City specialization Help

[dirtyd]

Hey ladies and gents, I'm a n00b and need some help please. I logged about 80 hours into Civ4, but I never really grasped 100% of the game. I really need some help on how to spec cities. I'm really just stumped on it. For example, if I'm making a production city, what should it's population be at? How many farms should I build. Should I build farms, then tear them down into trading post for gold? If I do that won't the population go down?

As you can see I'm totally lost. Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

 

[kaltorak]

But you are talking about civ5 now right?

I don't think specializing civ4 cities would have helped you much beyond the basics on doing the same on civ5.
I'm still trying to figure it myself, until now, my civ5 cities are quite allaround even though I tried to specialize them

 

[cembandit]

A city with lots of grassland makes a decent gold city, spam traders.
When you hit a golden age is good time to get markets and banks in such cities, if not already there.

You could also friend maritime cities for the food. Then you could trade post anywhere.

 

[kaltorak]

With specializing cities I would like to specialize some on each aspect. If just doing trade posts is the way to go, its boring.

 

[cembandit]

Well a science city works too, using specialist from lib, uni, etc. Then you need farms to feed em. Watermill, granary. Garden for more GP. Using Nebby this is insanely powerful. You'll be bulbing a tech in each science city for every tech you get by research. Add in research pacts and it's pretty nasty.

If not lightbulbing, then trade post end up being science under rationalization policy.

 

[cembandit]

For a production city, I like food and hills. If the foods way high then unemployed or engineer specialist add up, hammer wise. Remember to purchase hills since they don't come naturally in most cases. I also purchase any irrigated grass for a nice fat farm. I stay away from plains, I'd rather run a specialist off the farms surplus. Least then I get a great person.

 

[dirtyd]

Yes, I'm talking about Civ5. So, you build a lot of farms, store the excess food, and when you get to 20 population tear them down to whatever you want to spec the city with?