I have noticed that the AI likes to build cities overlapping each other. To the point when I wage war I end up razing a lot of cities just so I can move them over a few spaces.

Last night I steamrolled Caesar and found that Rome was in an excellent location, but he had built a crappy little city so close to Rome it choked off at least 3 tiles with Rome and at least a tile with another city to the south which ALSO choked off 2 tiles from Rome. If he hadn't, Rome could have ended up being an amazing city.

I almost never overlap tiles, sometimes leaving a few spaces inbetween cities so I can get the maximum number of resources in my city's FC. Is there something I am missing? Does the AI get other bonuses so that cramming cities together like that is not really a problem for them?

The thing about overlapping is that for the early cities, most of their turns will be spent at a population far lower than 20. Overlapping allows you to share resources, for example, Washington grows to its cap and works some mines instead of the irrigated rice. This is when New York can grab that rice and go on quick growing phase. Combine this with whipping.

I don't know how well the city governor handles shared tiles, though. Never paid much attention.

Then there's the lower maintenance fee if your cities are closer to capital.

A lot of players emphasis that it isn't how many good tiles you get in the city fat cross that matters. What matters is how many good tiles you can work to achieve your goal. So for an early production city that 's never ever going to get enough food to work all those plains hills, you might as well overlap it with your capital to reduce maintenance but still be able to work the same number of hills you could have, for the same maximum production at a lower maintenance.

The thing about overlapping is that for the early cities, most of their turns will be spent at a population far lower than 20. Overlapping allows you to share resources, for example, Washington grows to its cap and works some mines instead of the irrigated rice. This is when New York can grab that rice and go on quick growing phase. Combine this with whipping.

I don't know how well the city governor handles shared tiles, though. Never paid much attention.

Then there's the lower maintenance fee if your cities are closer to capital.

A lot of players emphasis that it isn't how many good tiles you get in the city fat cross that matters. What matters is how many good tiles you can work to achieve your goal. So for an early production city that 's never ever going to get enough food to work all those plains hills, you might as well overlap it with your capital to reduce maintenance but still be able to work the same number of hills you could have, for the same maximum production at a lower maintenance.

Well said. I had one game where my 2nd city had rice, gold, and fish. That's all I needed, and it spent the next few thousand years building mostly settlers and workers, with a lighthouse and forge thrown in, leaving my other cities free to do their own things.

Overlapping became a much better tactic when I learned that either city could work it...

If it's greyed out in the City Management window, ie being worked by another city in your empire, double-click it to make it available to that city. If you want to make it available to the other city again, right-click it. So friggin' useful...

Cramming cities together is only a problem if your going to grow the city to maximum size and squeeze out every last bit of growth and production from the squares, and it also depends on WHICH tiles overlap. Overlapping Iron or fresh watered food resources is a lot different from overlapping a few tiles of plains, desert, mountains, or tundra.

On the plus side overlapping cities are closer together minimizing "Distance from capital costs" as your empire expands allowing you to expand to more city locations earlier. That has some advantages for early production of military units, quick overall population growth, etc . . . it also means that troops can move to reinforce locations more quickly.

The opposing strategy is to build cities only on the best locations with a good amount of distance between them (3-4 tiles outside your fat cross'). This strategy gives you a smaller number of high quality cities which can grow and produce quickly due to resources. You pay less costs for "number of cities" and wind up with a smaller number of amazing cities later in the game. This strategy also lets you do nifty things like blocking an AI into one corner of your continent early on.

The drawback to this strategy is that AI players can settle "between your cities and need to be destroyed or they will steal your squares and cause you to have a lower number of less productive cities, each city also has to defend itself so your going to want more troops in each city. Plus you'll want to run culture to close your borders as soon as possible.

In between is the strategy I usually favor, where I avoid overlap, but keep my fat crosses touching. Since BTS I'll sometimes leave one square between the cities and place a fort there to station troops for quick reinforcement to whichever city is under attack. This has the advantage of still giving a decent number of early cities, fairly close together, and also allowing them to grow.

The disadvantage though is that some of those city locations are less viable than I'd like and my expansion may not reach some optimal city spots ahead of the AI. Those optimal city spots you do get are probably settled later than they would be if you were spreading your cities out more, so they don't benefit from a "head start" effect.

Each strategy has it's benefits and the AI unfortunately favors a strategy that is not optimal for many human players. Ideally I'd like to have "distance between cities" and "Acceptable overlap" programmed into the personalities of the different oponents so the different leaders would settle the continent in different patterns.

PS - when I started this nobody else had posted, if I had read the other posts this would have been a lot shorter. Other people made some excellent points.

Overlapping became a much better tactic when I learned that either city could work it...

If it's greyed out in the City Management window, ie being worked by another city in your empire, double-click it to make it available to that city. If you want to make it available to the other city again, right-click it. So friggin' useful...

Always wondered about this! I can't believe I hadn't heard of this yet!!! This was a major problem when overlapping, but given we can select which tiles are worked by which cities (something I was unaware of), it actually makes sense, in many cases, to go for it. =)

I think the AI still makes some poor decisions on City placement (one square off an ocean with 3-4 unusable ocean tiles in the fat cross being the leading example) but it is a lot better than it used to be. I always raze a few cities each game because the overlap is too great with other cities.

I build the first 4 cities a good distance away from the capital in each diagonal direction as a land grab, and pump culture out of them. This gives me a cultural area that has 8 city spots I can settle later, 4 without overlap and 4 with about 13 tiles give or take. Those last 4, when I settle them, pump out stuff like spies, missionaries, corporate executives, or seige weapons. Give 'em a library and they pump out enough research to make it worth settlement even before the courthouse is built.

With the massive culture from the 4 corner cities, no AI city can settle anywhere near them or else get flipped.

edit: Moral of the story, overlap is fine, cities can be useful without being huge ;)

I try and avoid overlap entirely... At least on my capital. I'm a builder though, and I love pushing my cities for all they are worth.
I try and build all around my capital first, expanding towards rival civs first, pushing them away from me. If I get lucky (with terrain and other civs), I can get 8 cities all 5 tiles away from my capital, for a total of 9 cities with no overlap.
It rarely turns out so perfect however. I do overlap on occasion, but I try not to overlap good squares, such as plains hills or resorces. And i don't know why, but i NEVER overlap on my capital.

I had to stop for a second when I realised that so many people didn't know you could share shared tiles, switch them back and forth. It's a very important thing to know. I always used to have an aversion to overlap. Sharing tiles, especially high food tiles between two cities is well worth it. In fact, I almost feel like a food tile is wasted if it's not inside the radii of two different cities!

Same here, hated this. Chances are the second city is an acropolis of the capital, which is often settled on a tip of a continent. The second city usually has few yet strategically important resources within the fat cross, is well developed, and is sometimes a Holy City. You would like to keep the city, but it soon is choked by the formidable cutural influence of the capital and witnesses the crusaders from the fatherland to reclaim it.

i overlap and then i MM borrowing one tile from the other when i'm in the mood to be that nitpicky.

the AI doesn't know how to share the overlapped tiles tho, at least not before BtS. one game i was culturally smothering pisae and julius let it starve down to 2 pop. there were at least 5 tiles shared with (and assigned to) rome. eventually all his city had was tiles that were my culture, and tiles shared with rome. one was a grassland hamlet assigned to rome that rome wasn't working! when my spies saw that i wanted to smack the AI, i mean that's just sad. if nothing else, let the other city work the cottages so that they'll be towns when your capital wants to benefit from them, whether or not i'm putting the culture pressure on you, sheesh! maybe it's better now in BtS, i haven't been in a situation to check.

edit: oops i was wrong, there were only 2 tiles that he still had access to. but, the one he wasn't working, rome had control of, and was not working! if there was ever a time to swap a tile from one city to another, that would be the time. but i'm no programmer and i can't imagine that would be an easy thing to program. but i was so mad at JC that i even put a sign on the tile and took a screenie of it, and still have the screenshot. this was months ago /sigh.
http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p285/kmadcandy/AntiumShared.jpg

My cities are alergic to each other. They just cannot share land. No way. No.

It makes me sad that FCs don't tesselate.

That's an interesting story KMC, you'd think that'd be the sort of thing the AI would be really good at. Oh well.

I used to have a bit of an alergy to shared tiles, but I got over it. You have to, it's a waste of a food resource to not use it to grow two cities when possible. Tesselating FCs would take a lot of the difficulty out of city positioning as well. I guess it's really a matter of taste, but I enjoy the current set-up. You have to make some difficult choices sometimes, and there's lots of room for strategy.

Is this really something new of BtS though? I saw the AI build overlapping cities in Civ4 Vanilla and Civ4 Warlords too, nothing special really.

Not just in Civ4... Also in previous Civs. Remember the times before Cultural Boarders when the opposing Civ would end up plopping down a city two spaces away from yours?

Mathematically, I know that overlapping tiles in cities is a small matter, that sharing resources between cities can be a powerful strategic advantage, and that a relatively few number of cities will eventually grow large enough to utilize the entire fat cross, and that not for hundreds of turns.

In practice, overlapping crosses make my teeth itch.

Mathematically, I know that overlapping tiles in cities is a small matter, that sharing resources between cities can be a powerful strategic advantage, and that a relatively few number of cities will eventually grow large enough to utilize the entire fat cross, and that not for hundreds of turns.

In practice, overlapping crosses make my teeth itch.

*giggle* i know what you mean. i used to be more that way. then i played my first culture games where i wanted towns ASAP for max commerce when i turned the slider to 100% culture. since i had to make little "filler" villages to do nothing more than build temples to qualify the big cities to make cathedrals, the best case scenario for that is to fit them in where they can work the cottages for the real cities while the real cities aren't big enough to work those tiles yet. tiny-temple-town never needs to be big, and this way they're close enough to save on maintenance too, extra bonus. man, as i've moved up in difficulty, the more that distance maintenance early on is a big factor in my decision!

obviously that wasn't a typical game setup, but that's what made me realize that the civ police didn't come out of the computer and kidnap me or anything :lol:. and it demonstrated to me that i have the tolerance to micromanage which city gets which tile when. hubby decidedly does not want to deal with that junk, once a city gets a tile, it's going to keep that tile, he just doesn't think that way! and that can work fine too, you can overlap and just perma-assign, as shocking as that may be to a perfectionist like me.

hubby and i play team MP at times. he'll leave a gaping hole of like 6-8 tiles between some cities, hills, floodplains, cows, always something good in there. at a certain point in the game i get sick of seeing that wasted space, and i say ok dear i'm gonna settle there and use those tiles. at first he thought i was insane, but he saw some of those teensy towns grow up quite useful. well admittedly he still knows i'm insane, but that's not proof of it ;).

The thing about overlapping is that for the early cities, most of their turns will be spent at a population far lower than 20. Overlapping allows you to share resources, for example, Washington grows to its cap and works some mines instead of the irrigated rice. This is when New York can grab that rice and go on quick growing phase. Combine this with whipping.

I don't know how well the city governor handles shared tiles, though. Never paid much attention.

Then there's the lower maintenance fee if your cities are closer to capital.

A lot of players emphasis that it isn't how many good tiles you get in the city fat cross that matters. What matters is how many good tiles you can work to achieve your goal. So for an early production city that 's never ever going to get enough food to work all those plains hills, you might as well overlap it with your capital to reduce maintenance but still be able to work the same number of hills you could have, for the same maximum production at a lower maintenance.

i totally agree. some cities max out at 10 other more or less. obviously you let the cap max out when it can, and you make situational calls on all the rest. that's the best way to maximize the use of the land in your cultural borders at a much earlier date. ics revised.

Have to agree on all points.....

Overlapping cities is extremely important at higher levels for a whole slew of reasons..... but the builder in me just can't do it - I need every city to be monstrous..... knowing full well that it wont reach its pinnacle until 3/4 of the way through the game..... ultimately it comes down to types of play - if I was playing just to win, I'd do whatever, but my games revolve around a pseudo RP and builder approach as that's what I find the most appealing - and in that situation, I want every city spankingly good.