What constitues a good city?

[naturesbandit]

For example, if you want it to specialize in production, what sort of landscape should you look for? Is there a hammer yield you shoot for? What size should you let it grow to? I got the hang of dot-mapping in CIV, but have yet to find a similar system for CiV.

 

[steveg700]

For example, if you want it to specialize in production, what sort of landscape should you look for? Is there a hammer yield you shoot for? What size should you let it grow to? I got the hang of dot-mapping in CIV, but have yet to find a similar system for CiV.

Well, food is the most critical element. You can have tons of mines on hills, but they won't be worked until everyone's fed (unless you want to manually force them to and suffer starvation). Some source of fresh water is good, because it improves adjacent farms quickly, and also even allows hills to have farms (which often wind up being more productive than mines, simply because they're more likely to actually be worked).

Gold is the other big thing. It's what makes rivers so ideal for settling. You get an extra gold for every adjacent tile, along with a source of fresh water, and you can set up the watermill for a little extra food and production. Let's not forget the hydro plant in the late game. If you can't find rivers, the next best thing is a coastal settlement. After that come settles near luxury resources.

Production's someone less important, because that's entirely localized. You can get away with having some low-production cities if they're generating enough gold (which in turn requires them to have higher populations, which in turn requires them to have a good source of food).

How much population you need is determined by a combination of how many good workable tiles you have and how many specialist slot buildings you have.

 

[Gimasag3]

Basically what steveg said. Also, culture is pretty important too. You need enough tiles so you can get a good population/income/production to start with and still have enough for specialists. And trade routes can help a lot if you're connecting two big cities.