Civilization 7 has drastically changed a lot of mechanics from Civ 6, especially city management. Civ can be a simple game if you want it to be, but it can also be an incredibly deep game if you want to take the time to learn all of its intricacies. In this video, we dive deep into the new complexities that Civ 7 brings to the city and unravel every dark secret it is hiding. My name is Drongo, this is Civ 7, and join me as we take one more turn. Just before we get into the video, a quick disclaimer.
because Civ 7 is new and there's a lot to learn. It's quite normal to feel overwhelmed by it all. It's important to enjoy Civ the way that you want to. And keep in mind that this is an advanced guide. There's a lot of focus on the micro level.
If you find that I'm glossing over some details, then make sure you check out the 90 minute long beginner guide that was posted earlier this week. I'll leave a link in the description. Now, let's get to it. This video is going to be in 7 parts, and it's going to take you through the phase of a game through antiquity all the way until the beginning of exploration.
As we progress through the game, we'll be taking a look at different aspects of the city management component for Civ 7. And that starts with Empire Planning. Okay, so we're on turn 9, and we've got some questions that we need to ask. The first one is, are there any super-duper good city locations that I can put down right now?
And judging what we've got here, this cluster doesn't seem particularly crazy. There's a couple cowl in over on this west side, and... Over towards this top, I fear that if we settle anywhere near this independent people, it's probably just going to cause us more harm than it will good.
So I don't think it's a smart move to start making settlers just yet. Now, we've opened up with two scouts. And then we've built a granary, and we've finished researching sailing with pottery about to come through. And the question is, do we make a settler, or do we further invest in our production? That's the early question that we're going to be looking at.
And I think at this stage of the game, with no clear answer here, the fact that we don't see any really strong expansion, going into production is going to make the most sense here. So we'll throw down the key, we'll add our next citizen in. Where are we going to put the citizen? Probably over here, next to the iron for the moment. And we'll move over to the next turn.
Now, what... What would have been something that would have been worth expanding to right now? And the answer is a natural wonder. So if you had a natural wonder nearby, so let's say that we saw the redwood forest that was over here, then you'd want to expand that as quickly as possible.
And that would mean as soon as you get to five population, because you can't do it before five, it's only at five population, can you start making your first settler? Then we would begin doing that and look to expand in that direction as soon as possible. The other option or the other position where you'd want to expand is if you've spotted a neighbor and you want to expand towards them very, very quickly because you're quite close.
So as an example, if we've got a neighbor that's over here and they're currently hidden and we don't know exactly where they are and all of a sudden we spot them, we can actually get a settler out immediately and then look to expand. Because what we want to do is create what's called a blocker city. Uh, so it's a city that is going to fill in that position, so it will block them essentially. So we'll continue and there we go. We we found our first player for today.
It's going to be Xerxes. So we'll take a look and see exactly where he is. Because there's always the risk that uh, we don't actually see his capital.
Okay, look so we've got to the north. Okay, so our blocker city is going to be somewhere in this region. This is actually not a bad spot to be putting down a town. But we've very quickly identified, so we're at turn 12 now, I think we started at turn 9, and now we're at turn 12, so we've very quickly identified where our first city, or where our first settlement, rather, is going to be going, and it's going to be going near him.
Now, I'll give you a couple of tips when it comes to settling cities on people's borders, or close to people's borders. Now, keep in mind, if we take a look at this position here, we're 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 tiles away from him, which means that if we settle a city, The minimum distance, so let's go with this tile right here, this is the minimum distance that we can settle it away, this is still pretty close to him, and it's going to make him angry. And because of that, especially when you're playing at the higher difficulties like deity, any little amount of influence that you cause to drop can be drastic for the outcome of the game, especially when you're playing against somebody like Xerxes, who is known for his aggression.
So if we take a look at... already at our relationship. We've got a plus 20 on the first meet because we've given him that influence. But one of the things that would really make that bad is if we settled close to him and the borders were touching.
So I would advise always look to settle at least four tiles away from the enemy. So that's the first, that's the second, that's the third. So I wouldn't settle here. I would say at least four. So I guess technically that's at least five.
You would want to make it so that your borders cannot grow beyond these tiles here. Because if they do, if they do touch his borders, that will also provide a negative modifier that's going to further reduce you. And one of the comments I often see on the videos is, how come the AI is never attacking you? And it's because managing the... The relationship with the AI is one of the most important things that you're doing in Civ 7. It is a lot different from Civ 6 where they're just kind of random and they declare surprise war on you.
There's a lot more prerequisites before they can declare war and doing your best to mitigate that is incredibly important. And that starts at the planning phase right here and looking at where are we going to put down a city. So I think by far the best position here is this spot right here. Because if we take this spot, we're going to be putting a block of city down that's the minimum distance from our capital. We'll also be expanding out towards this silk.
And not that silk's particularly important, but at the end of the day, I don't want him to get that silk. That's our silk, and it will be our silk because we'll settle down here. Now, we've only got one turn left on the fishing key, so we'll allow that to come up because it's a decent investment that we've already put forward. But we will put a settler in queue after that, and we will immediately look to get out towards this front. Other than that, that's essentially our early game planning phase when we're planning out Empire.
We want to spot out those five or six or five expansion locations, and they're already starting to come together. We've got the first expansion that's here, the second expansion that's over here, the third one that's over here. I don't know if I want to expand down here. This, to me, doesn't really look like another idea, but we've already found three expansion spots, so we need to continue searching, we need to continue finding more expansion spots. to get a bit of an idea, and I suspect we might have some stuff down here.
Okay, it's turn 21, and it's time to talk about defining our borders. We've already talked about empire planning, and roughly where we were going to put down some towns, as well as that nice little tip about just making sure our borders are defined against neighbours. But we need to speak more broadly about...
defining our borders because when it comes to defending your empire in Civilization VII, it's important you don't spread yourself thin. To our south, we've discovered Confucius, and very clearly there is a lovely expansion spot to our south and to his north that is definitely going to be contested if we want it to be. I think a city somewhere in here would be absolutely amazing. You'd be able to take the camels as well as the gypsum and have amazing growth along this navigable river.
But the only trouble is, considering we've got to our north Xerxes and we've already got a position up towards him, I don't think it's a reasonable decision for us to actually expand all that way down there because we're going to be spreading ourselves very, very thin. So should we actually contest this? And...
I'd say the answer is no, and part of the reason why is because of the natural terrain. If we take a look at this natural terrain, there is an absolutely massive navigable river that goes all the way up here. On top of that, there's only a single tile that's going to allow us to get through.
Now, eventually we'll be able to get a bridge along here that's going to make this transfer a little bit easier, but in the meantime, in the short term, this is going to be a very susceptible settlement, and I'm not in the business of giving away cities, especially not to Confucius. So... Let's talk a little bit more about where it could be appropriate for us to settle so that we can minimize the risk that he's going to be taking this city, as well as maximize the efficiency of that city and reduce the risk associated with it being taken. And this spot right here is what stands out to me. With regard to defensive terrain, it's incredibly important when we're playing Civ 7 to look at the terrain that is around our cities.
So as an example, the mountains, as well as the volcanoes, not that they really do much, but they're... tiles that can't be moved on, but the big kicker here is the navigable river. It's incredibly difficult to cross a navigable river. You're going to have to embark, you're going to be losing quite a bit of combat strength, and the enemy can pick you off as you're crossing that river.
So by taking advantage of that, we can look to settle on this tile right here, and that will guarantee that if the enemy ever tries to attack us, they're going to have a very difficult time coming through here, and it's also going to mean that realistically, we're never really going to be losing this position. So as long as we secure this, we've got... a very effective border along here. And that's why it's so important that we define our borders and we understand, okay, where am I going to be calling a distance in from? And this is it.
So I can already see that border along this navigable river all the way down along the edge like that. And this is a great little expansion. Salt, camels, as well as the horses. A great little spot, a nice little quadrant that we've got, and I suspect that we might have Confucius look to try and put a settlement here as well. It's not going to be as good, as long as we can snipe out these navigable tiles.
And now that we've expanded up towards the north... We've also got our second settler that's moving out towards this eastern position as we've taken out the position or we've taken out the independent power. We were fortunate in that we got an archer from a goody hut and that allowed us to kind of early steamroll them.
together and we're able to take this out without too much of a hassle nice and early so this settlement will go up but our next settler and we've got quite a few of them that are in queue at the moment will be coming down towards this position and we'll be looking to settle this in the meantime now one of the other things that you'll do throughout your gameplay which i would definitely recommend is you look to try and block the enemy at all points. So with our scout here, what we would do is we would be keeping an eye on any potential settlers that might be coming out from the capital. And when we see those settlers, what we'll do is block their direction that they're trying to go. So we might see that he is in this bush right here, and we might look to block this little angle right there, or maybe he comes across and stands on this tile. We can look to block in here.
And slowing down that settler could be the difference in making this test. this city in time or making or not making it in time and if they get the expansion up remember that there is a three tile lockout so basically if you put down a settlement there's three tiles where you can't or they can't expand within that three tiles and if he was to come in and put a settlement right here it would mean that you can no longer expand on this tile you might need to go back here and now because you're back here you don't have access to fresh water and because you don't have access to fresh water you're not happy and maybe you can't reach the navigable river there's a whole bunch of fallout so we want to do everything that we can to try and restrict the enemy from actually getting through onto this. So realistically, that's pretty much it for defining borders. The main thing is just kind of envisioning where your borders are going to be.
And as I mentioned earlier, just trying to make sure that your borders don't touch where possible. So another example is this expansion. I think the best position is going to be on this tile right here, just because it will have the fresh water.
And we'll also be able to get the horse's tile, which is the most important. But if we expanded here... As an example, this might be decent. We still have fresh water from the oasis that's here, and we'd be able to get to the horse's tile faster. But when we take that horse's tile, it's going to push all of our borders out, and they will be against Xerxes, and that's going to provide a negative multiplier.
At the moment, he doesn't have a negative multiplier, so you can see that we've settled too close. But we don't have the borders touching negative multiplier, which is quite significant. And it can be the difference between a war declaration and potential ally in the future.
So making sure we manage that. is incredibly important to defining our borders. It's turn 39 and it's time to think about city planning. City planning is the stage of the game where we start thinking about which of these settlements are gonna become cities and which ones are going to stay towns and which ones are we gonna start specializing.
The primary driver of a city versus a town is that a city should have a lot of production. So if we look at Chichen Itza, it doesn't have a whole lot of production. There's not a lot of production coming out of these tiles.
We're mainly focused on the navigable river because that's going to be yielding us a lot more than just... you know, one food and one production. If we were to compare that to Copan, as an example, where we've got two hammers, two hammers, another two hammers, another two hammers, there is absolutely plenty of production over in this town.
And because of that, the candidacy for a city is a lot higher over for Copan than it would be for Chichen Itza. So Chichen Itza, though, would be a great town to specialize. Now, when we specialize a town or when we make a city, it's important that we follow a couple of rules. The first one is going to be from the civil...
encyclopedia itself. If we take a look at the towns and scroll all the way down to the bottom, they actually give a great tip that says, instead of converting all towns into cities, aim to keep at least a one-to-one town-to-city ratio. And this is a great tip. You want to have one town that's feeding into your city.
The only thing is, and we'll touch on this a little bit later when we talk about roads, is you want to have the feeding town close to the city. That means if we want to turn this into a city, we need to have the town that's going to be feeding it close to that city. This, as an example, if we wanted to turn this into a city, we wouldn't be able to feed it with this town. it's too far away the food would get intercepted by Kopan or by Bach and as a result it never receives that food it needs to be think of it like a river it needs to be a creek that's trickling into that river and because of that these are I guess the best way to think about it is you've got almost different rivers here and if Khan is trickling into Kopan it can never get into Kalakmal so that's that's normally the the rule that I like to follow is the one by or the one for one rule when it comes to specialization there's a couple of different ways that you can play it but for me you by far the number one specialization is going to be farming town it just makes the most sense in pretty much all situations when we think about what the purpose of a specialized town is the first role of the specialized town is to send food to the capital or the connected cities and the second role is to provide an income source a gold income source and that's what it's doing by converting all of the production into a gold source so you're the way i see it is you're very much doubling down on its primary bonus, which is to feed your other or your connected cities.
Now, there's going to be a couple of factors that determine whether you actually go into that specialization, but you can definitely play around it. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is take a look down here in this bottom corner. There is a absolutely beautiful town that could be placed, and it's not going to have a lot of land resources, but one of the things that it will have a lot of is water.
And so what you can do is you can put down this town. and start taking all of the tiles around it that are connected by water. And eventually, you can get a fishing key, and that's going to further improve those tiles for you in that position.
And eventually, you'll just be able to send that back to the connected city. In this case, we'll send it up to bark. And we won't need a road connection for that, because it will be connected by water.
You can see that we've already got the trade ship out. We'll be doing much of the same thing, and it will be able to come all the way around, and it will be able to feed bark. And because of that, we can... to optimize our placement of our towns and our specialization by saying, I'm just going to plant on the coast and I'm going to leave myself enough tiles to make sure that I've got a decent food income.
And then I can use those to feed into my cities. So this is a huge component when it comes to city planning. It's about planning which ones are going to be cities, which ones are going to be towns.
And if I had to pick three right now, I'd say Copan is most likely to be our first city candidate. And the second city candidate, I don't really see a lot of production. throughout here. I think Cannes wouldn't be a terrible city candidate. There's some good production in here, but to be honest, Calakmul is quite nice with its production as well.
We can get these tiles up quite high because they're all vegetated. So I think this would be good. The only issue that this city is going to have is that there's no feed in for it, at least not yet. And if we wanted to feed into this town, it could be difficult. Or rather, if we want to feed into this city, it could be difficult.
Where are we going to put... a town to feed this. Like you'd have to put one out here and feed it in, or you'd have to put one out here and feed it in. And that's difficult to defend.
And we could technically put one down here because this spot is still open. But once again, a road, when it generates, it's going to generate to the closest town or closest settlement. And this is going to be a lot closer to Bark than it is to Kullikmal.
So I think that this could be a bit of a trap. But anyway, let's move on to our next point. It's turn 50 and it's time for us to talk about city building. This is the process of constructing buildings on the most optimal tiles so that we can maximize the yields across our empire. But how do we actually go about doing it?
Well, first we need to talk about the four different categories of buildings. The first type of building is the normal building. This is a building that doesn't have any bonus to anything. It is, however, some of these buildings have bonuses for tiles. tiles specifically.
Let's talk about those. So the first one that you'll be familiar with is the granary. The granary doesn't get any adjacency bonuses. If you put it next to something, it's not going to improve the yield that it gives you.
However, the more farms that you've got... within your settlement, the more yields you will receive because each farm that you've got will then receive a plus one for that. By the same token, the fishing key, which we've got right here, improves the yields on all of your fishing boats within your settlement.
So this is another example of a normal type building. Other normal type buildings are things like the saw pit, the brick yard is another normal type building, as well as the altar. The altar receives some adjacency bonuses, but they're much more general and not something that you can really look to optimize in the same way that you can do the other three categories.
So the other three categories are food buildings and gold buildings. So these both have the exact same adjacency type. When it comes to food and gold buildings, you can put them together. So if we take a look here at Bark, our capital, and scroll down, you'll see that we've got the garden, which has a plus seven for somewhere in this empire. Now I know where this is, and you may as well, depending on how many hours you've played of Civ 7, but the bonus is four hours.
adjacency to water. So there's a couple of different things, you know, that's navigable rivers, that's minor rivers, that's lakes, that's coast. And if you've got that bonus, it will provide a huge amount of extra for it.
So if we take a look at the garden, it has a base yield of three. That means no matter where you put it, you're going to be getting three. You can get three over here, you can get three over here, you can get a couple of happiness as well.
That's because we're playing as Ashoka and he gets bonuses to his happiness adjacencies. Or you can put it over here, where you get... Don't focus too much on the happiness.
That's Ashoka specific. Probably a bad idea to pick him for this playthrough. But the main focus here is the food.
So we're getting an extra food from each one of these tiles. And not only that, but... we would also be getting extra gold in the event we were to put down a market in this position as well so that's the second type the food and gold the third type of buildings are the science buildings and the production buildings so your library your academy your blacksmith actually i'm pretty sure i'm just thinking right now i'm like blacksmith is it barracks blacksmith they will all be considered production type buildings and they get bonuses to your Resources. So if we have a look here, we've got a camp that is currently sitting on ivory, and then we've also got some silk.
So if we were to build a library and a blacksmith in between these, they're going to both receive adjacency bonuses the same way that a garden or a market would have received an adjacency bonus for this water. So the more that you've got, the better. So if you can find a spot that's got like this right here, where you've got one, two, three resources on it, what you'd want to do... is build a library on it, and that's going to get plus one, plus two, plus three, plus the base yield. So if we take a look at what that is, so if we go into here and take a look, so it's got a plus two science as its base yield, so it would be a plus five library in this position.
And that would apply for everything production related as well. So we can go and have a look at our blacksmith, and that's plus three production with additional adjacency bonuses for each resource. So that would be a six.
And then from here, we've got our fourth. So that was our third one. Now we've got our fourth one, which is our happiness buildings and our culture buildings. They also stack together.
And what's really cool about this, just in general, is that it makes it very easy to do adjacency because you always know, okay, wherever I put down a good garden, I'm going to be able to put down a good market. Wherever I put down a good blacksmith, I'm going to be able to put down a good academy. And often these things link up in the tech tree.
If we take a look here at the tech tree right now, we'll see that we've got the market as well as the bath. that both unlock at the exact same time. Now the garden comes a little bit earlier, which is why we're able to build it now.
And the bath is also, if I remember correctly, it must be placed on a river. So you can't actually build it with the market. But if we go a little bit further on, we've got the blacksmith that unlocks here at engineering.
And then the very next technology after it, we've got the academy, which unlocks. So often you'll find yourself putting down a good blacksmith and then it will be followed by a really good academy. But then the final point or the final one that we'll talk about, though, as previously mentioned, the happiness buildings and the culture buildings, they stack up together and their adjacency bonuses are based on natural wonders as well as mountains.
So let's see if we can find a good spot. Here's a good spot right here for a monument. If you had a city that was somewhere in this region, maybe here, and you could put a monument right here, it's going to receive its base yield. So if we take a look at the monument's base yield.
I think it's a plus two, plus two culture. So it will get plus two and then plus three, four, five. So you'll have a five culture monument there.
And that's the same for your happiness buildings. They'll also get that additional happiness for each of the adjacent mountains. And if I remember correctly, this is a double adjacency. Actually, we can, we can, once again, we can check. It's a double adjacency for natural wonders.
Actually, maybe I take that back. It could be natural wonders that are mountains. So if you've got like Mount Kilimanjaro and you build it next to it, then technically it's a natural one.
but it's also technically a mountain so it will give you uh double the the bonuses at least that's that's what i remember it being okay so we've talked about adjacency bonuses and we've talked about the the best way that you can optimize each of these different things i mean you're primarily looking for rivers when it comes to gold and food you're looking for resources when it comes to production and science and you're looking for mountains or natural wonders when it comes to your happiness and your culture and This goes like this throughout the entirety of the game, and it means that once you get into the exploration age, it's relatively simple when it comes to overbuilding, which is something that we'll also talk about at the end of this video. It'll be towards the very end, actually. It's the last thing that we speak about. But let's talk a little bit more about our city building and about exactly where we're going to be putting cities or where we're going to be putting our buildings and the best way that we can be doing that. So just to start off with, your palace provides a adjacency bonus.
for all of the quarters that are around it. So when a building is built by itself, it becomes an urban district. So if we were just to take this arena as an example and just put it down here, that would become an urban district. It doesn't become a quarter until there is a second building in it. So here we've got a granary.
If we were to build an arena on this granary, that's going to give us the the quarter that's going to complete the quarter and all of your quarters that are adjacent to your palace so that's your city center and keep in mind that your palace is unique to your capital i think this is the founders edition palace that's why it looks all fancy uh but as an example over on this side you've got the city hall uh and that that's despite it being a town i know i've thought about it as well i'm like why are there city halls in my towns uh they're not cities anyway uh so they don't provide the adjacency bonus it is only here you which gives you a real incentive to build quarters around the inner tiles of your city, of your capital city. So that's the first sort of general rule that we could look to try and do. Now, and keep in mind that through the ages, this adjacency bonus will get stronger. So it's plus one culture and plus one science in the Age of Antiquity. In the Exploration Age, it's plus two culture and plus two science.
So one of the easy ways that you can do this is with a granary and a brickyard. And you take that granary and you put it down. Once again, ignore the happiness component of this. I don't know why I picked Ashoka to do this run through, but here we are. Probably the worst decision because it just makes it very confusing.
But we've got, you know, what would normally be a two production tile here. Now keep in mind that this is not based on any of the other adjacency components. This is just a normal building. If we look at the brickyard, because it's a warehouse building, which is an ageless building. So a warehouse building means it provides that bonus to specific tile yields.
And ageless means that it will last throughout the ages. You won't be able to replace it. But it provides an extra one culture, an extra one science. And it's the same if we were to do it over here.
If we were to pair the brickyard with our unique kuh-kuh-kuh-nah. But we would not want to do that because it's time to talk about our unique quarters. So a unique quarter is...
Obviously unique, hence the name, but each civilization may or may not have access to a unique quarter. So if we look here, we're playing the Mayans, we've got access to the unique quarter. But if we take a look over at, let's have a look and see, we can have a look at the Han.
They do not have access to a unique quarter. They've got access to a unique building instead, so it's a unique tile improvement. So not every civilization has got access. It is tied to the civilization. It's not tied to the leader.
So here's an example playing as the Romans. They do have it. And then we've also got the Persians who have got a unique building or unique tile improvement. So with the unique improvements, rather the unique... quarters.
It's absolutely imperative that you keep these two together, because when they are built together, they will form a unique quarter. If you build them independently, they won't. So here, the second component to our unique quarter is the jalao.
Jalao? Jal-jalao? That's- it's not my native language. So we could build it anywhere else, okay? We could build it down here.
We could- have a look at that. two culture and seven happiness yeah we'll take that but the moment you do that you're no longer able to build that unique quarter and you might be wondering okay but what's so special about this unique quarter well everyone's unique quarter is unique it's different so if we go take a look at charlemagne on the romans his unique quarter uh what does it do it provides plus one culture and plus one gold for every unique tradition in the government And as the Romans, that's typically something that you want to do. They love their traditions.
Plus two combat strength for every tradition in the government. Whereas our unique quarter, if we take a look at it over on the right side of the screen, every time you research a technology, the settlement gains production equal to... to 15% of its cost, which is pretty crazy when you think about it, right?
If we've got 52 science that's coming in every single turn, it's basically just like getting 15% of your science as production every turn. And we've only got 18 science, which means that, or rather 18 production, which means that that's equivalent to about seven production every turn. Now, obviously there's some caveats to that.
You know, it only ever happens when you're completing your construct or you're researching your tech. But the point is- You don't want to miss out on this. This is absolutely huge.
And you've got to remember, this is across your empire. So you could build one here. You could build one over here. Now, keep in mind, you can't build that in a town. You can't build this unique quarter in a town, but you can build it in other cities, just like we're doing right here.
So that means that every single time this tech completes, you're getting that 15% bonus production, which is represented as a portion of the science that comes through as production. And you're getting that depending on how many times you've got that throughout. throughout your settlement or throughout your empire.
So it's very, very impactful to be doing that and to be making sure that you take advantage of that. On top of that, your unique quarter, it takes me a while, your unique quarter has got adjacency bonuses as well. And it won't actually get the adjacency bonuses until you actually construct it.
So if we take a look, I'm trying to think, okay, hold on. We're going to have to see how to spell it. So the unique quarter... It is, I don't even know how we find the unique quarter, but basically it's got adjacency bonuses, depending on what is placed next to it. So it gets other bonuses.
So basically by splitting, never split these guys up, always keep them together. From there, moving on, there's one other adjacency that we haven't talked about yet, and that is the adjacency for World Wonders. World Wonders give adjacency bonuses to Everything. Quite literally, absolutely everything that you put a World 1er next to, it will get an adjacency bonus for. So you want to try and cluster everything together.
That's the general idea when you're making cities, when you're doing city building, you want to try and cluster things together. You don't want to have your city coming down towards this angle or in a single line snaking across. You want to try and keep it clustered as much as you can.
Try and think of like, you know, when you're playing the Japanese in Civ 6, it's the exact same thing. You're looking to try and get those triangles in. trying to get those diamonds it's the same sort of concept uh and just about weaving them in so perhaps i could see a world where we do maybe a uh production and science building here and then a world wonder here and then another well we can't do it because it's within the tiles but you guys get the idea we we want to try and maximize our adjacency we'll work it out for later later on uh down the road so we've spoken about quarters we've spoken about adjacency bonuses uh we've spoken about buildings uh i think that's pretty much It pretty much summarizes this, I guess the last component of city building, and this is probably a bit more of a general tip, but it's about building what is important right now.
So as an example, I'm playing as the Mayans, and after playing with them a couple of times, I think they actually might be the strongest antiquity civilization, and it might be by far. There's a couple reasons why I think this, and I'm kind of tempted to make a video just about them because they're absolutely crazy. But the big reason why is this building here, the Kuna. It has a base of plus three science, and then it has a further plus two science if placed on vegetation.
So that's basically just like you put this down on vegetation and you get five science. And then on top of that, it's got a whole bunch of other things that are just going for it. So you can pair it with the Jaloa, which obviously gives you that additional bonus that we've talked about.
But what this does... is typically whenever you would want to research something in the tech tree, that's science that you're contributing. So here as an example, if I want to get to writing, I need to use science to get to that writing before I can build the library. But what's kind of cool about this is you can actually use your culture to get towards this.
So you can use culture to unlock this. And what that means is because of that, I've got this building, which means that I don't need to make a library. It's less important for me to make a library because I...
The science that I'm getting is so strong from this, I don't need to make it. So when it comes to decision making, at least in the early stages of the game, one of the key factors to look at is what do I need right now? Another important thing to note is that warehouse buildings, normal buildings, and this is something that I think will change with time, but at the moment, the way that I'm seeing it is that your warehouse buildings, they can't be replaced. And there will be a time in the exploration age, in the modern age, where you will want to replace them. Your tiles in your cities are limited.
You only have a specific amount of space. You want to put world wonders down. You want to overbuild on top of them. And you cannot overbuild on a granary. You cannot overbuild on a brickyard.
So I think what we will tend to see or trend to see at the top level, and when I say at the top level, I mean, you know, for the real sweaty min-maxes out there, people like myself. they will find, or I suspect we will find that they only really look to put about one or two of these buildings down. And that's because they're realistically, there's a lot that you can build. If we take a look here in our town and keep in mind, you can build these out in the town.
I don't think that's a problem at all. There's one, two, three, four, five buildings that we've got here, six, including the ancient walls that could potentially be built in the capital. So those five buildings, now the altar is a little bit different, but those five buildings.
contributing to messing up the adjacencies that are going to be happening in here. So realistically, I think it's going to be an important thing to explore for us as civilization continues to grow. And I suspect that this is going to be quite a strong point.
Anyway, that's enough about city building. Let's move on to our next point, which is about specialists. So it's turn 57 and it's time that we talk about specialists. There are a lot of components to specialists.
So we're going to roll over this turn and we're going to complete for the first time this game. Currency. Currency is going to give us one specialist limit in all cities.
Now the way that specialists work in Civ 7 is quite different from Civ 6. The way that it works is you can allocate a specialist to any single tile that has got an urban district on it. You're not able to put that specialist on a rural district, only on the urban district. And what's particular about this is you can have one specialist on each of these tiles. And then that's it.
It's locked out until you increase the specialist limit of the city. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can do that. If you want to go up to two specialists, up to even three specialists in the same city on those same tiles, you can do that. I'll show you how.
First up, you'll need to go for a very specific wonder. There's only one of them in the game that you'll be able to grab. The anchor wand.
So plus one specialist limit in this settlement. That'll allow you to put... two on the same tile and then the third one is going to be in your leader attributes if we go over to our expansionist tree and scroll down we have plus one specialist limit in all cities but minus one settlement limit and this allows you to go up to three on the same tile now you might be wondering okay why the heck would you want to go for three specialists on the same tile and the reason why is because the specialists modify the adjacency bonuses an integral part of understanding how a specialist works is understanding adjacency bonuses so every building has got a base yield. As an example, the garden that we've put down on this tile here has got a base yield of three food.
If we take a look at it in the civilopedia. And look at the garden. It's got a base of three food, and then it gets plus one food for each of its adjacent yields.
And the specialist amplifies this. So if we were to put the specialist in here, you would see that I can tell you right now it is going to give one, two, three, four bonus ticks. The specialist has a multiplier or an amplifier of 0. 0.5. So basically for each adjacency bonus you get 0.5. So where the garden gets 1, 2, 3, 4, the specialist would get 0.5.
1, 1.5, and 2. So effectively half the adjacency bonus. So let's jump in and have a look. You can see there is the plus 2 food. Now the base yields on a specialist are 2 science and 2 culture.
You'll get them anywhere that you take them. And anything more than that is part of the adjacencies. Now for us, we've got a lot of happiness once again, because we're a shoker. So just ignore that happiness component for now.
One piece of happiness that you shouldn't ignore is the minus 2 happiness. You'll get that with all of your specialists. there are ways that you can mitigate specialist happiness. So if we take a look once again in the expansionist tree, and you have plus 15% food and happiness towards maintaining specialists, or 30% if you have three or fewer cities.
So that will reduce the cost of happiness for your specialists. So we've talked about adjacency and base yield. Let's talk about maximizing the bonuses that you get from specialists. So part of the reason why stacking up buildings on the same tiles that have got the same adjacency bonuses.
So as an example, with currency being completed, we're now able to build a market. And if we built this market, so the market has a base of two yield. If we were to build this market just on this tile out here, it's going to get that base of two yield, but it doesn't get any adjacency. Now we can put a specialist in there, but it's not going to give the same as if we were going to put that market into this tile, which gives that base two and then gives plus one, two, three. four so it will give us four four times uh 0.5 equals so it gives half the adjacency sorry uh so it would be two uh that you'll be getting so it's a significant difference between these two and what makes this so special so let's go ahead we'll put the market down here uh i'm just trying to think do we have anything that we can like compare it to you you'll have to trust me on this one i mean i can show you if you want to have a look at the the specialist uh it uh does it say it in here yeah So basically you've got 0.5 adjacency bonus.
That's essentially it. And it's just multiplying the existing adjacency bonus that is there. It's not amplified through any buildings. It's just amplified through the actual bonus of the building or the adjacency bonus of itself. But as an example, let's take a look and put the market on this tile.
And that's going to give us some very nice yields. And now when we put the specialist in there, you'll see just how beautiful that gets. Two food, two science, two culture, two gold, and four happiness.
Okay. which is two of that is going to be a component of Ashoka, if I remember correctly. So it's quite a bit of a bonus that you get.
So if you were to compare that to some of the other bonuses, so as an example like this one here, two science, two culture and one happiness, there's a lot of difference between these two. So if you can stack up specialists on a single tile, all of a sudden it becomes a very attractive thing to do. Now, I will also provide a caveat, and this is very important that you hear this. There is currently a bug in the current version of the game I know that the developers are aware of it and they are looking to fix it I don't know when it will be fixed, but when it rolls over- Hey, this is editing Drongo here. You can see I'm editing the video at the moment We're gonna be cutting this part of the video out because they literally just released a patch That fixed this issue so you don't have to worry about the specialists anymore.
We can we can go back to using them Because it's a key component of the game, they're very fun to play with. You can get some crazy adjacency bonuses on them. And there's a lot of different ways that you can amplify them through other bonuses. So if we take a look down through Code of Laws and under the Mastery for Code of Law, it gives a plus one culture for specialists.
There's all different civ-specific bonuses. You can also get some bonuses. I don't know whether we can see them in the challenges, but under the leaders, yeah.
So Confucius has a bonus where he gets plus one science for specialists, another one which is like plus one culture and gold. on specialists. So there's a whole bunch of different specialist bonuses that you can get, but pretty much that summarizes specialists at the moment in their current form.
Okay, it's turn 74 and it's time that we talk about roads. Now, before we do that, just take a look at these specialist tiles. Unfortunately, while they do look very juicy, we do unfortunately lose them in the next era. But let's talk a little bit about roads and about what roads do, how they work, why they work.
And I'll be honest, I'm kind of dreading talking about roads just because... They are very complicated. There's a lot that you need to know about it, and we'll start at the very top.
What is a road? A road serves as a connection from a town to another town, or a town to a city, or just in general between two settlements. And the whole idea of that road is that by having that connection, you're going to be able to send food on it. Now, that's not the only way that you can send food. You can also send food by water.
You can send it through cargo. But the main focus here is just going to be on the road itself. So a road is going to form when two settlements that are within 11 tiles of each other.
So that's if you're counting from the city center. So if I was to count from the city center, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. As long as I've got a city that's placed on this tile or any tile along this line that would be within 11 tiles of that city, would form a road between it. However, it doesn't always form a road with that settlement, because there may be a settlement that is closer. And that's one of the issues that you have.
As an example, here we've got the city of Bak, and we've also got the town of Khan and the town of Kopan. And when we put Khan down, we put this down after we put down Copan and the road formed and as you can see the road goes over to Copan so there's one two three four tiles to Copan and there's one two three four tiles to the capital and if we take a look at Khan right now and take a look at the food that it's delivering, you'll see that it is delivering 100% of its food to Copan. So even though both cities are the exact same amount of tiles away, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, even though this technically was a town at the time that it was formed, and this is like, this looks like a perfect triangle to me, the game doesn't agree.
The game doesn't think that there should be any food that goes to this city. And the truth is, I don't know why. Sometimes it does it, sometimes it doesn't work and i've i've tested with this uh extensively and i it's only blown my mind even more and i want to avoid getting too off topic here but like as an example okay uh if we've got one settlement here and one settlement here and i put a settlement in between them the road has connected through to both of them sometimes and sometimes it's connected to just the city and then sometimes uh i found that if i move it closer to this city it will connect to this one you And it just, I couldn't find any rhyme or reason.
So I'll do my best to sort of give you some general rules that you should try and follow and things that you can do. But normally, this is part of the reason why earlier on in the video, I gave the advice that you should always typically opt for the one-in-one rule, one city and one town. And that town should be close to the city.
It should be feeding into it directly. And it's specifically because of this. Because if you wanted this food to feed into bark, and this wasn't a city. If this was a town, and this was not a city, this food would be going nowhere.
This food would not be going anywhere, because the connection to the city must be direct. It must be immediate. There cannot be any drop-offs. Now, sometimes you'll see that roads, so This road may have connected into the middle. And sometimes, you just can't tell visually, but sometimes it will go and connect to this city with that road.
And sometimes it won't connect to that city. So the best thing that you can do in this situation is if you've got a town that you want to connect up to a city through a road. Once you've put that road down, ideally, in most circumstances, you want to make it so that it is closer to the settlement.
that you want to connect it to. But then what you can do is if your town is on a growing focus like this, and okay, I want to specialize, all you're going to do is change it over to your specialization. And then what you can do is check the town details.
You might need to like go out of it and then come back in, check the town details, and then it will tell you the city that it is being sent to. And by the same token, you can then go to that city and look at the food that it is receiving. Now...
I mentioned earlier about the fact that you might want to have this food sent to other cities. Now that is possible. So as an example, this one here is four tiles away. So what we can do is we can take a merchant, which is a unit that will unlock for you if we go into the tech tree for the civics, it will unlock a code of laws. So you'll get one for free, but you can also train these.
You can also purchase them from your cities or from your town. So here it takes one turn, but it's also going to cost 260 gold. And with this merchant, I can go and run it to the other leaders, or I can do a road to a settlement.
And when I do this road, it's going to do a couple of things. But the most important thing is that it is now going to start sending that food. So now that the road has been connected and I click on Khan, you'll see that it has now connected to Bark. So this whole time prior to the road being connected, it wasn't sending the food down here.
And it means that, look, if this was a town. and this food wasn't being sent anywhere, because that's what will happen. If you do set the specialization to farming town and it doesn't have a connected city, and when I say connected, I mean like quite literally connected.
If it doesn't have that connection, it will not actually send that food into the city. Even if there's like a city on the network, right? Like if Bark is down here and Kopan is like along the line, it won't do it. So as an example, if we look at Kalakmul, which right now is not receiving any food from anybody except for Kalakmul.
And if we... try and connect that so if we go and get a road and we say okay what if we connect this road over to bark and maybe that will allow it to get the food from khan and the answer is no it won't you won't see any food there and that's because bark is going to be intercepting all of that food and it's going to be eating all of that food for itself so how can you get around this because as an example we really want calakmal to get uh to get big to get fat uh so the best option that you've got is to have other feeders other feeder towns that will feed into calakmal you The second option is water and coastal and settling coastal really solves a lot of these troubles So as an example right here, Tikal, we've got it currently set to go for a growing town. And one of the issues that we're going to have is that there's no direct connection to the city of Bark.
And because we've got Chichen Itza that's in the way, it's going to prevent that food from going through. Even though it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 tiles away from Bark, the road still won't classify as a connection. However, because it's on the water, it doesn't matter. It does not matter whatsoever. We can just go and do the town focus and you'll see that it will be happily sending to Bark.
Oh gosh, don't do me like this. Don't do me like this. Hold on, have I got everything set up correctly? It should be.
Oh gosh, this... I tell you what, I told you I didn't want to talk about- about roads. Give me a second here, folks.
Why is it not sending? Oh gosh, this is hilarious. Okay, uh, that- that's actually funny. It should be sending.
Uh, I think it might just be bugged right now. I'm gonna try and reset it. Let's see if that worked.
Bear with- I- I don't know why it's not sending. This should be sending. It's- it's got an absolutely clear route to send it, so it is bugged.
Uh, if we take a look here at Koba, uh, Koba is growing. Okay. All right.
This I'm starting to, I'm not even kidding. I'm starting to get, uh, a little bit, uh, flustered right now. So there's no connection, no direct connection to Koba. Uh, if we purchase a merchant, we should be able to next turn, we should be able to purchase, or we should be able to get a connection down to this. So you can see that we can get a connection, which means there's no road connection.
So technically, all right, let's test it right now in front of you guys. I'd already tested it, so I thought we were fine. We'll go fishing growth and we'll have a look and see where it's sending its food.
So it's sending it to bark. So this is what I'm saying, where it's just like, you've got to be so... Look, we're still early on in Civ 7. I suspect this kind of bug is going to be ironed out eventually. But just to clarify, look, there is no road connection to Cobra.
It is not connected at all. The same way that we weren't connected up here. Oh gosh, this is quite funny.
But you can see that it is definitely sending that in. And of course you can do the road connection. It's not going to make a difference.
It'll form the actual road here, but we're still sending over to Bark. So that's essentially, I told you I didn't want to talk about roads. This is why I didn't want to talk about roads.
It's just, it still needs a little bit of bug fixing. And by a little bit, I mean a lot. Anyway, let's move on to our seventh and final point, which is overbuilding.
Okay, we're here on turn number one of the exploration era. We've just made it through the age of antiquity We've chosen our new civilization and now we're faced with this question. What the hell is over building and what should I do about it? So when you load in you'll see that we still have the yields for our specialists But as soon as you choose your legacies these yields are gonna go away And the trouble is if I was to show you, you know, like oh if we were to talk about the bazaar Which is like a market replacement in the um in the age of exploration it would show you all the bonuses there uh whereas once we spend our points so we we actually did all of the legacy parts in the last age i'm not even going to spend any of them actually do it doing i'm just thinking right now uh for the purpose of overbuilding right now let's just grab uh let's grab the piety civic for free uh just just for the purpose of overbuilding okay So we've now lost our specialist. As you can see, there's no culture.
There's no science anymore on this tile. It used to be a crazy good yield and now it's gone back to nothing. So let's talk about overbuilding. Let's talk about how it works and about why it's actually a really fun mechanic. So for overbuilding, the most important thing is you don't overthink it.
It's actually pretty straightforward. Whenever you move on to the age, it's to the next age, it's going to limit the yields on your tiles previously. So as an example, in the past, the last era we had a blacksmith and an academy that were on this tile and they were getting absolutely crazy yields but it brings it back it dials it in and all of a sudden you're only limited to two two of each yield two production coming from the blacksmith and two science coming from the academy now what's interesting to note is that this is per yield so if you've got a building that provides multiple yields as an example a monument which provides a yield to your culture as well as to your influence then you'll see as an example right here it's still providing that culture influence or that uh that uh the culture and influence uh which means that these buildings are a little bit more important than the other ones so our first golden rule is avoid putting avoid over building on buildings that give you influence influences are hard to come by uh resource so the more of it that we've got the better uh there will be buildings that lose the access to their influence so for example in the last age we had the altars that were giving influence you will lose your panther Pantheon when you come into the next age.
So it means that your Pantheon is, or your altar is no longer useful. It doesn't serve any purpose. So you can build over the top of it. Now, there are some buildings that you can build over the top of and some buildings that you can't. not build over the top of any normal building so any warehouse building so granary saw pit brickyard uh you're fishing but a key you're not going to be able to uh overbuild on top or overbuild on top of you're not going to be able to overbuild with you're not going to be able to overbuild on the unique district either but you will be able to overbuild on pretty much everything now another thing to note is that the reason why i say don't overthink overbuilding is all the adjacencies are pretty much the same right like Like in the last era, our food and our gold buildings went on the same tile because they both benefit from the same adjacency bonuses.
So when it comes to this era and I want to put down a gold building, where am I going to put it? I'm just going to put it on the gold tile because that's it. And it's going to replace it. And I'm not going to have to think about it.
And you might be wondering, okay, but what if I've got a better yield? What if there's a better yield somewhere else? Is it worth? Well, it could be.
But there's another thing to consider. Remember that every building that you've got has. maintenance fees on it.
You pay a happiness fee for some, you pay a gold fee for others and you can check that in the building breakdown here. So if we just scroll down slowly we'll see that the bath as an example has a two gold and two happiness maintenance fee. This was the same in the antiquity age and it's the same right now.
So if anything this bath that was previously giving like a plus seven food bonus and it's now only giving a plus two food bonus, I want to get rid of it. I don't want this bath being here. This is this is a bad investment. This is a bad deal. I want this out of here.
I'm incentivized to get that bath out of here. Now, of course, it's still providing a bonus. So it means that maybe if I've got an empty tile somewhere and I determine that that bonus is worth keeping, that I keep it.
But overbuilding is something that you should be actively looking to do. And it's something that you should find quite simple once you understand the adjacencies. Because remember that throughout each of the ages, the adjacencies will be the same. Your monuments, your amphitheaters are always going to throughout, or I should say, rather, your happiness buildings, your culture buildings, will always have an adjacency bonus to mountains.
So you're always going to want to have them near those mountains, irrespective of the era. And your food, your gold buildings are always going to have that river bonus. Your production, your science buildings will always have a bonus towards your resources.
Now, resources is the next point that we want to talk about here for adjacencies, because this is quite an interesting one. So as you go through the ages, different resources become available, but you also lose. different resources.
So as an example, in the last age, if you go back and have a look, we had a tile here that was a wool tile, a whole bunch of sheep, and it's no longer here. And that's because in the exploration age, wool's not so important. We're all heading to the Mediterranean. Well, not the Mediterranean. We're all heading to the British Virgin Isles to go and do some exploration.
We don't need wool anymore. At least that's the way I think about it. Further to that, we don't need salt anymore. I had some salt down here.
I no longer have salt. It makes me a little bit salty. I guess it makes me less salty now.
So we're missing that as well. Further, though, while you might be missing things, and there's more things that we're missing. As an example, we're also missing another tile here. But you will gain things.
So what have we gained? Well, we've gained whales. That's something that we've gained.
We've also gained, over here, niter. And that is going to mean that our adjacency bonus from the last age, which was only a plus one, plus two together. now becomes a plus three.
So all of a sudden, this adjacency is looking a little bit sweeter, but it does mean you might have to think a little bit outside the box, especially for your production buildings, especially for your science buildings, and be thinking, okay, well, can I really put these in the same place? Do I want to overbuild on them? Further to that, we talked about how you might want to be keeping influence buildings around a little bit longer or buildings that provide multiple yields because they do cap out at...
two, but you can provide, like, if you have a building that provides every single yield, but it only provides two of it, it's not going to lose anything. But there are yields that are more important than other yields. So I would argue the most important yields...
production and science. I think that those two yields are probably the strongest yields. You could make a pretty good argument that food and culture are also pretty strong. And maybe you could make the argument, I mean, to be honest, they're all strong. But I would just be, I'd be more hesitant to replace a production building than I would be to replace a happiness building.
Let's put it that way. And because of that, there should be some priority as to how it goes. If you're thinking about, okay, which one should I get rid of?
Should it be the happiness building or should it be the... Production building, it should normally be the happiness building. It should be, but at the end of the day, it's more so about the yields that you're going to be generating and less so about what you're going to be replacing because at the end of the day... If we look at the yields that we're pulling in from this, like plus nine gold, that's absolutely ludicrous. So we want to be getting in there as quickly as we can.
Want to be making sure that we take advantage of that. Other than that, I have read up online quite a bit about overbuilding. I read a Reddit thread and it was a...
Incredibly helpful Reddit thread, so shout out to that. But there was a post in there about, from one person. It was heavily upvoted, and they did also say... that there are quests that are related to overbuilding that can happen. Now, I couldn't get this to work, but I thought I would just pass it along because it's something that it seems pretty cool, right?
So basically, apparently, there's a quest that can happen when you build a temple over the top of an altar. So here we've got a granary and an altar. And a granary is an ageless building. You can't overbuild it, but you can overbuild the altar. So it means that if we purchase this temple and put it down, then all of a sudden that temple has replaced the altar.
And you can see that we do have some quests. No, I... anyway, I played through about 20 turns ahead to see if this quest actually comes out, and I never got a quest for it. So I don't know, maybe he's telling a porky, maybe he's not, maybe he's telling the truth and I just couldn't get it to work, or maybe it's bugged.
Who knows? To be honest, I'm probably leaning a little bit more to that one after the whole road incident. But that's essentially it. You don't keep your specialists, so you're going to have to put them back in.
And just remember, like, have a look at this. We're at 28 turns to our next specialist. It's quite a while.
But to be fair, none of these towns are actually feeding in yet. Once they all start feeding in, then we're going to be trickling in these specialists. And these specialists, I mean, if we take a look here, I'm kind of tempted to do it right now.
Just bear with me a second and I'll show you. Let's feed in every single town into our capital. We can't do that one. So, ob... By the way, another little tip for you, something I love to do.
As you get closer to the end of the age, and you know how you've got that settlement limit that you can't really go over? How, you know, you're kind of stuck to like six or seven or eight or whatever that number might be. And you want to try and push the 12. So what you do is you just get a whole bunch of settlers out in places that they can settle. And then on the very last turn, as the game's about to roll over, you put all of the towns down, all of them down at the same time.
And that's how you get to the 12. That's a cheeky little tip. That's something I like to do. Alright, so I think we've connected all of these bad boys in. And let's have a look and see.
Okay, so we've got five turns to go. So let's just have a quick look at our specialists here. We are...
It's telling us that we can allocate. That's okay. We'll just keep rolling over until we can actually get the capital. And you can have a look at just how strong these specialists are.
I don't know whether... Are we able to unlock a food building here? We've got the wharf.
And here we've got the gristmill. But that's just... That's an ageless building.
So that's not going to give us the actual bonuses that we want. That's okay. Alright, so let's go ahead and put that guy in and that one in, and we've probably got a couple more to get through.
It's another one of my little complaints, is that you can't choose which city you want to grow. You have to go through the order. So you can see that this specialist is going to be providing a plus three bonus, and that is because we've got a higher adjacency from the bazaar that's gone in there. So if we take a look at the bazaar, the bazaar has got a plus one gold for each adjacent navigable river tile, coastal terrain, and wonder. Uh, so I guess it's over the back here as well.
So we're getting adjacency bonuses from pretty- Actually, we're getting six adjacency bonuses from all of this. Uh, so that's, uh, that's definitely fitting into that specialist bonus. So specialist could be very happy.
He's getting every single tile there. Uh, so we definitely want to stack on that. Other than that, though, that's overbuilding.
Hopefully you've enjoyed this video. Uh, I've tried to be as thorough as I possibly can. If you've got any feedback, make sure you leave it down below. If you think that I missed anything, uh, I probably have.
And I do apologize. We're still early in this Civ 7, uh, Journey and look as we go on further we'll understand more of it and and hopefully this has contributed to that knowledge But if you've got any questions chuck them down below if you've enjoyed the video Please leave a like and of course if you're looking forward to more Civ 7 content Make sure you hit that subscribe button because there is always time for one more turn