How do you get high production cities?

[DynamicSpirit]

I seem to recall a few posts in which people have mentioned high production cities - citing eg. 50 or 100 hammers. I'm wondering how you can do that.

My own experience tends to be: It's rare to get a good city site that has more than 3-4 hills. With mines that might give you, typically say, 12 shields. What else is there? Well...
1. Workshops don't look sensible until you get state property coz of the food loss. (And even with state property, I find myself reluctant to start developing a city in a way that relies on me forever keeping the same civic. So - no workshops).
2. Watermills are mostly irrelevent because - well, if there's a river right by the city I'd likely have made it a commerce city, not a production city in the first place! More likely there's a river just on the edge of the radius, and I'm using those couple of fresh-water squares for farms to compensate for the lack of food on the hills.
3. Forest/lumbermills are also irrelevent - I probably chopped them all down in the early game for the hammers. And I don't see much sense in leaving land undeveloped for ages just in the hope that a new forest might spontaneously grow on it.

In practice what that means is that my supposed high production cities have at most, say, 15 hammers base production plus whatever extra the buildings give it. I get the impression from reading these forums that that's way below what some other people typically achieve. So am I missing something obvious?

In fact it's very rare that I have a purely production city - usually it ends up as a production/commerce city because in the early-mid game I put cottages on some of its grassland/plains coz - well, there was nothing else sensible to build on them! (And by the time I have state property to make workshops feasible, those cottages have become villages or towns so I don't want to get rid of them!). Evidently I'm doing something different compared to people who do have nearly-pure production cities...?

[Edited - grammar etc]

 

[Gdek]

Well, here's a typical example from my current game.

City is Hastings, with the following terrain in the fat cross.

2 Plains Hills (mined + rr) = 6+6 hammers
2 Forests (1 grass, 1 plain, both with lumbermills + rr) = 3+4 h
2 plains (towns on each) = 2+2
1 grass (town) = 1
1 grass cattle (pasture) = 2
1 mountain
8 coast (1 with fish)
1 ocean
City Centre = 1

So that's a total of 27 hammers. Keep in mind that Universal Suffrage as a civic gives one hammer per town, and railroading mined and lumber mill squares adds one. That's how the above totals were acheived. Plus I'm running 1 engineer for another 2 hammers.

So a total of 29 hammers. +25% for having a forge, and +50% for having a powered factory. That's over 50 hammers right there, for a city I would hardly consider a production centre.

Gdek

 

[Dueck]

I'm not at a computer with any good screenshots, but let me lay out a scenario for you.
Your city has, let's say, a single grassland iron resource, 2 hills, and perhaps a grassland cow. This is a reasonable hypothetical city.

Mine the hills, pasture on the cow, and mine the iron. From those 4 squares and your city, you get 2 (hills) + 4 (hill mines) + 3 (cow) + 4 (iron mine) + 1 (city) = 14 production, and 1 + 1 (hills) + 3 (cow) + 2 (grassland) + 2 (city) = 9 food. This is enough food to feed your 4 population, and 1 extra for growth.

Add in a few probable fresh-water-accesible plains into the equation and you get, say, 3 more production and 6 more food, enough to feed 7 population and still 1 for growth (which I'll ignore. So we're sitting at 17 production.

Apply improvements and/or civics:
forge +25% production
organized religion +25% building production
police state +25% unit production
heroic epic +100% unit production

These are all potentially available in the classical era (police state with pyramids only.) So, say you want to build your military in this city (I would). Have a heroic epic constructed there (note: need a level 4 unit for this, so you'd need to have seen war.)
You've got 17*(1.0 [base] + 0.25 [forge] + 1.00 [heroic epic]) = 38 production when producing military units.

Advance to the industrial era... your mines get +1 production eventually, each. This will give you 23 base production. Also, more improvements

drydocks +25% boat production
factory +25% production
power plant +25% production (with factory)
ironworks +50% production (with iron) OR +50% production (with coal) OR +100% production (with iron AND coal)

Let's say you have built a factory and powerplant, but no drydocks or ironworks.
Your production is now 20*(1.0 [base] + 0.25 [forge] + 1.0 [heroic epic] + 0.25 [factory] + 0.25 [power w/ factory] = 55 shields, when producing military units.

It can happen, and it's not so hard. Keep in mind, this was a 7 population city, with 2 strategic resources and 2 hills, which is not hard to get. Factor in another possible marble, stone, copper, etc, and maybe a few more plains, and you're talking about even more production; build ironworks, adopt police state and you're riding above 100 production per turn. In the ancient/classical/medieval era, though, above 30 is still a nice production city.

Edit: Mines only +1 more with tech. Thanks for catching me on that, DaviddesJ.

 

[DaviddesJ]

2 Plains Hills (mined + rr) = 6+6 hammers

Advance to the industrial era... your mines get +2 production eventually, each.

I'm missing something. Mines give +2 production, or +3 with Railroads. How are you getting up to +4?

 

[Artanis]

I seem to recall a few posts in which people have mentioned high production cities - citing eg. 50 or 100 hammers. I'm wondering how you can do that.

My own experience tends to be: It's rare to get a good city site that has more than 3-4 hills. With mines that might give you, typically say, 12 shields. What else is there? Well...
1. Workshops don't look sensible until you get state property coz of the food loss. (And even with state property, I find myself reluctant to start developing a city in a way that relies on me forever keeping the same civic. So - no workshops).
2. Watermills are mostly irrelevent because - well, if there's a river right by the city I'd likely have made it a commerce city, not a production city in the first place! More likely there's a river just on the edge of the radius, and I'm using those couple of fresh-water squares for farms to compensate for the lack of food on the hills.
3. Forest/lumbermills are also irrelevent - I probably chopped them all down in the early game for the hammers. And I don't see much sense in leaving land undeveloped for ages just in the hope that a new forest might spontaneously grow on it.

1) Workshops more or less turn flat land into a hill: lose food, but gain hammers. If you have enough food to feed all the city's mines and STILL have some left over, go ahead and put down a few Workshops.


2) I find that production cities are harder to find sites for than commerce cities, so if I find a good one, I use it. If that site just so happens to have a river running through it, I'm not going to suddenly decide that a half-dozen hills are worthless and start putting down Cottages on behalf of the 6 or 7 commerce the river will give.

Besides, without a river, it's hard to build the farms you need to feed all the mines


3) No offense, but you have nobody to blame but yourself. If a city site has the potential to be a MONSTER hammer-producer due to its forests and you clear-cut them for the sake of clear-cutting them, then you deserve what you get . The ONLY time you should automatically clear forest away from a tile near a future production city is if A) you can build a Mine on that spot, or B) you need to put a Farm on that spot.

Frankly, if a city has the sort of terrain that'd make it a good production city, it's going to get its stuff built pretty quick anyways once it gets going, and won't need chops. There ARE better things for your workers to be doing than destroying a city's future hammer output for the sake of a few immediate hammers that it does NOT need.

In practice what that means is that my supposed high production cities have at most, say, 15 hammers base production plus whatever extra the buildings give it. I get the impression from reading these forums that that's way below what some other people typically achieve. So am I missing something obvious?

In fact it's very rare that I have a purely production city - usually it ends up as a production/commerce city because in the early-mid game I put cottages on some of its grassland/plains coz - well, there was nothing else sensible to build on them! (And by the time I have state property to make workshops feasible, those cottages have become villages or towns so I don't want to get rid of them!). Evidently I'm doing something different compared to people who do have nearly-pure production cities...?

[Edited - grammar etc]

Your question in bold is answered by your statement in bold

The entire point of a production city is production, and as such, the normal rules do not apply. Commerce is BAD in a Production city because it takes the place of something that could be giving more hammers. Leave Commerce-gathering to the other 95% of your empire...a production city is pure hammers, plain and simple, providing your military all by itself so that the Commerce cities are free to build commerce-related stuff instead of being conscripted into your war machine.

Build a Farm or two to feed an extra Workshop, build a Watermill along a river, build a Lumbermill instead of chopping down that forest! When improving the terrain around a production city, ALL improvements should do one of two things:
1-Give you more hammers
2-Give you the food you need to work more big-hammer tiles

As for Workshops, you don't need State Property to make them feasable. You work plenty of hills, don't you? And hills give -1 food compared to the base terrain, don't they? All workshops are are miniature hills, and you treat them as such, building Farms to feed them. State Property is merely icing on the cake, letting your city either grow even more or else change out some farms for Watermills or Workshops.




...hope that helps

 

[Thalassicus]

In my production city I leave up all forests. Lumbermilled forests provide 2 hammers, 3 with Railroads. So I might have a city with:

6 grassland forests = +3 hammers apiece
4 hills = average +4 hammers apiece

So that's 34 hammers right there. Then you have:

100% - Base
25% - Forge
25% - Factory
50% - Power
100% - Ironworks
300% - Total

For a total of 102 hammers. This is with just 10 hammer-producing tiles (and only four hills), about the best I find on average in my games. It's easy to get far more if you have a spot with a particular abundance of hills and some food resources. Normally I make do with forest tiles.

Workshops aren't an option early on with the -1 food apiece and marginal returns. After I get Biology, though, I replace some of the farms around the production city with +0/3/0 workshops under State Property.

 

[Dueck]

I'm missing something. Mines give +2 production, or +3 with Railroads. How are you getting up to +4?

Whoop! Yeah, you're right. I was thinking about workshops.

 

[Grimz101]

why make a commerce city making 5% of your total income, when you can make a production city and conquer two cities atleast, and then make them both commerce cities and make 105% of what you would of made if u left it as a commerce city


or just rush build an army with kremlin your call

 

[Gdek]

I'm assuming 1 from the plains.

 

[King Jason]

I don't think Dynamic is taking into account the bonuses from forges and factories.

from RAW shields from tiles, no, people can't get 50-100 shields. It's the bonuses from the buildings that give you the shields per turn towards buildings and units.

 

[Maestro_Innit]

As posted above - the secret is to make nothnig that isn't gonna produce or feed. By all means develop resources but then only make farms for food and production improvements for the rest.

At the end of my last game (Cyrus / Prince / Continents / Marathon), my capital city was the following.

6 x Farmed Grassland 24f
1 x Grassland Cow Pasture 4f2p
1 x Grassland Spice Plantation 3f
1 x Grassland Gold Mine (rr) 1f3p
1 x Grassland Rice Paddy 6f
1 x Grassland Dye Plantation 2f
1 x Mined Hills / Plains (rr) 6p
1 x Mined Hills / Grassland (rr) 1f4p
2 x Lumbermills Forest / Grassland (rr) 4f6p
1 x Lumbermill Forest / Plains 1f4p
3 x Watermills Grassland 9f6p
1 x Freshwater Lake 2f
1 x Town Centre 2f1p

Total Base 59 food, 32 production.

59 Food gives enough surplus for 9 Specialists! That's 8 priests with Angkor Wat (2p) and an engineer (2p), making an extra 16 production in the city. Add to that a Forge and a Factory, along with Power (in this case from the Three Gorges Damn) and you have nearly 100 production. With Heroic Epic too, you can be making 150 production per turn when producing units! And since I have West Point in this city too, I couldn't have the Ironworks wonder which could have boosted military production to 200 per turn. All that whilst still churning out 36 gold, 112 beakers of research and 192 culture.



So as King Jason says: even in a fairly high production city like this one - base production is "only" 32, 49 with Specialists. It's when you add forges, factories and wonders that you get silly amounts like 200 hammers per turn.

London:

 

[Firebot]

Not everyone gets lucky with 5 ressource tiles in the city alongside a river. That city is simply ridiculous high production city or not, though using that food surplus to build a production powerhouse with priests in combination with Angtor Wat while GP farming is a good strategy.

Here's 2 more down to earth cities which shows typical ressource placement. The first one became my main production city, although it developed after I built my military production city. I actually had a city with more available hammers, but most of the surrounding tiles were plains, and couldn't build farms on them, so that city stayed at 7 or 8 pop until Biology. If you note the terrain there isn't much ressources other then copper, but there are a couple of hills in the vicinity, and there were some forest tiles. Note that I also kept - this city also had a forge and a factory along with the Ironworks (no power yet, it would have added 50%). Actually looking at it, this city has a better base hammer production then the example above (39 base hammers), the difference being Heroic Epic which boosted the tank production by 100%. This was on my practice Monarch game for the Gotm3 that I won on that turn.

The 2nd one is my capital, and as you can see I heavily pushed it as a commerce city (look at the science and money output, and realize that I don't have either Wall Street or Oxford in that city). That city could have been better optimized with those two, but I had already build the Global Theatre and National Epic (a mistake as I built the city more towards commerce then a GP farm even though it could do either). It's also not shabby at all in the production department (heck it actually has 37 BASE production heh), so it was a very solid city all around. Note that if I wanted to do a pure GP farm city, this city was in an ideal spot (could work the tiles to get 75-80 food a turn), where I would have used all the flood plains and build farm on them, while building windmills on the hills rather then mines.

 

[katank]

You typically want two or more bonus resources that add to production in your monster production city. For example, copper/iron/horses/marble/stone are all major production boosters. Throw in a few mined plains hills and you have some major production.

Every flatland tile should be farmed unless you want to workshop the grasslands and run state property. Excess food can feed engineers or priests w/ angkor wat. Note that angkor wat is very powerful in making priests as good at producing as engineers. With caste system, you can run unlimited priests while you can't run unlimited engineers.

For an example of production city, check out RB1 - Cuban isolationists in the succession game forums. Not only is the game played by two very talented players, the thread is entertaining and educational. San Roberto in their game had something like 100+ production when churning out military (w/ heroic epic). Some nice base production figures too.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

why make a commerce city making 5% of your total income, when you can make a production city and conquer two cities atleast, and then make them both commerce cities and make 105% of what you would of made if u left it as a commerce city

Because then you're playing a different strategy that you might not want to play?
OR:
Because it won't just end with two cities - it'll be two cities followed by a very angry AI civ that spends the next 30 turns secretly building a massive army and then suddenly launches revenge on you in a big way

 

[DynamicSpirit]

(This is proving a fascinating thread btw - glad I started it.)

I find that production cities are harder to find sites for than commerce cities, so if I find a good one, I use it. If that site just so happens to have a river running through it, I'm not going to suddenly decide that a half-dozen hills are worthless and start putting down Cottages on behalf of the 6 or 7 commerce the river will give.

Yeah that's a good point.

No offense, but you have nobody to blame but yourself. If a city site has the potential to be a MONSTER hammer-producer due to its forests and you clear-cut them for the sake of clear-cutting them, then you deserve what you get .

LOL! Just to clarify, I rarely chop forests to build normal buildings. It's normally either for settler/worker (to reduce the no-growth time) or for an early wonder. I guess what this is really saying therefore is that the city you build your early wonders in (if you're going that way) should not be the same city that becomes your main production city.

The entire point of a production city is production, and as such, the normal rules do not apply. Commerce is BAD in a Production city because it takes the place of something that could be giving more hammers.

Now this is something that still puzzles me. I know the consensus is to specialize like that, and I totally buy the arguments about specializing *to a reasonable extent*, but I'm still not sure I'm convinced that taking specialization to that extreme is good. IIRC (I'm away from home this week and don't have Civ with me to check so sorry if my numbers are out), a fully developed town will give you +7 trade, +1 hammer. A workshop with the right techs/civics will give you +2 hammer. Even granted that in the extreme case you've maybe built the ironworks and forge etc. in that town and you're not intending to build bank/market/etc. there, I can't see that the workshop is better. You seem to be losing a lot of potential research for not that much extra production. Is doing that really better than losing a bit of city specialization in return for increasing total yields from some tiles? Especially since I do sometimes run out of things to build (eg. if I'm not planning on any war soon, or my units will shortly go out of date and I'm worried about the upkeep costs), but oddly, I *never* run out of things to research

...hope that helps

It does ta! (As do numerous other posts here that I don't have time to reply to them all)

 

[DaviddesJ]

IIRC (I'm away from home this week and don't have Civ with me to check so sorry if my numbers are out), a fully developed town will give you +7 trade, +1 hammer. A workshop with the right techs/civics will give you +2 hammer.

No, workshop is +3 hammers. But I agree that towns are much better in most cases (always, if you have access to Universal Suffrage).

 

[rewster1]

I just started a random game, entered worldbuilder, gave myself all techs, a few health and happy buildings, and every improvement that maximizes production on a particular tile, save the 4 farms on all the bare grasslands, and raised my pop to 20. I then switched to state property for the food bonus. As you can see, my base production is quite high:
So theoretically it is quite possible to acheive 50+ production.

 

[goraemon]

ok i have to ask an unrelated question for a min...how do you take screenshots from within the game? i use prtscn then alt-tab out to paste etc. and there must be a better way.

 

[GenericKen]

Even with no special resources, late-game lumbermills can be powerhouses. 7 RR mills = 21 base shields & neutral food. Throw in two mines/cows & multipliers and 100 is nothing.

 

[Bezhukov]

Given the requisite techs, you can just spam watermills and windmills to get all the production and commerce you need. The key to effectiveplay is to minimize farms, as they generate no commerce or production.