City placement & development (and other questions)

[BurN]

Hi, this is the first time I post after a few weeks of lurking. I've been playing the original civ4 (I think you call it vanilla?) for about 2-3 weeks now. This is my first turn based game but I have to say I'm completely hooked. Started on settler and went up in difficulty pretty fast.

Yesterday I decided to give monarch a shot after I started steamrolling prince. I did get a space victory with Gandhi on balanced map/standard size/normal speed, running some kind of SE/CE hybrid.
However I had the constant feeling I wasn't really competing with the leading civs. I did well till around the modern age but then the romans' and egyptians' teching was going through the roof (and so did their power graph , I <3 not having acces to oil when the romans are attacking me with modern armor). And due my average diplomacy, there wasn't that much trading to do. If it wasn't for the internet and bribing people into war, it would've been a loss that's for sure.

I think my lack of knowledge is keeping me back. For example I have no clue how to maximize my cities output. E.g. I don't know what the perfect size for my gp farm should be or at what size it can run the most specialists. The same goes for how I should get the most & . I truly suck balls when it comes to maths and during my lurking I see there's quite a lot of people here that love playing with numbers. So I'm asking if anyone got any tips or advise on how to calculate my food vs / / . It would help tremendously in my early game when it comes to city placement. Every food or any hammer helps.

And I also have some random questions:

1. If two cities work the same tile. Can I alter which city is working it? Or does it just go to the most powerfull city.

2. I tend to build few but resourcefull cities rather then split the resources which would get me more cities (and sometimes more workable, read in fat cross, resources overall. I'm not quite sure if that's the best approach? As said I'm no wizard with numbers so I have no clue.

3. I usually make my capital my gp farm unless I find some uber gp spot for a second or third city. The logic being I build most wonders in my capital, which start to add up. But I read a lot of people bureaucracy/cottage their capital and see it as logical not to make your capital a and powerhouse. Am I missing something?

ps: I did look around for some calculations on city development/growing/output and I did find something that seemed usefull. But allas the links that were there don't work anymore.

Anyways, I'll go start another monarch game now and check back on this later. Thanks for the help in advance!

 

[futurehermit]

1. If you want to switch which city is working an overlapping tile open up the city that isn't working it and click on the tile. Voila, now it is working it.

2. It's better to build 2 cities working all the resources than to build 1 city with lots of resources but 2-3 resources going to waste. Especially if they are good resources like precious metals or food tiles. Every city ideally should have one or more food specials and one or more other special. You want to be claiming the maximum number of specials. Try and expand your empire as your economy allows.

3. In my experience your capital will either be a gpfarm or a comm/prod mix bureaucracy monster. Whichever it is you should look for the other asap as you want both. If you have LOTS of surplus food, make it a gpfarm (GL, NE, lots of specialists). If you have a moderate amount of food, get lots of cottages and mines and get bureaucracy. You say your capital builds lots of wonders. This can be good or bad depending. Generally for newer players I recommend building fewer wonders and focusing more on expansion. Newer players tend to build too many wonders and not nearly enough military and don't expand enough.

In my most recent game I horse-archer rushed my closest opponent after I had a 4-city empire building only 2 wonders (oracle for HBR and ToA but only because I had marble in my capital and they were cheap and easy). After the war (that was lengthy with a few ceasefires) I had a 14-city empire (there's a screenshot of it in the HA-Why the Hate? thread). After developing it (cottage-spamming) I was easily able to out-tech the AI and am cruising to a domination win (German panzers rock).

My point? See my signature