General Strategic Questions

[Sisiutil]

Now there's an interesting point. Really? I find that quite a few special improvements aren't that great. Elephant camps for example: meh. After industrialism I usually replace them all. And before I prefer to have only as many as necessary for myself and whatever I can export. And there are more: spice plantation can be nice if you miss food in the city, but if you don't rather build a cottage. And so on. All pastures are extremely good, and the farms and mines as well (except for the uranium mine), but the camps and plantations are rather a mixed bag of improvements if you ask me.

That's a very good point. Sugar is a very good example: +2 food, +1 commerce with a plantation, +1 food without. Big whoop. They usually appear in clumps on grassland, often beside rivers, so I like to have 1 sugar plantation for the bonus and maybe 1 more for trading. The others get cottages. And ivory tiles make awesome sites for watermills or workshops, as appropriate.

 

[cabert]

general thoughts :

- you should try different leaders to get a better feeling of what does what
- you should try different victory conditions, you'll get more familiar with what's important and what's not

A little more specific thoughts:
- it's already been said, but you can not have too many cities. If you can afford more, settle/take them. It's all a question of upkeep, but in the end almost any city could pay for itself (even those pesky fishing villages can be useful)
- it's already been said, but you don't need every building in every city. It's easy to have 8 commerce cities when you have 20+ cities
- play a bit with the civics, you'll see some very interesting effects (of watermills and workshops under state property, for instance :
here is my favourite picture, I show it every time someone says "space race" or "production city")

You can see 7 watermills in this picture, feeding mines and plains workshops (and even 2 engineers, but that's because there is one too many farm)...
If you count the base hammers, you find 65. Can you still not see how watermills can be good ?