lethstang said:
Im a new player, and I recently read an article about having some cities be production, some commerce, and some great person farms. What am I doing wrong in this game? Im looking mostly for a critique of city development, or anything else.
First thing that I did was look at the graphs. You are bottom of the pack in GNP, but are being completely outclassed by everybody in production. That's very bad - given that you are currently at war, you may be doomed. Then again, you do have a tech lead, so it might be salvageable. Unclear to me on first look.
Next I looked at the domestic advisor. Oh, you only have three cities. That would explain why your production is awful. OK. Given where you are in the game, I would expect to have 6-9 cities. Judging from the dates, you founded three cities fairly quickly (looks like you got a settler from a hut?) and haven't expanded since.
Reviewing those cities, they are all horribly underdeveloped. Whether that's a chronic condition, or a result of the war, is unclear. At the same time, you've got workers running around improving tiles that you can't work (cities can only work the tiles within the "fat cross" - the twenty tiles within the cities cultural borders when it grows from culture the first time; these are the same twenty tiles that appear in the city screen).
Earth is not an easy starting city. As you probably noticed, the lack of hammers makes building things the traditional way very slow. The answer here is the agressive use of the whip - which converts population to hammers, with some tradeoffs. Your research path was perfect here - Bronzeworking to get you the slavery civic, followed by Potter that you might build a granary. However, you should have switched to slavery as soon as you could (it's cheaper, and it allows you to convert citizens to hammers).
There's a thread on
slavery that may help you understand it better.
For specialization, it looks to me as though that site is destined for commerce, although it has enough extra food available that you might run some specialists there as well. I would expect most of the tiles to have cottages on them. Placing this city one tile further south, where you could use that green hill, might have been a better choice (because you are so starved for hammers).
Note that if you survive long enough to reach universal sufferage, your production problem here would be solved. You could also get a temporary break by building workshops (thanks to metal casting) or watermills.
Goku is sort of what a GP farm looks like - you prefer to have fewer good tiles, but sometimes you have to make do. You've a couple errors here (you need a workboat to get the extra food from the clams, and a lighthouse to get the extra food from all the water tiles). Water tiles aren't particularly great (compared with grasslands - where you can park a town on them). But you've got enough food on hand that you could be running your specialists here.
The basic drill of a GP farm is that you want to have citizens working every tile that produces surplus food (here, the corn, bananas, and clams once you get them hooked up
Edit - I lied, you're receiving clams in trade, so you are already getting the health bonus - you should hook up the clams, cancel the current trade, and negotiate a new one for something useful), run as many specialists as you can, and if you have spare health and happiness at that point, you grow the city to work other useful tiles. Towns on the grasslands are great while the population limit is low, but you may end up turning those grasslands into farms in time.
It is common to use slavery to finish buildings in GP farms. Not critical here, since you have production available.
OK, you've got the granary and the harbor (another reason to improve the clams: they are worth two health in this city). Lighthouse would be useful. A forge lets you run a Engineer specialist (more hammers, and great engineers can rush build World Wonders), and ups your production, and gives you more happiness (because you have silver). Some temples would be a VERY big deal - you have two holy cities, so great prophets would be most welcome [until you have built both shrines, then you turn your priest specialists into something else, probably]. And the National Epic is huge, because it doubles the number of points each of your GP sources creates - the interval between GP are cut in half.
For the other specialists, I usually think of running primarily a single type, and tailor the city to it. For instance, if I want science, I'll build a library, and as many monasteries as I can. If I want merchants, I'll try to build markets, grocers and banks. (Eventually, you have to leave cast system, and you will want to have enough buildings to provide the specialists you need). In this specific case, because the GP farm is a holy city, I'd be thinking about merchants. Shrines mean a lot of gold revenue, so you will often want to build Wall Street (an Industrial Age national wonder) in the city with the best shrine. If that's going to be here, then specializing with merchants (who generate gold, and help breen Great Merchants that generate more gold) has high synergy.
The towns are OK - not great, but OK - but with a GP farm you really want surplus food. Also note that if you have a continuous string of farms from a fresh water source (like the river) to the corn tile, the corn will give you more food. And when you have researched Biology, your farms all explode with food. Lots of many specialists.
There's some debate of whether mines are better than windmills for GP farms. Mines might be best, but windmills are essentially idiot proof, so I would go with that. The workshop on the plains tile is not a bad idea at all - you work it when you have something you want to build in a hurry, and use that food for a specialist when you are just marking time.
OK, the bad news. You don't have a good production city on this map. If you had placed Gohan one tile west (on the plains hill by the river) you would have had a rockin good time. There are two differences (1) by being on the plains hill, your city would produce an extra hammer per turn. Also, you would have access to the corn (+4 food).
But if you are going to play this game out, you have to make the best of it. Production cities are food and mines (and the occassional quarry, or pasture for horses). Towns are not useful, unless you have already harvested all the available hammers. Right now the city has 3 surplus food, which means you can work the iron (which needs to be mined), a mine on the grassland hill, and a windmill on the plains hill. If you farm the floodplains tile,
that produces another spare food, so you get another windmill. All the plains tiles get farms (that give you a hammer each), a farm on the grassland tile gives you another food (third windmill) and if you can afford to farm the silk (ie, you have silk somewhere else, so that you can give this one up without losing happy) you could convert one of the windmills to a mine.
Production cities don't usually generate a lot of commerce (though they do produce some) so libraries, monsteries, and so on aren't usually a priority. Barracks, Forge, those buildings you need to stay happy and healthy, then units units units.
(note, I'm somewhat supposing you intended this to be your production city, based on the barracks - my apologies if I erred in this judgement).
Anyway, that's my quick (?) review. Recommended reading:
A Guide to City Specialization....
