Different type of cities?

[johnny_rudeboy]

One thing I miss is that you dont really get any real benefits from specializing your cities.

I would really like to have one city set up to produce GS, near a mountain and who builds all the science buildings first. Then another city focused on gold and religion (spreading religion with trade routes etc). And then a city focusing on hammers, also the city that builds the military units and what not. And last but not least a city who focus only on food to distribute across the empire to the city that needs it.

That would be a fun way to plan and play. But since all internal food and hammer trade routes produce the same despite the amount the city it starts from generate it does not really matter. And since GS, GM and GE are on the same counter it does not really help to have different specialist in different cities.

As it is now you either go wide or focus on only one city, your capital. Sure settling a couple of more cities is good but hard to specialize them. You can of course still settle a city with good production and build army units there or work boats, workers etc for the other cities. And another city near gold generating luxury resources. But it will not truly be your production city since your great engineers that city would produce would make the science city have to pay more for a GS. So better just to have one city focus on it all. And why cant you choose what city should be your holy city? Why always the capital? And it would be fun if you could move population from one city to another. Perhaps a social policy or tech could be needed for that.

Perhaps I am just not playing it right and are there any mods (that work on Mac) that can be used to achieve the above?

 

[joncnunn]

That's not even the main reason different types of cities aren't done in Civ V. (With the exception of designated military unit city)
In base game, you need every single self built city to have a full set of buildings in order to build national wonders and the national wonders can all be built in a single city.

(By contrast, in Civ IV, you were forced to specialize by only being allowed 2 national wonders in a given city and you also needed a flat 5 cities to start construction of them. An empire with 6 or more cities could start them faster if they had the weaker production cities pick different standard buildings to construct.)

There are mods around national wonder behavior, if you change "-1" to 0 or higher then it would become a flat requirement like Civ IV. (With the note that it's number of other cities that have to have the building; e.g. setting to 1 actually requires 2. Set to 0 if you only want that city to have to have the building.) (Caution that values above 0 really could hurt AI Venice if they are in the game)

There is also XML for limiting number of national wonders that can be built in a single city, I've not tested that to see if its still active XML or just leftover from Civ IV, but you could try changing the value from -1 to something else. (Although you'd really hurt Venice if they are in the game)

 

[Trackmaster]

It's all about strategy honestly. You're not forced to specialize, but it can handy if you can plan to do it from the start. The game builds in that opportunity by giving some wonders the benefit of "increasing XYZ by XX%" as opposed to only a flat amount. This is a clue to me that I should build that city around whatever is being multiplied. And, if you choose not to take advantage of the National Wonders, then you can obviously mix and match your buildings, as most of them are built around multipliers or helping improve a specific type of tile.

And, naturally, you're going to want to build your coastal cities on the outermost edge around trade, your cities next mountains and/or jungles around science, just luxury resource heavy cities around gold and make sure that your pinch point cities and/or ones next to war mongers as your unit producers (because you always have the highest level barracks/armory/etc. available). Of course, because it was your first city and gets off to a fast start, you'll gravitate towards your capital for wonders, but try to spread that out and specialize if you can. If anything, the capital might work best as your cultural hub. You'll also probably be tempted to trade a lot from it because it'll probably be on a coast.

Also, there is no "production city." Production is generic and is used to build things. Make sure that all of your cities are productive, so that you're not waiting 50 turns to get things out the door.

 

[Callonia]

I've had specialized cities that was only good at production, gold, or science but by late game, they could do all three good because of the limited slots you have to put specialists in. So because of this I never worry that much I guess.. except for high production cities, they're a necessary if you want things built in reasonable time frame.

 

[joncnunn]

It's all about strategy honestly. You're not forced to specialize, but it can handy if you can plan to do it from the start. The game builds in that opportunity by giving some wonders the benefit of "increasing XYZ by XX%" as opposed to only a flat amount.

Which in 90%+ of the cases your capital has the biggest population, best raw production, best raw gold, and best raw science, making the capital the best location for all of these national wonders.

Edit: That percent is from Vanilla and G&K where cargo routes weren't available. In BNW, that can be 100% of the time but conversely you can also make the best pop city be a different one depending upon how you route your food cargo ships.

 

[joncnunn]

I've had specialized cities that was only good at production, gold, or science but by late game, they could do all three good because of the limited slots you have to put specialists in. So because of this I never worry that much I guess.. except for high production cities, they're a necessary if you want things built in reasonable time frame.

Placing specialists is a different issue entirely. The primary benefit in Civ V is actually producing the Great Person (GS -> past 8 turns of science in late game instead of capping at less than 2000 or if early on an academy, GE -> an entire world wonder instead of capping at around 1100 hammers [note that Civ IV great wonders hammer cost was also 2 times higher to compensate for the double resource bonus, to be like Civ IV it would cap around 550.], GM -> ok, this one is rather weak by comparison unless playing Venice)
And so you always run all science slots in all cities, never run any merchant slots in any city until there's no risk of actually spawning a GM (which due to shared counter means one fewer more desirable great person), and only work engineer spots when there's nothing better for that city.

 

[Trackmaster]

Which in 90%+ of the cases your capital has the biggest population, best raw production, best raw gold, and best raw science, making the capital the best location for all of these national wonders.

Right, and running everything through the capital and using your other cities as support is a strategy that you're more than welcome to use, but specialization is something to at least consider if you can pull it off. I would definitely say that a huge challenge of specialization is the difficulty of getting in Wonder finished in a non-Capital city early on (as they are what can help define a specialty early on).

Also consider that a potential drawback to an all one basket capital is that you didn't have a lot of control over where your capital is. You could search around a little bit, but ultimately you didn't want to waste to much time getting your Civ up and running. For your subsequent cities, you scouted and tried to cherry pick the best locations based on resources and how it fit your empire, conceivably meaning that they should be more resource rich.