Sid Meier's Civilization Series (Main Titles)

Depends on the Civ. A Tall civ relies on them, but they're more or less useless for wide ones.

I would say that it depends on whether you have policies and/or wonders that enable bonus output from your specialists, thus making them better than a citizen working a tile. The default city governor AI will allocate citizens for you and does a decent job of filling in specialist slots — at least, I rarely feel the need to argue with it.

You can choose specific priorities in the city screen, though — choose to emphasize science and the governor will assign as many scientist specialists as it can given the city's improvements, and/or put as many citizens as it can to work on science-generating tiles, like Academies, jungles with a University, certain natural wonders, etc.

Aside from the very rare case where I want to lock in a particular tile, like a natural wonder or a resource, I let the default AI do its thing.

edited 29th Jul '14 2:25:34 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

You should at least start thinking of them when your cities are already well established, you don't really need growth and you can spare production points. By the end of the game, you're probably going to want those great artists/musicians/writers at least.

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

I manage specialists manually because it is important for making sure you're generating the right great people. Due to how it calculates earning great people it can often be bad to generate say, great merchants if you're going for a cultural victory. Also you definitely want to make sure all your science buildings and your guilds have specialists in them at all times. I also tend to lock citizens into working on great person improvements and natural wonders, but otherwise i let it do its own thing.

Only if you don't have more pressing priorities, like production or growth. Big cities are crucial in a tall empire because they give you more citizens that can become specialists.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I will take specialists out of a science building to rush a wonder that i think another civ might be going for, or if a city would starve otherwise, but not for any other reasons.

But what happens when your city is size 5 while your rivals' are size 12?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I've never had that big a discrepancy. My capital or second city may end up a few population sizes smaller than other capitals, which I don't consider very relevant. I'll gladly trade a bit of growth for the extra science.

I know "building tall" means having few cities and "building wide" means having a lot, but is the only real disadvantage to going wide means taking longer to select another culture feat?

I guess what I'm trying to say is why should I build tall when building wide gives me more readily available options?

edited 29th Jul '14 3:57:34 PM by Spirit

#IceBearForPresident

Building wide does tend to lead to more unhappiness, fewer social policies, and possibly less science and wealth if you're not careful. Most of your cities likely won't be terribly well-developed, you won't be able to build too many Wonders, and in all likelihood you'll end up pissing off your neighbors.

Of course, strategic city placement can offset most of these.

In the Brave New World meta, wide is significantly advantageous. Of course, I prefer both wide and tall, with a core of maxed out cities and as many additional cities/puppets as I can afford the happiness to support.

The limits/restrictions on going wide include:

• Policies and technologies cost more for each additional city in your empire. The science penalty is for all cities, the culture policy is for non-puppeted cities.
• Each city increases unhappiness by a flat amount in addition to its population. You will reach a wall where your ability to own cities is capped by your happiness, forcing you to invest in policies and/or infrastructure to continue expanding.
• To a lesser extent, road and railroad connections between your cities act as a limiter by making it more expensive to have cities spread out far away from each other.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I agree with this. I'm not quite sure what the proper meta for expansion is but I do try to make sure the site is defensible and has at least 1 lux and 2-3 other resources to make it worth expanding into. If a city site has a unique luxury that your civilization did not have access to that's at least 4 happiness and basically makes your new city "free". I do think that if you've picked Liberty there isn't much downside to expanding whenever you have enough excess happiness. If you've picked Tradition there are a lot more incentives for keeping yourself small and building a puppet empire instead of settling sites yourself.

edited 29th Jul '14 4:26:32 PM by mrshine

For me, I almost always end up going tall. I just never get around to founding more than a couple cities before most of the good territory is taken.

About the only time I bother going wide is when I'm trying for a conquest victory, and even then, I typically don't actually found more than 4 or 5 cities. I just take the cities my neighbors decided to found.

edited 29th Jul '14 4:29:52 PM by IrishZombie

Going wide or tall also depends on what civ you're playing as. Some civs (like Rome) are clearly designed with rapid expansion and conquest in mind, while others (like Ethiopia or BNW France) can really benefit from the various Tradition tree bonuses.

edited 29th Jul '14 4:30:43 PM by Locoman

Yeah for me "going tall" is between 4 to 6 cities, going wide might be settling 6-8 and then annexing a bunch more. I don't tend to settle a huge number of cities because im picky about resources and quite concerned about things like happiness and making sure i can finish a national college in a reasonable time frame.

That's a major factor. Aside from having to construct more of the prerequisite buildings before starting national wonders, the wonder itself also takes longer to build the larger your empire is. To the point you're not finishing it without an engineer, i.e. not going to at all since those are probably best reserved for wonders everyone can compete for.

Science specialists are not always the best option, since science is based on growth (library +1 science/2 citizens, etc.). I'm sure math could be/has been done to figure out the optimal point to switch. In any case, the specialist slots I tend to fill are production, which if the city terrain is lacking will not increase simply by leaving it to its own devices.

Although I also haven't played Civ in months since I did end up purchasing EUIV in the Steam summer sale. I feel like I've forgotten more than the last time I took a long break, or maybe I'm blurring the series' mechanics together. Or perhaps it'll all come back as soon as I try.

I like the Disney civs, btw. Actually, now that Star Wars counts as Disney, makes me want to come up with some ideas for that...

Only the sun has stopped.

Population is always best in the long run because more people make every else. Unless you actually have a goal to work for like a Wonder or an important tech, I would keep them on mostly food. Or if you're about to win I guess.

Again, it also depends on what civ you play as. Korea, for instance, encourages you to get specialists up and running ASAP.

On a related note, going by my last Korea game, Korea + three banana resources + Sun God = insanity.

I like Korea. Likewise I've taken a liking to a modded Civ, Eientei. though she is a bit unbalanced in the modern eras.

min maxing with specialist handling is a tiresome thing to learn. While in Standard difficulty you can get away with ignoring it, it does help and becomes necesary in later levels.

As for large populations...yes, they decrease happiness...but one of the things that they provide which helps a ton, is science. The more pop, the more science the city will produce.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

The logic i use to justify early specialists is that a single scientist is worth as much as 3 civilians worth of research but adds only 1/3rd of the unhappiness. The specialist also generates great scientists which are probably the best units in the game. The end result is a smaller sized city that generates as much science as a larger one but at less unhappiness, and additionally works towards generating great scientists. Population does = science, but directly putting people into science generates science more efficiently than growth. I do think growth is still important, so I always build a ton of farms for the civilians in the city to work to support the science specialists.

So I accidentally played a game as north korea. It started simply enough. I was on a peninsula all on my lonesome just stradlling the southern pole with a land bridge leading north onto the further continent. I could have dropped a second city on the far side but it would've eventually started to compete with my capital for land so I decided to explore north. At the end of the land bridge sat Antwerp. Further exploration revealed two big expansionist civs who had already carved out the only good spots nearby. I was already at a disadvantage and I couldn't stay in one city all game so...

It took several archers and the lives of good warriors but Antwerp was mine. Four civs knew me by this time and had decided I was the evilest person ever. I spent the next era fuming at the hypocrites who denounced me with one turn then begged for pearls the next.

it wasn't too long from then that the swedes found all the other civs and started the world conference. First items on the docket: the worlds fair and embargo korea. I had zero allies and fewer still who would support me. Pearls bought one members support and Siam was willing for a bit of GPT. I figured our votes would be enough. People hated me but bitches love the world's fair and I was hoping that three against would be enough. And then I did something really dumb. I advanced eras. As it turned out the swedes had a bunch of city state allies and a hate-boner for me. I used my votes to throw Siam the world congress and hoped his six votes would go to vetoing the embargo. They did not. The embargo passed easily and I threw out denouncements like confetti.

I had basically zero culture and was going for a science win but out of pure fucking spite I threw all my hammers at the worlds fair and through some freak accident managed to win it. Fuck you, rest of the world. Me and my city state trading partners are going to have the Fair of Best Korea.

Shortly after this my two neighbours and the swedes decided that war would be an appropriate solution to their problem. I did mention I was an era ahead right? As it turns out firearms do in fact beat lancers and cannons beat ballistas. I smacked my two idiot neighbours around and manged to swipe a city each from them before suing for peace. At this point everyone but Siam hated me. I thew all my research into military tech and was two two turns from finishing artillery when it happened.

Everyone but Siam declared war. The entire planet minus my benefactor decided I was not worth the trouble. but they were fools. Best Korea would have artillery and modern units in no time at all and then they would rue the day they crossed me. My cities came under siege in an instant, Cannon fire raged on as artillery slowly made it's way from the capital. Knights gave their lives in suicide charges to inflict pain on advancing units. Riflemen held the line while their brothers died next to each other but in the end it worked. Artillery is simply to broken and I managed to have four built and on the frontlines in under twenty turns. I turned back the assault and captured four cities from my enemies. My two neighbours reduced to city-states-in-practice and enemies on distant lands too far and to weak to stop me.

I looked on in horror to see what I'd become. I had sacrificed my nations happiness, it's wealth, it's international reputation, and for what? Lines on a gameboard. I had become the hermit kingdom in my quest to expand Best Korea. My reputation would never be the same and I couldn't bring the colonies up to the capital's level, not with constant thread of invasion and zero dollars. So I made the choice.

In the end Siam was the only one to take the deal. All but Antwerp and the capital left mt control. Defensive artillery went up around both cities and a naval blockade threatened those foolish enough to come at me by sea.

In the end Best Korea managed to slink ahead in the space race and send the best and brightest forth to colonize the stars and bring it's message to all who would hear it; don't fucking colonize antwerp.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

If you're going to take over a city-state, you need to do it before you meet anyone else or else, as you mentioned, the whole planet will turn on you. Mongolia is obviously fairly good at this kind of early land-grabbing.

edited 30th Jul '14 11:28:14 AM by Locoman

I've been trying out Spain recently, trying to see just how luck-based its ability is. The idea was to use early scouting and the One With Nature pantheon to get the most out of any early NW's I find, and Holy Warriors to buy enough Conquistadors to conquer and/or settle the rest.

I've found out two things: one, not all Natural Wonders are created equal. I mean, you might as well reroll if the only free one you manage to get is Old Faithful, for instance.

The other thing I've found out is that even for the more useful Natural Wonders, the game will often spawn them in places that are otherwise entirely useless. To give you an idea, I found the Rock of Gibraltar off the coast of a one-tile island of tundra, and in another game I found King Solomon's Mines in the middle of the desert (someone beat me to Petra, which would have made that spot a lot better).

It's a shame, because I like the idea of a civ that gets a really good bonus that's random enough to force it to be adaptable, but too many things seem to conspire against Isabella getting a lot of mileage out of her ability.

While I don't have Civ V yet, are there any mods that y'all like? The various civilizations mods look interesting to me.

Not dead, just feeling like it.