Specialists in cities. When and what?

[PapaRockett]

I only just discovered adding specialists to buildings in cities and that it boosts yield output. Of course it decreases food output too.

I like to play as Shaka. What do I need to do to make my city specialist / food supply efficient? Do I just keep it on automatic?

 

[tu_79]

Automatic does a good work. Pick city focus as intended (Standard, Food, Production are the most used ones). If you reaally want to produce faster, ignoring culture, science and everything, manually place all engineers and merchants (yes, gold for your troops), but you risk falling behind in many things if you can't kill lots of enemy units.
Specialists also add unhappiness.

 

[Enginseer]

Just put the cities on a Great Person focus. It does the job great and attempts to readjust when a city is producing too much unhappiness from urbanization.

 

[tu_79]

Just put the cities on a Great Person focus. It does the job great and attempts to readjust when a city is producing too much unhappiness from urbanization.

I only focus cities on GP when I go Tradition or Aesthetics, not the best trees for Shaka, perhaps I am missing something?

 

[Enginseer]

Authority is great for the GP focus because GP focus often don't utilize production tiles, but rather food tiles to keep up the specialist consumption. You can try it. Put GP focus in your most prosperous cities and most likely to build a guild or two there. Never stack guilds at all in one city. You leave that city vulnerable to being taken over and you may be become a mini-Venice if it gets conquered not to mention you have to supply that city constant food to keep up with at least three guilds of 6 specialists.

There is something to mention however, mines are somewhat better than engineer specialists until later in the game and even then mines are equal-parred with engineers in terms of just producing production.

 

[Galbias]

I never even realized there was a GP focus, huh.

Engineers are the easiest to work early since production is useful for obvious reasons (and GEs are most valuable early-midgame). My rule of thumb is to focus on growth before anything else, and only work Specialist slots if you can do so while still growing.