I have always wondered which was the better strategy. Settling your cities close together or not.

As I see it the disadvantages when settling them close to each other is that they will have to share land (sometimes even ressources) and wont be able to grow bigger in the long run.

The advantages however is that you can work all ressources and that your cities are better connected, which will be good for defence and economy.

Is there some kind of optimal way to do it?
Is sharing ressources always bad? Also if it means you get acces to a ressource otherwise out of reach? (example: I have a capital built and one spot north of it is a wheat ressource, to spots north is the ocean, so getting that wheat ressource would mean sharing a lot of spots with the capital and the new city would have to work the ocean mostly. Should it be built?)

I hope you understand what I am asking. Alle thoughts on the issue is appreciated.

It depends on the kind of game and on your land really.

In single player sometimes claiming better land tops settling close.

Against humans...unless land is really really bad it is better to settle close and share resources between cities.

For example having 2 cities with 1 corn and the rest grassland is great, as first city can grow working the corn and then hand over the corn to second city and work grassland cottages when it grows enough.

Thanks for the answer.

I now realise I put this under articles, maybe some admin will move it to the main thread?

It depends on what kind of economy and civics you plan to use as well. Hammer (HE) and Specialist economies (SE) can work miracles with 7-8 tile cities. This means when other economies have 4 cities in a given tract of land a HE or SE could have 8-10 cities in the same space, work fewer tiles, and get great results.

Having said that, I think its best to aggressively settle land further from you when possible, and as your finances become better, then start filling in the space with a lot of smaller, compact cities.

I used to be very adverse to city overlap. I have since ammended this to placing an Overlap city with a very food rich capital. This is because with early game low happy caps my capital would often switch to either specialist or high hammer tiles to stagnate growth and those great food resources would in essence by 'wasted' until my happy cap grew, I built a settler/worker, or I could afford to whip. If instead I place an ok overlap city I could flop tiles as needed to customize two cities to have good growth.

Later cities I usually do not overlap because the you are much closer to the time of the game where being limited by tiles will hurt you and your happiness is likely high enough to warrant working all your food tiles for a single city.

Massive overlap can be bad when it's raw tiles like grassland, hills, basically anything worth working without a resource, since this will lessen the potential of the settled cities. Overlapping some tiles to share high yield bonus tiles is usually a good thing, since you can swap them between cities. Like CreeDakota said, you can use high food tiles to grow cities, but you usually won't be working all of them 100% of the time.
Sometimes there's a great site that will suffer from slow growth, like riverside grassland cottage cities without bonus food, and sharing a high food tile to boost early growth and production will get those cities up and running far earlier.

Massive overlap can be bad when it's raw tiles like grassland, hills, basically anything worth working without a resource, since this will lessen the potential of the settled cities.

I find the opposite to be true and always prioritize grasslands as my filler city 1st choices. Why?

A HE working 6 grassland work shops in SP + 1 engineer or 7 grassland tiles produce about 60 hammers or 60 beakers with a forge, factory, and coal plant - so for 6-7 tiles you get 1 Infantry every 2-3 turns on normal speed. Grow them to a quick 6 or 7 happy cap with biology farms then workshop over.

A SE working 8 grassland tiles with Biology irrigated farms is equivalent to 8 specialist or about 60 beakers under Representation with only a library and in Caste. When in a production cycle and in slavery you can draft + whip a huge army in a short time.

It depends on what kind of economy and civics you plan to use as well. Hammer (HE) and Specialist economies (SE) can work miracles with 7-8 tile cities. This means when other economies have 4 cities in a given tract of land a HE or SE could have 8-10 cities in the same space, work fewer tiles, and get great results.

Having said that, I think its best to aggressively settle land further from you when possible, and as your finances become better, then start filling in the space with a lot of smaller, compact cities.

Could you explain why it would be better to stack cities together? The way I see it you need more hammers into infrastructure for the same output?

The way I would see it is: Let's say for your "hammer economy", there's 4 hills available somewhere. What's the profit of working 2x 2 hills instead of 1x 4hills. With 2x 2 hills you will have to build 2 forges at half the speed? So the conclusion I would make is that the 4 hill city will get his multiplier up faster, saves you hammers and saves you a settler.

Or am I missing something here.

Could you explain why it would be better to stack cities together? The way I see it you need more hammers into infrastructure for the same output?

The way I would see it is: Let's say for your "hammer economy", there's 4 hills available somewhere. What's the profit of working 2x 2 hills instead of 1x 4hills. With 2x 2 hills you will have to build 2 forges at half the speed? So the conclusion I would make is that the 4 hill city will get his multiplier up faster, saves you hammers and saves you a settler.

Or am I missing something here.

People stack cities together the more they rely on specialists. Whipping remains efficient longer, and drafting has a LOT more potential. Later on things that give per city bonuses like shrines and ESPECIALLY corporations can take over.

I doubt they plan on much infrastructure in the filler cities.

Granted, I don't like playing that way due to the micro involved.

But IMO, early on the priority is to settle resource clusters and block the AI so you can get the most land regardless. Whether the player wants to tightly pack filler cities and switch which city is working that corn based on whip cycles etc etc. comes after that.

One metric that I use when settling cities is imagining the max size they can grow to with the tiles available in a spot. If I have a city that can grow to size 12 max, I won't hesitate to settle another city close by, because even with tile overlap, neither city misses out (if both cities can't grow that large).

Closer cities bring lower maintenance, this is another key factor. If money is tight or land isn't great to support super cities, settle them close. Also do this if you anticipate invaders, because closer cities are easier to defend.

Settle a city so it can use all of its tiles if it can grow to be very large.

Sometimes I build navy cities, cities with a drydock, lighthouse, courthouse, maybe a couple other buildings. Because of the drydock, I want to keep those cities population low, so they can overlap, and all they do is build destroyers in the late game.

Could you explain why it would be better to stack cities together? The way I see it you need more hammers into infrastructure for the same output?

To gain more production - more cities gives you that. The beauty of filler cities is you can already have every improvement made before you create the new city because your culture already covers the land. Once you have biology getting a new city up and running is very quick because you already have 3-4 irrigated farms planted a long with workshops. So you grow to your happy cap of 6-9 very fast and already have 15-18 base production which means forges, factories and coal plants will be up in no time. To further expedite new cities it would be a good idea to have build the hagia sophia and already have workers in place to replace the farms with workshops if running a HE or replace the work shops with farms if running a SE (after infrasructure is up - unless you just wanna whip em in).

In a HE health is the biggest issue and cities with higher population need to realistically have 18+ health in order to build a coal plant with the added +4 hit for electricity. This means the land needs to have access to enough biology farmed land to offset negative health - a lot of times the land doesnt allow this so you are stuck with +50% (forge, factory), +10% (SP), and +25% (PS) which will give a city of 12-16 in the 70-90 range. A smaller 6-8 working HE filler city with the addition of a coal plant (health wont be an issue) can bring in 50-60+ at half the size, which is quite useful.

I find the opposite to be true and always prioritize grasslands as my filler city 1st choices. Why?

A HE working 6 grassland work shops in SP + 1 engineer or 7 grassland tiles produce about 60 hammers or 60 beakers with a forge, factory, and coal plant - so for 6-7 tiles you get 1 Infantry every 2-3 turns on normal speed. Grow them to a quick 6 or 7 happy cap with biology farms then workshop over.

A SE working 8 grassland tiles with Biology irrigated farms is equivalent to 8 specialist or about 60 beakers under Representation with only a library and in Caste. When in a production cycle and in slavery you can draft + whip a huge army in a short time.

Filler cities aren't an overlap issue, they're the result of avoiding overlap and then correcting that with small cities working the leftovers. If you plan your cities with vanilla terrain overlapping, you won't need them, if you plan your cities by picking the best sites for specialisation you will need them, since there will be gaps.

My point is that you can plan your initial cities with a degree of overlap on bonus resources, since swapping those tiles can give good results. That isn't the case with vanilla terrain, since swapping those tiles won't give you a benefit.

I see your point. I just set up my cities differently. The word "filler" isn't always the right choice i guess because in my case I almost always deliberately plan my filler cities to be close together after my inital settling is finished, and even then sometimes I start off close. After I scout my land I am already purposely planning to put as many cities as close together as possible to maximize my production.

I keep using Infantry as my example because a HE hits full swing at assembly line. I could choose to have 4 cities with minimal or no overlap, working 14-18 tiles and produce roughly 1 Infantry every 2 turns. In 12 turns I get 26-28 Infantry (overflow). On the flip side, I could plan cities with massive overlap (6-12) that could never work more than 6-8 tiles. However, instead of 4 cities I could have 11 cities in the same space. Those cities would have the capacity to produce Infantry every 3 turns giving me 45-46 Infantry (overflow) in the same amount of time. Smaller cities are actually gaining me 50% production from normal ones!

The same applies when turning hammers into beakers. The 4 larger cities would be producing somewhere in the ballpark of 300-500 beakers (dependent if they had health for a coal plant). The 11 smaller cities would be producing 500-650 beakers. The same principles can be applied to a SE/FE too.

The best part about this type of game is it enables me to be in a state of constant micro management, which imo, is the best part of the game. Actually, when I think about it, if I wasn't able to micro manage there wouldnt be much else to even do, lol.

IMO this discussion is *somewhat* trivial. At first, you're going to be settling cities in resource clusters, because you want to work the best tiles sooner. Everyone does that.

After that, you have to evaluate whether you want to place filler cities so that they can use the specials while the other city is at a cap already, or just in spaces to use good but not great tiles. Very often how the specials are distributed, and what's between them, answers this question for you. Later on, corporations can make any city worth it no matter what (especially mining inc), or you can just bio farm some of the crappiest cities and you have a very pleasant draft cycle...or yes small workshop cities to stay under the health cap.

IMO this discussion is *somewhat* trivial.

I hope most people don't think so :). I don't think its trivial to help people set up their cities in a fashion that puts them in a better position to win ^^.

I hope most people don't think so :). I don't think its trivial to help people set up their cities in a fashion that puts them in a better position to win ^^.

I didn't mean it that way of course. What I meant is that the question isn't usually "do I settle cities close or far?" but rather "where are the best resources and how can I place my cities to optimize my land for what I want to do". Essentially, the OP is kind of asking the wrong question.

The "trivial" part is whether the filler cities need to be defined as such and especially a PRE-DEFINED strategy of just spacing cities tightly. This isn't ICS like civ III. You DO want to work your best tiles early in the game, and after that placing a city is more a question of "is this worth its cost". The answer is usually yes after the mid game.

Maybe trivial was the wrong word though.

We need "Attacko" to join in then it will be PERFECT.:goodjob:

Btw, on a serious note, the guy is a genius ^^.

I also will stack cities close to share tree tiles for the health.

I keep using Infantry as my example because a HE hits full swing at assembly line. I could choose to have 4 cities with minimal or no overlap, working 14-18 tiles and produce roughly 1 Infantry every 2 turns. In 12 turns I get 26-28 Infantry (overflow). On the flip side, I could plan cities with massive overlap (6-12) that could never work more than 6-8 tiles. However, instead of 4 cities I could have 11 cities in the same space. Those cities would have the capacity to produce Infantry every 3 turns giving me 45-46 Infantry (overflow) in the same amount of time. Smaller cities are actually gaining me 50% production from normal ones!

The same applies when turning hammers into beakers. The 4 larger cities would be producing somewhere in the ballpark of 300-500 beakers (dependent if they had health for a coal plant). The 11 smaller cities would be producing 500-650 beakers. The same principles can be applied to a SE/FE too.

The best part about this type of game is it enables me to be in a state of constant micro management, which imo, is the best part of the game. Actually, when I think about it, if I wasn't able to micro manage there wouldnt be much else to even do, lol.

How you get more production from the same amount of tiles by placing more cities? At the point in the game you keep bringing up, I'll be working well over 90% of the available tiles with most of my cities working 15+ and some specialised ones 20. What do you do with IW? With the HE? With WS? Oxford? NE? Those are best served by cities working their entire BFC, not size 8 cities.

You keep bringing up health as a limiting factor, but usually I'm comfortably running size 20+ cities when infantry comes around, even after industrializing my empire.

We need "Attacko" to join in then it will be PERFECT.:goodjob:

Btw, on a serious note, the guy is a genius ^^.:eek: I find his mixture of the plausible sounding nonsense and truly useful too confusing! It's unsettling enough to hear experienced sounding posters express seemingly contradictory viewpoints (which they amend and rephrase and etc.) or leave out key assumptions. I can easily see Attacko's input baffling the guy who's just visiting the forum for a specific question and says "Really? I always thought the opposite..."

I play a lot lot TMIT, and I agree that early on, I just want to claim as many resources and bonus tiles as I can. And because of maintenance, you have to do this with a limited amount of cities. After Currency/COL, etc., once I've claimed as much land as I can peacefully, then it's usually not too difficult to see which areas I should throw some "filler" cities into, and which cities are gonna be able to abuse most or all 20 tiles of the BFC. And at that point, or any point later in the game, I can throw the cities down as needed. Then again, by that point I'm usually taking someone else's cities....

@ jammer

The national wonders go in higher populated cities and imo they generally get created much faster because your economy is based on hammers.

How you get more production from the same amount of tiles by placing more cities?

A SE with 8 large cities and 40 little cities can whip many, many, many more troops than an empire with 20 large cities in the same area.

4 HE cities at 20 population would need to have a base of 60 hammers with 135% modifiers (forge, factory, coal plant, SP, PS) to get 140 hammers a turn which is the cost of Infantry on normal speed - or 48 Infantry in 12 turns, the same amount 11 smaller cities offer.

Off memory (if wrong correct me please) a forge, factory, and coal plant providing electricity give 8 :yuck: + 20 :yuck: from population + 2 :yuck: or more from difficulty. That is a whopping 30:yuck: . Now I can only speak from my own game experiences, but when I normally complete Assembly line on Emperor or Immorta (actually quicker here) it's around 1600-1700 AD. Hospitals and public transportation havent been discovered yet so I generally range from between 17 (some maps suck) - 25 :health: which means I'm 13 to 5 health short in order to run a 20 populated city with every modifier. And even then, it's very doubtful you will meet the required 60 hammer starting point to put the big cities on par with the little ones.

P.S. - Am I really one of the few people that think tighter city placement can be a lot more beneficial under certain economies? I've never come close to matching production with a fewer number of large cities, not to mention, as I've moved up in levels production is tantamount to victory.

P.S. - Am I really one of the few people that think tighter city placement can be a lot more beneficial under certain economies? I've never come close to matching production with a fewer number of large cities, not to mention, as I've moved up in levels production is tantamount to victory.

You aren't the only one. I often employ, what I call whipping-drafting cities in the age of cannons and muskets. They manage to draft a musket (and later on a rifle) and whip a cannon every 10 turns and get a tremendous amount of production out of a modest food surplus. That means many more cities can be useful including those with seafood and a few coastal tiles that don't benefit from workshops. Workshops need grassland. floodplains or plains to be effective and they aren't available on all map types to justify the civics needed to make them really effective. That means my technique peaks well before infantry, although these cities can draft infantry and whip artillery later on, perhaps not every 10 turns though. I seldom use factories or power even with these small cities and I seldom run Caste System.

I always thought you got a standard health bonus, not a malus. I don't remember having an unhealthy capital at turn 1, not even when not settling near fresh water. That would surely be the case if I started with -2 health.

As to your 20 to 40 cities comparison; how many hammers are 20 barracks? 20 granaries? 20 factories? 20 forges? 20 coal plants? Don't forget 20 courthouses, you're gonna need your courthouses, because the upkeep on those cities will kill you.

Also, in your example you gave your small cities grassland workshops under SP, at 4 hammers. So there, you only need 15 tiles to get to a base of 60 hammers, with size 20 cities, you'll have spare hammers.

I always thought you got a standard health bonus, not a malus. I don't remember having an unhealthy capital at turn 1, not even when not settling near fresh water.

Hehe ^^. Next time you play a game, after you settle the city take a look into the city screen and you'll notice something like +7 health from level, forest, water, etc....then you'll also notice something like 2-5 unhealthiness from level, food plains, etc.

The rest of what I wrote is based on the majority of Immortal games with what I consider good success. Take what you need and leave the rest. Game theory and reality can be quite a bit different ^^.

Here's what I do.

If the map has been unkind to me and placed tons of good lands FAR FAR away from me near immortal and deity level AI's, then priority #1 is to get cities far away ASAP. I'm currently playing an old deity SG (Dirk's Ultimate Deity Challenge 2, playing the first save) where I played Elizabeth and an AI near me had tons of good land so I had to rush and steal them away from him/her (I'm not revealing the AI if there's a chance anyone will play the year-old game). By my count, my first city was TWENTY THREE tiles away from my capital. My second was about that same distance. :crazyeye:

On the other hand, you need to be able to distinguish when it is profitable to LET the AI get land. If you're on your own peninsula with room for 6-7 packed cities, and you have the OPPORTUNITY to grab great land outside of it, you sometimes shouldn't. Letting the AI get more land means more opportunity for AI-to-AI wars. In addition, closer cities help your research initially which in turn can lead to war bribes to slow down AI's.

It depends. :)

Just for the record: I tend to found a lot of cities. Ideally every 3 squares on plains hills (since I need to get all that infrastructure up quickly). With more efficient whipping, religious wonders, free specialists, trade routes and corporations, the benefits outweigh the costs by a considerable margin.
Sure, it takes a while to recover the investment... but the earlier I start the earlier I can whip the essential infrastructure and the earlier I have a long-term asset.

I often find that capitals have more food than they can efficiently use for a long time - in this case I'll split the resources between two cities. One of them usually acts as a settler pump, the other may go for wonders or commerce. Then I look for good spots for blocking cities, after which I'll settle from the inside out in a fairly tight pattern (ideally: 3 tiles apart, on plains hills).

Sometimes, my secondary cities will shrink... if my caps rise my national wonder cities will hog the good tiles they couldn't work before, at the expense of the filler cities (I want my strongest yields to be run through the best multipliers available).

Another use of a secondary city close to the capital is for it to work cottages for the capital while it whips infrastructure and works farms and hills to build national wonders. The combination of high health and happiness plus economic multipliers with fully grown towns and the Bureaucracy bonus is a very strong capital in the middle game. Sometimes, with inland starts, I settle two cities overlapping some of the capital's tiles and work a few cottages for it on two sides while it concentrates on production in the early game. Eventually the capital is able to work all its tiles and takes over fully developed cottages. The secondary cities usually become unit pumps in the late game.

Overlapping tiles and co-operation between cities is a powerful technique that involves a good understanding of the game and some increased micromanagement, but it can be the economic advantage that tips the balance and allows you to play one level higher than otherwise.

I also tend to overlap cities...and there's no need to wait until you have many of them, either.

The key point is that the cities need to individually have access to enough resources to be productive. Because they are overlapping, it is often possible for one city to use more than its normal share of the tiles. For example, when a city is recovering from whip unhappiness, it's usually not a good idea to keep feeding that city a high-food tile, until the unhappiness goes away.

So at that time, the other city takes the food, and starts to grow. If you arrange your cities in pairs, it is possible to synchronize the whip cycles of both cities in each pair. When one city whips, it takes control of a high food tile to regrow to normal size. Meanwhile, the other city has already regrown but has not yet recovered from whip unhappiness--so it doesn't need the food. After the first city has regrown, it no longer has use for the food, which is then returned the second city, and so on...

Sure, but generally not at first; you typically wanna block off as much land as possible early.

Sure, but generally not at first; you typically wanna block off as much land as possible early.

Only if it's optimal. BOTM 10 probably wasn't an optimal blocking game unless you count moving the capital inland to block off a peninsula. That's a huge gamble, though.

I think it's usually best to spread out as much as possible early on so as to block other Civs and also so that you can get more resources. Of course later on you can fill in the gaps with some new cities... I do this but I tend be more passive than other players here.

Infinite city sprawl works in BtS with the UoS/AP/SM. Spamming as many cities as you can is a winning strategy at least through immortal on land heavy maps (i.e., not archipelago or the island region of big & small). Of course in that type of game, you'll finish the game before AL kicks in so the whole factory/coal plant argument doesn't apply.

I think it's usually best to spread out as much as possible early on so as to block other Civs and also so that you can get more resources. Of course later on you can fill in the gaps with some new cities... I do this but I tend be more passive than other players here.

Read post #31. :)