I'm very new to this game and I'm struggling with some very basic concepts so I'm hoping for some help.
Help is what you shall have. Keep those questions coming!
First of all, I'm impressed that you've already figured out that the City Screen is where you manage you empire (as your empire is the sum of your cities). So keep exploring the mysteries of the City Screen and you're on your way to mastering this game.
5) As I understand it, I can't actually stockpile food/production, just generate more than I'm using?
Take another look at the City Screen, and you'll realize that the amount of
and
that are accumulated in each city on every turn is placed inside the Food bar and the Production bar, respectively.
Lets say that your city is producing an excess of 3
(read what the other guy said about food surplus) and 5
every turn. The total amount of
on the Food bar then increases with 3 every turn and the total amount of
increases by 5. Once one of these bars are full (hit their target value) you get another Citizen/population point in the city (surplus
) or you finish whatever you were building
hammers
. Any overflow will be added to the next growth/production cycle.
Note that the Granary building stores half of the Food bar each time the city grows, thus doubling the growth rate. But this also means that if your city starves there will always be some stored food available (since all of it wasn't used to create that latest population point). You should be able to figure out what I mean by studying the City Screen.
Also note that Settler and Worker units are produced with
both and (really surplus
). This because they represent citizens that are sent out on the fields. (Previous versions of the game actually made a city shrink once you built one of these units.
) Producing such a unit will also stop the city in question from growing, as no surplus food is added to the Food bar.
Remember that most answers to your questions will already be right there in the City Screen - you just have to decipher where that information is located and how you interpret it. Its all simple arithmetics however, so its possible to figure most of it by yourself. Some concepts might seem a bit strange at first though, so we'll help explain those.
One last tip: Mouse over any bars or value or piece of information and you'll get a breakdown of the math used to calculate those values. (This works with the Beyond the Sword expansion, at least, but its been a really long time since I tried
Vanilla.)
