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How do I upgrade a city with a city improvement?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e · Catan: Cities & Knightsbg-926-en-1e

To upgrade a city with a city improvement, follow these steps: 1. Ensure you have at least one city on the board [1]. 2. Discard the commodities shown by the next space on the track [1]. 3. Move your cube up the track to that space [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook · p.8 · BUILD · City Walls · City Improvements

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 293 ms · ask 9282 ms · total 9586 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9586 ms
retrieval refs (raw)
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You cannot build a city directly. You can only upgrade an existing settlement to a city. You pay the required resources, return the settlement to your supply, and replace the settlement with a city on the same intersection Y . Each city is worth 2 victory points. You receive double resource producti", "headingPath": "Cities", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "You may only establish a city by upgrading one of your settlements. When you upgrade a settlement to a city, put the settlement (house) piece back in your supply and replace it with a city piece (church). Cities produce twice as many resources as settlements. You acquire 2 resource cards for an adja", "headingPath": "c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031258, "snippet": "Now you can build. Through building, you can increase your victory points Y , expand your road network, improve your resource production, and/or buy useful development cards. To build, you must pay specific combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Card Y ). Take the appropriate number ", "headingPath": "3. Build Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030092, "snippet": "ALCHEMY Play this card at the start of the Roll Dice phase. Set the production dice to the result CRANE ENGINEERING Build 1 city improvement for 1 commodity less INVENTION Build 1 city wall at no cost. Swap 2 number discs of your choice (except 2, 6, 8, or 12). IRRIGATION Take 2 grain cards for each", "headingPath": "PROGRESS CARDS: SCIENCE · ALCHEMY (2x) · CRANE (2x) · IRRIGATION (2x) · MEDICINE (2x)", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.028718, "snippet": "This 'Catan Almanac' contains detailed, alphabetical entries and examples for Catan . These are not the 'Game Rules.' You do not have to read this material prior to your first game. Instead, use the Game Rules. Then read this to enjoy the complete experience. This almanac includes advanced rules and", "headingPath": "almanac", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.028309, "snippet": "You may build on your turn after you have rolled for resource production and finished trading. To build, you must turn in the specified combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Cards Y ). Return the resource cards to the supply stacks. You can build as many items and buy as many cards ", "headingPath": "Build (BuildinG)", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.027271, "snippet": "The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example", "headingPath": "roads", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
citations (raw)
[{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "BUILD · City Walls · City Improvements", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 boosted
layering — route
not layered — one pooled read: the books were read together and that read answered, so re-reading them one at a time would spend the same GPU to re-derive an answer already given
answered-before recall
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until
Nov 3, 2026 21:08

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Cities p.6 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain p.5 0.032002 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) 3. Build Y p.4 0.031258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) settlements p.12 0.030118 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) PROGRESS CARDS: SCIENCE · ALCHEMY (2x) · CRANE (2x) · IRRIGATION (2x) · MEDICINE (2x) p.13 0.030092 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) almanac p.6 0.028718 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Build (BuildinG) p.6 0.028309 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) roads p.11 0.027271 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) BUILD · City Walls · City Improvements p.8 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 293 ms · first delta 9056 ms · total 9586 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 0 ms · retrieval 293 ms · ask 9282 ms · gateway work 9586 ms · total 9586 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2741
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
63
tok/sec
136.4 tok/sec — 63 output tokens in 0.462 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 27s ago)
stream path
streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog
first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture
both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.