general advice to take advantage of happiness plus other civics bonuses of religion. I advise sending missionaries hot on the heels of your settlers in nearly all circumstances.
- Sistine chapel (+2cult/specialist) allows you to run a citizen specialist and expand in 5 turns
.
- Whip population (under slavery civic) to rush production [note that pop. can sometimes be put to better use than whipping]
- Use Great Artist to 'culture bomb' an instant 4000
It is very important to note that after calendar tech, you CANNOT build obelisks (which are v.cheap) and your culture buildings become rather expensive for a hammer-poor starting city. I have delayed researching plantation when actively expanding my empire.
Also, if you are stuck with no Hammer tiles in your first ring, you should still NEVER take eg.50 turns to build a theatre. Run your first citizen as a citizen specialist to get an extra hammer (or an engineer if you’re under caste system
Future plans involve discussing the importance of rivers, planning out a settlement pattern and getting some screenshots to help explain things.
Hope people find this helpful and this provokes some useful thoughts. Lemme know what you think here or PM me if you fancy
HOW TO LOOK AT CITY PLACEMENT
First off, the principles of this article
1) Specialist cities are better than general cities, 2 cities with decent gold/hammers will eat up more upgrades (double libraries etc..) than great commerce +Great hammers in 2 seperate cities. The single great hammer city is much better at getting world wonders; and national wonders doubly reinforce then argument; you get one shot at doubling your gold output you want it to be a big fat o’ pile of gold.
2) Tiles/resources are USELESS if you can’t work them, whether it’s a lack of food to feed your citizens, not being able to get your fat cross or lacking a worker improvement.
3) There can be reasons to ignore best food/gold/hammers (F/G/H) to grab strategic resources.
SITE
Look at the entirety of the city site before sending a settler in ie. know what the fat cross will cover. Do NOT jump on 3 good tiles if the overall site is poor.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD SITE?
Generally, food is king. Each citizen takes up 2 food. Considering Hammers, good H tiles are invariably food deficient (ie. Mining a hill does not yield 2 food) therefore a good production city needs a food surplus from somewhere in order to work enough hills.
Similarly you need to feed citizens working cottages and specialists.
The way to think about food is to consider 2food/tile as your necessary average (there is free food from your city tile). Therefore a vanilla grass tile 2/0/0 will just supply for the citizen who works it, plains (1/1/0) need 1F from another tile to cover its worker, this means that 2 farmed grass (pre-biology) of 3F are needed to provide enough excess for 1specialist/1 plains mine/ 2grasshill mines.
As you may have noticed, this means a lot of grassland farms would be needed to support a mining city of any size. Given that getting a farming population of 4 to support 3 miners (circa 13 H for 7 population depending on city tile) is pretty rough we need another solution. Not in the least because pre-civil service tech you can only farm next to a river, so getting 4 farms in would be rare.
This solution comes in the form of high food tiles, flood plains and the pig/cow/corn/rice/fish/crab/clam resources. These give you single tiles with about 5F (in the early game before technologies give you a production boost) and are key to supporting cities.
FAT CROSS ERRORS
Very common mistake is to pick a site that is fantastic when it gets its second ring but rubbish before then (eg. all the resources 2 tiles out) AND THEN not be able to obtain your 10 culture fat cross quickly enough and have a dud city for anything up to 50 or 90 turns (1H build times for theatre/library). Solutions :
- Pick a creative leader (+2 cult/turn in all cities)
- Use culture slider (available post-music) to turn 50% hammers into culture.
- Build Stonehenge (free obelisk in all cities till Plantation tech)
- Use Caste system to run an artist specialist.
- Get state religion into the city (+1cult/turn), this is good general advice to take advantage of happiness plus other civics bonuses of religion. I advise sending missionaries hot on the heels of your settlers in nearly all circumstances.
- Sistine chapel (+2cult/specialist) allows you to run a citizen specialist and expand in 5 turns
.- Whip population (under slavery civic) to rush production [note that pop. can sometimes be put to better use than whipping]
- Use Great Artist to 'culture bomb' an instant 4000
It is very important to note that after calendar tech, you CANNOT build obelisks (which are v.cheap) and your culture buildings become rather expensive for a hammer-poor starting city. I have delayed researching plantation when actively expanding my empire.
Also, if you are stuck with no Hammer tiles in your first ring, you should still NEVER take eg.50 turns to build a theatre. Run your first citizen as a citizen specialist to get an extra hammer (or an engineer if you’re under caste system
Future plans involve discussing the importance of rivers, planning out a settlement pattern and getting some screenshots to help explain things.
Hope people find this helpful and this provokes some useful thoughts. Lemme know what you think here or PM me if you fancy
). Can you explain the significance of your Calendar comment? I assume you mean that when obelisks go out you should have missionaries around to help 
