Advice on Specialists!

[lordvelius]

Can the experts out there give me some advice on how/when to use specialists? In what situations do you assign them and which ones do you assign? Do you use different strategies on the surrounding tiles to allow for specialists? Any advice you can give would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Generaldoktor]

I'll start with the basics and then a true "expert" will undoubtedly chime in later. BTW, RancidLunchMeat did an excellent thread on "Great Person (GP) production" last winter that also had a lot to say on specialists.

Here's that:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148866&highlight=GP+Specialization

Besides contributing to gold, research and production in various ways, specialists also generate Great Persons, (GP.) Many consider that their most important function.

The main thing to remember when generating specialists, beyond the odd one or two per city, is that to have them you must have FOOD! You must also be willing to champion the food, i.e., you probably don't want to cottage heavily your grassland/river squares or floodplains squares, build farms instead, because specialists do not generate food to feed themselves. (At one time, when the game first came out, merchant specialists generated a small amount of food, I believe this has been changed by one of the patches.)

You probably know by now what the various Great Persons do. Because GP generation is mixed up heavily, for many players at least, with specialist choice, the amount that you have of each will be weighted in all probability by the kind of GP you want coming out of that city. Priests are relatively easy to come by in the early game, for example, they also contribute some production. But "Great Prophets" have limited utility after about the early game period and virtually none in the modern, so by necessity, to avoid generating undesirable Great Prophets, you will have to phase out Priest Specialists at some point in your midgame, even though their production might still be valuable. Engineer Specialists actually generate more production, but are harder to come by. Only certain select city improvements and wonders allow you to add them and only in limited quantities.

As RLM's thread mentioned above points out, most players are trying to "specialize" the type of GP a given city produces, by eliminating random seeds due to generation of inconsistent specialists. In other words, if you want to put out Great Engineers, concentrate wonders and improvements in a given town (with plentiful food) that permit engineer specialists and don't build improvements and/or Wonders that would encourage another kind of rogue specialist to pollute that GP generation mix.

Holding your mouse over the specialist area of your city screen will give you the probabilities at any point in the game of what kind of Great Person you are generating with the mix you have at that point. Mixes are based on the amount of time you've had a given group of specialists, as well as what you have presently, so don't let those priests hang around too long in your designated GP producing cities, if you don't want Great Prophets. Changing at the last minute before a GP pops out, will not be sufficiently soon to alter the type of GP produced. The correct mix must be selected long before and referencing the specialist area for GP type generation likelihood on a regular basis will help your planning.

It's a narrower view, but if you are just trying to add to cities' capabilities without consideration of GP generation, merchant specialists add wealth and scientist specialists augment research; this besides the production bonuses you can get from priests and engineers, (priests generate a small amount of gold also.) Remember that every specialist consumes a worker slot that could be working a tile, so you must consider whether that specialist could be more valuable on a tile, working it as humble labor, rather than earning his bonus as a specialist. This is true at least, until your food-fat cities get so large that there are no more tiles, or at least good tiles, to work and the excess population then automatically becomes specialists of one sort or another. (Choice partially dictated by you and partially by the city's wonders/improvements.) This usually only happens at late game.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Originally posted by Generaldoktor
BTW, RancidLunchMeat did an excellent thread on "Great Person (GP) production" last winter that also had a lot to say on specialists.

Was it that long ago? Wheew... Took a bunch of months off, and I come back and read your messages and see your skill level has surpassed mine by leaps and bounds, GD. Good work on learning the finer points of the game! I'm working to catch up to you now, though!

(At one time, when the game first came out, merchant specialists generated a small amount of food, I believe this has been changed by one of the patches.)

Has it? I haven't gone back and checked. But that sucks, if true. That was one of the main reasons I used GMs, too boost food production in an arctic city to enable use of two production specials (beavers/gold/silver) that like to hide in ice areas more frequently than other areas.

Engineer Specialists actually generate more production, but are harder to come by. Only certain select city improvements and wonders allow you to add them and only in limited quantities.

Still haven't found a better/quicker way to get more GE or ES than was discussed in that thread.

As RLM's thread mentioned above points out, most players are trying to "specialize" the type of GP a given city produces, by eliminating random seeds due to generation of inconsistent specialists.

Actually, if I recall correctly, that was one of the main points of contention of that thread. The "specific GP" vs "more GP" debate.

Funny now though, as I read messages from Vel and Blake, that they most certainly believe in specializing your GP in order to produce the shrine, academy, rocket through techs with certainity, etc...

I think I must have been on to something, even if I was originally fascinated by the idea because of my GE fetish

[Generaldoktor]

Well this was a newbie that started this thread; and I thought I'd mention we'd covered the ground earlier. Hopefully this will help him, but also I'm imagining some Poly heavyweights will weign in soon with their respective opinions. Your estimation of my learning process is flattering, but I still consider myself to be learning about specialists/GP.

I'll set something up tonight where I either plant some GM or at least Merch/Specs to find out about the food from merchant thing. It might be that the specialists don't generate food, but if you create a "superspecialist" with a GM, he does.

[lordvelius]

Thank you for all of the information. Now what would be a good situation to use specialists? If you pick up a city with mediocre tiles, say, do you irrigate and just throw specialists in there? Do you have a specific town for them like you have production and commerce towns? Are they something you fit in to every town?

[Generaldoktor]

GPP specialization cities, as mentioned in last winter's thread I referred to, are specialized to the point that they produce heavy amounts of food to support the specialists. Your playing style and the specific situation on your map will determine how much of what kind of specialist you will use.

Simple math can do the rest, in particular for cities where you just want to spur what they are doing, with maybe GPP only a secondary consideration. For example, in such a general use city, if you have squares surrounding a city that are poor for production, you would develop the food and use as many engineer specialists as your buildings allow, then priests, I guess, to make up the difference. But you might want to do the same if it is production-heavy, to make it heavier. (See math analysis below.)

Cities that are producing a lot of wealth anyway, from cottages or wealth-generating resources, (don't include foreign trade in this,) might benefit from merchant specialists. Generally you wouldn't add to mediocre ones to spur this, as commerce benefits better from specialization. (All cities need production, less so for commerce, or science; see about "scattering" below, in reference to these last two.)

Science specialists ideally go in the city or cities with Oxford University, your academy you built with a great scientist, (generally always recommended you have one,) and Great Library, if you managed to get it finished for yourself. The reasoning here also is, if you've got a science concentration in a town, might as well play to it with a few more specialists. These buildings (also regular libraries and universities) actually give you the sanction to add more science specialists, so that's why you use them there.

Conventional wisdom these days is its better to specialize than to scatter a little bit of everything everywhere. The surrounding squares and the composition of buildings you concentrated in a given city determine its specialization, subject also to your taste. (Taste meaning, if you need spears, ease up on culture and related specialists; if you've got a huge science lead, you might want to slow down on that.)

Even if a city is specializing, with lots of food, in making Great People, the criteria is similar. If you built a lot of science-friendly improvements in the city and you want Great Scientists, add science specialists. If it's a town you want Great Engineers out of, only build Wonders and improvements for that, though there's some dissension here in the playing community; some saying a few other things like National Epic or The Parthenon don't hurt because they are designed to spur Great People Production of any type. They do pollute the mix if you want GE's, because they are slanted toward Great Artists.

I use a separate city to try to create Great Artists and build improvements friendly to Artists and add only the related specialists there, to the extent possible. Sometimes, as with libraries or the semi-random-appearing Great Religious Building for your religion, they will have to show up where they are not supposed to, but to get the specialists you want (most of the time, at least, ) you have to try to reduce polluting the mix with the other types.

Math comes in where you decide what is "mediocre tiles" for what you are trying to do. If you want hammers for production, add up the hammers from tiles that can be optimally worked by your present and projected near-future population and compare as to whether you could get better from pulling them off to be your allowed mix for the present/near-future of specialists. You might want to consider bonuses from buildings. Same idea if it is a commerce-heavy city; see if you get more by working all the tiles or pulling off your allowed specialists as merchants. Game situation comes into play too. If you need research, you may be wanting some even from non-optimum cities, ditto for hammers, ditto for commerce. There's only so much of this that can be spoon-fed. You have to play around with it and decide what you like, for when.

Though multi-player is now workable for this series and the game itself tries to get you to record all your starts as successes and failures, on Single Player (i.e. "solitaire" ) setting, only you know what was finished or not. (You can delete games from your folder that you don't want to finish by going into program files, ask if you need more info, I'm not able to access those right now.) Start a few dozen games and play them different ways with different mixes of worked tiles and specialists and find out you what like for which situation. I won't tell. No one will know!

[PaganPaulwhisky]

I learned alot about specialists by just playing philo civs over and over. Its a lot of fun to pick one of these civs and just go all out GP (Saladin is awesome at this). With Saladin you can immediatly get a religion and some temples up to run priest specialists. Add early stonehenge and Oracle and you will be churning out the prophets (you will be suprised at how many you can get especially if you have a high food capital). These guys are great when settled in your cash city. Make pyramids a priority over any other wonder to get full effect from this technique.

You will most likely have to rely on your capital to produce GP for a good chunk of the game. If your capital is coastal with a couple seafood resources, then get fishing boats ASAP as this is probably the best possible situation for producing GP early. Unfortunately my capital is often not as food rich as I would like. With a philo civ you can still rely on wonders and Heroic Epic to punch out the GP for a good while. If your capital is food poor, then look for a floodplain site to set up a new GP factory. One good tactic is to generate an early engineer via pyramids and forge and then rush the GLib in this city while using the capital for production.

In the mid to late game its all about biology and representation. If I am not going to get a domination victory, I will usually extensively terraform my low production cities into food machines (farm everything). I will max out specialists in all these cities and run representation. Make sure to get markets, libraries and other specialist buildings in these cities. You will be able to run 7 or 8 specialists (or even more in some of these cities). You can even starve the cities to generate GP early (make sure to deassign after you get the GP as I have starved cities down to size 1 by not being careful).

[Generaldoktor]

Great examples here of what can be done. PP has a very definite idea of the role Great Person Production will play for him. He doesn't limit himself in advance to what specialists he will produce or the exact number; the game situation at any given time dictates that.

The technique of "starving" to produce Great Persons, involves pulling off labor from most of your tiles, even food tiles, to generate the maximum number of specialists to generate the maximum number of points for Great Persons. Again game situation will dictate what kind, which is also limited somewhat by what the buildings/Wonders in the city allow, but Great Engineers are always popular. As he says, you have to watch how quickly your population does shrink, with everybody on specialist, even at the expense of food, or the city will shrink to nothing!

I believe there is an example on the GPP thread from last winter, (again, cited above,) where one of the old-timers shows how it is of advantage to make the population go up and down, depending on the need for specialists to generate GP at one city, then another. This prevents one city and its prevailing type from monopolizing the production of Great Persons, which can happen due to the escalating number of Great Person Points (mostly from specialists) that are required for each subsequent Great Person and the fact that one or two cities have a tendency to churn out the majority of Great Person Points per empire normally, unless food management techniques are used to periodically harness them, allowing cities with smaller GPP to get ahead occasionally to harvest their Great Persons potential.

All this again, refers to the Great Person Production function of specialists. As I said above, many, including PaganPaulwhisky in his example, regard this as specialists' most important function. Obviously, when used in these numbers, the specialists are contributing significantly with their bonuses towards the production or science or commerce potential of the cities involved as well. However, this often becomes a secondary consideration to GPP, unless you choose to make it otherwise. Choice is a lot of what Civ4 is about.

[Datajack Franit]

lordvelius, just find the city of your Empire producing a BOATLOAD of food, and possibly the cities that are growing from happiness/unhappines 6/5 to happiness/unhappiness 6/7

Cut the food and see science, culture and money growing up

[zeace]

After reading this thread, and the one's it's linked to (and even a few they're linked to) I'm really exicted about the idea of making GPP specialized cities.

The basic ideas seems to be:
1 GS/GE city, 1 other GP city
1 GS, 1 GE, 1 other
1 GS, 1 GM, 1 other

Usually you make your capital the other city, because if you make it the GS city, no other city can keep up. You also generally avoid founding religions so you don't have GPr points polluting the rest. This gave me an idea:


- Build a settler very early and found a high production city.
- Found a religion, it will end up in the new city
- 2nd city focuses on spreading religion and building GPr
- 3rd city is the food city, and it specializes as a GS city
- Build Pyramids in Capital, it will be a GE city. It won't produce a lot of GPP, but that's ok as it lets other cities keep up.
- 2nd city takes on all GPr and later GA wonders, and with enough wonders should be able to keep up with GE and GS cities even without much food
- If a nice coastal city is available, make it a GM city. If not, you probably aren't building the GM wonders anyway. You could build them in 2nd city...

I think this would let you get 3 or 4 cities all producing great people with limited pollution. It also lets you have a religion.

The trick is to found the 2nd city before you get a religion, and leave your best GPP site for 3rd. I think this would work best with Industrious as you'll want lots of wonders but won't be bee-lining for the techs.

Of course this is probably impossible on Emp+ levels, but for someone seeking a nice specialist-centric game it could be fun.

Any thoughts? Obvious pit-falls?

[Generaldoktor]

Zeace, I try not to quote right after, especially on big posts, to save Poly bandwidth, but I am responding to your last.

What we found last winter was that religions are usually founded in cities other than the capital, depending on how soon you found it. If you are playing a leader that starts with mysticism and go straight for a religion, it will end up in your capital; otherwise, usually not, which is good, because your capital frequently ends up being the best city for Great Scientists or Engineers. (Pyramids and/or Oracle and/or Hanging Gardens often end up there. Otherwise, Great Library frequently can; and Oxford University later, sending the capital down the science path.)

So, the "high production" initial city often becomes a GE producing city, (or mostly, see below.) Purists who love GE, like my colleague in this investigation last winter, RancidLunchMeat, will generally try to have a separate city just for science, not even polluting the potential GE base with almost equally valuable scientists. I am belatedly coming around to agree with this view.

Otherwise your analysis is good, except for these two caveats:

1. The system is programmed to occasionally throw in a wildcard. I had GM's showing up in my Great Artist city occasonally, even though the percentages in the mix said I had predominant chance for GA. The GM came from a grocery or something I had built for health and maybe kept for the profit. I'm not even sure I kept the Merchant/Spec associated with the grocery. You have to monitor your specialist mix pretty regularly, because even with governors turned off, which is the only way I play, there is some kind of "shadow governor" that assigns specialists when there's a lot of food and you haven't done it for awhile. They aren't always what you want. Ditto for Great Prophets that showed up periodically in my science city. I had priests there for awhile, maybe for a temporary production boost and from a temple for happiness or something and the shadow governor kept them on long enough to register a percentage, which triggered. I can't prove it statistically yet, (not every game encourages GPP, see below,) but I think the game deliberately inserts some variety into Great Persons, despite our best efforts to control it.

2. Sometimes you just don't have three cities to throw around for GPP, even by midgame; (their utility diminishes somewhat in late game; late game being criticized a lot in both C3 and C4 for being boring and irrelevant anyway.) First of all, you could run the table on locations, get your first ten cities in brilliant locations for production and just roll over everybody. This is sort of pie-in-the-sky, but occasonally happens.

Secondly, you could get the opposite, AI and Barbs on your a-- constantly; a tech wizard like Mansa, Asoka, Hat-Baby and/or Peter constantly scoring advances first (with their great locations) and finishing every Wonder first; in other words a basic fight for survival. Or you get pinned in and have to form castle, but you only got six cities Jack and they all gotta make spearmen, lots of them. You might put out a limited number of GE and GM for this, both are good for "castle" strategies. But three cities, producing mostly food and idlely knocking out different breeds of Great Men; nah, in these type games that's beyond you. The game situation must always be looked at, smart and early, before you commit to GPP.

LordVelius, I hope you are getting something out of all this, also.

[phlucas]

You have to monitor your specialist mix pretty regularly, because even with governors turned off, which is the only way I play, there is some kind of "shadow governor" that assigns specialists when there's a lot of food and you haven't done it for awhile.

I think this is when the city grows: The new worker will be assigned by the governor. When it does not grow, the governor does not adjust type or number of specialists.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Originally posted by Generaldoktor
Purists who love GE, like my colleague in this investigation last winter, RancidLunchMeat, will generally try to have a separate city just for science, not even polluting the potential GE base with almost equally valuable scientists. I am belatedly coming around to agree with this view.

Heheh.. Although I've gone through many different phases as of late.. hopefully I'll master them all enough to tie them into one coherent strategy eventually.. But in the course of my 'studies' I recently forced myself not to build any wonders at all. This was primarily due to my dependence originally on the CS Slingshot (Oracle) and then on my dependence on the Pyramids (early representation, and GEs). What I've been focusing on is improving my research path, and then then slowly adding in certain wonders (back to the CS slingshot if you'd believe it!) that will help rocket me down the direction I need to go in.

So instead of floundering around mid/late game not really having a direction set, or being tech advanced but lacking funds to feed my kingdom and my army, I'm far more potent.

I still think there definately is something to the GE, though.. for the same reason I thought so before.. rarity makes them valuable.

1. The system is programmed to occasionally throw in a wildcard. I had GM's showing up in my Great Artist city occasonally, even though the percentages in the mix said I had predominant chance for GA. The GM came from a grocery or something I had built for health and maybe kept for the profit. I'm not even sure I kept the Merchant/Spec associated with the grocery. You have to monitor your specialist mix pretty regularly, because even with governors turned off, which is the only way I play, there is some kind of "shadow governor" that assigns specialists when there's a lot of food and you haven't done it for awhile.

Not exactly. The system isn't 'programmed' to occasionally throw in anything. I asked about this problem which I thought was a huge problem after I upgraded to 1.61 and nobody really seemed as outraged as I was.

What happened is exactly as you say, but it's not a 'shadow governor' that is trying to screw up your GPP pool, or assigning specialists because it thinks you don't have enough.

What happened is that the code has changed (for the worse, IMO), so that it considers specialists for their inherent production value regardless of GPP generation or anything else.

For example, if you had your governor turned off.. well, then the computer will still assign the next citizen anyway. How does it figure that out? I'm not sure.

But say you have your governor turned off but have clicked the emphasis commerce box. You build a market. The governor won't take an existing citizen off a hill to make him a specialist, but when your city grows, he might assign that citizen to be a merchant because that will produce more revenue than working any of the tiles.

This is different then leaving the governor ON and telling them to put an emphasis on commerce, in which case they will MOVE citizens you've already assigned to specialists, cottages, etc..

It's a damn pain in the ass, if you ask me. I've had my GPP pool polluted more than once because of this change in the code since the recent patch.

All you can do is check the other emphasis buttons and then monitor the GPP your city is producing so you can tell if something is out of whack.

Even then, a ONE TURN mistake on your part (during war, and not checking or whatever), can lead to the AI assigning a merchant (or priest or engineer or artist) in your otherwise specialized GPP city and that single turn can be all it takes. Instead of having a 100% chance of generating the GS you wanted to build an academy, you have a 99% chance of a GS and a 1% chance of a GA.

If you get the GA? The setback in terms of strategy and turns is huge.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Originally posted by phlucas


I think this is when the city grows: The new worker will be assigned by the governor. When it does not grow, the governor does not adjust type or number of specialists.

Duh.

Said it alot better than me in a lot fewer words!

Brevity isn't my strong suit.

[Blake]

Some advice: Leave the damn governor on! I always use him.
(no, not the production governor, he REALLY sucks)

Set the city to Maximize Food, Hammers and Commerce (in some cases you might want to have only 2 of those on, like Food Hammers), make sure the tile-worker governor is activated.
Force-allocate the desired specialists.

This will ensure the city will only ever assign specialists if they literally have higher yield than any tile (this is far more likely if you're running Rep).

If it's really critical that no specialist gets assigned then use avoid growth, once the city has filled the growth bar, then go force the new specialist (freeing up a tile) and turn off avoid growth, the city will grow and the new pop point will go on the freshly vacated tile.

In my experience the only situation in which I can beat the "maximize food+hammer+commerce" governor is when I want to kill growth. Usually however I want the city to keep growing so I can whip the excess pop and for whipping the maximize everything setting is just perfect.