The Specialist-Fam Threshold

[Bowsling]

First of all, apologies for the error in the title.

At what percentage of corruption do you guys start farming cities rather than using them for working tiles?

Personally, I normally farm cities at around 40-50%, and 60-70% if the the tiles have lots of hills/plains as opposed to grasslands and flood plains.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Only the 90% ones, and even then only the ones with bonus food. It's a progression thing for me, once you've expanded all you can without war, progression comes with workers doing what they do best.

 

[Skullsplitter]

Except in the early stages, or right after a new offensive unit becomes available, I don't bother with more than a half-dozen cities producing stuff anymore. A dozen tops. If I start producing chariots as soon as they are available and upgrade them to horsies as soon as I get the tech, I find I don't need many cities to replace losses. I kept track of my losses a couple games back, and had only 7 horsies, 3 knights, and 14 cav KIA before I was building tanks. I had taken out 2 civs and crippled 4 others by that time.

When tanks come on-line, I'll hurry some workers in a few of the better towns close to the capitol, switch from irrigate to mine, then pump some tanks, but pretty soon they go right back to farming.

So the answer would be almost all of them become farmers, corruption notwithstanding.

[EDIT]
Oh, BTW, once a farm town drops to 1 or 2 fpt, I'll often produce a settler, sometimes hurrying him if the food box is going to fill too fast. Maybe a worker. Rarely anything else.
[/EDIT]

 

[Bowsling]

But that was on a dry, flat map? Casualties are always waaaayyyyy higher if you have to cross mountains or wetlands to invade.

 

[Skullsplitter]

Mountains or wetlands are actually less painful, because you can escort the horsies with swords or spears/pikes all the way. Oh, yeah, I lost a ton of swords that game, but I didn't keep track of them. They are just disposable units.

[EDIT]
Early wars tend to be easy. Defenders are usually regular, occasionally conscript, never walled, etc. If the town happens to be 7+ pop, just wait 'em out till they are size 6. Don't attack across a river. Even fortified regular spears on hills tend to go down fast to horsies. It helps that vet horsies retreat fairly often. Save the elites for taking out the bowmen and warriors he inevitably has as his last line of defense.
[/EDIT]

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Only the 90% ones, and even then only the ones with bonus food. It's a progression thing for me, once you've expanded all you can without war, progression comes with workers doing what they do best.

Okay, I've been playing since Civ2 and loving it, still finding things out. It was mostly about keeping busy between wars I would look for the most profitable cities to turn into Science Farms, hence my comment about bonus food tiles. Well in my current game I wondered about that and started irrigating my towns of 6 to see how many Scientists I could get. Obviously depending on map size and number of towns, a lot of towns with 3 Scientists will probably out number a few large cities with 6-12 Scientists.

So many things in this game taken alone are insignificant, but multipling those little things can result in awesome advantages.

The obvious one are roads, mining & irrigating, one of the early hurdles for beginners is getting enough workers and keeping them busy through most of the game.

Then there is bombardment, never found much use for less than 20 or 30 artillery.