Why ever pick a town specialization?

[[bd]JohnnyPneumatic]

Maybe I'm incorrectly assuming this based on previous games, but my thinking is: pops produce everything, so there's no reason to ever limit growth until you're at max population for your town. At which point, you probably want to convert to a city, so you can start slotting specialists. So, why would you ever pick a specialization?

[Merkognomen]

I'd say your assumption is correct depending on the situation, however when you choose a specialisation for a town its food is sent to all connecting cities so you will be limiting growth in the town for more growth in your capital for example. So if you want to play tall with a few large cities it could be a good idea to specialise for that extra growth. But I think it definitely depends on the situation if you want to specialise or not.

[Eustache]

Originally posted by Merkognomen:

I'd say your assumption is correct depending on the situation, however when you choose a specialisation for a town its food is sent to all connecting cities so you will be limiting growth in the town for more growth in your capital for example. So if you want to play tall with a few large cities it could be a good idea to specialise for that extra growth. But I think it definitely depends on the situation if you want to specialise or not.

I dont get with people saying this knowing your capital cannot go above 3 tiles lenght, you dont need specialized town to fill up that tiny little space

[discab]

Originally posted by Eustache:

Originally posted by Merkognomen:

I'd say your assumption is correct depending on the situation, however when you choose a specialisation for a town its food is sent to all connecting cities so you will be limiting growth in the town for more growth in your capital for example. So if you want to play tall with a few large cities it could be a good idea to specialise for that extra growth. But I think it definitely depends on the situation if you want to specialise or not.

I dont get with people saying this knowing your capital cannot go above 3 tiles lenght, you dont need specialized town to fill up that tiny little space

The trick is not to fill all the squares of the capital, but to stake the specialists. Once you have specialists you can literally put 5 populations on each square, and for that you need a lot of growth

[dcbobo]

Originally posted by Eustache:

Originally posted by Merkognomen:

I'd say your assumption is correct depending on the situation, however when you choose a specialisation for a town its food is sent to all connecting cities so you will be limiting growth in the town for more growth in your capital for example. So if you want to play tall with a few large cities it could be a good idea to specialise for that extra growth. But I think it definitely depends on the situation if you want to specialise or not.

I dont get with people saying this knowing your capital cannot go above 3 tiles lenght, you dont need specialized town to fill up that tiny little space

it's not about just filling it up, but how quickly "growth"

[Andra]

I do like to keep my towns on growth for a long time - even all the way through antiquity era. That's probably not optimal though since each era tends to introduce new town buildings with better yields, etc, but I like my towns to be quite big and productive before linking them to my cities for yields.

[bsones]

Originally posted by Eustache:

I dont get with people saying this knowing your capital cannot go above 3 tiles lenght, you dont need specialized town to fill up that tiny little space

You continue to need city growth even after you have filled all the tiles because Specialists are critically important. In the Exploration age alone, you can have as many as three Specialists per tile, so claiming all of the tiles in a city's radius doesn't mean you are done growing that city, or even close to it.

[Martin]

I turn all my towns into cities.

[Andra]

I suppose you "could" turn all towns into cities but they'd all have middling growth and I presume your gold per turn would be really low. Benefit of towns is they transform hammers to gpt, so it's not unusual to have 2k+ gpt in the late game and be able to buy everything you could ever want. In my experience, anyway. I might just be really inefficient with that much gpt.

[[bd]JohnnyPneumatic]

Originally posted by bsones:

Originally posted by Eustache:

You continue to need city growth even after you have filled all the tiles because Specialists are critically important.

Are they? I feel like I was pretty much assigning them at random and I was still on an unstoppable steamroll by the 2nd age on standard difficulty.

[Ruibarian]

Town specializations allow you to play tall without giving up territory.

[RamboRusina]

Well, if you change your capital I can see the argument. But really it's so you can make some wonders and science/culture only available in cities and space is limited. But realistically, yes you should keep ton of towns since production being gold means you can get the units/buildings anywhere anytime you want them. It pretty much trivialized gold as resource.

[Jartasm]

Because specializing turns the town's production into gold. You'll always want some ratio of Towns to Cities, because without Towns you don't produce gold. Some towns you get up to a suitable Production level of ~25-45, and by specializing, you essentially get ~50-90 gold per turn for doing so.

The idea is that you don't need to invest in making every town a city, or in improving every town to its min-max value.

[[bd]JohnnyPneumatic]

Originally posted by Jartasm:

Because specializing turns the town's production into gold. You'll always want some ratio of Towns to Cities, because without Towns you don't produce gold. Some towns you get up to a suitable Production level of ~25-45, and by specializing, you essentially get ~50-90 gold per turn for doing so.

The idea is that you don't need to invest in making every town a city, or in improving every town to its min-max value.

Town's production is always turned in to gold, regardless of if they are specialized or not.

[Jartasm]

Originally posted by bdJohnnyPneumatic:

Originally posted by Jartasm:

Because specializing turns the town's production into gold. You'll always want some ratio of Towns to Cities, because without Towns you don't produce gold. Some towns you get up to a suitable Production level of ~25-45, and by specializing, you essentially get ~50-90 gold per turn for doing so.

The idea is that you don't need to invest in making every town a city, or in improving every town to its min-max value.

Town's production is always turned in to gold, regardless of if they are specialized or not.

That is true, I am speaking imprecisely. What I should say is that it maximizes the returns you get for each town. For example, mining towns boosting that production value for more gold, or food towns boosting the amount of food forwarded to your City. The benefit in specializing towns is that it magnifies every benefit they provide anyway.