Specialised cities? Who needs them?

Aldor

King
Joined
Nov 26, 2005
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688
Location
Germany
My last game was quite fun. My capital city had quite good production from the beginning, so I was looking to turn it into a production city. The interesting part was, with a river and being by the sea, it also had quite good commerce. And then the fun happened: first a gems resource popped up in a mined hill. A few hundred years later, a gold resource came up in another hill. And yet later, ANOTHER gold appeared! At this point, the capital was the main science center, and with also coal and iron being around (coal popped as well...was not there from the start!), I built iron works and oxford university there. Have a look, who needs specialised cities again? ;)

(Of course I see the value of specialised cities, but I still use generalized ones more often.)
 

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Usually you only need 1-2 production center (no cottages at all, just farms and workshops), and all the other cities purely commercial.

Congrads of having so many resources in a city. I heard that the chance of random resources popping up in a being-worked mine is 1/500. Usually, I have "1" resource popping up through an entire game. Therefore, specialization is still preferred for the not-so-lucky majority.

Also, a gold / gem mine is actually not better than a (fully upgraded) Town. Those grassland farms can be replaced by cottages, and no-resource hill mines can be replaced by windmills. Town will give you 1 hammer under universal sufferage anyways, and windmills compensate the food shortage from the farm replacement, plus it gives more gold. I would have killed that grassland forest long time ago to pop up a cottage there as well.

If you do all that I believe your beaker can shoot up to at least 400+ under bureaucracy.
 
maltz said:
I heard that the chance of random resources popping up in a being-worked mine is 1/500. Usually, I have "1" resource popping up through an entire game. Therefore, specialization is still preferred for the not-so-lucky majority.

I'm not a math expert, but wouldn't this depend a bit on the game speed too? The chance may be low, but in a marathon game you have a LOT more turns, so more chances to find something nice. Of course, it is probably still better to make good use of what you have than to hope for more than you have ;)

Anyway, I have been quite lucky with finding stuff in mines in my last games (all marathon). So I'm somewhat reluctant now to build windmills...mines go wherever I can put them!

Also, a gold / gem mine is actually not better than a (fully upgraded) Town. Those grassland farms can be replaced by cottages, and no-resource hill mines can be replaced by windmills. Town will give you 1 hammer under universal sufferage anyways, and windmills compensate the food shortage from the farm replacement, plus it gives more gold. I would have killed that grassland forest long time ago to pop up a cottage there as well.

But, I need 2 windmill'ed hills to compensate for one farm (I tend to build ahead of time with biology in mind...perhaps better to adapt to what you really have!). I got the gems and first gold quite early, so building windmills and cottages was not so attractive anymore after that. Then again, of course I don't need over 20 pop either, and could give up some food.

If you do all that I believe your beaker can shoot up to at least 400+ under bureaucracy.

It is over 400 beakers, under US :) would be interesting to check how much more it could be with bureaucracy at that stage... EDIT: woops, I meant its with free speech of course.
 
I have no idea what the city holds without showing FPC. However, from what i can gather, it still seems much better suited for production than commerce. If this is indeed your best science city, then you're certainly not specializing your other cities properly. A simple jungle city with no bonus ressources at all and cottages everywhere should completely anihilate this city in terms of commerce.
 
Zombie, seeing as he didn't know the coal was going to be there until the city was already much developed, I think he might not have had much choice.

To have gems and two gold resources, with a food resource, available... I agree, that city would probably be best used as balanced in both directions - production and commerce. Seeing as it has good production, it wouldn't be so painful to build the commerce infrastructure anyway.
 
Zombie, terrain is often the most important consideration when choosing how to specialize a city, but it is not the only one. Although I would agree offhand that a pure cottage city may make a better science city than one with hills, Aldor might be weighing in other factors that he didn't disclose when making his decision.

Feel free to correct my math, but my current understanding is that the best a cottage city can get, science wise is:

{(20 * 8) * (2.25)} + 1 = 361 beakers per turn
{(20 * 9) * (2.25)} + 1 = 406 beakers per turn for a financial civ

That is 20 fully developed towns with Library/ University/ Laboratory/ Academy/ Oxford University. With Free Speech, of course, and science set at 100%. Minus, of course, any commerce coming in from trade routes.

Of sourse, that figure can be augmented by Super Specialists, but once that becomes a significant factor, terrain is no longer as relevant in the final equation. With Frederick, I was producing 117 raw science points purely from my Super Specialists and my one Priest specialist, after modifiers (x 2.75 due to Bureaucracy), that came out to 321.75 beakers/turns before taking any terrain-based or trade-based terrain into consideration.

In another game, I pumped Great Merchants/Scientists into my capital city and build Oxford and Wall street instead. Of course, the downside to this is that the science specialization is weakenedsince less Great Scientists are produced, and adding Super Engineers to the city early on is no longer a no brainer.
 
Nefelia said:
Zombie, terrain is often the most important consideration when choosing how to specialize a city, but it is not the only one. Although I would agree offhand that a pure cottage city may make a better science city than one with hills, Aldor might be weighing in other factors that he didn't disclose when making his decision.

Feel free to correct my math, but my current understanding is that the best a cottage city can get, science wise is:

{(20 * 8) * (2.25)} + 1 = 361 beakers per turn
{(20 * 9) * (2.25)} + 1 = 406 beakers per turn for a financial civ

That is 20 fully developed towns with Library/ University/ Laboratory/ Academy/ Oxford University. With Free Speech, of course, and science set at 100%. Minus, of course, any commerce coming in from trade routes.

Of sourse, that figure can be augmented by Super Specialists, but once that becomes a significant factor, terrain is no longer as relevant in the final equation. With Frederick, I was producing 117 raw science points purely from my Super Specialists and my one Priest specialist, after modifiers (x 2.75 due to Bureaucracy), that came out to 321.75 beakers/turns before taking any terrain-based or trade-based terrain into consideration.

In another game, I pumped Great Merchants/Scientists into my capital city and build Oxford and Wall street instead. Of course, the downside to this is that the science specialization is weakenedsince less Great Scientists are produced, and adding Super Engineers to the city early on is no longer a no brainer.

8 commerce per tile for a non-financial civilization assumes that every tile has a river. I have never seen that, but it could happen. But lets assume 7 commerce per town for a non-financial civilization. Still the total research output can become far higher than what your calculations suggest.

Assuming a size 20 city with 4 good trade routes, then this city could bring in 40 commerce from trade. The tile output would be close to 20*7=140 commerce for a total of 180 commerce.

The multiplier would be 1+0.25 (library) + 0.25 (university) + 0.25 (lab) + 0.25 (observatory) + 0.5 (academy) + 1 (oxfords university) = 3.5

3.5 * 180 = 630 science output.

If the city has a number of floodplains tiles, then the science output will be even higher. Not only will the rivers increase the raw commerce output from the tiles from 7 to 8, but the extra food will allow the city to maintain a fair number of scientist specialists. A few great scientists would also increase research a lot.
Each scientist adds 3 * 3.5 = 10.5 research while each great scientist adds 6 * 3.5 = 21 research.
If you have a financial leader, then output will also be a little higher.
You should however be content with a super science city that can reach the 500 mark since you don't always have this perfect or nearly perfect terrain within your borders.
 
Math schmath. :p
I was lost at "omg, look at those resources"
 
Zombie69 said:
I have no idea what the city holds without showing FPC. However, from what i can gather, it still seems much better suited for production than commerce. If this is indeed your best science city, then you're certainly not specializing your other cities properly. A simple jungle city with no bonus ressources at all and cottages everywhere should completely anihilate this city in terms of commerce.

Yes, it was my best science city, because the land around me was not that great. Caesar to my south had a lot of jungle and better commerce city sites, but he converted to my religion and after that I just COULD NOT kill him :D

I'm afraid I don't have the initial save nor a late autosave anymore, but here's a rather early save (from around 1000bc) if anyone's interested. I have a later save too (around 1500ad), but can't find it among many others right now (have to start up game again to check).
 
If you think about it, it's better to have one city on 100% production and one on 100% science than 2 cities split half and half for the simple fact that you don't have to build commerce buildings in the production city. That's hundreds and hundreds of hammers saved that can be spent on units or wonders.
 
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