Growth/Food Production

[Titus Caesar Vespasianus]

Is growth and food production not as important in this game as in previous civ games? It seems that way, because not only do pops not contribute toward science but you also run out of areas to grow/expand too after a certain period.

[Supremax67]

The way they contribute is different from previous civ versions. Specialists also generates negative values more impactful imho

[Bandit17]

Production is king and food is the weakest of the bunch. I suspect some balancing will eventually come to boost food because it really hurts a few civs.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Titus Caesar Vespasianus:

It seems that way, because not only do pops not contribute toward science but you also run out of areas to grow/expand too after a certain period.

That's where specialists come in, especially once all productive tiles have been assigned.

In antiquity specialists are mostly there to squeeze extra science and culture out of things since it's not that likely for a city to have exploited all the three rings of tiles around it before the next age. But the specialist assignments are preserved on transition and continue to provide some science and culture even from aged buildings, so they can grant the player a good early boost to researching those important techs and civics of exploration (and eventually modern).

Growth shouldn't be overlooked. The +2 science and culture will start to seem unappealing pretty quick, but that's when the policies come into play. You can push the maintenance of specialists very low and add bonus yields to them, at which point they function more like extra buildings when stacked with proper adjacency bonuses. Having 3-4 specialists on a tile with two buildings of same yield type should essentially double their output unless they have zero adjacency bonuses.

Assigning specialists is the only way to increase productivity of settlements once they've exploited all the land around them and built up the available infrastructure. Rural tiles should be overlooked, though, especially as source of local happiness in large empires in later ages when population can be assigned on mountains. With warehouses, productivity from mines and such can also be better, but that means giving up on the inherent +2/+2 advance yield and any added bonuses from adjacency and policies.

Finally, some civs and leaders like Abbasids and Confucius benefit extra from growing tall cities.

[Cryten]

If you look at the food required for new rural / specilist citizens chart per age you see that each age has a threshold where it becomes basicly impossible to generate new citizens unless you are pumping 100 extra food into the city from towns and it gets worse every new citizen. But on age transition the graph gets easier for about another 6-7 citizens. Basicly food only matters for the first 80 or so turns of every age outside of min maxing, and lots of food will likely only get you 1 more citizen in a city compared to medium amounts.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Originally posted by Bandit17:

Production is king and food is the weakest of the bunch. I suspect some balancing will eventually come to boost food because it really hurts a few civs.

Yes and no.

Production is, I agree, the hardest yield to get, currently. Only a few buildings directly give production yields, and there are times when the terrain around your starting area is mostly other yields than production. In Civ 6, you almost always had a handful of hills to put mines on, but here, rough terrain seems sporadic and forests provide less production than rough.

Food can be a big deal, though. A lack of it at the outset can greatly slow a start, just like almost all other civ games. Further, even at the end of an age, getting another citizen or two in a settlement can be a nice boost as you get those specialists locked in. Finally, I find food is pretty good at the end of Exploration Age in particular... hospital can be a huge boost if planned for (leave those peninsulas open to take the hospital/inn combo). The food situation at end of Exploration is good, which helps because the beginning of the Modern Era doesn't allow for quick food buildings (grocer takes a lot of production). Getting food and more citizens in the waning phase of Exploration means maybe not needing as many towns to be farm/fish towns at the beginning of Modern, allowing me to get more gold by taking mining towns or get other stuff.

But all in all, production, I agree, is a little bit lacking in Civ 7. I can eventually get tons of it in the mid-to-end of Antiquity, with rush-buys of barracks, blacksmith, and the production warehouses. But after that first age transition, production ebbs away a bit much of the rest of the game until victory time in the Modern Era (when I can get social policies up for added production on specialists, and stack production buildings for them).

[Bandit17]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

Originally posted by Bandit17:

Production is king and food is the weakest of the bunch. I suspect some balancing will eventually come to boost food because it really hurts a few civs.

Yes and no.

I agree that food is important but I would still put it last on the list. Too easy to set up a good fishing town if need be.

It is so important to have good production that once you have that set up, whether it's a rough or wood start, you can get a good tempo going and have a good strong Age. Good production will solve almost any problem and the more cities you can get up and running the more problem solvers you have.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Cryten:

If you look at the food required for new rural / specilist citizens chart per age you see that each age has a threshold where it becomes basicly impossible to generate new citizens unless you are pumping 100 extra food into the city from towns and it gets worse every new citizen.

100 food is like the food output of a single well-built farming towns... easily achievable.

[jorgen_cab]

Food is only important in the start of the game and for the first 7-10 pops in each town before you convert them to cities. Above this food becomes a very wasteful use of population.

Growth otherwise should come from tiny towns producing migrants, this makes food almost pointless for cities growth in general.

You want pops to produce production or be placed as specialists.

The most efficient way to build your civilization is almost exclusively to have about 1/4 towns and 3/4 cities. The towns are just very small ones in between the cities producing migrants to populate the cities. These towns should be about 3-5 rural pop maximum.
Most of the time I don't even bother building food producing building in cities at all, really won't make a dent in the cities pop development.

[Cryten]

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

Originally posted by Cryten:

If you look at the food required for new rural / specilist citizens chart per age you see that each age has a threshold where it becomes basicly impossible to generate new citizens unless you are pumping 100 extra food into the city from towns and it gets worse every new citizen.

100 food is like the food output of a single well-built farming towns... easily achievable.

In the modern and towards the end of the exploration age yes. In the antiquity right at the end they typically field between 60-80 if built up and using specilisation bonus, typically giving 30-40 to a city. Thus requiring 2-3 late antiquity towns feeding 1 city to get 1 bonus population. That was my point.

And given the easier curve in the next era all that effort gets immediately undone.

It creates a play pattern where it is far easier to grow at the start of ages, incentivising growing out your towns, then converting them to feeding cities in the second half when the towns growth slows to get 1-2 extra pop in cities by the era transition. Since your town would miss out on the easy extra 4 pop from the new growth curves in exploration in the first 60-70 turns if they where still feeding turning off their growth. But it also means that cities that had their growth boosted by a pop or two previous era have low growth prospects until the town go back to feeding. Since they got that are easy to get in exploration when they where hard to get in antiquity.

Seriously I recommend looking up the growth curves, they are quite informative to play style.

[Titus Caesar Vespasianus]

So basically, food in this game is largely irrelevant.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Titus Caesar Vespasianus:

So basically, food in this game is largely irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant, it's just featured differently than in the past where every city was largely responsible for their own food production. Now we have some actual logistics.