17-12-2001 21:53									#1
	Beating the 12 population barrier (The binary city technique) Got spare money?

This is a minor tactic I've employed to make the trip from Aqueducts to Hospitals a little less painful. Used to some degree I've found it to be quite successful.

Basically, choose a few cities out of your empire (usually the hard-core production cities that have mines all over the place) and build a settler. Use the settler to make a city 2 squares away in the absolute worst terrain you have to offer (all cities produce 2f 1s regardless of the founding site). Provide that little guy a single mined grassland (or an irrigated plains) and set him to build settlers. He will produce one settler every twenty turns, as well as growing from size 1 to size 3 every twenty turns, making for the perfect match. Whenever the settler is ready, move it to the "sister city" and fortify it.

The small city should not interfere with the main city's production in any way, since a size 12 city can't use all the tiles it encompasses. It's a transient settlement (you'll ditch it later) so there is no reason to invest in anything other than producing the settlers.

When you are starting research in sanitation, starve the small city so that the next settler causes the city to disband (it's done now.) By the time you finally research hospitals and build on in the main city, you should have 6+ settlers standing around which can then instantly integrate into it, vaulting the population from 12 to 24+ in a single turn. I've found 26 (7 settlers) to be the ideal spot, since the 6 overflow population can be made into entertainers causing 'we love the ____ day' to be celebrated from that point straight until endgame.

Some notes:
- This tactic obviously isn't corruption friendly, (it increases your 'number of ideal cities' value) so only choose a scant few of your settlements to use it. (The production heavy cities tend to be best, since they also tend to grow slowly.)

- One could probably argue to build workers instead of settlers since they can do something else, but I've always had far to many workers anyhow. The settlers come at the same rate since the speed is really limited by the city's growth and not production, and they only cost 1g/ 2 population instead of 1g/ one population to be eventually crammed into the founding site.

- It's always nice to have a dozen settlers running around, since city reversion during wartime domination is so absurd. Raze enemy settlements and use this crew to make instant population 6 cities during conquest.

- A size 3 city should never enter disorder regardless of the level you're playing since by the time you start this technique you will have at least 2 luxury's flowing through your empire to keep those 2 population points happy.

Chris Woods

	18-12-2001 04:06									#2
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yeah I do this; the strat works well in that it is usually better to avoid building workers from established cities seeing as they take longer for the pop to bounce back. I use workers though, because there are so useful at most points in the game, and are only 10 shields. I don't think there is much point pop-booming past 20, seeing as the return on specialists is _ummm_ slightly lacking. It is even worthwhile packing in cities in this fashion on the outer reaches where one shield per turn is the norm. One worker per 10 turns is always useful, so this is an alternative to packing in loads of cities and exploiting the power of pop rushing in despotism to rush units from cities that otherwise can be quite useless.

	18-12-2001 07:14									#3
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Yep this does work well, i have used a similar tactic when needed.

However normally i find that just as im about to get sanatitation i have just finished railroading my empire with many spare workers, i sometimes have anything up to 100 workers keeping only 20 for automated pollution cleaners.
So this leaves 80 ready to instantly join.. or 10 citys from size 12->20 in the same turn.

I agree greater than size 20-24 is too large and a pain from a pollution point of view, i normally get a city to a size where it can maintain wltkd and then stop its growth by mining everything possible.

zedar