Terrain You'd Like for City Specialization

[SerapisIV]

I've seen a lot of discussion on city specialization, but I haven't seen much discussion on the preferred starting city terrain.

I haven't played much of CIV yet as I'm still wrapping up the semester, so I'd like other people's take on what makes a good start so I can play a better game when I'm able to boot it up again.

Do you prefer to make your capital a commerce city, a GP factory, a unit factory? What are your min terrain requirements for those city types? Which bonus resources would you really like to have for those cities?

[Diadem]

The best bonus resource by far are cows. A plains cow gives 3 food and 3 hammers. That's just 'wow'. But all bonus resources are good. Almost always they make a tile significantly better. And more different ones is good, of course. Though I might prefer 10 cows to 10 different plantation-resources

City specialization comes in three basic flavors. Production, Commerce and Great People Generation. It's fairly obvious what you need for each city.

A production city needs a lot of good production tiles. But all plains-hills doesn't work of course, you need at least some food. A fat river is also nice, because it allows you to build watermills, meaning high production and never any food problems. But of course, fat rivers are good for any city.

A commerce city needs good solid grassland so you can spam cottages on them without starving. Of course a combination of food resources and plains also does the trick. Do not forget that you need at least some production as well. 20 grassland tiles looks nice, but even a library will take bloody ages, and Oxford University an impossibility. Unless you rushbuy everything, of course.

A Great People Generation city needs food. Lots of food, and then some more. You want to have lots of specialists in your city, so you need food to be able to have them. But that's not all. You also need a high production. You want many world wonders in this city, as well as some national wonders and a lot of normal buildings. This makes such a city the hardest one to set up. You need a really excellent location for this city. Of course, you only need one such city in your empire. So your capital will usually do