Building everything or specialize cities

[peter79]

General question for people, if you have a city where you have a limited amount of good adjacency spots would you decide specialize? For example you only have 1 good resource adjacency spots so you decide to focus on industry and don't bother with science buildings (you may have a better city from science spots).

 

[stealth_nsk]

General question for people, if you have a city where you have a limited amount of good adjacency spots would you decide specialize? For example you only have 1 good resource adjacency spots so you decide to focus on industry and don't bother with science buildings (you may have a better city from science spots).

That's the story which changed with the last patch. Generally yes, you want to specialize, because you could add on top resources with +% bonuses to maximize particular yield. And urban towns could provide the mass of basic yields.

In practice the patch is too recent to say for sure.

 

[Nic@Melbourne]

Build per need rather than ‘specialize’. Try to balance things a little.
Build counter to uniques and policy cards. If unique is science, gold. Then I build that of course. Then build the opposite with other buildings, so you aren’t too weak in one area.

 

[Berrern]

Personally I prioritise buildings that give good adjacency bonuses first, but I find that I still end up building nearly everything in the end - except for very late age, when I don't really need any further science or culture yields anymore.

What has really changed is how many cities I end the age with. Before this patch I always converted as many towns into cities as possible, but that's no longer a viable strategy. Instead, I now end up with 3-4 cities and specialize every town - if they have good adjacencies, I choose Urban center, if not I specialize based on their highest yield. Most of them actually end up being Resort towns!

I'm still only on my first game on 1.2.5, well into Modern age, and as @stealth_nsk said, it's still a bit too early to know the best strategy.

 

[Leucarum]

The increased building costs in 1.2.5 definitely mean you have to consider whether you want to build specific buildings in cities. But I don't know if it's prompted specialization as much as it has created a hierarchy between different buildings in terms of which ones are less important.

Also I'd advise you to use urban centers as much as you can. Putting a tier 1 science/culture/gold building everywhere is often better than building too many cities.