Specializing Cities

[Wem]

Can anyone offer tips on how best to specialize cities and what strategies to use, to that end?

So far I usually have every one of my cities emphasizing production, I usually have the avoid growth turned on at about 6 population for a while (anyone know at what point you can turn off avoid growth?) and eventually hit the emphasize great person.

In my last game, for the first time, I managed my capital city's citizen allocation so that I could get the pyramids built faster, say, moving a worker onto a quadruple-hammer tile and setting back growth by 10 turns (in this particular case the math worked in favor of getting the wonder done more quickly.)

I hear talk about specializing cities on commerce and food also.. how is that done? Can / should I specialize a city on research? Is excess food produced by one city shared with food-poor cities, etc?

From what I gather, better city management looks like the key to greater success!

 

[Artanis]

Can anyone offer tips on how best to specialize cities and what strategies to use, to that end?

So far I usually have every one of my cities emphasizing production, I usually have the avoid growth turned on at about 6 population for a while (anyone know at what point you can turn off avoid growth?) and eventually hit the emphasize great person.

Turn off Avoid Growth when the city has more than in it. Occasionally, you might want to leave it on anyways, but that's relatively rare.

The vast majority of your cities won't produce jack worth of Great People. That dinky little iceball out in the middle of nowhere isn't going to be popping out Elvis anytime soon, so don't bother putting Emphasize Great People in it. For that matter, I wouldn't turn Emphasize Great People on even in your best cities, since assigning the specialists manually gives you greater control over what Great Person is eventually spawns.

I hear talk about specializing cities on commerce and food also.. how is that done? Can / should I specialize a city on research? Is excess food produced by one city shared with food-poor cities, etc?

Food is not shared between cities (unless you count the 1F produced by a Great Merchant super-specialist, but that's kinda a pathetic return for how much it took to make him in the first place).

As many cities as possible should be specialized towards one thing or another. What they specialize in depends on the terrain: lots of hills and a food resource or two means a production city. Lots of flat land and/or coast means a commerce city. Lots of food resources means a Great People city.


How you go about doing the specialization is that you build up the city's buildings and surrounding terrain so as to best suit what it's good at:

-A production city will be surrounded by nothing but hammer-boosters (i.e. Mines) and whatever Farms/Pastures are required to feed those mines...AND NO COTTAGES. Inside the city, there will be Forge/Factory/Power/Barracks/Drydock. However, it won't be bringing in any Commerce, so the science and gold buildings are pretty much useless in their normal function (i.e. the only reason you'd ever put a Market in a production city is for the boost).

-A Commerce city will be surrounded by Grasslands, Flood Plains, and Coast, with the first 2 mostly covered by Cottages. It actually needs to build its banks and such though, so a couple Mines and/or Watermills are needed, plus whatever farms/pastures are needed to feed everything. Commerce cities' hammer output should be "adequate", and no more. Inside the city, Forges occasionally come in handy, but it's really all about the Bank, Grocer, Market, Monastaries, Library, University, and Observatory. Basically, if it improves the science or gold income of the city, a Commerce city should have it.

-A GP city will be surrounded by food, one way or another. More food = more specialists. More specialists = more GPP. More GPP = more Great People. Thus, Farms/Pastures will be the dominant terrain improvement. Like a commerce city, however, a GP city will need a couple Mines to get its buildings up and running...unless you're running Slavery, in which case you get an absurd amount of people to into buildings. Most buildings will be for the purpose of either A) letting the city get bigger, or B) allowing you to use more specialists (if not both).


Once you've got the hang of deciding how to specialize based on a city's surrounding terrain, you can start working on choosing the city's specialization first, and THEN building it in suitable terrain for that specialization. In other words, instead of building a bunch of cities and later saying, "hmm, now which one has a lot of hills around it", you look around before you colonize and say, "hmm, now where's a good spot with lots of hills and some food, making for the perfect production city?"

 

[Wem]

Thank you very much.. that's very helpful.

 

[katank]

As for tile management, early on, you will generally want to emphasize growth to hit happiness limit ASAP. More tiles worked earlier is generally good. This means try to not work any tiles less than 2 food.

Exceptions are if you want to tech rush. If you would like to grab an early religion, it might help to emphasize commerce at expense of food.

Emphasizing production at the very beginning isn't so helpful since chopping provides more shields any how.

As for avoid growth, I don't like to use it. You are just manually stopping expansion. If it grows over happiness limit, it's time to break out the whip. Slavery is probably the best labor civic as it's no upkeep and lets you pop rush. Whippings that cost multiple pop still only generate 1 unhappy face. Hence, if you have 6 happy, 7 pop. You whip for 2 and then the happys and pop is balanced. So turn those excess food into shields.

Slavery is probably the best way to make fringe cities profitable by making infrastructure.

 

[Nestorius]

I got a question: If your capital has lots of grassland, and happens to be the best grower, is it better to make it a GP city, or would it be better to cottage it and add Oxford/Wall Street? My capitals always seem to want to be GP cities, but it seems so much potential commerce is wasted.

 

[Sparta]

I got a question: If your capital has lots of grassland, and happens to be the best grower, is it better to make it a GP city, or would it be better to cottage it and add Oxford/Wall Street? My capitals always seem to want to be GP cities, but it seems so much potential commerce is wasted.

Personally, I prefer Oxford and Wall Street, as my capital will most often get an Acadamy, and I fairly routinely run Bureaucracy (and with +50% commerce and shields, you hate to be going the GPP route and upping the one commodity with no bonus). Another aspect of this is that the palace alone generates eight gold per turn, which works well with going the financial route early on. This does typically mean you'll have to try to get a good food bonus city elsewhere to be your (primary) GPP city. (You can always pop a great person or two early on from your capital and later transfer primary GPP duties to a more suitable city too - I'm doing that in a current game (capital has wheat) and it seems to work well.)

You could probably go either route (especially in extreme cases, like if your capital is the only city with 2+ food resources, or a different city has 3+ financial resources), but you're correct in that it is really best if you can focus primarily on one aspect or the other (especially in a city as important as your capital), not an even mix of the two, with food and commerce probably being the most rewarding two to distinguish between anyway (since every city can use some production).

 

[katank]

Please be careful between the gold city and commerce/science city.

Wall Street is best in your shrine city or where you merged in tons of prophets/merchants.

Oxford is best in capital or some other highh commerce city.

When you put both in one city, whenever one is used, the other is less effective. Total commerce is split between gold and science.

 

[Cadran]

A good way to learn how to specialize cities is to actually name them based on their specialty--production 1, commerce 1, commerce 2, great person, and so on. It's a little cheesy, but it forces you to think about the intended role of the city from the beginning.

 

[Artanis]

I got a question: If your capital has lots of grassland, and happens to be the best grower, is it better to make it a GP city, or would it be better to cottage it and add Oxford/Wall Street? My capitals always seem to want to be GP cities, but it seems so much potential commerce is wasted.

To be honest, I don't really know. In all but two games, my capital has been so good at everything that I can't help but have it end up as some sort of super-hybrid, with tons of commerce, hammers, and GPP .



Just for the record, those 2 situations were:
1) Capital had 3 clams, a fish, and a corn outside it. I was building settlers in something like 3 turns.
2) Capital had about 15 Flood Plains around it. As Mali.