Guild placement

[Wojciech Rodzik]

Hi,

Where do you place your guilds (music, artist, writer)?

I usually place them in 2nd or 3rd city, access to fresh water + national college epic.
But from posts here I read that capitol placement is very popular - which I do not understand:

You want your capitol to be as big as possible, and able to generate a lot of hammers - obviously if you take 6 citizens from the tiles\factories to be "artists" you are loosing a lot of food\production.

 

[FeiLing]

CV: You want as many GWAM as possible, so all 3 guilds should be in the capital with Gardens and National Epic. Why capital? Because it has the largest population, so you can start working the GWAMs much earlier. Also you get a lot more food from Maritime CS in the capital (and Tradition obviously too). Of course you also want a large production to build as many wonders as possible and stack their huge culture output (after you get them all do +3 via World Congress) with Hermitage and SOH.

Other victory types: You want to work scientists everywhere immediately and always. You want to pop a few writers maybe for extra SPs and also because working the guilds is the only source for culture early game apart from Cultural CS allies. Maybe later you'll add Artists for even more culture and a GA or two. But still, it's not that important to have these in the capital any more. I usually will have the Writers guild in the cap, and the artist guild in another city. Musicians are worthless in non tourism games apart from maxing your score with a few more great works (and a tad more culture), so if I build it at all, it usually goes to a third city.

 

[Soffacet]

Hi,

Where do you place your guilds (music, artist, writer)?

I usually place them in 2nd or 3rd city, access to fresh water + national college epic.
But from posts here I read that capitol placement is very popular - which I do not understand:

You want your capitol to be as big as possible, and able to generate a lot of hammers - obviously if you take 6 citizens from the tiles\factories to be "artists" you are loosing a lot of food\production.

I think you have your reasoning a little bit backwards. You want all of your guilds in the same city because you can only have one NE and Hermitage, and your capital is the only city that can reasonably be expected build those NWs in a reasonable amount of time and man them asap. This is not just because your capital has a 40-50 turn head start on your other cities, but also because so many sources of extra food (Tradition, Maritime CS, etc) explicitly prioritize feeding the capital.

 

[joshua43214]

With a tradition opener, you should have no trouble filling all the science building and 2 guilds (I don't bother with musicians guild). Tradition gives all the benefits to the cap, so it should get all the guilds.

With a Liberty opener, the game is less capitol centric and building the guilds in expos will help for border expansion as well.

If you expect to build the Hermitage, they should all be in the same city

 

[Deau]

You don't want to build a GM guild until information era for CV and it's also the bottom priority guild for other VCs as the GMs can really only be transformed into great works for non CV.

As Soffacet pointed out, you typically want the guilds running wherever they will put out the most culture and earn the most GPP. So typically, you will want them all in the same city which will also have hermitage and national epic. The error most players do is build them early in a growth starved cap and work 6 slots with an already crippled city.

Depending on VC/capital growth potential it is sometimes best to only run GW guild in cap and GA elsewhere or even delay GA guild much later in the game. Alternatively, you can consider not working GS slots to work both GA and GW in early renaissance to try to plow through rationalism faster. However, if you do that, you would prefer the 2 guilds + NE in another city so as to benefit from the +50% science from NC on scientists.

Long story short - rule of the thumb in cap assuming it had great growth. Spread otherwise. Ignore GM and possibly even GA guild if you have bad food tiles yet can sustain some culture CS allies.

 

[joncnunn]

Playing Tradition: Place them all in the capital. Run 3 food cargo ships to your capital. Combined with the tradition bonuses of food; this completely solves the problem of how to fill all guild slots & all science slots while growing your capital.

 

[Arms Longfellow]

I miss the city specialization tactics from Civ 4. It's kinda boring to just stack everything in the capital, but they've forced our hand because of all the bonuses. I sometimes pick a different city to put stuff in though if I'm forced to settle inland ... having access to cargo ships is just so much better.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I know my opinion is not as valid as I only play on like.. Easy/Warlord, but my idea usually revolves around my method of wonder hunting where I switch the focus to Production, which often makes the Focus-AI to fire all non-production specialist, which slows down the spawn rate of great people, this becomes troublesome as capital is usually my number 1. wonder building city, so I start building the guilds in a non-mountain tile city (where Machhu Piccu usually ends up).

 

[cinattra]

Yeah, with a liberty opening the priority to place in the capital is not there. I try for a second city on a river that can grow people and place my guilds there. Yeah, the capital does have the advantage and could probably produce great people faster, but there is sometimes so much other stuff to build as well. Sometimes you just can't maximize your great people production.

 

[victorpras]

You don't want to build a GM guild until information era for CV

Newbie question: why shouldn't we build GM guild until info era?

 

[pvtjava]

Newbie question: why shouldn't we build GM guild until info era?

You create the GMs faster right after the guild is built therefore some players will wait and use them all for concert tours to catch runaway civs. This is optimal play at higher difficulties especially.

 

[Redaxe]

You create the GMs faster right after the guild is built therefore some players will wait and use them all for concert tours to catch runaway civs. This is optimal play at higher difficulties especially.

The downside is you miss out on a lot of early culture from working the guild specialists. But I agree if you play tradition you should generally try to work all 6 guild specialists in the capital. Not just for the National Epic and Hermitage but Monarchy will give you 3 gold and 3 happiness for those 6 citizens.