Building settlers, hammers vs food.

[Dinner]

I have always thought that, since cities do not grow when building settlers or workers, that it was best to move pops from tiles producing lots of food to tiles which produce lots of hammers. Is this correct? The reason I ask is because someone recently told me excess food gets converted to production when settlers are being produced, so according to this person, it is better not to produce hammers but to produce food.

Can some civ master please clarify this situation for me?

[Dinner]

Never mind. I did some tests and it appears that with settlers and workers extra food is indeed turned into extra production. I guess you learn something new every day.

[-Jrabbit]

Still, this is a topic I've often wondered about. When deciding to build a settler or worker, what are the consequences of various tile deployments? Does it matter? Also, does it effect your use of specialists? (Early scientists are of particular interest.)

[rah]

If you're imperialistic and get a discount on settlers, it's better to use hammers instead of extra food (without going into starvation) since you get the bonus on hammers and not on the extra food. But if you're not imp. just make sure if you have a choice between squares of equal food and hammers that you use the one that also has a coin.

For specialists, you can still use them but your settler will take longer so it's a choice of what's critical at the moment. Normally by the time I can use scientists, I already have 3 cities and my cap is approaching it's happiness cap so I'll keep the specialists working and let it delay the settler a few more turns.

[wodan11]

What Rah said, and it's important since an IMP leader should build them in production cities, while all other leaders should build them in the highest food/hammer aggregate cities.

In general, the key thing is to recognize that each citizen uses up 2 food. So, the highest value tiles OVER 2 are the best to work. Improved tiles, definitely. Usually in the early game this means farmed corn and netted fish, etc.

Thus, it often is the case that cities of size 3-4 or so are the best places to build them. Smaller, you're not working all of your best improved tiles. Bigger, and you're working more than your best improved tiles and are working additional tiles such as unimproved forests (which are usually 21 or 12 and thus are not really good tiles to build settlers & workers). Yes, your net gain may well be more than the medium city, but OTOH your bigger cities are often better making something such as a Library or Market since the value you get is so much larger in a big city.

[DaveV]

I'll usually end up building settlers in my capital, since it tends to have some good food resources and will grow to the happy cap before the other cities. Instead of pulling the citizens off the high-food tiles, I can continue working them and make the settlers/workers faster. For example, if the capital has two farmed corn or a bunch of flood plains, it will grow into unhappiness pretty fast if I let it; if I build settlers and workers I can keep working those high-food tiles and build the settlers faster instead of having to switch to lower-yield tiles to keep from growing into unhappiness. Whipping settlers and workers seems like a good deal to me, since you can grow back to the happy cap while the whip unhappiness is dissipating.

[rah]

Yep, that kind of sums it up as far as I'm concerned. After a few settlers though I may designate that to another city if I'm now working wonders in my now able to use a few mines cap.

[Ming]

Yeah... as I race to either monarchy or the Pyramid, a combination of the whip and having cities working on workers or settlers controls the early happiness issues. If a city is growing too fast, it's great to whip the infrastrure needed, then switch to building a worker/settler while the unhappiness works itself down.

[rah]

Or units.

[Ming]

Yes... or units. Especially if you have snoopy or kril on your border

[rah]

Regardless, units always help.

[Blaupanzer]

Units help once you are in HR, but not so much on the way there.

[rah]

In MP, units just don't help, they're mandatory.