should I specialize my cities?

[guermantes]

I have seen in some threads that people mention specializing their cities so that one produces soldiers, one technology, and the rest a little bit of everything.

Is this considered to be a 'taken for granted' strategy or do some people have all their cities produce everything?

Reason I ask is that since I am new to Civ it is still a bit unclear to me how to manage cities and I don't know whether (when learning the game) it is good time spent to practise streamlining cities to do different things or not?

/p


Also: what does 'beeline' mean?

[Aeson]

A 'beeline' means to go straight for something.

[Ansaga]

Its mostly up to you. Sometimes I played without specalizing and I do fine other times my cities are made specifically for doing a certain thing.

Like a city next to a river make all the tiles farmland and you have a specilazition city powerhouse. Or a city next to like 6 hills and make the rest workshops or lumbermills you have a army building factory.

[Quillan]

Specializing is good, at least for a while. Since there is no maintenance cost per building, if one of your cities has all the military improvements, another has all the cultural improvements, and a third has all the economic improvements it will cost you the exact same amount to maintain as it would if each of those cities had every single building. However, you generally cannot build every single building in every city without taking a LONG time doing it. So, pick a city and concentrate on one thing for a bit. That will allow you to make a city really good at one thing, rather than ok at several. Fill the rest of it in afterwards.

[LzPrst]

aye. I played a game where I tried to build everything. I just didnt have time and production for it. I'm gonna try a new game when I get home and go for specialization.
will post here to tell how it went. actually I might post in the stories thread.

[Arnelos]

I've tried both ways in Civ4 now. My estimation is that specializing beats the snot out of trying to do everything with every city. That said, you have to sort of play it by ear. There are times when you need to retask cities, such as when you need more military units of a specific type and you need a lot of them 5 turns ago (or any war in general). There are also improvements you're eventually going to want in EVERY city, but the order in which you build them where might depend greatly on which city is specializing in what and what they're building between improvements (such as military units, settlers, and workers), etc.

So don't remain too married to specializing a city, but specialization as a matter of *priorities* helps a lot. In particular, you really should specialize 1-3 cities as your production centers for wonders and specialists to generate great people points. Because of the escalating costs of great people points as you go on through the game, it's just not efficient to have more than a tiny number of cities actively working on it. Additional cities simply won't be able to keep up with the escalating cost, so they might as well be doing something else.

You'll also find that you might entirely respecialize a city. If you're fighting more wars early in the game, you might have more cities that just need a barracks and a forge and pump out military units. If in that example you find yourself in a very peaceful situation later on and you need a lot more commerce for research, you're going to want all of your cities to build at least some of those improvements, but you might also completely respecialize some of those formerly military cities to be commerce-focused cities going forward.

I think as long as you're not *overly* wedded to it and you still respond to immediate needs as required, specialization as a matter of different priorites by city can be a huge help. The fact that Firaxis has included the "National Wonders" for the specific purpose of specializing cities just makes it more important once you start building those in the mid/late game.

[Jcg316]

I agree with the above and to great people in general I've found it to be like this, so far anyways:

Multiple great people generating cities has decreasing returns but if you need the great people, artists for culture victories for example, it is still worth it just not to the same extent.

With a 100 city and an 80 city starting from already having nine out, needing 1000 for next, with future increases at 200, (the numbers break down really well this way). The 100 city produces 5 in 90 turns with the last on the 90th with the 80 producing 4 in 90 turns with the last on the 90th. The single 100 city produces six in 90 turns with the last on the 90th.80% increase in production points in a second city yields a 50% increase in great people in this situation, certainly worth it if you need them.

With nine cities with one focusing on great people and the others, having one or two specialists in each with pacifism or a phi leader, could add one great person each with ease over the course of the game and only slow the specialized city down 3-4. This could give you a handful of extra wonders, techs, or the 16000, 20000 culture you need. Which can be put in whatever city you want where letting it buld naturally at 150-250 per turn would take much longer. The advantage that way is you aren't getting it from wonder points at prophets or scientists when you need artists for example. You get exactly what the specialists you use provide for.

The city may be better used another way as it won't suffer from decreasing returns but even with three cities near a hundred, far easier to do than one at 175-200 significantly out performs one or two, IF you need the great people.

The hermitage and stacking base bonuses from wonders, though certainly not bad and still help in addition, are much less effective than pacifism and phi leaders spreading it around to more cities for more total GPP increase. For a culture vic you would want to spread the wonders around anyways for culture balance and getting three 50,000s instead of a 75,000 and losing because you needed that 25,000 in another city, but that's a different tangent.

The problem is that more unfinished GPP would be wasted but at even three cities a fair amount unfinished at the end of a game is minor compared to the total GPP benefits.

Multiple cities is significantly more productive but at quite lowered efficiency. For conquest a few efficient cities produce fewer units than more cities, certainly not advantageous to winning that way. Higher production at what you need to win trumps lower production spread around other facets more efficiently.

In the end, ONLY IF you need the great people to win is is better but if you MUST have them to win, culture primarily, it is essential.It can be the difference between an early 1900s victory with no culture rate and a late past 2000 victory where you had to use culture rate and fell behind in other ways, which could allow your culture cities a much higher chance to get a quick raze when your seen up close to winning on the culture leaderboard.

[joncnunn]

Specalization is very much rewarded in Civ IV.

No more than 2 National wonders allowed in any city for one in addition to the shear number of improvements allowed.

[Velociryx]

To Specialization.

The only thing I wouldn't specialize on is barracks. Build 'em everywhere, so that when war finds you, it's easy to go on a nation-wide war footing (and it's a relatively cheap building).

Otherwise, I'd specialize out (and do remember that even if every city you control has a barracks, some of them will lack the production to really hang with the big dogs during war...they'll create a few supporting units, but the cities you already have primed and geared for massive production will still be supplying you with the bulk of your war materials, and rightly so!

-=Vel=-

[Glostakarov]

I tend to specialize my great person production into 3-4 cities, by type. If I have one city cranking out all the wonders it tends to produce prophets almost exclusively. If I dump all the prophet-producing wonders in one city, all the artist ones in a second, all the scientist ones in a third, and all the engineer/merchant ones in a fourth, I wind up with a decent rate of GP production, with each type popping out at a predictable rate.

The exception of course are the national wonders, which are only two per city. I fit those into the mix as well as possible, but wind up with a few spares here and there. If my plan requires lots of GP then I'll play as a philosophical civ and pair it with the mercantilism civic to have all four cities cranking them out with regularity.

[Saldrin]

Besides deciding what wonders to build in a city, how do you specialize a GPP city?

I've been adding certain specialists to a city, and I try to keep them with the preset of my cities. For example, if I know a city is my money building city ( has the gold coin icon) then I try to add merchant specialists to it. I add them until I hit starvation, then force one back so its either stagnant or slighly growing. Problem is, production in that city takes a huge hit ( many many rounds to complete a building/unit).

What is a good stratigy for adding specialist to influence GPP, but keep a decent productivity rate?

[bigfatjonny]

National Wonders

One of the most important things to planning your specialist cities is using the national wonders properly. Remember that now you can only have a maximum of 2 N-Wonders in each city.

Stacking all the bonuses of each type in one city will create the greatest results.

An example of this is;

1. Heroic epic (double military unit production) and west point (+4 exp)
or
the Heroic Epic and the Red Cross (free medic upgrade)

2. Using the National Epic (double great person) in a huge food producing city, and turning most of the tiles into food producers so you can use as many Specialists as possible (use this with the Caste System)

3. Pairing small wonders with great wonders, Great Library and Oxford (use this with representaion)

[Drachasor]

One of the best things about specialization is that you won't get caught with your pants down. For instance, it is easy to lag behind on military units now and then (even if you are pretty heavily militarily focused), but if you specialize then you'll always have those 1-3 cities producing military units. This means that you'll have a strong military which intimidates the AI among other things.

[ThePlagueRat]

Originally posted by Velociryx
The only thing I wouldn't specialize on is barracks. Build 'em everywhere, so that when war finds you, it's easy to go on a nation-wide war footing (and it's a relatively cheap building).

-=Vel=-

Good point... From what I understand, you don't specialize any city for unit production then, as some people have suggested. B ecause all the productive cities are eligible for that task. A barrack is simply raised when u need to build more units.
When we rule out this category, the only thing that is neccessary to specialize in is the religion, commerce, science, specialists, wonders and the great persons.

Here is my suggestion:


Wonders vs. Great people:
So typically the wonderbuilding cities would be the same as to pump out great persons, because many wonders modify that birthrate. When building wonders and you dont need to grow, use engineer specialists or priests. (high production is natural here so they might build a barrack in a a turn or so) but to specialize this from being a Wonder or unit-factory, to being a Great People-factory, simply make more specialists by reallocating the tiles, usually reducing production. Also the land around these cities should be hilly with forests and hopefully some food resource. Cottages are not so important for this task. Then you improve this terrain remember high emphasis on mines and farms at the early stage.


Commerce/Science:
Especially huge coastal cities, might be low production, but hopefully growing cities. Inland cities like these would be typical floodplain cities. These will have to be improved with lotsa cottages on the land side, and seaside should build lighthouses, markets, banks and so on. If you got some trees here you might chop them for total specialization, but I like saving the forest better. If these are to grow and produce science too, you will need some production left. One should not use a lot of specialist pops here but in case you have excess growth, use scientist or merchant specialists.


Culture&Religion:
These are the cities that is neither useful as a good income source or as a good production source. They might even be a liability, but once you have them, they can build theatres, temples, monestaries, missionaries and so on, typically on the fringes on your empire. In case you have excess growth, use priest or artist specialists.


Ok, these 3 categories are merely what I bet it worth specializing in... I might have mistaken something, cause I havent been playing this very much yet.

[Martinus]

I think specializing a city for unit production is still better, simply because making barracks and units in other cities is ineffective, as it prevents them from building things they specialize in, not to mention you will normally have the xp bonus wonders in the military city.

If you have a good unit factory, barracks actually make for one of the least necessary buildings in a non-military city - your science city could still use a theatre or colloseum to keep people happy; your great people city could still use granary or aqueduct to keep people fed (and allow you to put more citizens as specialists) etc. Whereas, unless you run Nationhood (unlikely, in a long term), barracks will only benefit unit you construct in the city - and these units can be constructed faster and with better result in your military city.

And if you start building units in your non-military city "when they are needed" it is usually too late.