Specialized Cities?

[p55carroll]

Do you expert players take care to build specific buildings in certain cities? Or to make one city your unit-production center, another your research center, etc.? If so, what kinds of specialized cities do you create?

Do the resources and sites within the city domain determine that city's specialization?

For years I've heard about doing this in Civilization, but I've never been able to actually make myself do it. Instead, I just try to build everything in every city. And I do the same in AoW3. I start with a store house and builder's hall, then build whatever my intuition tells me is needed next. Every now and then, I build a couple units to help defend or to flesh out an army.

Trouble is, I almost never have time in a game to build everything. War breaks out, and I can't afford to build an observatory or anything like that; I have to focus on survival.

 

[Frank327]

With the "produce merchandise/research/etc." You can increase the output of a settlement's resource by 50%. So if you have a town with 30 research from structures, 30 research from buildings and max happiness, you can boost research from 90 to 135. That's 45 research every turn.

That way you can also specialise in gold or mana. Het high base yields then switch it to producing more of it for 50% extra.

Usually around half your cities will specialise in producing units.

 

[p55carroll]

I tend to run low on gold, and it happens so often that long ago (before AoW3, when I was still playing AoW1 and AoW2) I got in the habit of alternating Produce Merchandise with whatever else I wanted to do. I'm sure it's probably an inefficient way to do it, but it means about half my cities are producing gold and the other half are producing buildings or units.