chazzycat
Deity
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2010
- Messages
- 3,001
I think I am finally getting the hang of this on my 5th game. If you want a late-game specialist powerhouse, it's something you want to plan far ahead for. Here's what worked for me:
- Confucius is the obvious leader choice. Not much more to be said, he's just perfect for this approach.
- Specialists aren't very important in the antiquity age. It's more important to focus on growth, in both your cities and towns. Choose the governments with the 20% food bonus. I assigned a handful of specialists in this age, but not many.
- Don't worry too much about productivity of your towns. These exist solely to funnel food to your megacapital. As soon as growth slows down, convert to fishing/farming towns. Whenever you unlock a new building you can buy in these towns that add food, do so and also revisit the growth timing. It may make sense to let your towns grow a bit more if the new food source cut down the time to something more reasonable. You don't want to just "set and forget" your towns for the entire age. Every tile they grow into is more food for your capital eventually.
- I played Khmer and found it a very solid choice for growing a huge capital. Their traditions and wonder are also great fits for an eventual specialist economy, even if you don't get much impact in the early game.
- Maintain a town:city ratio of about 3:1. That means for the first age it's mostly about your capital, but you do want to develop a 2nd city as well. I'd recommend this city be coastal. In fact, settling a bunch of fishing towns up & down the coast seems like a great strategy.
- In the exploration age, your main goal is to acquire as many "fish" resources as possible. Settling the islands on continents plus is a great way to do this.
- In my game I went with Majapahit and they are truly fantastic for this approach. They have a strong incentive to settle all the islands, due to their tradition for +1 production and culture on every marine tile. So I naturally gobbled up tons of fish along the way. Majapahit also generate a ton of culture & happiness from their unique quarters. Happiness is actually really important for this strategy, because a specialist economy needs a lot of social policy slots to be effective. The culture is frankly more than needed, but hey doesn't hurt.
- I actually found a use case for switching capitals. It makes a lot of sense to do this as Majapahit, since it effectively lowers the specialist cap in your capital. This way, you focus on building up your 2nd city as the new capital, while your old capital (likely much bigger) still gets their extra specialists.
- In the modern age, focus on getting 1 factory up ASAP and fill it with fish. Each fish adds 5% growth to your entire empire. In my game, I have nine fish slotted in my capital. As you could imagine, this takes your growth to a ridiculous level. I'm talking about cities growing every ~5 turns on EPIC SPEED
- Meiji Japan is a very potent civ to wrap up this playstyle in the modern age, especially if you went Majapahit and grabbed islands. They get +1 production from specialists, and TONS of production especially on islands. It's actually crazy how much production they can get out of small islands. The tradition for coastal adjacency on military buildings is lowkey INSANE, in addition to their unique production building with the same adjacency bonus. Production is probably the weakness of a specialist/coastal based economy, so it's a great fit IMO. Their wonder giving more pop growth is nice too.
- For ideology, I prefer communism so that assigning specialists doesn't slow down growth too much. +6 food isn't a lot at that point, but with all the multipliers it adds up, because you WILL stack up a crazy number of specialists in every city.
What do you all think?
- Confucius is the obvious leader choice. Not much more to be said, he's just perfect for this approach.
- Specialists aren't very important in the antiquity age. It's more important to focus on growth, in both your cities and towns. Choose the governments with the 20% food bonus. I assigned a handful of specialists in this age, but not many.
- Don't worry too much about productivity of your towns. These exist solely to funnel food to your megacapital. As soon as growth slows down, convert to fishing/farming towns. Whenever you unlock a new building you can buy in these towns that add food, do so and also revisit the growth timing. It may make sense to let your towns grow a bit more if the new food source cut down the time to something more reasonable. You don't want to just "set and forget" your towns for the entire age. Every tile they grow into is more food for your capital eventually.
- I played Khmer and found it a very solid choice for growing a huge capital. Their traditions and wonder are also great fits for an eventual specialist economy, even if you don't get much impact in the early game.
- Maintain a town:city ratio of about 3:1. That means for the first age it's mostly about your capital, but you do want to develop a 2nd city as well. I'd recommend this city be coastal. In fact, settling a bunch of fishing towns up & down the coast seems like a great strategy.
- In the exploration age, your main goal is to acquire as many "fish" resources as possible. Settling the islands on continents plus is a great way to do this.
- In my game I went with Majapahit and they are truly fantastic for this approach. They have a strong incentive to settle all the islands, due to their tradition for +1 production and culture on every marine tile. So I naturally gobbled up tons of fish along the way. Majapahit also generate a ton of culture & happiness from their unique quarters. Happiness is actually really important for this strategy, because a specialist economy needs a lot of social policy slots to be effective. The culture is frankly more than needed, but hey doesn't hurt.
- I actually found a use case for switching capitals. It makes a lot of sense to do this as Majapahit, since it effectively lowers the specialist cap in your capital. This way, you focus on building up your 2nd city as the new capital, while your old capital (likely much bigger) still gets their extra specialists.
- In the modern age, focus on getting 1 factory up ASAP and fill it with fish. Each fish adds 5% growth to your entire empire. In my game, I have nine fish slotted in my capital. As you could imagine, this takes your growth to a ridiculous level. I'm talking about cities growing every ~5 turns on EPIC SPEED
- Meiji Japan is a very potent civ to wrap up this playstyle in the modern age, especially if you went Majapahit and grabbed islands. They get +1 production from specialists, and TONS of production especially on islands. It's actually crazy how much production they can get out of small islands. The tradition for coastal adjacency on military buildings is lowkey INSANE, in addition to their unique production building with the same adjacency bonus. Production is probably the weakness of a specialist/coastal based economy, so it's a great fit IMO. Their wonder giving more pop growth is nice too.
- For ideology, I prefer communism so that assigning specialists doesn't slow down growth too much. +6 food isn't a lot at that point, but with all the multipliers it adds up, because you WILL stack up a crazy number of specialists in every city.
What do you all think?
