Advanced Guide: Magical Hammers & Between Turn Ordering

[Smote]

This guide instructs you on how to make free hammers with your citizens, during the inbetween turn growth phase. If you grow your city quickly, this can be a very valuable source of hammers that can get you 20+ hammers/city throughout a game, some of which come during those valuable first turns. Observe the series of screenshots.

Game setting: Quick/small/6 person ffa/pangaea



http://i.imgur.com/WaT76.jpg

Here is turn 4, no micromanagement.

http://i.imgur.com/sVMbh.jpg

The natural continuation. Notice the gold increased by 8, not 7. Now, lets go back to turn 4, and treat these last two screenshots as reference.

http://i.imgur.com/Z0q0F.jpg

Notice the selection of production focus (though in this case gold focus is actually better). The locked tile is necessary to make sure the city uses the sugar instead of a sheep.

http://i.imgur.com/HmdG2.jpg

And here's the stunning result: a gain of 7 production, instead of 5!

http://i.imgur.com/auJgy.jpg

This screenshot is for the sake of comparison of the game state on turn 5, between a micro-managed city and default focus'ed city. Notice the gain of 2 hammers. Generally, 1-4 hammers can be gained each time any city increases population by using this trick. If we had selected gold focus, we would be in even better shape, gaining an additional gold by using the silver mine. We could then manually adjust to the desired tiles.


Let me go on to say that every city should therefore always be in production (or in special cases gold/research) focus, and every tile should be locked.

So what else can be learned? Let me continue on to:



Turn Ordering

The way the inbetween turn phase works, is that your cities are processed starting with your capital and moving through the list of your cities, in order of acquisition.

1. Happiness increase for golden age is tallied.
2. Each city FIRST grows, THEN produces. Thus, first it gains food, then it gains production and gold, and then science. I am not sure about production before or after gold (someone can test this by building a market or national treasury). I am also not sure about happiness (someone can test this by having 2 cities 1 turn away from growing, while at 0 happiness, and see how much food each makes).
3. The cities' production of culture and research is tallied and added to the empire. This means that production of national college can unexpectedly increase beakers.
4. A fun trick is to grow and produce Hanging Gardens at the same time with your capital, since growth happens before production. Your capitals population will increase by 2. However, if another city was going to grow, it won't, because your capitals production happens before your 2nd cities growth.


Cares and considerations:

Barbarian and enemy movement happens before growth. This means if you are depending on a nice 5 food sea tile, and are at 0/60 food or so with locked tiles and a barb comes and blocks your nice fish tile, your city will actually starve a population. This can also happen on land-based tiles, so always watch out for enemy units blocking your tiles and potential implications for starvation. This can happen suddenly, so try to keep any active barbarian encampments far from your civilization.

Edit: Made pictures links to increase clarity of post.

 

[Dreadnought]

Took me a second read through to fully understand, but now it makes total sense.

Thanks for the info! I never thought of this. Now, especially in the early era, I'll have my cities set to production focus and simply micromanage my citizens.

 

[Smote]

yep. I do this with every city, every game of civ, always! and if you get distracted by war, at least youre on production focus so you get hammers

 

[pirsq]

Great write-up! I do this sometimes in the course of my regular micromanagement, but now I'll consciously put 1-turn-to-grow cities on my mental checklist.

Choosing a focus is also the way to lock a citizen to a tile when it bugs out and becomes non-lockable (when a barbarian is standing on a previously locked tile, for example).

 

[Smote]

Thanks! I actually plan for it, and frequently have situations where I am 7 hammers from completing something, and am making 5 a turn, but 1 turn to grow (and get 2 extra hammers). Then I complete it, even though the previous turn it said 2 turns remaining. Constantly shaving turns like this has a snowball effect which can end up in a substantial lead over opponents that don't know micromanagement tricks

A focus is a way to fix a bugged citizen, though a better way to deal with it to click on the center city tile, which unlocks all citizens and allows them to be re-locked (and unbugged)

 

[vexing]

good to know. i think the pictures detract from the clarity of the message - especially since they're 1080p.

to summarize:

growth happens before production
by selecting a production focus a newly born citizen will work a useful tile the turn it is born and add to production, whereas on default focus it'll work a food tile and add nothing.

 

[Smote]

The pictures prove it ;P There are many skeptics out there.

Thanks for the criticism, I made links instead of full pictures since they blocked the text too much.

 

[Astragoth]

Maby I am missing something, but ny keeping on food focus in this example after the 2nd citizen is born, you get 2 surplus food instead of one.

Thisa means the next citizen is born in 8 turns and not 16, according to the screeshots).

Isn't growing your city more important then early hammers?

 

[Schalke 04]

Maby I am missing something, but ny keeping on food focus in this example after the 2nd citizen is born, you get 2 surplus food instead of one.

Thisa means the next citizen is born in 8 turns and not 16, according to the screeshots).

Isn't growing your city more important then early hammers?

The trick is:

your city will have 0 Food in the bucket after it grew, no matter how much surplus food it has per turn. So surplus food is always wasted when your city grows, the extra hammer is not

Directly after the new pop point you can adjust your tiles to food again and don't loose any growth potential at all.


In addition to the OP:
You may want to check your cities 2 or 3 turns before they are going to grow. That makes it sometimes easier to have a perfect output. What you want to have is not a single food unit "overflow". If you check it in the last turn before growth, this overflow is not always avoidable.

 

[vexing]

The trick is:

your city will have 0 Food in the bucket after it grew, no matter how much surplus food it has per turn.

that isn't true - surplus food definitely rolls over.
this only applies to the newly born citizen producing food; they don't because they aren't born until food production happens. however fresh from the womb they can still be sent out to the mines to do something productive that turn.

astragoth - on the turn the citizen is born, you can (and maybe should) lock them to a food tile to continue growth. again, this strat is specific to one turn prior to growth, you can have default focus at all other times.

 

[Smote]

Its not a decision between hammers or growth. Its a trick to get extra hammers. The bottom screenshot is unarguably ahead by 2 hammers, compared to the 2nd screenshot.

 

[godevils]

So do you use this tactic each time the city is at 1 turn before growth. If not at some time maybe even early the city will go into stagnant with no growth.

 

[vexing]

you have to relock the tiles after growth turn.

so turn before growth: click production focus, lock food tiles so city will grow
after growth: click default focus, click city center to unlock tiles.

or alternatively always keep production focus, and lock food tiles as necessary. this is dangerous because you can starve if barbarians come.

 

[Kevin J]

Wow, this is a neat little trick. I'll be incorporating this - at least for the early game.

Very nice find!

 

[EmperorFool]

that isn't true - surplus food definitely rolls over.
this only applies to the newly born citizen producing food; they don't because they aren't born until food production happens. however fresh from the womb they can still be sent out to the mines to do something productive that turn.

In my mind this is the real trick. By setting focus to production or gold you're helping the governor choose low-food tiles. Since the new citizen won't earn any food but will earn production and gold, any food on the added tile is wasted that turn.

Whether it's a bug or just an oversight, the governor should clearly consider all tiles as zero food when assigning the new citizen for that turn and then reassign normally after adding the tile's production and gold. Either way, this is good stuff.

 

[vexing]

i use this extensively for gauntlet submissions. for even greater benefit you can work the other end:

imagine you need four food to grow, you're working a mine on a hillside gold for +3 production, 3 gold, and your other worked tiles give you 2 excess food.
if you leave things the way they are you'll grow in two turns.
if you instead take the citizen from the mine and put them on a grassland, you'll get the 4 food you need to grow next turn, and you'll still end up working the mine with the new citizen, so you grow one turn early for free.

 

[MadDjinn]

erm, how is this a trick?

leaving focus on default is always a bad idea...

vexing's management of food to gain a pop one turn early is actually more interesting.

 

[EmperorFool]

erm, how is this a trick?

Because you're taking advantage of a non-obvious effect of the timing between adding food, production, and gold and when the population grows.

I had always assumed that the new citizen had zero effect in between turns and only added anything on the following turns. We can argue whether that's logical or expected, but it goes against my expectation and thus is a trick in my book.

leaving focus on default is always a bad idea...

Yes, for other reasons I suspect.

 

[Tabarnak]

I always do that. If you can produce same or more hammers for a short period of time(1 or 2 next turns) without halting growth, well go for it. Simple math. In fact i always microing intensively my citizens in the beginning. Each turn or so. Extracting optimal food, gold, pop. for a given task. With some practice, it comes naturally. I did that in civ4 too.

Took me time to understand what Smote was saying lol. Pretty much more simple from what vexing said.

April 16th??? Lol i missed that one completely!

 

[Monthar]

I did not know about this trick until a few hours ago. So I ran a test game on emperor, standard map, and speed, archipelago with Elizabeth. Even without having and CS allies and, 5 tiles that couldn't be farmed, 4 cows, 1 whales, 1 fish, 1 cotton and 2 riverside hills that I did farm and about half the tiles were sea tiles, so only 2 food with the lighthouse, I still managed to grow the city very quickly and get a lot of building done.

With this new-found knowledge now I'm going to have to go back and replay several of the GotM maps to see if it helps me finish them faster.