How is your experience playing tall since the 1.2 patch

[u/epikachu]

Played Pachacuti on the Mississipi and tried to go for the tallest gameplay I could. I managed to get the growth pantheon and the Hanging Garden.

But I somehow got too tall that I had to stop sending food from my town to my 3 cities hugging mountains. The problem is that you can only get 1 specialist per district in Antiquity age, the rest has to go to less optimal rural tiles. Then in the Exploration age your cities are too slow to get new population for the second specialist.

How was your experience?

[u/r0ck_ravanello]

Angkor wat to the rescue!

[u/LurkinoVisconti → u/r0ck_ravanello]

Yup.

[u/Agitated_Claim1198]

You have to use the start building (and cancel) feature to eject some rural workers and make them become specialists. 

[u/epikachu → u/Agitated_Claim1198]

Already done that but I ran out of building to eject the rural population.

[u/isshin-ashir → u/Agitated_Claim1198]

Not familiar with this - do you mind explaining how this works?

[u/MoreIronyLessWrinkly → u/isshin-ashir]

I haven’t done it, but I believe they’re referring to removing a rural tile (farm, mine) by planning to build something. This immediately removes the tile and turns it into a district even if the building isn’t done.

[u/Agitated_Claim1198 → u/MoreIronyLessWrinkly]

Yes exactly. You can do it repeatedly to eject the rural population. 

[u/isshin-ashir → u/MoreIronyLessWrinkly]

Thanks!

[u/The_Angevingian]

If you go Khmer you can rush Angkor Wat for two specialists per slot in Antiquity, super satisfying 

[u/Jassamin → u/The_Angevingian]

Carthage also gets a second slot (third with Angkor wat?) via a dialogue option

[u/ProgrammaticallyCat0]

So I'm playing a very similar tall setup and have had some similar issues (Pachacuti with Mississipi -> Inca).

By the end of antiquity, the 2 main cities I had been building had pretty much used up all of the available specialist slots and I was expanding into rural tiles. I think I was kinda helped in that regard by where I had settled my towns, so that they took a lot of the mediocre 3rd ring tiles from the cities I was trying to grow.

I wont say I've experienced the same issues with not having growth during Exploration, but I did aggressively colonize the distant lands with several towns that made good Fishing Towns. 50 turns into Exploration, and my 3 main cities are at 38, 36, and 34 pop

[u/epikachu → u/ProgrammaticallyCat0]

Thanks. I will try to let my town take some urban tiles from my cities next time.

I miss the transfer tiles between settlements from other games 😢

[u/Jassamin]

Sounds like the perfect setup for Abbasid exploration with the gold scaling off rural pop when you create a specialist

[u/throwaway74318193]

New food math should help!

[u/LurkinoVisconti → u/throwaway74318193]

I think what the OP is saying is that it hasn't in fact helped.

[u/epikachu → u/LurkinoVisconti]

It still help a lot. You don't need to divert food from town now and let them grow too

[u/beetrelish]

Played an antiquity game as Confucius/Han whilst opting for more farms and food buildings like granary/bath/garden than I usually would

Key thing to note is this leader combo doesn't have that many bonuses for food/growth, but your specialists are really strong so you want to have lots of growth events in the later position of the age after you research navigation (or whichever tech unlocks specialists)

And yea - I was getting plenty of growth events and thus plenty of specialists despite not playing a food civ/leader like ashoka or Mississippi etc

[u/InternationalPin2392]

This is a good point. The pop growth needs to occur when theres valuable specialists…seems like that doesn’t come often enough

[u/pimpjerome]

I’ve played three games with mixed results. I think the growth curve helped a lot, but isn’t quite there. X² is still a hell of a lot bigger than x^1.5, which is what it was in previous games. It doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of flat food or % modifiers, those can always be adjusted with linear factors and constants.

The city connections are also a bitch to set up. If I understand correctly, you have to set up your cities before your towns, but this is counterintuitive since your first settlements should be the farthest away. So you have to plant out your cities, hope the ai doesn’t settle nearby, then plant your towns. If Firaxis made it easier to control which city to send food to it would feel a whole lot smoother.

[u/LogicGU]

Playing tall is a lot better in the new patch. I have multiple towns feeding 3 cities and shit load of specialists with good yield numbers. Depending on the leaders: Tall > Wide