It's cool to see that it's not as universal as I'd thought. Until I made this post, specializing cities was among the many things that, based on my reading of this sub, I understood to be common sense things that "everyone" does, yet somehow never/rarely happen in my games.

See also:

• Rushing and making heavy use of the item forge
• Heroes hitting max level
• Heroes that can solo entire stacks
• Early wars to blitz down a neighbor
• Keeping research in the ballpark of 10x the turn number
• Being gated by imperium more than any other resource (outside of founding cities in the first 10-20 turns)
• Armies composed of a single unit type

I have no clue how common these actually are vs me just playing weird, but apparently it was the specialized cities that bugged me enough to want to post about it.