What causes end-game city stagnation?

[Gideon (The Cat)]

I tried looking it up on the forums, but I wasn't sure what to search for. But I want to know what is causing my cities to become to unproductive towrds the late game. I have enough food for my cities to grow, and enough aminities to keep my people happy, but once my cities reach a population of 15 or so it takes them forever to build anything. I'm assuming its an issue with my cities production, but even having my city on a production focus with a maxed out production district it still takes forever to get anything done. I'm talking 30 turns to build one tank, or 50 turns to build a district. I'm unsure on what to do, because issues like this are what kill me in the end game and usually keep me from winning science victories.

[Sinjet]

Tanks I can answer, your allowed so many unit's when you exceede that limit production goes down by 10% for each unit your over, can't remeber if it's the same for district but does sound like it.....

[Digihuman]

Production in this ghame just sucks.

Districts have a scaling cost based on tech/civic progress (supposedly, that or something to do with how many there are currently), so end-game district building is stupidly useless.

[Gideon (The Cat)]

Originally posted by khancock:

Tanks I can answer, your allowed so many unit's when you exceede that limit production goes down by 10% for each unit your over, can't remeber if it's the same for district but does sound like it.....

So how do you know you unit limit? I mean thats ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brutal for smaller civs if the game won't let you increase your armies to defend yourself from bigger civs.

[Gideon (The Cat)]

Originally posted by Digihuman:

Production in this ghame just sucks.

Districts have a scaling cost based on tech/civic progress (supposedly, that or something to do with how many there are currently), so end-game district building is stupidly useless.

So basically build districts as early as possible, because the later you get into the game the harder they are going to be to build?

[leandrombraz]

You need to optimize your production, if you do it right building a district won't take more than 10 turns:

- Try to get as much adjacency bonus as you can;

- Send Envoys to production CSs. You don't need to be their Suzerain, just send enough to get the production bonus on Industrial Zones;

- Optimize Factory/Power Plant regional effects, make sure all cities are covered. Keep in mind that the bonus don't stack, so you just need one factory/power plant covering each city. It also don't stack with the production that the building give direct to the city you build it, so if a city is covered by the regional effect of another city, you don't need to build a factory/power plant on it, they are redundant. The only thing this buildings will give you in this case is a specialist slot and great engineer points;

- Use production policies, both general (e.g. 100% adjacency to industrial zones) and situational (e.g. 50% towards melee and ranged units). Optimize its use. Need to reinforce your army? Synchronize some of your cities to build units at the same time, pick the apropriate policy, build the units, swap the policy for something less situational;

- Use internal trade routes to improve your production. There's a late game policy that give +5 production and +10 gold from international routes, it's pretty good once you get there;

- Needless to say but make sure your cities are working production tiles. Use the specialists if necessary.

- Try to get some great engineers, make good use of it.

- chop florests, jungles, harvest quarries and other resources that give production, in case you need a boost and won't miss having that resource on your city. Specially important if you gonna build a district/wonder on that tile, make sure you harvest the resource first.


Unless your cities are in ridiculously bad spots you should have at least a decent production on your cities. Off course new cities settled in later eras will have a hard time to catch up, use trade routes and regional effects to help those. Also keep in mind that you don't need to build everything in every city, specialize your cities.