Puppet cities gold focus rules?

[clinton]

I've read that puppet cities are set to gold focus. But what exactly are the rules for gold focus?

Ideally I'd like to know the rules of exactly how puppet cities use their tiles, so given the rules, I can predict correctly what tiles the puppet city will use (so I can correctly manage their improvements).

 

[FeiLing]

Food > Gold > Production (exceptions are luxury resources, for e.g. a mined silver resource or also cotton with a plantage (that would be like 2 food and 4 gold for e.g.).
That is right - even though it's gold focus, they still try to grow. Therefore it is common to replace all farms asap with trading posts (or just destroy the farms by starting a trading post and canceling the order again - you can still finish all them after all the farms are gone).

 

[clinton]

Food > Gold > Production.

I'm not sure how to apply your rule, could you please address these examples?

So lets say a two population puppet, with a centre tile giving 2 food, and only three other workable tiles. Which two tiles would it choose if the following three were available?

1f, 1f, 0f 6g?
2f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?
2f, 1f 6g, 1f 6g?
3f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?
5f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?

Keep in mind the city needs 2f to be stagnant in pop, less than two will cause it to starve.

 

[FeiLing]

So lets say a two population puppet, with a centre tile giving 2 food, and only three other workable tiles. Which two tiles would it choose if the following three were available?

1f, 1f, 0f 6g - so it won't starve.
2f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g - so it can still grow.
2f, 1f 6g, 1f 6g - I really don't know.
3f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g - similar to the case below.
5f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g - "enough" foo + a "6-value" tile even trumps more food in the AI's mind (hard to believe^^)

Don't nail me on any of these, just my estimation (especially as there is no 0f 6g tile (well hmm... maybe a great merchant tile improvement on a desert does this?^^). What I basically think applies as a rule of thumb:
A 3f, 1g tile will be chosen over a 2f, 2g tile even though the "value" of both tiles is "4 production".

 

[vexing]

puppets will starve themselves, especially if you're in unhappiness.

as for the rules, to give an idea it's something like gold is worth 7, food 3, production 1, but if you dip into unhappiness food and production switch places. those numbers are completely fabricated.

 

[Resonance]

In a long game I had puppets produce great merchants. There were no wonders, so they were running specialists. When and how does that happen?

 

[joncnunn]

Gold focus is generally

Gold > Food > Hammer

Unless so doing would cause the city to have negative growth, in which case enough food tiles will be taking to avoid starving. Note that it may choose to remain stagnant if the gold values are high enough. (Sufficient Plains + Tradeposts along a river during a Golden Age)

Production is similar

Hammer > Food > Gold. Again unless so doing would cause the city to have negative growth.

Food focus is a more extreme version of default and you need to have things like a Gem mine or a Gold mine with a Mint to tell the difference. (Food >>> everything else)

Science as you would expect tries to work tiles containing Science. But unless you have jungle tiles with a university, trade posts with the Rationalism sub policy, or one of the science National wonders, the governor won't find any and would only be able to assign scientist specialists.

Also, when you annex a city, by default it still has gold default on. So you probably want to switch that off.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

Gold focus is generally

Gold > Food > Hammer

Unless so doing would cause the city to have negative growth, in which case enough food tiles will be taking to avoid starving. Note that it may choose to remain stagnant if the gold values are high enough. (Sufficient Plains + Tradeposts along a river during a Golden Age)

He's only talking about puppets so only this section applies and is correct.

You generally don't want your puppets to grow beyond 4-6 population (as with everthing in Civ there are many exceptions). If your puppets grow much larger you will have happiness issues. So you need to TP enough riverside flat lands so the city counting the city itself and any incoming food from maritime is about 8-12. After that you will want to put TP only on hills so you can get some production so the puppet will build you some buildings. Also you will want to put mines on mineable luxuries right away to get more production.

 

[vexing]

In a long game I had puppets produce great merchants. There were no wonders, so they were running specialists. When and how does that happen?

as soon as they've built a market they tend to fill it, same with bank and stock market.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

I'm not sure how to apply your rule, could you please address these examples?

So lets say a two population puppet, with a centre tile giving 2 food, and only three other workable tiles. Which two tiles would it choose if the following three were available?

1f, 1f, 0f 6g?
2f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?
2f, 1f 6g, 1f 6g?
3f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?
5f, 1f 1g, 0f 6g?

Keep in mind the city needs 2f to be stagnant in pop, less than two will cause it to starve.

I'm not sure what your tile labels mean there. Normally they go f, p, g. Please clarify your numbers.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

as soon as they've built a market they tend to fill it, same with bank and stock market.

This is true only when there are no workable gold tiles that produce more gold than a specialist and no workable tile that produces the same amount of gold with any food.

 

[clinton]

In summary, would it be correct to say that puppet cities try to maximise gold, but will ensure food balance is at least 0?

This seems to mean it's close to impossible to grow puppet cities, especially after they build a marketplace and can hire specialists with the excess food?

 

[WeaselSlapper]

In summary, would it be correct to say that puppet cities try to maximise gold, but will ensure food balance is at least 0?

This seems to mean it's close to impossible to grow puppet cities, especially after they build a marketplace and can hire specialists with the excess food?

Your summary is correct.

Having puppets grow is easy. Just put trading posts on tiles that produce 2+ food. Keep in mind the city itself will produce food and puppets will normally build a granary. So the city is at 4 food even with no food from citizens. Puppets will also get food from maritime cities.

The problem is not getting puppets to grow, it's getting them to stop so they don't chew up all your happiness. Remember happiness will normally be your limiting factor to allowing growth in your controlled cities. So you want to keep your puppet population as small as possible because population in a controlled city is > population in a puppeted city.

Puppets will only use specialists when there are no tiles they can work that will produce more gold or no tiles that will produce the same gold and any amount of food. So it's normally pretty rare that a puppeted city will run to many specialists.

 

[Resonance]

as soon as they've built a market they tend to fill it, same with bank and stock market.

This is true only when there are no workable gold tiles that produce more gold than a specialist and no workable tile that produces the same amount of gold with any food.

I think WeaselSlapper is correct since you can still see the merchant points produced and for the first 150 turns or so nothing happened. Then, with enough happiness, some puppets became really big.
Thanks for this.