Specialising Cities

[JesusOnEez]

Without getting into a CIV and CiV slanging match, this is a genuine question to enhance my enjoyment of CiV which has greatly improved with G&K. In CIV, I used to enjoy tweaking and specialising cities. Gold/Science/Production/GP Farms and so on.

I don't get the "feel" for doing the same thing in CiV and was wondering if it's still feasible, and if so, whether it's actually worth it. Production seems easy enough, lots of farms, lots of mines, but the others I struggle with.

Any suggestions for this kind of tactic or is it generally better for most cities to be a jack-of-all trades and master of none?

Particularly, I'd like to know about putting together science cities, gold cities and GP farms beyond just building the right buildings...what improvements are going to help me the most with this kind of city building?

 

[regeneration64]

I also don't feel the urge to specialise the vast majority of my cities. That said, I often find my capital to have either very high production or food.

* Gold - Build plenty of trading posts. However, I seldom have a gold-focused city and puppets are perfectly suited as gold-focused cities
* Science - I have never felt the need to have a science-focused city. This comes naturally from high population within a given city or across the empire as a whole. Of course there is nothing stopping you from building lots of farms and acadamies
* Production - Settle on hills and build those mines
* GP farms - farms are key at first in order to grow your city so that you have a high enough population to use specialists. Once you hit (say) 10 population manually control your specialists. E.g. if you want a great engineer then assign them to workshops, factories etc.
* Culture - I believe that is all about the right buildings but landmarks can help too

Don't forget that certain wonders can also aid certain specialist cities and remember that farms are key (at least initially) for any specialist or non-specialist city. Overall I think that it really doesn't matter if you specialise cities or not. Both options are viable strategies and it just depends on your playstyle/how you manage your empire.

Hope that helps.

 

[Slvynn]

Its good to have science specialized cities.
In modern CiV best scientists grow when they live in jungles, eat bananas, store them in granaries, and visit endless jungle trade posts to sell said bananas in get beakers from such trade
Scientists and People in Jungles in Civ IV lived much worse, unhealthy lives

 

[miked1991]

Gold - I rarely ever build a city purely for gold as a puppet will do this job for me. Only exception is if I have a lot of jungle and I can cover the land with Trading Posts and take a science bonus too.

Science - Science comes from population, and it's easier to maintain X pop equally over all my cities than it is to have one much larger city (costs more food to grow each new pop). That said, I will make sure my NC city is on food focus for most of the time and plant any academies around that city to maximise the bonus.

Production - Like you say it's easy enough to spread farms and mines. I like to settle around river hills that I can farm for 2f2h1g tiles after Civil Service and they help production a lot. Generally though I don't feel I need to go pure hammers in a city, since it makes more sense to upgrade your armies in ciV I tend not to build a single unit after the Classical era until Bombers come into play.

Culture - It's hard to accumulate much culture in a city unless you run all your Artists slots and lay down some landmarks. But these will slow the production of other Great People I'd rather get (Scientists & Engineers) so I don't bother. Instead, I pick up a reasonable enough stream of culture by building ampitheatres and opera houses in all of my cities when they have nothing more pressing to build. Every city will start out building a monument so I can usually unlock a couple of trees early on in the game and then go into a third later on with a small culture trickle.

GP Farms - I generally want to produce Scientists and for these you only get 2 slots from a University, then the next doesn't come until Public Schools I don't think. So there's no need for a specialist city, instead each city that's up and running will run 2 scientists after building a uni and that'll do the trick


In short, I don't find specialising as important as it was in cIV. Quite frankly all I find I need to do is work the best tiles my city can offer, and then if it turns out my cities particularly good at lets say producing gold, I'll prioritise building markets and banks before other buildings.

 

[JesusOnEez]

"In short, I don't find specialising as important as it was in cIV. Quite frankly all I find I need to do is work the best tiles my city can offer, and then if it turns out my cities particularly good at lets say producing gold, I'll prioritise building markets and banks before other buildings. "

That's kind of how I have been playing. The city evolves naturally and then I prioritise buildings accordingly.

I've heard people talking about getting gold from puppets and city states...what's involved here? Can you improve land in puppets and just spam trading posts (same with city states) or is there something I'm missing...didn't think you could build improvements in puppets...

 

[vibe96]

You can improve everything that's in your borders. So you can build those trading post next to puppets.

 

[JesusOnEez]

You can improve everything that's in your borders. So you can build those trading post next to puppets.

Aaaah, didn't know that. I thought if they were a puppet they effectively ran themselves and thus their workers would continue to improve the land as they see fit. I thought you could only make changes to the city and its' grounds if it was annexed.



Feel a plonker!

 

[alpaca]

Specializing still pays off, but it's not as all-important as in civ4. I found it important to have a few (read: as many as you can afford to) cities specialize heavily on science and pop growth. These cities need to build or buy every science and food building you can get ASAP. If you can, try to build them near mountains to get observatories, or near jungles to get free science for each tile you work.

Gold focusing is less useful as trading posts are so weak until the late game boost from economics. If you can plant a city with access to three or more decent luxury tiles, you can use that for a gold focused city, but otherwise I wouldn't bother and just build markets everywhere (it's important to note that not only do markets yield +25% but also a flat +2 income per city). The main exception: jungles. When you get into the renaissance and if you choose rationalism, you might want to convert some farms into TPs in your science cities, especially non-irrigated ones. Merchant specialists are just as bad as TPs, providing only 2 gold and a relatively weak GP.

Production is, as you said, fairly straightforward. Just make sure you don't build too many unnecessary buildings. Workshops and factories are generally fine but stables, windmills and such usually don't cut it. Ideally, you'll want to settle near a river through hills. If you can, you might want to look into building cities with a lot of stone nearby. With stoneworks, each of those tiles provides either 2 2 or 1 3

Culture focusing is possible but the lack of % modifiers means it's not very useful. I mostly tend to cram in culture buildings in any of my cities when I can.

GP farms aren't really feasible, or useful. You'll want to use science cities to produce scientists and production cities to produce one or two engineers for key wonders. If you go for culture, you might want to produce and settle some artists.

 

[JesusOnEez]

OK, this is all making a bit more sense now. Thanks for the help all.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Mostly it's the land that dictates if you can/should specialize.

In a past game I got a mountain surrounded by jungle so that's obviously science, and another with a river, mostly grassland and wheat and bananas, so that was for GP. If there's nothing special about the city, it's hard to specialize it.