Strategy Thread - for quick strategy questions and answers

[Krill]

You need cities that are dedicated hammer cities (as opposed to high food surplus and a granary to double/triple whip settlers); you don't want cities that just build military units.

[WilliamLP]

Pumps are overrated.

Even a strong HE city?

[NobleHelium]

HE cities do not exist in the Ancient Era...

[Dhalphir]

Sorry, I should have made it clearer - my question about high production cities was separate from my question about raising an ancient age army. Mainly I wanted to know what I should be looking for when founding a city that I envision to become a production city down the line.

[NobleHelium]

Production cities should have tiles that produce hammers. It's not complicated.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Mainly I wanted to know what I should be looking for when founding a city that I envision to become a production city down the line.

Depends in part on when you need the city to be producing. For early eras, hills and spiky food to feed them is enough - you want great hammers per pop, but you don't need to be able to support a lot of population. You are primarily going to be working resource tiles and mines (+2). Because of where you are on the tech tree, the hammers need to be on the map.

In the modern era, monster production cities need food, population, and improvements that give hammers -- but because you've got a lot more options available, the hammers don't need to be on the map. Workshops and watermills love State Property, which means that you can create a powerful production center out of a football field with fresh water: farm everything to get the population up to the happy cap, then replace the farms with +3 and +4 improvements.

[Dhalphir]

Thanks VoR, exactly the answer I was looking for.

I've been practising basic mechanics by playing and replaying the same game on the same map over and over and trying to play more and more optimally to improve my dates for important events like first settler, first strategic resource, # of cities in 1AD, etc.

Its the method I use when training mechanics in Starcraft - eliminate the decisionmaking variables as much as possible and focus your learning efforts on a few things at a time.

Working well so far, largely due to the amazing advice and help from here.

[TheHumanHydra]

What difficulty are you on now, Dhalphir? I'm contemplating my first Deity run, and thinking about posting reports of my progress (or demise) here. Currently trying to kill people with cataphracts on Immortal to soothe my wounded soul ...

[Dhalphir]

I'm playing Monarch. It's probably a bit too easy actually now - I tend to be dominant in score by turn 200 without too much trouble. At which point I usually figure "yeah i have this won" and start a new game rather than playing it out. My current game is a Huge Custom Continents on Monarch with 18 opponents. The next one will probably be on Emperor.

[Dhalphir]

I'm pretty proud of this micro moment in my first Emperor SP game.




You can see here this is my second city (out of six so far).

In the next turn, three things happen

1) The scientist specialists that I hired several turns ago will produce a great scientist
2) The whip anger from my last whip will wear off
3) This current turn, I put the turn into the settler that would be required to 3-pop whip it.

What I'm also proud of is this is my seventh city at 725BC.

Making progress, again, largely thanks to the massive help I receive from you gentlemen.