Grow cities and build settlers at the same time

[Ungar]

I've been playing on Deity and I've made some observations on city growth.

It is possible to grow cities while building settlers.

You can do it using worker chop, but it requires a ton of micromanagement.

This is not an exploit, but it does change the game to the point where they should allow city growth while building settlers.

The designers assumed that when you build workers/settlers that you want to dedicate 100% of your resources which are hammers and food per turn into settler production. You can't choose to use food for city growth and hammers for settlers only.

City growth is constrained by how much food you take in each turn and you may not want to waste it in settler production.

There is a way around this..

You have to use worker chop and rely on build queue overflow.

Settlers require 100 hammers/food to build. One forest chop will net you 30 hammers usually and takes three turns.


Option #1.

Start building something like a warrior and queue a settler after it. A warrior only takes 15 hammers I believe.

Start chopping a forest.

After three turns your city should net you something like six food, six hammers and thirty more hammers from a forest chop.

The six food go into city growth since you've been building a warrior.
The six hammers go into building your warrior.
Nine hammers from your forest chop go into completing the warrior.
Twenty one hammers from your forest chop go into your settler.

Immediately queue up another unit or building before the settler and start another forest chop.

Three turns later you get another pile of hammers from a forest chop, but all the food is still going into city growth and rest hammers go into your new unit/building with remaining hammers going into your settler.

Option #2.

Queue up something that takes longer to build with a settler behind it. Barricks would be good.

On the turn the forest get converted to hammers, move the settler to the top of the queue ahead of barricks. You'll lose your food production for one round, but all the forest hammers will go into the settler. Swap the barricks back to the top of the queue once the chop is completed.

This takes a bit more timing.

.....

I figured this out after conquering a new city with two workers in it.

I started building a barricks immediately and sent both workers out to do forest chops.

On the same turn both forests got converted to sixty hammers and my barricks got completed. The very next turn I got a thirty five hammer Axeman. This was odd since barricks was a sixty hammer build.

Then I figured out since I had the aggressive trait, barricks only costed thirty hammers with the extra thirty hammers going into my axeman.

.....

Hammer overflows apparently only work on the very next item in queue. They do not overflow into a second or third build instruction.

 

[Shillen]

This is already posted all over the place here. Some argue that it's an exploit, some say it's not. Some say it isn't even helpful at all, that you're better off just building the settler along with the chops and getting it out sooner. You can put me in that last camp.

edit: Ok I read your strat in more detail and yours is actually not the same as the one posted all over. Yours is less efficient. You can get all the hammers to go into the settler without losing any turns of growth except for the very last turn where the settler is built.

 

[Dog of Justice]

Option #2.

Queue up something that takes longer to build with a settler behind it. Barricks would be good.

On the turn the forest get converted to hammers, move the settler to the top of the queue ahead of barricks. You'll lose your food production for one round, but all the forest hammers will go into the settler. Swap the barricks back to the top of the queue once the chop is completed.

This takes a bit more timing.

That's not the best way to do it. At the beginning of the turn the forest chop will complete, switch production to settler, then "wait" all your units and the settler will receive the forest shields. Then, before the turn is over, switch production back to what you were originally working on. No food loss at all.

 

[Lov2play]

Then, before the turn is over, switch production back to what you were originally working on.

How do you that? I didn't know there was a way to reshuffle the production queue, aside from adding a new item to the front or end.

 

[CaptainEO]

The game remembers your progress on the unit you were building even if you delete it from the queue (within 1 turn only). So removing and re-adding a unit (on the same turn) is the same as reshuffling the build order.