Where to plant GP?

[bonniepbilly]

What are the optimal tiles to plant each GP on a tradition capital? Ie on which resources (assuming the city won't be able to work both resources and GP improvements)?

Can you only look at immediate yield increase by the GP, or do you need to anticipate which yields will be increased by future techs (for example, do you compare the yield of a manufactory to a pasture, even if the pasture will be improved by a stable, and the manufactory later...).

 

[CrazyG]

You want to put them on a tile with a weak potential improvement.

Sheep are usually my first choice. Stables buff sheep, cows, and horses, not pastures. So a horse with a manufactory on top still gets 2 hammers from stables.

Stone or marble are decent choices for similar reasons (stoneworks buff the resource directly, no matter what is on top).

Ivory or bison are good choices, but deer, furs, and truffles aren't.
Plantations other than dye (because it gets 2 culture from the plantation itself)

Mines get buffed by the forge, so I usually won't put a great person on mining luxuries.

The Great Person can instantly connect and chop forest/jungle (if you have the tech), so sometimes I'll clear a forest using him.

If you plant on tiles without resources, put on tiles without freshwater first, because farms get bigger buffs for fresh water. I like to put on flat land before hills.

 

[DeAnno]

I often like to plant GP on hexes at least two of my cities can work, especially if one of the cities is a Tradition capital that might be very pop-limited at certain times in its life.

 

[bonniepbilly]

Thanks both!

 

[telelavoro]

Just to expand on CrazyG's post above, often the improvement with the weakest improvement potential depends on your later policy choices. So if you're planning to go fealty, maybe keep your pastures, or if you're going industry, you might not want to get rid of your quarries (although tbh industry is so late and quarries are so bad that you may as well...)

 

[MarvelOfRain]

What are the optimal tiles to plant each GP on a tradition capital? Ie on which resources (assuming the city won't be able to work both resources and GP improvements)?

Can you only look at immediate yield increase by the GP, or do you need to anticipate which yields will be increased by future techs (for example, do you compare the yield of a manufactory to a pasture, even if the pasture will be improved by a stable, and the manufactory later...).

I usually look at my city and ask myself what it will work in the future. Tradition capitals, for example, will have only a couple of citizens working tiles, so I put GP very often on top of luxuries and bonus resources to make sure I won't be forced to leave them empty. On the other hand, if I am going for domination and have a city with a bunch of flat-land without freshwater I might put my great people around the city just to increase the number of good tiles. Generally I never place great people on freshwater tiles just because they will not get any benefit from that (until Hydro plants) and I might want farms later.

Plantation resources are probably my most common target since they scale poorly into the late-game.

One trick I also do is place my great engineers and prophets 3 tiles away from my capital, but have my other cities work them (to speed their development). Once I need the extra production (rushing a Wonder) or get a bunch of buildings that give Tourism from terrain culture (Hotels, Airports, National Visitors Center) I switch them back.

 

[Kim Dong Un]

This sounds silly, but aesthetics and realism often go into my decisions if I'm really into a specific game; a lot of my fun comes from the civ builder aspect and using imagination. I don't like placing things where they wouldn't necessarily make sense, so sometimes I'll sacrifice a few yields in order to avoid situations like having academies far from cities in the middle of nowhere (unless I've specifically designated it a military, religious, or "super secret aka this is where my evil scientists reside" facility), holy sites surrounded by mines, towns not along road/rail city connections, etc.

I generally like to apply this to guilds as well. I'll role play and assign specific guilds to secondary cities based on varying conditions: Writers' Guilds are more spaced to simulate the funneling of distant information across/through my lands. A city with a marble/gems/jade deposit is probably getting an Artists' Guild.

I know this is not ideal gameplay, but I only play Emperor so I don't have to squeeze out every last yield. It's just a personal preference of mine to envision more scenarios during each unique playthrough, and I'm curious if any others sometimes play like this.

 

[CrazyG]

This sounds silly,

Is it anymore silly than having cows and horses walking over all of my nation's top scientific academies?

 

[Kim Dong Un]

Is it anymore silly than having cows and horses walking over all of my nation's top scientific academies?

Wait, aren't the cows and horses supposed to be the staff and faculty? Maybe that's why I can never get out of Ancient; my academies are filled with barnyard animals instead of humans! Hah, it all makes sense now...

Time to move up from Settler difficulty!

 

[MarvelOfRain]

Wait, aren't the cows and horses supposed to be the staff and faculty? Maybe that's why I can never get out of Ancient; my academies are filled with barnyard animals instead of humans! Hah, it all makes sense now...

I sometimes have a visual bug where upon placing a GP tile improvement over plantation resources I have both displayed. It then literally looks like an academy that has cotton growing all over it

"There you can see the library. We grow cotton on the walls since the state legally considers this place a cotton plantation and will close us if we don't meet the production quota. And they're right next to you can see our new lab dedicated to researching nuclear energy. We also grow cotton on that."

 

[Stalker0]

This sounds silly, but aesthetics and realism often go into my decisions if I'm really into a specific game; a lot of my fun comes from the civ builder aspect and using imagination. I don't like placing things where they wouldn't necessarily make sense, so sometimes I'll sacrifice a few yields in order to avoid situations like having academies far from cities in the middle of nowhere (unless I've specifically designated it a military, religious, or "super secret aka this is where my evil scientists reside" facility), holy sites surrounded by mines, towns not along road/rail city connections, etc.

I generally like to apply this to guilds as well. I'll role play and assign specific guilds to secondary cities based on varying conditions: Writers' Guilds are more spaced to simulate the funneling of distant information across/through my lands. A city with a marble/gems/jade deposit is probably getting an Artists' Guild.

I know this is not ideal gameplay, but I only play Emperor so I don't have to squeeze out every last yield. It's just a personal preference of mine to envision more scenarios during each unique playthrough, and I'm curious if any others sometimes play like this.

His worshipfulness is being modest. As all supplicants of his holy worship well know, all tiles he makes are GPTI

 

[Gidoza]

I'll happily put my GP on mines as well as anything else even if Forges make Mines stronger. In the long run working specialists I will have less tiles working, so I'll simply make sure all the most powerful tiles are available, which includes mining resources. When playing tradition, I always have enough GP to swamp all my tiles anyways.