Tips on Micromanaging Cities?

[Rathelon]

You could have been improving luxuries, building mines or constructing roads during those three turns. If you're on a difficulty where you can consistently build the Pyramids, pretty much any strategy is sustainable. Move up a couple of difficulty levels, and you will get punished for inefficiently building Farms.

Never did I say I was neglecting my special resources, roads, or expansion. I always improve specials first. Just because I said I build farms, doesnt mean I blindly spam them everywhere. C'mon. I said I farm river tiles, plains, and the infrequent desert hill with fresh water. I also build trading posts in grasslands and flood plains, mines on bald hills, lumbermills in forests. And great people buildings in empty desert tiles when I feel like it (or plains hills in the case of the manufactury). It's nothing new; I'm not reinventing the wheel here.

Food that is generated by working a tile is less efficient than food that is gifted by a Maritime, because you have to spend Happiness to get the food. That's a killer in the early game, when Happiness is the primary constraint on your empire.

I find this inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, but if you're working tiles to generate food, you need more citizens to generate the same level of Hammer/Gold output as a player using Maritimes. Therefore, food generated by working tiles is Happiness inefficient.

This is a valid argument. However, I still prefer supplying my own food and keeping my gold to purchase buildings or units rather than paying off a city state.

 

[diz2]

This is a valid argument. However, I still prefer supplying my own food and keeping my gold to purchase buildings or units rather than paying off a city state.

But the point is you should have even more gold to purchase building and units if you use the maritimes...

They save you pop slots and worker turns that can be used for more beneficial purposes.

Though frankly I seldom purchase buildings and units myself. I usually put the extra citizens to work in the libraries.

I typically pop cap 80% of my cities at 3 or 4, so investing in farms is pretty pointless. I think even just one maritime CS + city tile can support 2 guys in the library + one guy in a mine.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Never did I say I was neglecting my special resources, roads, or expansion. I always improve specials first. Just because I said I build farms, doesnt mean I blindly spam them everywhere.

Order matters. If you're building Farms to grow when you could have been building Mines, you end up with less total production during the period when you were building Farms. That results in slower infrastructure, which results in slower horizontal expansion. You then end up behind the player running Maritimes for Food.

This is a valid argument. However, I still prefer supplying my own food and keeping my gold to purchase buildings or units rather than paying off a city state.

You may prefer it, but it's easy to demonstrate that your approach fails to solve the production maximization problem. It follows that your approach is suboptimal.

 

[Varanid]

I prefer getting big cities even if it's less efficient, so I do use farms; but they are cheezy as hell for being weaker than a Maritime CS. You'd think a farm should produce more food than one maritime (from a game balance standpoint)

 

[EscapedGoat]

This is a valid argument. However, I still prefer supplying my own food and keeping my gold to purchase buildings or units rather than paying off a city state.

If you can find a better deal than +2 food per city (a free citizen), +5 happiness, +x strategic resources for 7.14 gold per turn (250/35), I'd like to hear it

That lump sum will buy you a warrior or half a granary...

 

[neilkaz]

Order matters. If you're building Farms to grow when you could have been building Mines, you end up with less total production during the period when you were building Farms. That results in slower infrastructure, which results in slower horizontal expansion. You then end up behind the player running Maritimes for Food.



You may prefer it, but it's easy to demonstrate that your approach fails to solve the production maximization problem. It follows that your approach is suboptimal.

Martin's tip to mine hills early on to get production has been a big help to me, and has helped me go from usually (not always) beating Emperor level to currently almost always beating Immortal.

Three reecent Immortal Pangaea examples as I've been trying out a few civs that I have little experience with before the patch comes out.

1) India. I start with a large forest on a river (yes India not Iroquois). It was nice to have good production right away and once I could build lumber mills and then later research steam power, Delhi was a production powerhouse. I only founded Mumbai that game to get horses and had a very strong crushing easy win. Why so easy? Well my production meant that I could build all sorts of buildings and units quickly and some GA's enhanced that. Mumbai also expanded into forest tiles and became nearly as useful. My puppet empire focused on gold as usual and I painted their tiles with TPs.

2) Greece. This time I have some hills and I mine them quickly to help me get a few of the very OP CC's out to battle. With ease I control the eastern half of the map, and am well ahead of the two gals (Cathy and Liz) in the west neither of which will last long once I tech up to better units and build a few more. Once again, production and early production in my few cities is extremely useful.

3) Siam. Few hills around and few forested tiles. Lots of plains and nice river tiles, mostly plains. This should seem like a good game, but it hasn't gone all that well. My lack of production is obvious as it even took longer than I'd like to build colosseums. I now can't crank out elephants and cannons as quickly as I'd like. In contrast to the previous two very dominant games, I may even lose this one if Harun or Sully becomes a run away civ in the east. Harun is able to build almost every wonder, and I was beaten to FP a good 30 turns before the AI's usually get it. (ie I can get it most of the time on Immortal).

So my Siam game stinks compared to my India or Greece game and IMO mostly because I don't have the same level of production.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[diz2]

Martin's tip to mine hills early on to get production has been a big help to me, and has helped me go from usually (not always) beating Emperor level to currently almost always beating Immortal.

Even if you're going to use a city for science in the long run, a mine or two will get you there a lot faster.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Even if you're going to use a city for science in the long run, a mine or two will get you there a lot faster.

Which is another reason that packing cities tightly and tile sharing is amazing. Your Science city gets use of the Mines until it has its infrastructure, and then passes the use of the Mines to the nearby production city. This saves Worker turns, which are hard to come by early on for builder approaches.