Specialists: What am I doing wrong?
I can't tell if my problem is a personality thing, or if I'm completely overlooking an elementary game mechanic here. But I can't ever seem to get a city to the point where it can comfortably support citizens specialists. At least, not until later in the game. As far as I can tell, there are a couple reasons for this... tell me which is correct:
1. You just have to let your city starve if you want significat specialist action.
2. Only cities with certain opportune tiles (Maybe food heavy?) are suitable for supporting specialists.
3. Other.
I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to 'tune' a city to produce certain types of great people, and it seems impossible to me to win a cultural victory due to this limitation.
Each citizen of your city, be it a citizen working the land or a specialist, will need 2 food to support him. The citizens working the land typically provide food for themselves, the specialists don't. So to employ several specialists in a city, you will need to compensate by working food heavy tiles with the citizens that are working the land. In some cities this can be relatively easy because the city has food resources and citizens working those tiles provide an abundance of food. In other cities, you have a mix citizens working tiles with enough food to feed themselves and citizens working low food tiles (typically hill mines). These cities won't be able to support specialists.
Enter a few cities of yours and look at the upper centre-left part of the screen. Next to the food bar is the amount of food that the city is producing which if you count will typically be the sum of the food produced by citizens working the land. Next to the amount of food that the city is producing is the amount of food that your citizens are eating. This is typically 2*the number of citizens in your city (which is equal to your 2*city size). Only when the healthiness is lower than the unhealthiness in your city will the city need one additional food for each point of extra unhealthiness (shown to the right of the food bar).
The surplus food is used to make the city grow and gain additional citizens once the food bar is filled. The city starts with a food surplus of 2 provided by the centre city tile which doesn't need to be worked by a citizen.
Look at a few of your cities and look at the amount of food they are producing and the amount of food they are eating. See how you could increase and decrease the food surplus in these cities by working certain tiles or by building farms on certain tiles which are now improved with different improvements. If you play around a bit with the citizens and theorize a bit about adding additional farms to the city, then you should get a feeling how you could create more specialists in a city.
By the way, the game isn't about maximizing the number of specialists in your cities. Very often, it is better to work land tiles than use a specialist. As said earlier, specialists don't provide any food, so you need to put a citizen on another high food tile to provide the food for the specialist and the citizen working the high food tile. The citizen working the high food tile isn't adding anything to your city as food is only a means to an end. You need food to feed your citizens so they can produce hammers and commerce and to grow your city so you have more citizens producing hammers and commerce. But food by itself doesn't add anything to your city (exception: slavery pop-rushing).
I'm not saying that specialists are useless, far from it (it's the best way to get great persons). But their use is situational. If you have a city that is naturally producing lots of food (multiple food resources), then you won't have to build lots of farms (which don't produce hammers and commerce) to be able to employ specialists. In that case, the 'cost' of the specialists is fairly low. If you have to build many farms on tiles to be able to employ specialists, then the cost of the specialists is high and just working the land is typically more efficient.
There are 2 main ways to acquire a cultural victory. Both employ multiple religions to get multiple cathedrals in the 3 great cities to multiply the culture production.
1) Develop your empire normally where you build several cathedrals in the 3 great cities and improve the land around the 3 great cities to maximize the commerce output of these 3 great cities. Then when the cathedrals are in place and the free speech civic is improving the commerce output of your cities and adding a culture bonus (or later after broadcast towers), you maximize the culture slider so that these 3 cities convert all of their commerce into culture.
Advantage: highest culture production possible in these cities. Disadvantage: low science production (nothing from the science slider, only scientist specialists) once you maximize the culture slider.
2) Develop your empire normally where you build several cathedrals in the 3 great cities and improve the land around the 3 great cities to maximize the food output of these 3 great cities. Use the caste system civic to employ many artist specialists which can be supported by the high food output of the cities.
Advantage: you can put the science slider at any level that you desire. The culture production in the city is largely independent from this slider. Disadvantage: The culture output is significantly lower as with method 1 after the slider is moved to 100% culture, but higher before the slider is moved to 100% culture.
