Settlers without loosing city size.

[smilo]

Fiddling around with civ, I found out the following :
when you have only 1 city of size 1, you can produce settlers without the city loosing 1 population point and changing back to a settler itself.

The usefullness of this ... is not quite clear to me yet.

[Sten Sture]

Right - this is the Capital settler strategy - if you can get enough cash to rush build a settler before you grow to size two you can get extra settler and exponentially expand your early growth.

There was a thread about this a month or two ago and was evidently known for some time by some ICSers, but they decided to keep it to themselves for a while.

edit: that thread may have been on the MP board, a quick glance thru the strat threads didn't reveal it.
[This message has been edited by Sten Sture (edited September 20, 2000).]

[smilo]

Thanks for pionting that out Sten.

Question when you loose your capital and have only 1 city left withour a capital, does it still work then?

[Ming]

Never tried it after losing a city...

But one additional bonus you didn't mention. You don't lose the food already stored up. So if you time it just right, it will crank out the settler, and then go to a size two city the next turn.

[smilo]

Quite right Ming, you can even go on building settlers, as long as you don't have a second city and can produce enough food to kee your city from starving it will work fine. Nevertheless it still seems quite unusefull to me (except in very specific cases where your first city is located in the vincity of high production and high food resources so you can swap around).

[smilo]

This might be intersting : you build the settler, food stays where it is and shortly thereafter your capital increases to size two. You bring the settler back in the capital and pop the capital to size 3...

Or even go on building some more settlers and bring them all back in the capital when food becomes problematic.
[This message has been edited by smilo (edited September 20, 2000).]

[cavebear]

I never realized that a size 1 cap can produce settlers without disbanding or wasting the shields. I'll definately have to make use of that...

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[cavebear]

Thought: Does this connect with Xin Yu's "Size 5 city" strategy? What if you built 4 settlers from the size 1 capital (let them explore or improve local resources or build roads to likely city spots), then brought them back to the capital and made it an instant size 5, converting the settlers to scientists and went ahead with his strategy?

Would there be a benefit in that?

Or suppose you used each settler to establish a city, and built a settler in it, then sent it back to the capital?

I don't think that is *exactly* what Xin Yu suggested.

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[SandMonkey]

here it is sten:
http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum3/HTML/000888.html

or at least that is the *first* thread where it was brought to the surface here.

[Sten Sture]

SandMonkey - did I write "a month or two ago"

I'm getting old!

[Crustacian]

This news will help greatly to ease the demand for
tee-pee poles in Crusthavn's early years.

[smilo]

Cavebear,

It would be difficult to build 5 settlers this way as you need to support them with food. If you run out of food one of your settlers will be disbanded. Having only a 1 size city it doesn't leave much room to produce the required quantities of food to support a large amount of settlers as you need enough shield to make it interesting.

[SCG]

If you have a full food storage, and a city on wheat/oasis, even in despotism you could last 6 turns supporting 5 settlers from a city. In monarchy you could maintain indefinitely provided the city had wheat/oasis and was on a grassland, although you wouldn't grow. Granted, you couldn't support any other units from the city in either case, but if you have any NON units, that shouldn't be a problem.

Despotism: 4 food (7 consumed), 4 shields (1 free support, 4 supported)

Monarchy: 7 food (7 consumed), 2 shields (3 free support, 2 supported)

Also, since you will take at least 5 turns to build the settlers, that is plenty of time to irrigate something before you get the 5th settler built.

Edit: correction to despotism situation
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[This message has been edited by SCG (edited September 21, 2000).]