City Build question

[Mordraken]

I'm relativley knew to Civ4, but played Civ1 for years.

I have a couple of questions for those that know about building in cities. First, do you build a Grocer in a city that doesn't have those 4 resources (bannanas, Spices, etc) within their resource area? or does that bonus for those resources apply to any city (i.e. if you have one Bannana in your nation, then every city with a Grocer gains +1 health?). If you don't have any of those things, is the +25% to commerce worth the cost of the Grocer? Same sort of question for the harbor if you don't have those resources...

Second - when you have built all the buildings in a city that you can build do you generally start producing wealth, culture, research or military units? How do you decide what to do? I've had that "problem" in one game where I had a few cities way away from where my combat front was, and the city was quite large.

I know these decisions are really dependent on the strategic situation at the time, but in general, how do you decide what to do?

 

[Equisilus]

I'm no expert...which is why I decided I liked the below responses so much more than mine, you better just forget you ever saw this one.

 

[SheckyS]

In order to get the health benefit of a grocer/harbor, the city doesn't have to have the resource within it's radius. It just has to be connected to the resource. So the resource itself can be in a completely different city, as long as the resource tile has the appropriate improvement on it and is connected to the city by a road, river, or coast (once you have the right tech), the city gets the benefit. You can see all the resources that a city has access to on the city screen in the upper right.

 

[petey]

If you have one of a resource within your territory, then all cities get the benefit from it. So, if one city has bananas, then every city will get the health boost from it when they build a grocer.

If you have nothing else to build, build units. The AI can be a lot sneakier than in earlier versions of the game - especially at the higher levels - so building a few more units to move down and garrison your border cities while you're waiting for more buildings to become available is rarely a bad thing. Extra units cost extra money, though, so if you can't afford it, build them anyways and then go pillage and capture a few cities to make up the cost.

 

[Seven05]

With regards to the individual buildings, I never build a building just to build something, there is always something better to do with those hammers.

If you don't need the health bonus from a groccery (or won't get it because you lack the resources), it is only useful if the city is making enough gold for the 25% to actually amount to anything. In a lot of cities this will mean no groccery stores for them. The same is true for a lot of buildings people build just to build something. There are some exceptions, for example I will build courthouses in cities that don't really need them just to get enough of them to allow the Forbidden palace if I need that.

Instead of wasting production on buildings that will not benefit me I will either adjust the tiles being worked to slow production in favor of great people or commerce or I will produce additional military units to bolster my power rating and ensure no AI is ever foolish enough to attack me (and any that are will be quickly dealt with). If military upkeep is becoming a problem I will simply slow down the production speed of the city while I wait for a new technology.

I will build wealth, research or culture at times. Most often I will build wealth and adjust the population in favor of producing commerce since that tends to have more of an impact on reasearch than 50% of the production except at cities that are truely production powerhouses. For example, if I can switch to commerce tiles that increase my commerce by 8 that is better than 16 hammers of production used to build wealth or research.

It's a bit confusing to explain and sounds like a lot of micro-managing but it's really pretty easy once you get used to it. You'll also quickly learn what cities are capable of and which of them need micro-managing like this and which of them can simply switch to building wealth or reasearch. Even if you want to avoid micro-managing at this level you can always go to the city before it finished building its last building and turn on "emphasize commerce" to let the AI manager do the work for you.