Specialists are a mechanic in Civilization 7 that are unlocked after you start to build up your capital and other settlements. Specialists are only available in cities and they provide an extra layer of depth to every one of your ti🌞les.
However, Specialists can be a little tricky to implement in Civilization 7, so allow me to explain how they work and🀅 when you should use them.
How to unlock Specialists in Civ 7
Specialists are unlocked in the Antiquity Age after you’ve reached anywhere from 50-100 turns. For me, it was at 30% of the progress bar in the Antiquity Age, but your mileage may vary depending on the game speed you’re playing at and the size of your map.
You’ll know you’ve unlocked the ability to place Specialists after a new pop-up tutorial appears that explains the mechanic. From there, you can close the tutorial or read more about how Specialists work in the encyclopedia.
While you might unlock Specialists at a given time, you don’t get to use them right away in Civ 7. Instead, you have to wait for one of your cities to grow by a certain number of citizens. At that point, you’re able to take a turn and place a Specialist in one of your tiles. However, this doesn’t happen too often, so you want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the Specialist turns when they happen.
You can start to implement Specialists as your city reaches its population capacit♐y. So, instead of adding new tiles to your city, you add Specialists to the individual tiles.
How Specialists work in Civ 7
It’s important to note that Specialists are not the same thing as a town’s Specialization. A Specialization is only for towns and allows them to focus on one specific yield to increase the amount of gold they receive. Specialists are only available in cities and give you a chance to specialize each individual tile in a given city.
Putting a Specialist in a tile will improve specific yields, such as Science, Culture, Production, Gold, etc., but it will negatively affect your city’s Happiness and Food needs. When you get the chance to place a Specialist in a tile, you’ll see most or all of your resource icons appear in a tile along with a +/- number next to each of them. If a resource icon has a + next to it, then the Specialist will increase that yield by the number it says. However, if a resource icon has a – next to it, that resource will be decreased.
Most of the time, you’ll see a +1/2 next to Science, Culture, and Gold along with a -1/2 next to Happiness and Food. Sometimes, you’ll see a repeat of resource icons on a tile, meaning that the resource’s yield is increased and decreased at the same time. Its net yield will be the sum of its two values on the tiles (i.e. +0.5 and -2 equals a net yield of -1.5).
Tiles that don’t have a resource icon associated with them can have a Specialist added, but any tile with a resource icon will stay as is. When you add a Specialist to a tile, it’s a permanent decision, so you want to make your choices carefully. As you progress in Civ 7, you’ll be able to add multiple Specialists to every tile, further specializing their yield outputs and your city’s yield output as a whole.
Overall, you don’t want to add Specialists all over the place in every city you have in Civ 7. Tiles that increase more resource yields than ones that decrease are generally what you want to target, as those have more value in the long run. Of course, if your city is low on Science and Culture, then you might want to target tiles that boost those resources when adding a Specialist.
In the grand scheme of things, you can always offset whatever you receive/don’t receive from a Specialist tile. Specialists are simply a way for you to make a little extra gold or add some more Science or Culture to a few of your tiles. If you go overboard with them, though, you’ll find your cities will be low on Happiness, as Specialists always reduce that resource no matter what. So, in order to keep your cities as happy as possible, try to find a happy medium with increasing necessary resources and lowering Happiness.
The best way to go about that is by specializing a few tiles and leaving the rest of your tiles unspecialized. Not every tile in a city needs to have a Specialist, so pick a few tiles that increase the maximum amount of resources and keep adding Specialists to those as much as possible in Civ 7.
Published: Feb 28, 2025 07:55 am