Basic Question

When you are just starting to build and specialize your cities isn't food still a high priority?
I mean even a production or commerce city needs food to grow right? Do you want all your cities to reach 20+ population?

Thanx For Responses

 

Perfectly right; food is necessary for every city: commerce, production, GP farm... I'd say every city has at least 1 (lucky), 2 (more usual) or more (GP farm, production city) working on food tiles (food specials or irrigation).

Without food, you can't grow, you cant' work food-deficit tiles, so of course it's necessary.

 

perfectly right that food is a high priority.

but no, when i'm 'just starting to build" my cities i don't necessarily want all my cities to reach 20+ population. i don't want any of them to reach 20+ early. i'd go broke, and i don't have nearly enough happy and health resources/techs for that many people until quite late in the game! plenty of my cities are built knowing they'll never have access to all 20 of their own tiles due to overlap, but that's okay in that situation.

i want to have enough food so my city can grow to whatever "the right size for this city at this current time in the game" is. for me, that's not going to end up being 20+ all the time, it depends. sometimes it'll grow pretty good at first, not amazing, but i know it'll get better during a second growth phase after biology, when farms get better.

 

With commerce city there is the issue that you actually have to WORK cottages for it to be a good city. That means if you put too many citizens on food it is not as effective.

So I'd say for commerce, food is a medium priority. Try to have a 3-6 surplus maybe(2 farmed grasslands, 1 pig or wheat), and work as many cottages as you can.

It is the same for a production city, the whole point is to make hammers and build things. So you can't dedicate too many citizens to food. But food is more important for production... you need extra food to offset the hills that don't give food.


So food is a high priority in production cities. you probably want the same surplus, 3-6, but you will need more farms to reach that surplus.

 

Some cities you may build to obtain particular resources eg to obtain early access to Iron, Copper before your culture has the time to spread there. Others you may build to block out other civs. They may not have good potential to reach 20 and the city may be poor in other respects (production, commerce, etc) so food would not necessarily be a priority - the city may never develop much.

What I cannot get my head around is how fast to grow a city to the level I can currently support ( because of happy limits ).

I tend to grow at a pace of plus 2 food up to size 6-7, then probably build a granary if I've not already. Then when I can increase my happiness more, and when health gets to be a problem I look to grow as fast as possible and then once at the city's happy-max I revert to the squares that give me the most hammers, coins, food etc.

Not at all sure if this is the correct approach.