User Guide

Food Storage
If you maximize food production for your new city, you should produce a
surplus of food. Look at the row of food symbols in the city resources window of
the city display. A food surplus is noted by a break in the row of food symbols.
Food to the left of the break is required to maintain the city’s population. Food
to the right of the break is a surplus. Each game turn, surplus food harvests are
placed in the food storage box of the city display, where they accumulate. When
the food storage box fills up, the city’s population grows by one point and the
food storage box empties. Next turn the box begins to fill again. In this way,
surplus food is converted into more people.
When a city’s population grows, several things happen. The population roster
on the city display increases by one figure, representing the new people. On the
world map, the number on the city square increases by one. On the city map,
people are put to work on an additional square, increasing the city’s harvest.
Population growth may mean more food and/or resources and/or trade,
depending on where the new people are put to work. Population growth
probably doesn’t mean a larger food surplus because the new people are likely to
produce just enough food to feed themselves.
The relationship between the accumulation of food surpluses and the growth
of city population is one of the key concepts in understanding how to play
Civilization. City growth is important because larger cities are usually more
productive, efficient, and resilient.
City Production
Each city may produce one unit or improvement at a time. Units are the
playing pieces of Civilization that move about the map, explore, and engage in
combat. Improvements are buildings and Wonders of the World that can be built
inside your cities to enhance their production, efficiency, and growth. The item
currently being produced by your city is named or marked in the production box
of the city display.
Look at the number of resource symbols (shields) in the second row of the city
display’s city resources window. These shields represent the industrial resources
harvested by your city that can be turned into new units or city improvements.
Look on the city map for the square outside the city that contains the symbols
for food(wheat stalks), resources (shields), and trade (double arrows). These
symbols may not all be present, but food should be at the minimum. This is the
square where the city’s people are working. Click on this city map square with the
LMB and the harvest symbols disappear. The people have been taken away from
the square and have temporarily suspended their harvesting. Look at the
population roster and see where the single figure has been replaced by an
Entertainer. This is a type of Specialist that you can ignore for now. All specialists
are discussed in Chapter 2.
Point to any other available city map square and click on it with the LMB. The
people are put back to work there and the symbols representing the harvest
reappear. Look at the city resource window in the city display to see what the new
harvest is for the city. Try moving your people around from square to square and
watch how the harvest changes as they are put to work on the various types of
terrain.
At first, the harvest from the various terrain squares is somewhat limited.
Harvests can be improved later in many cases by improvements made to map
squares by Settlers units, which also serve as your construction engineers. Settlers
improvements can upgrade agriculture (may increase food), industry (may
increase resources), and transportation (roads and railroads speed movement and
may increase trade, but railroads are not available until the proper technology has
been acquired). Note that your city square is already improved with roads and
irrigation (an agricultural improvement).
Settlers may also convert certain types of squares into other more productive or
desirable square types. For example, a Swamp square which has a small food
harvest may be converted into Grasslands which is a great food producing terrain.
For more information about these improvements, see Settlers.
The harvest from individual squares may also be improved by other types of
government for your civilization, but changing governments is not practical for a
new civilization. The types of governments and their effects are discussed in
Chapter 3.
Choose which map square you wish to leave the city’s people working on. We
recommend that they be placed to maximize production of food, represented by
the wheat stalk symbols.
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CIVILIZATION
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CIVILIZATION
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