Thanks for the replies. Norton, I see your point about specialization. I did think this was one of the problems. What I fail to grasp is, say I was focusing on production in a city, building mines and workshops, surely the city will stop growing before very long if I choose to ignore farms and windmills.
You're right: before state property, you need some farms (and maybe some windmills) in order to keep the city growing and support the citizens working the mines and workshops. It's best to look at the city's fat cross, add up the food that each tile produces, and subtract that number from 40 to determine how many farms and windmills you'll need. After switching to SP, you can replace some of your farms with watermills and probably change some windmills to mines and some farms to workshops.
Likewise, concentrating on farms for a city would lead to no production for that city, so it could not build any improvements in a decent amount of time.
Don't forget the whip! If you find a city site with three or more food bonuses and some grasslands, you've got a GP farm in the making. Just maximize your food output and whip whatever buildings you'll need. You can stay in slavery and whip buildings to support specialists if you're not too particular about what sort of great people you'll produce, or you can whip some happiness improvements, then switch to caste system and run as many merchants, scientists, or artists as your food surplus and happiness limit can support. Also, if the city's got a couple of hills in its fat cross, you can occasionally reassign specialists to those hills and build whatever you need.
I also find it hard to dip into a city and take a citizen from the fat cross and set him to specialize as that usually results in the city going into starvation or losing lots of gold or production.I know I must be wrong in my views, just find it hard to grasp.
That's why you need a large food surplus in your GP farms. For other cities, assigning specialists is one way to keep the city from going over the happiness limit if you don't want to whip.
I tend to follow the advice in the game for choosing techs, maybe this is wrong. Also I did feel the blue circles indicating a good place to settle were often too far away from the previous city, but assumed the game's hint of a site was better than my choice.
Click
here to see what comes of following the game's advice on everything. That's not to say its advice is always bad, just that your judgment is often much better.
I know I am behind in military, I do tend to try to improve my cities rather than build strong armies, (probably wrong again). I set the game to conquest only as it seems easier to me knowing the AI cannot sneak another kind of victory. I have noticed the lack of happiness resources, maybe just bad luck.
I'm a builder at heart myself, but recently I've been learning the value of building axemen, for example, instead of wonders. I had to learn a similar lesson in Civ3, which favors the warmonger even more. It probably wasn't as important in this game, where there were only two civs on a huge map, but unless you wanted a time victory, you'd have to build up some troops sooner or later. Also, I think the number of civs might have had something to do with the lack of happiness resources--it works like that in Civ3, anyway.
BTW, do you still have the starting save?
for 10 turns on normal speed every time you whip. It's 5 turns on quick, 15 on epic, and 30 on marathon. So you can whip once every 10 turns without much trouble, or if something's really important, you can whip more than once and just deal with more unhappiness for a little while. If you have the Globe Theatre in one of your cities, that city will have no unhappiness, so you can whip or draft all you want there (as long as you have enough population).
