Growth Tactics; Mega-City vs Controlled Growth

[Ferrum Rex]

A Mega-City is the idea of growing your Capital(or any city really, the capital being the most effective though) to massive populations in the early stages using Settlers produced from smaller cities. You can send the settlers to you future mega-city and have them join the city. This is also aided by Wonders, such as the Hanging Gardens, which helps your city grow. The Republic form of government is also the most efficient to use because it limits Settlers to costing 1 population instead of two pop. Only One pop will join your mega-city, regardless of Government.

Controlled Growth is my idea of trying to grow 4 or 5 specialized cities. Settlers joining cities is still a great advantage to seek. Spreading this out over a few cities seems more beneficial to me though. Also an early war or two gives you experienced armies and free cities(occasionalingly techs too). Developing a War-Dedicated city, I saw myself pumping out armies, which in combination with barracks and a Great General unit settled in the city, all these armies started Veteran with 3 different specialties(promotions, i.e. March= one extra movement point. Awesome for ranged unit like catapluts or cannons). Capitals are a breeding ground for wonders under this strategy. After a few buildings you can start pumping wonders while your other cities do the grunt work. Growth Cities need little production or commerce and are the center of the settler production, surround it with the most food you can find. It may start slow, if you lack a production tile. The idea is quick growth outside of the city tile, and production from within. The last two cities would be commerce and technology. Relatively easy to produce from existing cities, these could be interchangeable with other specialized cities. Both are best as coastal or Island cities. Island cities are easily defense able. If your War-Dedicated city is not coastal, a hybrid city is very workable with Tech and Commerce specific cities and useful for multiple naval bases.


The original Mega-City idea, I believe belongs to Vale. The second is my concoction. To be fair Vale had this strategy for the demo, which has only the easiest two difficulty levels. I am curious to what other think of both strategies, as well as any other strategies.

 

[vale]

I haven't crunched the numbers completely by any means, but just from empirical observation, it seems that the cost to grow a city from population N to population N+1 increases very rapidly with N.

You can observe this effect to some degree with the following experiment:

Take any city at population 2 in an empire with the Republic.

Grow it to within a turn of growth (where a 2 food tile would push it up to population 3).

Build a settler while working only production tiles (don't grow).

When the settler is complete, observe where your food is at.

You go from population 2 with almost a full food bank to population 2 with approximately a half food bank. So the cost to go from population 1 to population 2 is (very) approximately half the cost to go from population 2 to 3. This is a huge departure from prior incarnations of civ and is why I believe that pumping one (or maybe two) city with settlers is the way to go.

 

[Ferrum Rex]

I think that starting out that way is key. With your Capital and Military city being Settler pumped, I think it can afford you time to do the same with a few more cities. With a stong finanicial based city, production become almost a non-issue in the smaller settler pumper(not that there has to be only one to start with). I am speculating that on higher difficulties, a Controlled Balanced growth policy maybe the most efficient method of reaching what ever end you choose, while affording you the ability to switch incase of unexpected AI victory choices(i.e. an economic while your close dom. or space race).

 

[Magwill]

Can you guys elaborate a bit on this tactic? I've tried it out in the demo and maybe you can give me some pointers. MrGameTheory on the official forums was saying he got economic victory at around 1000 AD. Now I don't even get near. At 1000 AD I have like 16 population in my capital and having 3 settler generating cities.

I start like this:

Balanced working in capital. Building 2 warriors to explore and get gold.

Then I build a settler. Usually this means I get my 2 settlers at about the same time and I go out to find a good food spot, that is within 2 turns of walking for the settler.

Then I regulate the workers to only work on food. Then when the population increases I start to work food and one 2 hammer tile.

I then build roads and start moving the settlers to my big city in one turn. I also try to build the cities in such a way that the roads will be shared so the settlers arrive at the capital in one move and can settle in the city directly.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

A settler generating city should always be working
1 2 food tile and 1 2 hammer tile, (easy enough if you tell the city to focus on hammers)
... remember, that is all they need 1 Forest, one Grassland

Only have Rome* build 1 Settler, get the secod from gold and make both of those Settler pumps

get 4-6 of settler pumps before you start sending the settlers back to Rome



*Rome because you need republic to start with for this

For Rome itself, after it finishes the first Settler
1. Focus Research, get Alphabet for the Library (save the minimal hammers you get)
2. Focus Hammers, Build Library
3. Focus Research/Growth, get Pottery + Bronze Working and some other techs save the hammers, quite a few of them
[Occasionally switch to Gold to buy settlers from cities that are growing to fast]
Irrigation is good here, get that +1 pop and then rush the settlers from all the cities that are pop 3 now.

Once you have reached the Mideval Era, for the 1/2 Wonder Discount:

Build the Hanging Gardens so that is finishes as soon as you have 20/21 population
(the Trade Fair is a good place to store production for the Gardens while you are waiting)

Build the Colossus if you can once you have Bronze Working (do it before the Gardens if you have the time.)

Once you have 31 pop shut off the Settler pumps (they won't contribute Much from now on, but their Settlers aren't useful any more)

If you are lucky you can get your 31 pop mega city in very early AD
It should be able to build most Wonders in 2-3 turns, and you will soon be getting techs 1 per turn. (assuming you set it to science)

To get the best Results, research Democracy just After you get the mega city and become a Democracy....enough Science to research Wonder building Techs and enough Gold to Buy the Wonders or Reach the Economic Victory.




The Key thing with Mega cities is you want to do 1 at a time.... it is better to have 1 city at 30 and another at 10 than 2 cities at 20

2 reasons,
1. is Things that can only affect 1 city (Colossus, Monarchy, Great People, Trade Fair, Shakespeare)
2. the "City Workers" give more and more trade the higher the city population.

So first get 1 city to pop 31, then if you want to get multiple mega cities, stop pumping settlers from your 'pre mega cities' and start building useful buildings in them, and make them 'mega' one city at a time.

If you want to raise an army, then mega ities don't give That much production, but they do give science to make your troops advanced, and gold, so you can buy troops from your Other cities.

 

[vale]

A settler generating city should always be working
1 2 food tile and 1 2 hammer tile

This isn't quite true as you really want to avoid growing to population 3. You will have to move off that food tile from time to time to add an extra 2 hammer tile or you will waste a ton of food growing to population 3.

 

[bo-oz]

@Krikkitone

Nice strategy and explantion, but how do you deal with 'security', whats your strategy? After you build Rome, you say to focus on building settler to get the pumping going, but is that before or after developing adequate defense?

thanks

 

[KAZUY4]

@Krikkitone

Nice strategy and explantion, but how do you deal with 'security', whats your strategy? After you build Rome, you say to focus on building settler to get the pumping going, but is that before or after developing adequate defense?

thanks

Usually you have specialist cities. I always use one to just create soldiers, a city with a lot of hammers usually gave you a fast production of units so u can move into the other cities. The rest of the cities doing settlers, and the science city building something like university, etc, something that generate more science. (remember to switch that city from gold to science).

 

[bo-oz]

I mean more like time-line wise... do you start with settlers (1x) --> build new cities to support growth on first --> establish security. Or do you start of with adequate security measures?

 

[Palamon]

Since this tactic only works with the Republic government, I assume it only really works with the Romans. What city tactics can be used with other civs?

 

[KAZUY4]

I mean more like time-line wise... do you start with settlers (1x) --> build new cities to support growth on first --> establish security. Or do you start of with adequate security measures?

U have a army of 3 warriors at the beginning, that is more than enough to start.
I'll have some pictures of a science city of mine in the demo, and I have a pretty good army too, even a nuke.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=278993

 

[KAZUY4]

Since this tactic only works with the Republic government, I assume it only really works with the Romans. What city tactics can be used with other civs?

Every civ can use republic gob. but for the romans is easy because u start with republic. Basically the benefit with republic is that the settlers only use 1 pop.

 

[Magwill]

What can you do to optimize this strategy for Multiplayer? You say you want to play it on Chieftain and thats hardly the opposition you will meet. Still there must be some way to integrate this into a good MP game. I will now try out Krikkitone's tip about 5-6 settler producing cities.

 

[KAZUY4]

What can you do to optimize this strategy for Multiplayer? You say you want to play it on Chieftain and thats hardly the opposition you will meet. Still there must be some way to integrate this into a good MP game. I will now try out Krikkitone's tip about 5-6 settler producing cities.

I do not think that chieftain is the difficulty for MP, is warlord. Remember to use a republican gob to make this work, otherwise you cities are going to be running out of pop soon.

 

[Magwill]

I do not think that chieftain is the difficulty for MP, is warlord. Remember to use a republican gob to make this work, otherwise you cities are going to be running out of pop soon.

I meant how to make it work against human players The difficulty of the AI in a MP game is higher than Warlord for sure, at least in the demo. I would guess that in the final game its dependant on your rank. So new players get to play with easy AIs. It would be quite ridiculous if they got their asses kicked by the AI all the time When I played multiplayer in the demo the AI was always much more aggressive and built stuff faster.

 

[KAZUY4]

Against ppl is the same thing, but remember... a human is not as stupid as the computer is, so if he notice that you are producing settlers.... he is going to start attacking you cities, at least that is what I did yesterday in a MP game. I saw the other guy rushing the zulu and then I notice that we was making settlers only... piece of cake, no defense in bases, 3 cities loss = GG. ALWAYS check you opponent.... if you have the enemy under control, probably is a good time for science city.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

One thing, the undefended settler pump is really only necessary for the demo where it cuts off.. I can easily see a multiplayer setting up cities that get themselves some defense first, and Then start pumping Settlers to the mega city (misses out on Hanging Gardens, but that just speeds it up a bit.)

The mega city is probably also at a slight disadvantage in MP/real game because your opponents will obsolete the Colossus/Trade Fair significantly knocking down the Science/Gold power of it.