Do you use specialists?

[mbarker]

These seem under-powered. Does anyone actively use them and, if so, how do you make them impactful?

 

[AsH2]

They have a big impact on birth control.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Sometimes specialist actually provide better yields than tiles and food become easy to produce with mechanized agriculture. Some yields such as Culture and science is not Always that easy to produce from tiles, so specialist can help you get a jump here.

 

[leandrombraz]

Depend on what I'm doing. It's useful when you need as much as you can get of a yield. If I'm building a wonder I might be able to build it one turn faster using specialists. If I'm going for religious victory, all that matter is faith, so it make sense to work every specialist faith slot, get as much as I can from my holy sites. It's also useful when your cities overlap and there isn't a lot of tiles to work.

 

[Victoria]

Seems like a bi-monthly post.
There is less value in growing cities above 10. They have all the distriocts you normally need and amenities become more difficult, big cities sap happiness from an empire a bit.
So when you get to 10 and all you are doing is having pop on food tiles, make them specialists instead.

Also think about it... 2 science from a specialist does not see like a lot but how much science does a library give you... 2 science. You have just doubled your science by using a specialist, it does not have to be at 10, even a city at 6 can have a campus and 2 specialists... 2 for the lib, 4 for the Uni and 4 for the 2 specialists

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Amenties is not much of a problem once you get into the later parts of the game, because at this Point the game give so many options to increase them and the fact that Entertainment complex stack with water parks make it easy for even large cities to reach +3 amenties.

Food is also easy to produce with farms having yields as high as +7 food and that don't consider the base yield of the tile. The big problem for growth is housing and building expensive neighbourhoods may not be Worth it.

A large city is pretty much Always better than a small one but there is some cost to growth that may not make it Worth to grow it very large but if the game was slower and harder you would have much more reason to build large cities since a large city use the land more efficient than a small city and land is limited in this game so the more Power you can concentrate on a certain area the better.

Specialist allow one tile to employ three people and given that district tiles are already supertiles, it simply make them even better and concentrate production better than normal tiles do.

For example a mine can produce let say 6 production, an industrial hub can produce like 20 from adjacency, +3 from workshop, +6 from factory and +9 from three specialist so nearly 40 production while using only a single tile and 3 pops which can be feed by a single farm. Similar conclusion can be made with the other districts.

The drawback is that districts need more investment than tile improvement and larger population to make the most use of them, but in a packed empire in which cities are placed as close as possible which will be more productive per tile compared to a empire who only build a few cities in the same area.

Like you want as many cities as possible, you probably going to want them as big as possible, each Citizens is Worth 0.5 science and 0.3 Culture with extra value from tiles they work and districts they unlock and the amenity problem mostly go away later in the game so the main question is how much value there is to invest in housing past the cheap ways to gain housing.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Nah! I don't reallocate city populations. and what are 'specialist' that enables better tile yield?

 

[Victoria]

A large city is pretty much Always better than a small one

Like you want as many cities as possible, you probably going to want them as big as possible, each Citizens is Worth 0.5 science and 0.3

This is only true for people that play a longer more immersive game
If you were wanting to play as fast as possible the old best size was 6, with the changing of rationalism it is now 10.
Both ways or others ways are equally fine, depends on what you want out of your game.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

This is only true for people that play a longer more immersive game
If you were wanting to play as fast as possible the old best size was 6, with the changing of rationalism it is now 10.
Both ways or others ways are equally fine, depends on what you want out of your game.

I suspect that is guess rather than actually proved with mathematics. Only sure way to know the optimal solution would be to let an perfect ai play through to see the optimal city sizes.

Also winning fast is not particular impressive, try to win giving away 20+ turns doing nothing.

 

[Victoria]

I suspect that is guess rather than actually proved with mathematics.

The 10 is fact, based on gaining 50% science and culture bonuses to cities with a population of 10.

You would trust an AI’s choice over some of the best SP players from this forum and the Chinese forum some of who have maths master degrees who concluded and concurred that a population of 6 was optimum before the card change?

I suspect no guessing involved when it came to these decisions which are in old posts on this forum by the likes of @civtrader6 and @Lily_Lancer and can be ratified by Chinese forum visitors like @Boyan_Sun

Using words like the perfect AI indicating such a decision is impossible I would guess is a little far fetched. Suspecting a guess is rather unkind.

You have your view on fast wins but the strategies taught to new players to help them on harder levels were created by the fast players. Impressive or not it is how they like to play. Please respect peoples right to choice.

@Lily_Lancer is now playing online speed deity and says that is the best test, rightly or wrongly. 20 turns doing nothing is a bit weird as you can be dead in 20 turns so I cannot take such a suggestion seriously.

 

[Sostratus]

I suspect that is guess rather than actually proved with mathematics. Only sure way to know the optimal solution would be to let an perfect ai play through to see the optimal city sizes.

It's a fairly straightforward thing if you think like an AI:
The most powerful thing a city has is districts. You want as many copies of the "winningest" districts as you can get. Districts (and their buildings) are where our profits are!
For pretty much any empire, the marginal city located in an arbitrary location best serves the empire by possessing a campus, Theater, and commercial hub. Why? Because it boosts research, civic, and gold, which are all universal, plus we get our trade route. Further, with card support, these districts get the biggest boosts of any. (A faith empire would want Holy sites too.) Assume you cannot guarantee adjacency because you're an Ai and therefore you suck at that.

Okay, so for any given amount of space, the way to maximize the great number of campuses is to maximize the # of cities in that space. But wait! every district is tied to # of cities, and # of districts per city is tied to pop, which means at the cost of 6 food, 3 housing, and 1.5 amenities, we can make a city pull extra weight with more district capacity. Population is where all our costs are!
Packing more cities into a given space will eventually lead to a trade off food+housing per city to allow for a greater number of cities. This is because districts take up space. At maximum pack, cities have ~12 workable tiles each, less any terrain problems. 12 tiles is obviously enough to support 1 pop, every district we add drops the workable tiles by 1 by raises the global resource outputs we care about. So there's a trade off in how many pops we can support tied into how many districts we make.
The optimal population point will always end up being either a district unlock point or some external factor like the +50% from cards bonus, which conveniently overlaps with your 4th district. The 3 pops from 7->10 are worth a TON because they give you a massive reward from the card. In fact, pop 8, 9, are worth basically zero, pop 10 brings a district slot AND the +50% boost.
More pops than contribute little to your science, culture, and gold per amenity spent, since you can't get more campuses or theaters in that city, so we'd prefer to invest those amenities into pops in cities that do have very high per citizen returns on sci/culture/gold. Being over 10 pops intentionally isn't really something you want. Contributing more food/production by working a new tile is generally not going to speed up your win as much as if you had those pops in a new city that could deploy its own campus. If the food is there and you have stadiums its not the end of the world though.

Things have gotten more complex now that there's power in the game, and the game lasts longer. But in a simple analysis of getting the most profit and paying the lowest cost, we want to maximize # districts per empire population, which means many smaller cities. And size 10 essentially makes several districts worth 1.5x more, so that magic number also increases our effective districts per pop as well. (A size 10 city with 3 districts under card support really has 4.5 districts, the unbuilt district slot doesn't matter much since globally we only care about sci, culture, gold, in this instance.)

Going to 13 pops is pointless because the yet additional district won't do much for our gold/science/culture, and 17, 20, etc, do nothing either. So we are stuck at 10. For production needs the obvious workaround is a core of larger cities that are very good at that, and then you spam as many of these pop efficient settlements as you possibly can. It is absolutely abusing the math of civ6 but since we know the math/ the outcomes of our actions, it's solvable without ever playing an actual game.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Well, Holy Sites are much more critical districts in GS. And IZs are not a bad idea. I guess this still doesn't justify growing to pop 13.

Though there is that GE!

 

[Sostratus]

Well, Holy Sites are much more critical districts in GS. And IZs are not a bad idea. I guess this still doesn't justify growing to pop 13.

Though there is that GE!

Its from the standpoint of "i have a basic core of cities that cover all the other boxes, now i just want to win science as fast as possible" or what have you.
This does not mean you can't do very well using other strategies, and i find the "optimal" city spam boring. Except as Mali, because toss a holy site in to round out 4 districts and you've got a science/culture/faith/gold generation machine that perfectly meshes with their playstyle!

 

[noonex]

> A large city is pretty much Always better than a small one

That is strange logic. 3 cities pop 10 are way more better than 2 cities pop 15. If you argue or have no problems getting both wide and tall - I will ask at what difficulty are you usually playing

 

[Ziad]

> A large city is pretty much Always better than a small one

That is strange logic. 3 cities pop 10 are way more better than 2 cities pop 15.

The person you are quoting only mentioned one city compared to another. It has no mention of multiple cities.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

> A large city is pretty much Always better than a small one

That is strange logic. 3 cities pop 10 are way more better than 2 cities pop 15. If you argue or have no problems getting both wide and tall - I will ask at what difficulty are you usually playing

It is about comparing 2 cities. It is well known you want as many cities in a land area as possible and after that the only way the game allow you to increase their productivity is by growing and building buidlings/districts.

So if you have infinite time and one empire have x cities with y Citizens and the other have x cities with z Citizens and y < z the empire with z Citizens will most likely produce resources Assuming that neither y or z are super large values per city

Given that the game give you alot more time than you need to win the payback time of growing your cities or even building tile improvement are too long to justify the additional long term resources.

 

[Ownsya]

Wow, this thread got a lot more interesting since last I checked it. Good timing too, I was literally just trying to analyze this question myself yesterday. Great explanations here, thank you for this post and answers.

 

[Ownsya]

Does the ideal 10 pop rule-of-thumb mean that for any city with access to freshwater, it would be wasteful to invest in a neighborhood or aqueduct (unless you want the IZ adjacency bonuses)? Since you can easily reach 10 pop housing with just city center buildings and one of campus/encampment/harbor/holy site (depending on beliefs)?

Also, are there some situations where higher pop is desirable? For example, what about for loyalty pressure if you want to flip cities, or you dont have access to a lot of land for settlements and are playing peacefully?

 

[kryat]

There are a few situations where more population in a single city is better, but it is rare.

Science wins can be accelerated by having higher production to complete projects and production often does scale with tiles (more so than science and culture). However, there’s a big caveat even to that since production is easier to obtain through trade routes (which scale to number of cities) or IZ adjacency bonuses.

Certain civs also have improvements that can increase gold, science, or culture (esp Mali, Mapuche, China, Sumeria, and Spain).

 

[Victoria]

Since you can easily reach 10 pop with just city center buildings and one of campus/encampment/harbor/holy site (depending on beliefs)?

It is important to remember that you want to be 10 at rationalism and if you are being fast that may be around T120-130 and certainly farm triangles and chopping cows helps.
You may have settled chopping cities that you know will never reach or just cities that were poorly placed with little prod and nothing to chop. It’s just judgement on a city by city basis because both easily and on time are questionable.