Specializing cities through permits.

[remconius]

I wonder if permits have a downside.

Science doubled, but production halved. Production doubled, but health -20%. Food production double, but no gold produced.

 

[apatheist]

I'd prefer that, as then you wouldn't need artificial and arbitrary caps to limit and balance their use.

 

[Ramalhão]

In Civ3, it's possible to specialize your cities, but most people don't know how to do it.

In Governor screen, there's a tab called Production. It's possible to set several priorities for production and choose this city, all cities and continental cities. If you need a settler factory, tell the governor to build only settlers (disabling all other unit types) and to produce growth (food). The same config could happen to build a worker factory, only enabling to build workers instead of settlers. A spearman factory could be done setting to build defensive land units and emphatizing production (shields). When you'll build a wonder, tell the governor to emphatize production, so it will try to get the most shields possible. Obviously, a good micromanagement do a better job, but it takes time.

Jesse Smith said "There are 19 town permits that have been added to the game." Maybe governor system in Civ3 was entirely redone. By the way, that Production tab has 15 options. I think most people here don't use/like these governors, but maybe they'll do a better job in Civ4.

 

[apatheist]

That's specialization in the sense of restricting what a city does, but it's not specialization in the sense of a city being especially good at certain types of things. You could do the former in every civ game thus far, either through the governor in civ3 as you describe, or by managing it yourself. The latter has not been in civ games and is what we mean by specialization.

 

[Ramalhão]

I understood what you mean. Eg: if a city is specialized in science, it'll have great chances to generate a Great Scientist. This city may need to have several science facilities and several scientist specialists, who knows?

But I wrote the text about governors to point that list has 15 options, while Jesse said about 19 town permits. These numbers are close, so there may be a relation. As I wrote above, maybe governor system was redone, but it will surely be better than it was in Civ3.

 

[remconius]

Something else related to this topic:

I read somewhere you can trade food to other cities. does that mean you can use a few high-grassland cities with loads of excess food to feed a mountains/hills only city to create the ultimate production town?