Roland Johansen
Deity
Okay, a little background first: I played at least 200 or 300 games of Civ II. Probably a lot more, but let's just say it's around that number for now. Then, I played Civ III a little, but ended up not playing it much at all after a while.
Now I've got Civ IV cranked up and have probably played about a dozen game so far. I'm slowly moving up the difficulty level and am at Prince right now. I'm also messing with the map choices a little, and have found that I prefer continents or even the islands much more than the pangea.
Here's the deal. Given my roots with Civ II, I'm having a hard time breaking my desire to have every city build every improvement. I've got my arms around the fact that I don't need to build a few things until the population is either ticked-off or living in filth, but other than that, I find myself building all of the science buildings, all of the commerce buildings and a lot of the others in ever city.
The net result seems to be that I'm always running the game right to the very end of time, where I'm either trying to eek out a diplomatic or space race victory. (Always normal speed on a standard map for me.) The other result seems to be that I have very rarely been able to put together a quality stack of doom for conquest any time after riflemen show up.
So, can anyone point me to some of the discussions here that will explain to me how I can set up my cities where every city doesn't need every improvement in order for me to be successful in vanilla Civ IV?
Thanks!
City specialisation can be useful to some extent. You should specialise the cities that contain national wonders so that these +100% bonuses don't go to waste. And it can be useful to specialise a few cities with high potential production to maximise this production for units. That way other cities don't have to build units and can concentrate on buildings to improve your overall economy.
In this case, I'm talking about specialisation of the tile improvements around the city. A production based city should have mines and workshops with high food tiles to balance the food shortage of these high hammer tiles. Other cities should have lots of commerce tiles with a few hammer tiles to produce the economy buildings.
But in the end, there are few buildings that aren't useful in a city. It's more a matter of priority. Do you prioritise the courthouse or the library, the barracks or the forge? You have to decide which building will be the most useful.
If you're having trouble finishing buildings inside your cities, then maybe the problem is that you have created commerce cities with barely any high hammer tiles. Such cities might get the highest raw commerce output, but without any hammer output, these cities won't build the economy improving buildings very fast and in the end they are not that efficient. In the late game, universal suffrage might give some decent hammer output to your commerce cities, but at that time the game is already largely finished.
What I do:
I specialise the terrain around my national wonder cities to take maximum advantage of the bonus of the national wonder.
I create a few high hammer cities to produce units.
The large majority of my cities have a decent hammer output and a high commerce output. These are the cities that drive my economy.
The high hammer output cities don't get the economy improving buildings soon. The commerce cities don't get the barracks soon.
I don't specialise a lot, most cities get most of the buildings and I'm playing on immortal/deity. Specialisation is overrated in my opinion.
Thanks for the info & thought... I was playing catchup yesterday and replied to about 4 DIFFERENT posts posted over several days.
Personally, I don't like the posts where someone replies in one long post to several others - especially on different topics.
I'll try to avoid doing that in the future.
I sometimes create such posts where I react to multiple posts. They can become a bit lengthy and thus intimidating. I do try to use paragraphs and quotes so that people can read the part that they think might be interesting and can ignore the rest.
In your case, the replies were mostly very short and I don't think the post would have gotten an intimidating length when you would have combined them in one post.
On the other hand, there wasn't a real problem or something. Your posts were quite readable and in the end, that is the most important.