Yellow and Green Actions

Green Actions are instructions given to your city. Examples include:

• change the city borders (claim or unclaim land)
• build something new
• found a new city with its citizens

Yellow Actions are taken by your pawn. Examples include:

• move your pawn
• help a city build faster
• increase a city's population, happiness, or culture

As all action cost gems (action points) and you have a limited number of gems in a game, always look to finding more efficient ways of using your actions. You can find some essential considerations on this page to get you started.

Favour Green Actions

When you start learning, you will tend to use more yellow actions than green actions. As you refine your skills, green actions will start to dominate. Why?

• Yellow actions, such as raising culture or happiness, can help you prosper with one only city and without thinking ahead
• Green actions, such as designing cities, can be used to make citizens and traders do the work of raising culture and happiness, allowing you to have many cities and a much higher culture

Let's look at some yellow actions and how too many short-term solutions can lead to poorer results.

Raising Culture

Raising your culture by 0.5 takes a whole yellow gem. A city will normally increase its own culture by 0.25 every turn (faster with strong trading). To compare:

• With about 50 yellow gems, you could develop four good cities, gaining more than 2 culture a turn, gaining you over 100 culture in those 50 turns.
• If you spent those 50 turns developing one city and raising its culture, you would gain 0.75 culture a turn, gaining you about 40 culture in those same turns.

Raising Happiness

Similar to raising culture, citizens and traders will naturally raise the happiness of a city of if their needs are met and people are well-employed. Raising happiness can help you out of a tight situation — but then seek to learn new strategies to avoid those situations in future games.

Helping a construction project

You may have noticed that you can use your gems to speed a city's construction projects. This is rarely a good idea because:

• you can't use those gems for other, more long-term, strategies ("opportunity cost")
• the construction project will employ less people — and employment is almost always a good thing. High employment raises the cost of work, making it easy for citizens to buy all they need. High employment also attracts more immigrants, thus helping your city grow the capacity to take on even more land and projects in the future. Delegate! Let citizens do the work that they like to do.

Moving

Some yellow actions, such as moving, are essential for gathering information. What's the right ratio to moving and doing?

• Too much action will deprive you of the information about the rest of the world and you may miss important opportunities or be unprepared for larger events.
• Too much moving will deprive you of the gems needed for designing your cities.

Whereas ideally you would eliminate most other yellow actions from your game as you get better and better at Ludopolis, moving is one action that you will always do a lot of.