What's your advice on 'Citizen management'?
I have been focusing on Production early on in an attempt to get buildings and wonders constructed early. Sometimes I switch to Gold focus if I'm running a little tight on funds.
I've noticed though that the AI tend to grow their cities REALLY fast with new population happening every other turn and they can end up with cities in the 20's while I'm still in the 10's.
This of course means the many slots for specialists often are not fully used and I'm wondering if this is my fundamental flaw?
This is really dependent on location and opening-tree.
First of all I'd like to say that my Citizen management is by no means optimal, I'm in 90% of the cases using the automated citizens (mostly to test that they are doing fine, which they usually are), only switching the governor focus around.
I do however usually lock specialists myself, or at least when the governor specialists conflict with how I want to play the game.
Anyways I'll split this into Progress and Tradition.
As Progress, I tend to keep my cities on either default or full production focus, switching between them from time to time to cut turns off buildings or turns on growth, when I get close enough to get a new citizen I usually switch to full food for a turn or two to pick it up. In general I let the food from buildings policy do most of the citizen building and then I finish it off with food focus.
This isn't really working that well anymore since the food from buildings policy got moved, so these days I tend to use default focus a lot more than production focus, sometimes even switching to full food for a few pop, if I feel like the city is falling behind. I think the most important part of this is actually making sure you get the buildings providing production out quickly, Watermill, Forge, Well, Arena, Baracks.
For Tradition you usually need a lot more micro-management, your capital tend to throw away most of your food on specialists if you don't control it properly. That being said, running those specialists usually isn't a bad idea, the governor is usually just trying to run too many of them. For this reason my tradition play uses a lot more Food focus than my progress play, growth-bonuses in tradition makes focusing on food slightly more effective than it is for Progress. However, getting infrastructure up is still important, usually requiring me to make investment in stuff like Watermills to get the cities up and running.
The key to population-growth, is that by definition, everything else gets easier if the pop goes up (assuming you improve the land and actually have enough tiles to work). For example, if your goal is to build a market, build a library and reach pop 10, the most effective way to do this is focusing food until you reach pop 10 and then build the market and the Library, because you have access to more pop that can work more production. As you might expect this does not always work out very well, and the key is to know when to prioritize growth and when to prioritize production.
Not really a very good answer, but it is too situation-dependent for me to say anything useful, sorry about that.
So what's the early warfare army composition usually like? Spearmen plus chariot archers? Spearmen plus chariot archers plus catapult? Horsemen plus catapult and one or two spearmen?
I'm usually not in the business of ancient era warfare unless I have a unique unit available, so I can't say that for sure.
Are catapults worth building? I kind of find their attack strength to be a bit weak, but are they still built as a precursor to having better promoted trebuchets?
Catapults are definitely worth building, they demolish cities without walls. They die in like 2 hits, but they dish out damage just as quickly.
I know there will be varieties of time when you first start to conquer your first city, but what are the typical army compositions like? (E.g. spearmen + archers for early rush, maybe different when slightly after...)
Also, which promotions do you normally prioritize for your melee units? Getting to shock 2? Or double medic? Or one medic, one cover? Two covers?
Here's the deal, it completely depends on what your goal with the war is and on how the terrain looks like.
Early warfare can usually have two goals, first is to kill a lot of units for Authority bonuses, and to stop potential expansion towards you, this is usually best handled by archers and horse-units (and spearmen if you run out of horses) chariot archers are also fantastic at this if you're play playing in rough terrain, where they are completely useless. Of course if you have access to Swordsmen, compbows or skirmishers you're going to be using those units instead.
If your goal is to take cities, your best bet is either catapults, but make sure the terrain allows your catapults to attack properly, you want to place them on hills and you usually want hills or forests(but not forested hills) in front of them so the city(and defenders) can't attack you back. If the terrain don't allow you to set up your catapults properly you can either try to move into melee-range with them or you can just give up on it and go for another city.
If the city is coastal, Dromons work just as well as catapults and cheaper.
For my melee promotions, I tend to focus a lot on Medic and Cover, like you said, the goal for my melee-units is to stand still and take punishment and those two promotions helps with that the most. Usually I end up with way too many medic-units but I rather have too many than too few.
Sorry if that was not what you wanted to hear.
Anything, huh?
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So, Funak, what are you wearing?
Right now I'm not wearing anything, I just woke up
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