Novice City Specialisation Question

[Ralph_Jackson]

Well having played CIV4 for a few weeks I have hit the "noblish difficulty bump" that many people seem to experience and having looked round the forums have learned a lot of useful information which has helped me immensely but one thing is not clear to me.

I can see you need to plan what you want your city to work (commerce, food production improvements etc) and can understand if you want a GPP factory what sort of sites are suitable (suitable foodsource to permit max specialists) etc,.

What I can't understand is that I have also seen people say that your other cities should specialise in commerce or Production e.g.
"With 6 cities a good aim would be 3 targetting production 2 for commerce and 1 a GPP factory".

Other than a city site begging to be a GPP factory most sites seem to me have a mix of tiles suitable for production and some for commerce (plus others for food to support the city).

So the Question is:- What are the strengths / weaknesses (See I have already learned no single perfect answer in CIV4!!) of having 5 Cities with mixed production and commerce tiles based on the terrain versus having some cities that specialise a lot on prodcution and some that specialise a lot on commerce.

Thanks for all the advice I have picked up and hopefully will get in response to this.

Ralph

[Velociryx]

The main strength of specialization is its efficiency in hammers spent.

If you only have one city focused on being a production powerhouse, then per specialization theory, you only need one forge (since the other cities won't have as many hammers anyway, they'll see relatively less benefit from a forge than your production beast.

Likewise, money. Your 2-3 financial centers will get all the financial improvements, and everybody else will run without.

And same for Research (tho many times, research and money centers tend to be the same places, in my experience).

Fewer centers = less hammers invested in infrastructure = bigger returns on hammers invested.

I don't play that way very often, preferring to set up what I call "Multi-Role Cities" which takes advantage of what you mentioned....that most of the time, the land itself is balanced, and not especially well geared toward a singular function. So I play to that.

Drawback here is that it's a lot more hammer intensive, in that nearly every city will be making enough hammers, coin, and research to warrant all of the supporting infrastructure, so it takes longer to set up.

It also means, however, that in terms of safety, you're nearly impossible to hurt (and even harder to kill), and it means that you're gonna have a larger aggregate economy than the purestrain specialist (who will be vastly more efficient than you in terms of hammers spent, but also significantly smaller in terms of overall size).

-=Vel=-

[Crossfire]

Great answer again Vel! That is exactly my feeling as well. Occassionally I will settle a city that just screams GPP pump or commerce city and I will take advantage of that, but usually most cities have well balanced resources and they become generalists with maybe some emphasis on hammers versus commerce depending on those resources.

[DirtyMartini]

Originally posted by Crossfire
usually most cities have well balanced resources and they become generalists with maybe some emphasis on hammers versus commerce depending on those resources.

Agree, I was begining to think I was missing something, since I really like my balanced cities. They usually start out somewhat specialized then evolve over time into multi-purpose. For example, my heroic epic city is usually a production powerhouse, but I still get a library in there eventually. The only true specialists are the fishing villages: lighthouse+granary on the rush, then limp in libraries etc. on the one hammer from the city tile.

What I'm still very poor at doing is using citizen specialists well, or setting up a great person pump. Maybe I'm too into seeing low "turns til growth" or "turns til production completed" numbers to take too many workers off the land.

[ben_sphynx]

Another advantage is related to national wonders:
You can only have one Wall Street, and only one Oxford Uni.
It makes sense to concentrate as much commerse as possible into the cities with those national wonders, so as to maximise the amount of commerse that has its effect multiplied.

Similarly, with great person production, there is a national wonder that helps one city, with unit production, there are several national wonders that help only one city.

Specialising those cities is a good thing.

[Quillan]

Actually, if you're doing really well monetarily then commerce will count for basically nothing in the Wall Street city. If you can afford to run science at 100% (or a combination of science/culture), then none of your commerce will be generating gold, so Wall Street will have nothing to double. You can still get gold from other sources, though, so I like to build Wall Street in a holy city of a religion I've pushed hard, and settle Great Prophets/Merchants in that city for direct gold generation.

[Blake]

My stance is that the advantage is nearly ALL in the National Wonders.

Say you build the Heroic Epic early, before forges even.

In effect, a mine goes from 1-3-0, to 1-6-0. This completely blows any commerce improvement out of the water. It's madness to build anything other than hammer enhancing improvements around the Heroic Epic city (so, farms/mines/lumbermills/watermills/workshops).

National Epic is simialler, if you go for a wonder-powered National Epic, you want to have really good hammers for pumping out yet more wonders, commerce will hurt your wonder production. If you're using Specialists, you want to maximize food, because each specialist is worth so much more in the city.

For cities without a national wonder focus it makes considerable sense to go with a balanced approach, considerable sense might be an understatement, if you want to build those powreful national wonders most of them have a pre-req of about 6 buildings; bank, university, whatever. You thus need your other cities to produce enough hammers to quickly build those 6 buildings when the tech becomes available. And given that the 6 cities will have a wide spread of buildings it doesn't hurt to mix up their tile improvements.

So in the game there is incentive for both specializing and generalizing cities. Optimal play comes down to getting the mix right for the situation.

[Quillan]

Originally posted by Blake
Optimal play comes down to getting the mix right for the situation.

You know, you've just summed up the basis of mastering this game in one sentence. That's at the root of everything, being able to decide which option is best in this circumstance.

[Blake]

Indeed. And it's the mark of quality for a good strategy game .

[eris]

Sub-optimal play consists of "I wonder what will happen if I try this. Oooh, that didn't work." That, too, is the mark of quality of good strategy game. (Well, in my hands it is, anyway.)