Migrants might seem like a bit of a tertiary unit inCivilization 7- serving no military purpose and unable to establish trade routes - but they are actually very useful, and there are certain strategies you can employ that allow you to create sort of “Migrant Generator” cities that serve population to your other cites and towns.
In simple terms, Migrants are population that you’re able to movemanuallybetween settlements. They allow you to settle on any rural tile in a city or town. However, with a bit of trickery, you can use this to essentially turn a Migrant into a district or quarter. We’ll cover all of this below.
Migrants, Explained
You typically won’t generate your first organicMigrantsuntil at least the end of the Antiquity Age, during the plague crisis. Theplague crisiscan cause Migrants to spawn in infected cities. Later on, you’ll begin to find more Migrants appearing in your empire - these are usually generated by population overflow. We’ll get into that in a moment.
How To Generate Migrants
However, there are a few other ways to get Migrants - including playing asHarriet Tubman, who generates them with her MementoLanternwhich generates Migrants whenever you successfully pull off a diplomatic espionage action.
There is also the chance ofnarrative eventsanddiscoveriesthat will give you the choice of a Migrant or another bonus, often a warrior.
Lastly, you could build the Statue of Libertyduring the Modern Age. This will instantly spawn a group ofMigrantsthat can be moved around at will.
Migrants from the Statue Of Liberty can be used to generatefreepopulation growth in a city, particularly useful if you’re using forward settlements to advance your military conquests in Distant Lands or at home.
What Should You Do With Migrants?
Migrants on their own are not massively impactful units, but you can use them to send population from larger settlements (that might be growing quickly anyway), to smaller settlements that are growing slowly. Migrants can only be placed on Rural tiles.
Migrant Strategy
While all of this seems pretty random so far - with little meaningful addition to your empire in terms of strategy or even choice - there are a few ways you may game the systems and mechanics of Civilization 7 toturn your Migrants into very useful units.
This strategy relies onoverflow population, which is a mechanic in Civilization 7 which generates Migrants when there is no available tile or specialist slot for new population to fill in a town or city.
You can read more about towns in our complete town guide.
The aim of this strategy is to cause your one single town to be extremely limited in tile usage. You can do this byplacing multiple towns around a central town.
Use the borders of those surrounding towns to restrict the central town’s tiles. Once you’ve done so,any new population that spawnsin the central town will instantly be turned into a Migrant - which can then bemoved to the capital for free growth.
Wonder Cycling
To make use of Migrants - and to actually be able to place them as specialists, as they are by default only able to establish themselves on Rural population - you will need to cycle your wonders or buildings.
This is a technique where you place down a Migrant on a Rural tile, then instantly build a wonder or district over the top of that tile. This will expel the Migrant from the tile, which will then allow you to place it as aSpecialist.
This technique can be used at any stage of the game, not just with Migrants. you may quickly expand town borders by placing down a population, building a district over the top of it, and then canceling the district. You can jump one or two tiles this way using a single population.
