New to civilization

[spybot]

I played civ 3 for a little bit, but that's pretty much all my experience with the series. So I have a few questions:

1) How does production or hammers or whatever its called work? I know it makes you build stuff faster, but how does it affect that exactly?

2) What's the point of specializing cities?

3) Should I listen to the game's suggestions? For example it often tells me to build more settlers and when I listen to it I end up with at least 10 cities, but I've also heard of people winning victories with 5 cities or less.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[jar2574]

I played civ 3 for a little bit, but that's pretty much all my experience with the series. So I have a few questions:

1) How does production or hammers or whatever its called work? I know it makes you build stuff faster, but how does it affect that exactly?

2) What's the point of specializing cities?

3) Should I listen to the game's suggestions? For example it often tells me to build more settlers and when I listen to it I end up with at least 10 cities, but I've also heard of people winning victories with 5 cities or less.

Any help is appreciated!

1) Hammers allow you to build things. Without hammers your city would build nothing. Each city produces one when it is founded. The others come from the citizens working the surrounding tiles.

2) Specialized cities kick ass at what they specialize. A research city, with lots of towns, a university, a library, and a observatory, can produce more research than three average cities with only libraries. The same is true for production, and for anything else you want to specialize in. The degree of specialization should depend on the game, but its a good strategy in Civ IV.

3) Sometimes...but not always. Sometimes it reminds me that I should build something I do need, but often it would have me build things I don't.

 

[GenocideBringer]

As for 1, each building and unit has a cost. Say unit X costs 50 hammers. Every turn, you make Y hammers. When you produce enough hammers to cover the cost of the unit/building, it is built.