ok I just read cracker's opening moves article, which gave me a ton of new insight into openin the game. I have started a new game at regent, continents, 70% water, normal clim, 4 bil. age, roaming, and got a great start: two cows, coast nearby, on the eastern edge of the map about at the equator. I have just built my first settler. I have also attached a screenshot of my start. My quandary is this... should I build the second city directly on the river (north side, between the wheat tiles) to take immediate advantage of the wheat, or go northwest one square to have better access to shields and get the wheat on cultural expansion?

btw, my capital is very capable of producing both settlers and cheap mil units due to two cows and game

one last fyi, the are two incense just off-screen to the west, you can see the edges of my warrior's visibilty, he is right next to these incense

...and still no reply... anyway I have already placed the city as well as 4 others, but I would still like to see some feedback about what you would do. as for the placement, i did not place on the river, went nw on square and got the wheat on cultural exp. I figured that there would be more potential food in the end, even though I would not get a free aqueduct from the river... plus I could not turn down the shields from the extra plains

Well I can't leave you hanging on with no reply so let's see if my one gets the ball rolling :)

You look like you're going to need plenty of workers with that wide expanse of plains heading towards that incense so I would have placed it south of the river directly between the two wfp tiles and I would build nothing but workers from it. Shields could come from the hills and desert later on.

I thought about the first ring of cities would go when deciding upon this. You don't say whether you're playing C3C or vanilla/PtW so I did RCP distance 4. Of course if you were playing conquests the distance from the capital could vary. The attachment shows what I would do.

My second city would go between the 2 wheats on eather side of the river.
3rd close to wines.

ok here is an update... after building a couple more cities, i ended up in a minor war with russia over the iron between the two of us. I razed a city since i didn't like their placement and am planning to go for mil. victory, and built directly on the iron, and they attacked and took it as well as kagoshima, i ended up destroying the iron city trying to retake it, and now there is a settler with spearman (yellow arrow) going back to reclaim. russia built on my shore, so i built a city right next to it to get a flip, should happen pretty soon as i will pop rush the temple as soon as i can. i like tone's plan, i know i will get the hang of things eventually. as for the placement of the second city, i decided to place it where it is because of the long term potential of the 21 square footprint as opposed to the immediate benefit of wheat. more comments welcome!

sorry one more note... i am playing vanilla

My second city would go between the 2 wheats on eather side of the river.

If i had this opening my second city would be placed on the second wheat just south of the mountain to avoid overlaping.

Why would your site be better?

I recently restarted to play Civ3 and i have lost some of the basic "know how":sad:
But Im working on it! :goodjob:

Why are you building harbour in Edo when its a size 6 city?
And why a granary in Satsuma when its a size 6 city? Is it a settler factory?

Build road up north to the contested iron resource. Will let your troops reach the front faster as well.
Roads=a good war investment.

I would build the iron city one hex north(on hill) of the ore to be able to mine the ore later on. Or one hex southeast on hill.
Build city walls and turn it into a fortress city. Build units in all cities. Declare war on Russia and let them bleed themselves trying to capture your city on hill with city walls.

When it comes to city placement, there is one thing that I value extremely high - it´s almost like an obsession: fresh water access! I always try to build next to rivers or lakes to get free aquas. Building those costs a lot of shields, I´m willing to sacrifice a lot to avoid it.
And dbarandiaran, you might want to familiarize yourself with the ring-city placement (RCP) that Tone already mentioned. You can find everything you need to know about it in the war academy. This strategy (some would even consider exploitive) takes you a long way!

If i had this opening my second city would be placed on the second wheat just south of the mountain to avoid overlaping.

Why would your site be better?If you will permit me to reply to this as I also said that I would place the new town between the wheats....

Why is overlapping bad? Overlapping is absolutely no problem until you get hospitals as no city can work more than 12 of the 20 tiles in its city radius before then. Even then I don't find it a problem as I prefer to have cities that are happy and so having them at size 20+ is not so good. I have seen many people argue that they like to have powerhouse metros in Modern Times but I haven't seen it from players that I know play at the top level. Draw your own conclusions!

I like to have my first ring at around 4 tiles from the capital as it allows them all to grow to size 12 comfortably but it decreases corruption in my core cities (closer to the capital) and it uses more of the tiles in my territory. On Deity and Sid I will often place them just three tiles apart to enable units to shuffle between towns in one turn-useful for defensive purposes. I'm not sure if this was the key factor but when I started to build a more compact core, I quickly moved up through the difficulty levels. The trouble is that there are so many things that I learnt from this site that it is difficult to decide which ones were more important.

@ dbarandiaran: On reflection I would change my placements a little to get another city in but no matter now. If you are playing vanilla then I suggest that you look up Ring City Placement (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/ring_city.php) as it seriously increases productivity and commerce. There are utilities out there that help you determine where to place cities in rings. Let me know if you can find them but Dianthus' CRPsuite is the one I use for this purpose.

Why is overlapping bad?


I never said it was bad!

If you build a town over a wheat do you get it bonus in food?

I never said it was bad!sorry, I obviously infered something that was unintended. However I believe that the closer site is better due to lower corruption, more towns using more tiles and...
If you build a town over a wheat do you get it bonus in food?no, and that's a big bonus to lose!

no, and that's a big bonus to lose!

Thanks!
I guess that goes for all rescources and luxaries too?

Ooops double post!

I guess that goes for all rescources and luxaries too?If you just mean food then that is correct. IIRC commerce is never lost, so settling on silks for example is no problem. Shields are more complicated but you generally get the bonus, although you cannot improve the terrain. For example, when dbarandiaran settles on that iron, the city centre will produce 2 shields (3 when he gets out of despotism). However he obviously cannot mine or rail the tile and so will not get the full shield bonus for the terrain, but at least he does get an extra food from it. Other examples of getting two shields in the city centre during despotism are furs on plains and cows on plains.

See this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=45687) thread by DaveMcW for full details.

Why are you building harbour in Edo when its a size 6 city?
And why a granary in Satsuma when its a size 6 city? Is it a settler factory?

Build road up north to the contested iron resource. Will let your troops reach the front faster as well.
Roads=a good war investment.

I would build the iron city one hex north(on hill) of the ore to be able to mine the ore later on. Or one hex southeast on hill.
Build city walls and turn it into a fortress city. Build units in all cities. Declare war on Russia and let them bleed themselves trying to capture your city on hill with city walls.


both the improvements in question were started before the cities reached max allowable size. I also am building directly on the iron to make it more difficult for AI to deny me the resource.

btw thanks everyone for the feeback! it seems most ppl post here in the morning... I was starting to think that my post was not worthy of your interest:p like I said I am still getting the hang of all the ideas i have read about, i already read about RCP, but have also read like 10 other articles in the last week or so, it is almost too much to incorporate at once, but all your comments are most welcome. before you know it I will be thinking about diety!

I would do It like this!
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=103913&stc=1&d=1132078708

Do you have a safe file of 4000 BC ? (maybe in your autosafe folder) I'd like to play it a bit. (what is your patch version btw?)

I would do It like this!

Does this work? :confused:
I never placed my cities that close.

If you have the savefile I would like to try it too...

Personally I don't think that it's necessary at Regent level although I have done something similar at Deity when early territory can be hard to come by. That's an individual choice though and close placement does give some advantages. Several cities close to your capital can be improved quickly, towns can share tiles (eg if you don't need to use a bg to complete a build, give it to a neighbouring town for that turn) and they have minimal corruption as the distance from the capital is low so it can be very powerful iin the early game. Furthermore you can jump your palace to a different town later in the game by abandoning the capital after building the FP in one of those core sites. They then have more space to expand for the middle game and you get your second core without using a GL.

However in that picture they are at different distances from the capital and thus would not gain the advantages of RCP, so I wouldn't recommend that placement for vanilla/PtW games.

How exactly does "palace jumping" work? And what is your view regarding moving the capital in general?

/ D

Disband your capital; your palace will automagically be moved to your biggest (by population) city. It's an exploit, haven't used it myself. I don't move my capital, I'd rather start a new game if the starting location is horrible.

Disband your capital; your palace will automagically be moved to your biggest (by population) city.Well to be pedantic there's a bit more to which site becomes the new capital than just the largest population centre that is left. Foreign nationals are worth less than native citizens, the number of other population centres close by and the number of military units in the garrison all play their part. Dave McW's article (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/palace_jump.php) gives the full details if you're interested. Utilities such as ainwood's CivAssist II (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=118540) show you which town would hold the new palace were you to disband your existing capital (or lose it to an enemy attack for that matter).

I agree that moving the capital by jumping it seems like an exploit but it is allowed in GOTM and SGOTM and indeed I have used it a couple of times in SGOTM. My personal opinion is that I'm not totally happy with the concept but I prefer it to RoP abuses to name but one other allowed 'exploit'! However there are historical examples of where nations have moved (or attempted to move) their capital to another city and so I see nothing wrong in using a Great Leader to move the capital to another location.

Thanks for the update Tone.

:)

My reason for doing that is becouse it creates 3 very powerfull settler an worker generators in the least amount of time, I may even dismantle them later.
But there is so much food there, close to the capital, it seems like a good idea to me to capitalise on that. The 4th city is placed there becouse it is the best place for a coastal town with good production that can grow to size 12 without an aquaductm, wich is a good thing for building boads, or maybe even sea side wonders.

MAS

How about these alterations to give 5 cities on RCP3? Would that still give what you were after but with better corruption figures?

If you disband your capital, wont the disadvantages of loosing all those city improvements and all that production outweight the advantage of a free palace? And all the tiles that have been worked around the capital will be useless for a while as well. Or do you disband the capital right after the REX-phase when you havent got that many city improvements anyway?

Isnt it better to just build a new palace with conventional means at the site where you want it? Unless you want the palace at a place with horrible corruption of course....

@Drendor; Yes you do lose the improvements so, as you rightly said, you don't build (m)any in the first place. For example, you might only build a granary in your capital and just use it to pump out settlers. This is not that unusual in my games anyway as normally each town has a primary purpose and only gets the building it needs to do that job. Once the expansion phase is over, then I start thinking about markets, aqueducts, etc.

If you have your first ring as MAS has posted, you can then work those tiles vacated by the ex-capital so the tile improvements are not wasted. Alternatively you ensure that you leave a settler around when you're running the capital down and use it to replace the capital city with a new one in its ruins during that turn.

Why do it in the first place? Well it's normally in order to get two productive cores going as cheaply as possible. Ideally you want the FP and your actual palace to be far apart so as to create two cores that don't overlap (in vanilla/PtW at least). That way you get the most out of the power of your FP. The trouble is that the FP costs 200 shields and if you build it far away from your palace, it will take 200 turns. However if you build it in your core, close to your capital, you can build it much more quickly. Whilst building this, you set up a site for your new palace with cities in rings around it and wait for the FP to be completed. When you have the FP, you simply make sure that you have sufficient military units in your target city for the palace to jump to the correct place and then disband your capital. You now have two productive cores, income and productivity rocket and you can take over the world.:)

Of course you could use a GL to rush the project and save you disbanding the capital. However many people would either use it to rush a great wonder or build an army and aim to get Heroic Epic. It is a powerful technique which is exactly why many consider it an exploit. Others say that it takes a fair amount of preparation and does have a cost and so should be allowed.

Speaking of Palace Jumps and Exploits, what undoubtably is an exploit is to move your palace so that it is far away from any other city. The reason? It will lead to a huge number of cities having a rank corruption of 1 so that even cities a fair distance from the FP are still productive as long as they are closer to the FP than the nearest town's distance from the palace. (This one is banned from GOTM BTW.) Full details are here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=62851), posted by the masterful Qitai, although you probably need to have read alexman's guide to corruption and waste as well to fully understand the reasons behind why it works. Try it out sometime and prepare to be amazed-just don't try it out in a competition game.;)

wow all of the sudden my thread is quite popular! btw to those that asked, I start new games all the time and regularly have 2-5 going at once, so my 4000BC file is gone... sorry guys!

I read Daves article. It was very intresting. Also thanks to Tone for your informative answer.

I will definately try the new palace jump technique next time i play...
Have only managed to win on Regent this far. Am aiming for emperor.
Im still a noob when it comes to city placements and city improvements (i place my cities too far away from eachother and build too many improvements)

I read about the ring placement, very intresting as well. I will try to implement it at a noob level. Generally i focus alot on resources,freshwater,lux when i place cities. I will think more of rings and forbidden palace from now on.