Ring City Placement (RCP) is a new approach to city placement in your empire. Other placement strategies, like OCP, are based on land use patterns. RCP is based on a different principle: reducing corruption.

Thanks to alexman and this thread Do you think you understand corruption? (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19922), we know that corruption has two sources: corruption due to the distance from the capital or forbidden palace, and corruption due to the number of cities.

There is a natural tension between these two: you can achieve low corruption of the first kind by placing many cities very close to your capital (a la ICS), but this means that if you want to exploit all of your land, you need a lot of cities, and the corruption of the second kind is severe. On the other hand, if you try to work all of your land with relatively few cities, to minimize corruption of the second kind, then the cities are spread out and far away.

Alexman discovered that corruption of the second kind depends on the number of cities that are closer to your capital or forbidden palace than a given city. When I read this, after a while, a question occurred to me: what happens if two cities are at the same distance from the capital or FP? This called for some tests, but the answer is that only cities that are closer count for corruption purposes; cities at the same distance don't increase corruption in other cities at that distance.

There's a way to take advantage of this: build several cities at exactly the same distance from the capital. I call this Ring City Placement, because the cities at the same distance form a "ring" on the map.

It's important to understand how the rings work, which has been explained in detail in the alexman thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19922).

Corruption calculations do not use Euclidean geometry, nor unit movement points, to get distance. Instead, the distance is based on the shortest path, where each orthogonal move costs 1.0 and each diagonal move costs 1.5. Another way of writing the distance formula is Distance = max(x,y) + 0.5*min(x,y), where x and y are the distance in the NW/SE and NE/SW directions, respectively.


This method of calculation is unintuitive at first, but with practice, it becomes easy to "see" the rings at a given distance. The Firaxis distance is always an integer, or half an integer, so there are many more city sites at the "same distance" than you might first expect. For example, there are 8 city sites at distance 3 from the capital (but some of these might be unbuildable mountains or water, of course).

[TODO: insert illustration of rings and distance calculation]

Here's a chart for various distances, of how many sites are at that distance, and how many cities can potentially be built at that distance. (Sometimes two sites at the same distance are adjacent, so only one of the two can be built.)


Distance Sites Cities
2.0 4 4
2.5 8 4
3.0 8 8
3.5 8 8
4.0 12 8
4.5 12 12
5.0 12 12
5.5 16 12
6.0 16 16
6.5 16 16
7.0 20 16
7.5 20 20
8.0 20 20
8.5 24 20
9.0 24 24
9.5 24 24
10.0 28 24
etc.


As should be clear, RCP is not a single fixed rule governing the exact locations of cities. The player can choose the distance of the rings, and also to decide whether to build on some or all of the potential city sites in each ring.

One natural approach is to build an "inner ring" at distance 3-4, and another "outer ring" at distance 6-9. I call this 2RCP, because there are two rings. You get several inner cities with extremely low corruption (often around 10% or less), and a whole lot of outer cities with manageable corruption (well under 50%).

But there are other alternatives. You might build on some but not all of the sites in the inner ring, in order to reduce corruption in the outer ring (because each inner ring city increases corruption in every outer ring city). (Call this 1.5RCP.) Or you might decide not to build an inner ring at all, and just build a single outer ring of cities at distance 6-9, which could have as many as 20 cities with as little as 20% corruption in all of them. (Call this alternative 1RCP.) You might also make different choices at different points in the game: you could start the game with an inner ring, but once the outer ring is fully developed, abandon some or all of the cities in the inner ring.

There are also a lot of open questions, like how to combine RCP with Forbidden Palace placement, or with a Palace Jump. Clearly you can build one set of rings around your Palace and another set of rings around your Forbidden Palace, but they have to be far apart, or else the rings will interfere with each other. Are there other ways to use the Palace and FP? I'm not sure. I'm definitely still learning, myself. I also know that some people have already been experimenting with RCP, since I mentioned it in the GOTM20 Spoiler #1 thread, and I hope they will post their observations here, for a larger audience. I'm personally applying the RCP idea in GOTM20, and I hope to post detailed illustrations and examples from that game, once the GOTM period is over. (But first I have to finish!)

I do want to especially congratulate alexman for all of his work on corruption, because if he hadn't worked out the basic mechanisms, I never would have had the idea for RCP. I also really look forward to other players finding ways to use the RCP idea, which I may not have thought of, and I hope they will share those in this thread.

Very good research! Thank you for sharing them.:) Do you have a sample screenshot of your RCP?

Daviddesj, congratulations for coming up with an original concept. This is a field rife for exploration and graduate research. In theory, RCP is a very powerful, although not unbalancing, approach to expansion. What I wonder at first blush is how applicable it is in actual game conditions. The following questions come to mind (including ones you raised):

1. Corruption is equal in all properly-placed ring cities. But what happens when you build a city that breaks the pattern? This is likely to happen due to geographical constraints, or the requirements of a settler factory, for example. Would such a city suffer disproportionate corruption if outside the first ring, or greatly dilute the value of that ring if inside it?

2. If the effect of breaking the pattern is serious, then the FP would need to be placed far enough away to have no effect on the outermost ring of the palace. This is probably ideal, anyway, although hard to achieve in practice.

3. Jumping the palace seemingly destroys the entire point and benefit of RCP. On the other hand, by the time you're ready to jump, you may be able to do without RCP's benefits.

I'm sure you've either considered or encountered all of these questions in GOTM20, and am very curious to hear what the various effects were.

Question:

According to this picture (see attachment of this post), what is the distant of B, F, and H?

Are the following calculation correct?

A = 2
C = 3
D = 5 ???
F = 4 ???

Note: I am really interesting in the correct distance of D and F. From the look of it, D seems to be a lot closer than F.:confused:

Here are some RCP screenshots. You don't have to use all the locations, but each one you do use gets 2nd city corruption.

Radius = 3
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/rcp3.jpg

Radius = 4
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/rcp4.jpg

Radius = 5
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/rcp5.jpg

Since There are 6 possible sites with the radius of 2, what I don't understand is why DaviddesJ mentioned only 4 of them. What is wrong with the fifth one and the sixth one?

It's about time that someone formalized this concept. I've been doing symmetrical builds for quite some time to leverage off the corruption calculations. Now I know to keep an even tighter reign on placing and positioning.

:goodjob:

[Edit] I had a game as the Koreans lately that I posted a shot of the build, I affectionately called it the Korean Death Star build out. :lol:

Originally posted by Moonsinger
Question:

According to this picture (see attachment of this post), what is the distant of B, F, and H?



Unless I am Gravely Mistaken...
Distances are from Paris
A = 2.5
B=3.5
C=3.5
D=4
E=4
F=4.5
g=4.5
h=5

[EDIT] I have been working on a program to calculate the comparative advantaces of the different ring placements. I'll try to post something on this tonight.

Originally posted by jeffelammar
Unless I am Gravely Mistaken...
Distances are from Paris
A = 2.5
B=3.5
C=3.5
D=4
E=4
F=4.5
g=4.5
h=5

DaveMcW & DaviddesJ,

Please confirm! For some strange reason I think the distance of "A" from Paris is equal to 2 not 2.5. That's really the source of my confusion.:(

There are only 4, Moonsinger, at a distance of 2.

If we take x and y as NE/SW and NW/SE.

There are 4 cities with coordinates of 2,0 0,2 -2,0 and 0,-2. The cities with coordinates of 2,2 are in fact 3 squares away on the algorithm, used to calculate distances. (=big number + 0,5*small number). Cities at coordiniates of 1,1 are in fact 1.5 squares away. Its weird at first but easy to figure after a while.

At a distance of 3 we can have 8 cities
4 at 3,0 etc and 4 at 2,2 etc. Unfortuantely some are adjacent so we cant build them all.

I've tried a few sample games but the price you have to pay is often building on bonus tiles and losing the bonus / mountain or sea in the wrong place. I like rings at 4 and 8 but 3 and 6 can work well too.

Utlimately you still have to decide whether that cost is worth the gain in efficiency due to lower corruption.

In your diagram A is (2,1) so the distance =2.5 = (2 + 0.5*1)

Thank you col!:) In that case, according to my above map, Paris E, Paris N, and Paris NW are all at the distance of 2.5 instead of 2.:( Oh well, I need more practice.

Sure looks like 2.5 to me...

By my reading you choose the shortest movement path which....
For getting to A form Paris is either SE + S or S + SE.....
And then you calculate:
N, S, W, E = 1.0 each
NW, NE, SW, SE = 1.5 each
For totals of (1.5 + 1.0) or (1.0 + 1.5) .... 2.5 either way you cut it.

Just my take...

FWIW...I get the same numbers as jeffelammar for the A-H points when I count.

Great stuff, DaviddesJ! :thumbsup: But I have a feeling the other factors in city placement (f/s/c values of the surrounding terrain, being on coasts instead of one tile away, being on rivers, taking advantage of the AI borders, not bothering reposistioning captured cities, etc.) might top corruption and waste in importanace. I guess I'll have to wait and see until GOTM 20 is over. I can't wait! :)

I am bored. So I made color coded rings 1-5:

Wow! Thanks for the screenshot with color coding, ilovetoast!:goodjob:. Looks like a spacing of 5 would be good for the 'builders'. It offers twice the number of cities as OCP, but would probably be about the same amount of corruption, and certainly be more powerful well before OCP is.

DaviddesJ, your RCP idea is ingenious! It should prove to be a powerful strategy for the early game, probably becoming popular in multiplayer and higher difficulty levels where a strong start is more important.

However, as Txurce observed, the Palace move, (essential to happen ASAP for boosting your economy) would mess up the RCP strategy, so you would have to wait for a leader to build the FP instead. Just make sure there are more non-ring cities closer to the FP than the number of city-members of your Palace rings.

The main benefit of your idea for my own gameplay will probably be to adopt a hybrid approach, being concious of the opportunity to place two or more cities at equal distances from the capital so they share the lower corruption.

By the way, thanks for all the credit, but I don't deserve it. The corruption article has evolved over time, with contributions of many members of the community, including you.

Alexman, does a hybrid approach work? By this I mean, could you create a first ring, a partial second, and then chuck the whole thing as you move out? In this scenario, do the non-ring cities pay a disproportionate price in increased corruption, or just the standard for the number of cities and distance from the capital?

Here's an example.

Empire A has 4 cities in addition to the capital, all at different distances from the capital. These cities all have different OCN corruption corresponding to ranks #1, #2, #3, and #4.

Empire B has the same number of cities, but the second and third cities are equidistant from the capital. The OCN corruption of the cities in this case would use ranks #1, #2, #2, and #4.

Originally posted by alexman
However, as Txurce observed, the Palace move, (essential to happen ASAP for boosting your economy) would mess up the RCP strategy, so you would have to wait for a leader to build the FP instead. Just make sure there are more non-ring cities closer to the FP than the number of city-members of your Palace rings.


RCP does not eliminate the Palace jump strategy. Since you have to plan a Palace jump anyway, you could easily build your initial cities with the ring centered on a different city than the original. You wouldn't see the corruption benefit till the palace jump happens, but you would be rocking the world when it did happen.

It certainly seems possible to plan to build a very early FP, build the initial rings centered on the FP city, and then jump the palace away. Even before the palace moves, the FP is working to generate low corruption in the rings around the FP. However, the FP city itself will probably not be the closest to your capital, thus may have some extra corruption which may delay the FP somewhat. And during the important early turns (before you can build the FP), you won't be getting the benefit of the RCP approach.

The second alternative is of course to just build the rings around the palace, and plan to build the FP far away, with a leader.

Whether there's another idea, perhaps involving overlapping rings that somehow don't interfere with each other too much (e.g., build the FP in one of the rings, and then add rings around the FP, and get lots of low-corruption cities without ever jumping the palace at all), I'm not sure.

I have a detailed screenshot of my RCP strategy in GOTM20 in Post #85 of the Spoiler #1 thread in the GOTM forum. Probably almost everyone here can read that (because either you aren't playing GOTM20, or you have already qualified for Spoiler #1), but I can't post it outside the GOTM forum for another 5 days. So I suggest that if you're interested, you look it up there.

Here is a little more data to look at

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/jeffeCorruption.jpg

What I've done here is calculate approximate corruption in Despotism for connected cities at various distances. (For a non-commercial civ)

I have assumed a Standard size map at Emporer Difficulty. I have also left out the .5 distance numbers as they are close to the surrounding distances.

The scales change in different governments, but we can see some trends here that might help discuss the RCP.

I would assume that are at least 5 cities in the inner (1st)ring (adding in the capitol means that the 2nd ring would have "6" cities closer. Resulting in 42-50% corruption under despotism.

These numbers look a lot better once you start adding in Courthouses and switch to Republic.

As you can see a ring can be of great benefit even if it's city # is close to or at the optimum city count.

Originally posted by jeffelammar
I would assume that are at least 5 cities in the inner (1st) ring (adding in the capitol means that the 2nd ring would have "6" cities closer.
[/B]

I'm quite sure that the capital doesn't count as a "closer" city. For all of the cities in your inner ring, the number of closer cities is zero.
For cities in the second ring, the number of closer cities is just the number in the inner ring.

BTW, the formulas in alexman's corruption thread don't seem to be exactly 100% correct. I think they are like 98% accurate, but sometimes they are off by 1% or 2%. There must be some details that aren't accounted for exactly right, or maybe just rounding errors in the way the corruption is calculated internally.

P.S. I forgot to mention in my original RCP posting one of the nice things about RCP. Because you have many cities with exactly the same corruption, it's convenient to figure out exactly where the "breakpoints" are for each city (the number of coins or shields at which adding one more coin or shield will just increase corruption and not increase your output), so you can micromanage cities more easily by aiming for values that are just at or below the breakpoints. Of course, you can do this even without RCP, but it's significantly easier with RCP because there are only a few values to remember, instead of a different set of values for every city.

Originally posted by DaviddesJ
I'm quite sure that the capital doesn't count as a "closer" city. For all of the cities in your inner ring, the number of closer cities is zero.
For cities in the second ring, the number of closer cities is just the number in the inner ring.


Correction noted. When using the table, slide thing down a level)


BTW, the formulas in alexman's corruption thread don't seem to be exactly 100% correct. I think they are like 98% accurate, but sometimes they are off by 1% or 2%. There must be some details that aren't accounted for exactly right, or maybe just rounding errors in the way the corruption is calculated internally.

Agreed, but the calculations are as you say it close enough to detect trends and basic strategy (maybe not enough for the fine grain micromanagement)

DaviddesJ, I noticed your first Evrika comment as well as your detailed description of the RCP. I think you made a very important discovery that will shape the play style of the important players as well as improve the appearance of the city design. I can see all those nice circles in all the minimaps.

I tested the 3.5 RCP and it’s working out great. IMO the placement of the second circle/or its mere existence is linked to the city density that you prefer. I’m sorry that I can’t find my sheet with RCP planning but a 2RCP (3.5, 6.5) seemed to give me a nice 25 towns base with around 6 tiles per town (IIRC). Of course the terrain would not allow placing all of the 25 towns so the actual tile/city would be larger. On the other side a 1RCP of 3.5 with border expansion would give 9 very productive cities. The second RCP would then be at least at 7.5 to allow the first cities to grab all the land they can get.

Regarding the FP, I would rather delay it until I can use a leader to build it on a decent position and then build/rebuild another 1RCP (3.5) around it. In the end that would give me up to 18 very productive cities. I doubt I would need more for any victory type.

PS: I'll name my second town in GOTM 21 to honour of your discovery. :)

After first reading about DaviddesJ's RCP I decided to test it and compare it to OCP. I have been using OCP since at least CIV 2 and maybe Civ if the citizens have always worked the same 21 tiles I just didn't know it had a name.

I tested on a modified Civ 3 map I used to play on. I'm a builder so I like huge maps. The map has 3 continents on a world with 70% water so there is no contact until a Civ gets navigation. One of these continents is small like Australia and only had 1 starting location.

I modified this continent so I could build ring cities out to 11 tiles without working any water tiles. Except the starting location all potential city sites get exactly the same terrain (bonus grassland with cattle and river).

My only problem with this map is it's saved as a scenario with raging barbarians so the starts get a little messy. It doesn't really matter because cities grow like crazy. I play all test city placements as Carthaginians at Monarch difficulty level and conquest as the only victory condition so I really don't have to pay any attention to the other 7 civilizations.

So far 3 tests have been conducted out to 12 citizens per city. Eventually these 3 will be taken out to maximum population to see if the city efficiencies are consistant. If the efficiency is constant I will only play all the other planned tests out to 12 population which only takes a couple of hours each.

The results will be reported as ring city distances because the corruption for any given ring is the same regardless of the number of cities in the ring.

All tests with 12 population are recorded when the civilization is in it's golden age and every city is celebrating WLTK. All improvements for the ring cities are barracks, temple library and marketplace. The capital improvements are more extensive but I don't record the capital efficiencies so it is not important I hope.

The first test is a classic two ring of cities where the first ring is at a distance of 5 tiles while the second ring is at a distance of 9 tiles. This is as close as I could get to the OCP. There are 6 cities in the 5 ring and 12 cities in the 9 ring.

The 5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 2 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 96.2%, commerce is 80 gold with 4 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 95.0%. The 9 ring cities produce 52 shields with 7 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 86.5%, commerce is 77 gold with 11 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 85.7%.

The second test is a classic OCP with 6 different rings. There are 5 cities in the 5 ring, 2 cities in the 5.5 ring, 2 cities in the 8.5 ring, 2 cities in the 9 ring, 6 cities in the 10 ring, and 2 cities in the 11 ring.

The 5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 2 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 96.2%, commerce is 80 gold with 4 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 95.0%. The 5.5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 2 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 96.2%, commerce is 80 gold with 4 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 95.0%. The 8.5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 6 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 88.5%, commerce is 77 gold with 10 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 87.0%. The 9 ring cities produce 52 shields with 8 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 84.6%, commerce is 76 gold with 12 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 84.2%. The 10 ring cities produce 52 shields with 9 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 82.7%, commerce is 75 gold with 14 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 81.3%. Finally, the 11 ring cities produce 52 shields with 13 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 75.0%, commerce is 73 gold with 19 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 74.0%.

There are some surprises here. First the inner ring of the OCP has exactly the same efficiencies as the RCP no matter the slight difference in radius of the 2 OCP rings. My suspicion is that the program ignores the fraction but will have to verfy that in test 7,8,or 9. Yeh the more I test the more I find out and that leads to more planned tests. I think I have about 10 on paper waiting for the chance to get to them.

You will note that the 9 ring cities in the RCP are more efficient than the 9 ring cities in the OCP. Also note the big drop in efficiency when the radius goes to 11.

The last test was a Hybrid of the first 2. The inner ring was identical to the RCP and the results were identical. The outer ring was made up of three ring distances, 6 cities in the 9 ring, 2 cities in the 10 ring and 4 cities in the 10.5 ring.

The 5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 2 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 96.2%, commerce is 80 gold with 4 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 95.0%. The 9 ring cities produce 52 shields with 7 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 86.5%, commerce is 77 gold with 11 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 85.7%. The 10 ring cities produce 52 shields with 10 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 80.8%, commerce is 74 gold with 16 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 78.4%. Finally, the 10.5 ring cities produce 52 shields with 10 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 80.8%, commerce is 74 gold with 16 lost to corruption for an efficiency of 78.4%.

OK, the results were not exactly what I expected. The 9 ring was exactly the same as the RCP because it was the second ring but the 10/10.5 rings were less than the OCP 10 ring and the 10 Hybrid ring was only the 3 third ring while the 10 OCP ring was the fourth ring if my theory about the 5 and 5.5 ring counting as only 1 ring is correct.

The goal of reducing the corruption in the outer ring of the OCP worked even if the 10 ring is less efficient. Based on shield production, the outer ring efficiencies for the Hybrid test was 83.65% average while the OCP outer ring efficiency is 82.7 % average. The efficiency of the RCP outer ring was 86.5 so you can see the power of RCP.

I have yet to finish these tests to see which 19 city arrangement produces the highest overall production when all available tiles are being worked.

One of the many tests yet to be run is a three ring arrangement with 4 cities in the 3 ring, 8 cities in the 6 ring and 14 cities in the 10 ring.

I want to thank alexman for his work on corruption and DaviddesJ for his invention of RCP. The power of this discovery is tremendous. I used to place what people here call settler factories 2 or 3 tiles away from my starting city and disband it when the capital grew to over 12 population. I now know that if I want to do that I need to put them in the first ring so they wont decrease the efficiency of the first ring.

For those people just trying this, once you build a couple of test maps it just becomes second nature after you decide what the radius of each ring will be.

What a cool and novel placement idea!:goodjob:

Here's my initial take. The corruption at low populations is much less that the cities actual corruption. (95% corrupt is 20corrupt sheilds for 1 non corrupt. But if a city is only making three shields, it looks like its 75% corrupt.) So in the very beginning, expansion and despotism, the cities are not showing their true corruptness. That means the advantages of RCP aren't there YET.

An interesting approach to maximize the efficiency throughout the the entire game would be to build your second city to be the FP site. This should be at a very close radius to the capital so it can get the maximum shields. Then start building ICS like at distances greater than the FP site. Make sure that the ICS builds include cities in your preferred ring around the FP. Also Make sure that the ICS builds include another core that is far enough away from the first core and includes cities in rings around their center. Once the FP is built the other core is ready for a jump, start disbanding the cities that aren't on your desired rings. starting with the ones closest to the FP (including the old capital) and closest to the new capital.

This would take advantage of the ICS build in the early years, but will take advantage of the RCP in the later years. It also has an advantage that the AI won't settle in the middle of your rings and mess up your RCP.

I think this approach would take a TON of pre planning and could only be executed correctly by the accomplished ICS builders but it does seem to give them a way out of the late game waste that occurs with ICS.

Great idea DaviddesJ :goodjob: I probably won't employ RCP as a method, but I certainly will take note of city distances in my core areas, and where terrain permits, take advantage of certain cities "sharing" a lower city rank for corruption purposes.

Originally posted by ControlFreak
Here's my initial take. The corruption at low populations is much less that the cities actual corruption. (95% corrupt is 20corrupt sheilds for 1 non corrupt. But if a city is only making three shields, it looks like its 75% corrupt.) So in the very beginning, expansion and despotism, the cities are not showing their true corruptness.


I don't really agree. E.g., a city generating 3 shields with 5% corruption will give you 3 shields and no waste, but with 20% corruption it gives you 2 shields and 1 waste. (Corruption is multiplied by the total output, and then rounded off to the nearest integer---this should be added to the corruption thread.) So that early city is 50% more productive (from 2 to 3 shields output) if you can lower its corruption using RCP....

I do think your overall concept (build cities without much regard to early corruption, but with careful planning so that in the midgame corruption will be very low and the palace and FP will both be well placed) could be a very good approach.

Originally posted by Svar
I used to place what people here call settler factories 2 or 3 tiles away from my starting city and disband it when the capital grew to over 12 population. I now know that if I want to do that I need to put them in the first ring so they wont decrease the efficiency of the first ring.

The catch with the effect of a settler factory on RCP is that you rarely have a choice of where to build the factory. If anything, the location of the factory would be more likely to determine the distance of the first ring. In cases like this, I wonder if the best practical solution would be to build the factory (rarely later than the second city or third city), and then - if it's impractical to build a ring at that distance, build a ring just outside it, so that the capital is #0, the factory is #1, and the first ring has #2 city status.

This RCP strategy is very good, but I don't think I will use it any time soon. As of this moment, I'm done testing it. Sure I will have a couple cities 2 squares away from my Palace and FP as I usually do, but I won't use the RCP. I figure...if it take 30 shields to build a horseman, with 100 cities, I would still be able to produce at least 100 horsemans in 30 turns.

I think that people are overlooking the power that can be extended onto a second ring type cities, especially on larger maps. My posts in the HOF last November with the Egyptians, used a 5 tile radius around the capitol for the first ring, an 8 city version, although the mini map distorts the graphics very severely you can see the patterns of the rings in the shots. It's those next set of cities that can benefit greatly and make you total empire output soar that leverages the corruption reductions so much. More complex problems are how to incorporate the system to apply to both the palace and the FP at the same time and when to switch over to fringe ICS. ;)

First of all, great discovery DaviddesJ.

For me, I'll probably still expand in the initial stage as I do now with emphasis on accessible terrian more than anything else. In most cases, early growth, which has a cascading effect, is much more important than considerations for 2000 years later. However, knowing RCP means sites with same distance with any existing city will be given a slight bonus in city placement decisions.

Later in the stage of growth, for those cities which are hopelessly corrupted, I will probably give a heavy weight to the RCP consideration. I get concern about corruptions only when it gets significant, like 40% and above.

And since I always have a palace Jump backup plan so as not to relay on getting a GL, the RCP outer ring will be put around the FP instead of the Palace. I may even consider abandon any existing hopeless corrupted cities to shift them to a more appropriate placement whenever it makes sense.

Ok Cartouche Bee, you are driving a hard bargain.;) I will see what I can do.;) Will setup another test run.

Originally posted by Cartouche Bee
I think that people are overlooking the power that can be extended onto a second ring type cities, especially on larger maps.

I agree completely. I don't think that the placement of the first ring has that much effect. It is the 2nd ring where you get the big win. I intend to try a modified version of the placement.

In the early game I will have 3 types of cities.
1. Inner cities (at about dist 3.5 or 4).
2. Ring 1 cities (at OCP distances)
3. Ring 2 cities (at 8.5 or 9 depending on terrain)

As the game progresses I will disband/worker build the type 1 cities out of existance. I will do this at the dawn of the industrial age. This will give me a core of 6 cities. As they become metropolises will be true power houses. This will gain the advantages of the OCP - Metropolis (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17235) while allowing for the advantages of close in placement in the early expansion times.

The main disadvantage will be that I will probably disband some decently built up cities, but I will try to minimize that by careful building.

The one warning here is that the comparative advantages are map size dependent (as well as difficulty to a lesser extent). On a huge or large map I intend to try for 2 rings of widely spaced cities (with closer pack in early game) and then my RCP ring.

My basic intent is to make sure that my RCP ring is placed such that some of the cities in it would have been past the Optimum City Count.

Originally posted by jeffelammar


The main disadvantage will be that I will probably disband some decently built up cities, but I will try to minimize that by careful building.



When I identify cities that I will later abandon I rename them Extra # so I don't waste shields on improvements. All I use these cities for is unit production, mostly settlers and workers

This RCP has some of the same elements of the Camp Strategy system, although the screenshots look similiar to the Pre-Fabricated Settlement strategy I used to utilize in some of my first Diety level games.:goodjob:

Camp Strategy Thread (http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90000)

Ok, here was my attempt at using this new RCP style:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/BamspeedyRCP.jpg

I hope I calculated the distances right. I found my own easy way of figuring the distance, but I was pulling my hair out at first trying to figure it out. :mad:

As you can see, the first ring is pretty dense, but I needed to utilize the lake as best I could (only fresh water source on the whole island). This might be a good model for those that like to do an ICS kind of start. The capital itself, is a little squished, but every other city is utilizing a full 12 tiles (I missed 1 grassland square-but the wheat was more important, and a few odd water tiles are unused).

Standard map:
Four cities at 2.5 distance.
Ten cities at 7.0 distance.
Five cities at 11.0 distance.

There normally would be more chances for sites, but of course the shape of the island dictated the number of sites.

Here is some figures for later on in the game.
In democracy:
First ring: ~2% waste with factory, courthouse, WLTK day (just 1 shield)
~6% waste without courthouse, factory, or WLTKD (~2 shields out of 30+).
The first ring built the pyramids, Hanging Gardens, and all the wonders after the ancient era (monarch level)

Second ring: 10% waste if you have factory, courthouse, WLTKD 20% without any of these.
If you include the capital, that is 15 cities with 10% or less waste for a map where 16 cities is the 'optimal' number.

Third ring: 30% waste with factory, courthouse, WLKD, 63% waste without any of those.

Note, these % would get better when you get Hoover's (I had no rivers on my island :mad: ) or other factory enchancements, and when you get police stations built.

If this was a pangea map, where I wouldn't be so restricted in how many cities to put in that 3rd ring, I can imagine you could have double the optimal number of cities and the worst city would have less than 50% corruption, without a forbidden palace needed.

Ok, I had trouble figuring the distance and trying to decipher the formula, so I have included my 'easy' version of figuring out the distance. ilovetoast's color coded chart helped for up to distance 5, but I was lost after that. I was getting confused because I would get different distances depending on which path I took to get there-until I realized one way wasn't really the 'shortest' path.

Picture that the map is divided in quadrants, with the capital being the very center, and the map is divided going straight north to south, and east to west. (The yellow lines in my screenshot).

You need to see which tile the quadrant would go in, to be able to accurately count the tiles and give you the 'distance' of that tile. If the tile is to the NW of your capital, then count how many tiles you should go NW to be parallel to it, counting each tile as 1. Then when you are parallel to it, go NE/SW towards it and add on .5 for each tile. (More easily explained in the screenshot).

If the tile is 'straight' east or west, south or north of your capital, then just count each tile on the way there as 1.5.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/bamspeedyRCPcounting.jpg

Originally posted by Bamspeedy
If the tile is to the NW of your capital, then count how many tiles you should go NW to be parallel to it, counting each tile as 1. Then when you are parallel to it, go NE/SW towards it and add on .5 for each tile.

This is certainly valid. Another approach, which some might consider easier and others harder, is to move diagonally (at a cost of 1.5 for each step) until you are in a straight line with the city, and then straight toward it (at a cost of 1.0 for each step).

So, in your example, Konya is 4*1.5 + 1 = 7.0. Denizli is 4*1.5 + 5 = 11.0.

I tend to use a hybrid of these two methods: I use your method if the city is "nearly" along the NE/SW or NW/SE line. If it's "nearly" N/S or E/W, then I move diagonally first.

I use the 1.5 diagonal distance until it lines up method. So if the ring is a x.5 distance I know I have to go either 1, 3 of 5 diagonals before I go straight. If the ring is a x.o distance I know I have to go 0, 2 ,4 , or 6 before going straight. This is when I'm actually building the cities on a test map.

I use the back of engineering paper which has a 5 lines per inch grid to lay out the test patterns. Then it is just a matter of transferring that pattern to the game, but after a while if you know what
distance you want the rings you don't even need the diagram.

Another thing I do sometimes is print out a map image (screenshot of the zoomed-out view), and then mark planned city locations on that.

Placing cities to share a corruption slot is an important aspect, but I also prefer to keep the total number of cities down so that can utilize the maximum number of tiles per city before Sanitation.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/citysites.gif


I try to keep all the corruption elements in mind including the OCN factor and thus want to Minimize the number of cities and their distance to the capital while Maximizing the total tiles they utilize.

Lining up the city is what I found myself doing as well. One of the great things about this strategy is that you don't have to commit fully to it. You could settle where resources suggest, then either use RCP to match that distance, or just use it when it doesn't matter much where you settle a particular city. In this way, a player could ease into this approach, without any burden or even a great deal of calculation. Unlike most strategies, first-timers could incorporate it easily, at least in part.

Originally posted by Cartouche Bee
It's about time that someone formalized this concept. I've been doing symmetrical builds for quite some time to leverage off the corruption calculations. Now I know to keep an even tighter reign on placing and positioning.

:goodjob:

[Edit] I had a game as the Koreans lately that I posted a shot of the build, I affectionately called it the Korean Death Star build out. :lol:

Yes, I noticed that one. :)

Often, however, there are so many other considerations that a nice, clean ring doesn't happen. One extra shield or food early on, or fresh water access, or connecting to a resource sooner, or occupying a strategic location, can easily make up for the loss of efficiency.

It need not be a perfect ring though. Always if there is an equal choice between two or more spots, picking one that ties in distance with another city location is profitable.

Originally posted by Ribannah




Often, however, there are so many other considerations that a nice, clean ring doesn't happen.



I think the integrety of the first ring has more flexibilty that the second ring. Once you get out there the more cities that can be evenly placed, the better. if one of those cities can't be placed perfectly for what ever reason make sure you place it further rather than closer. ;)

I had a thought about incorporating the Forbidden Palace into RCP.

Alexman says that "The FP gets a whole new set of cities where the number-of-cities factor starts at zero".

So I guess the only thing to watch out for is if a city in the outer Palace ring interferes with the outer FP ring.

I did an illustration to show what I mean... sorry about the acid colourscheme! In this example, there is a Palace on the left and a FP on the right, with colour coded distances marked to the nearest. The two sites at distance 10 from the palace (boxed in red) would interfere in a second ring about the FP if that ring was at a distance of more than 7. The blue ones also if that ring was at distance of more than 8.5.

I don't know but I assume that because they are closer to the FP, they are excluded from the Palace intervening city count, and included in and subject to the FP intervening city count? That would also mean that the sites of say distance 8, west of the FP, would not interfere in the Palace outer ring even though they were inside it?

Nice picture! You're right that taking the FP into account is very important.

I don't know but I assume that because they are closer to the FP, they are excluded from the Palace intervening city count, and included in and subject to the FP intervening city count? That would also mean that the sites of say distance 8, west of the FP, would not interfere in the Palace outer ring even though they were inside it?Building on the FP-8 squares inside the Palace-10 ring will increase corruption for all Palace-10 cities. (Except the red 7's which benefit from the FP.)

Originally posted by Pie Man
I don't know but I assume that because they are closer to the FP, they are excluded from the Palace intervening city count, and included in and subject to the FP intervening city count? That would also mean that the sites of say distance 8, west of the FP, would not interfere in the Palace outer ring even though they were inside it?

My understanding is that there is no exclusion. You count out the city number from each of the two places. And then you take the lower number.

So if City A is #6 from the palace and #7 from the forbidden, then City A has city # equal to 6, but the #7 from the FP is wasted.

Originally posted by Pie Man
I don't know but I assume that because they are closer to the FP, they are excluded from the Palace intervening city count, and included in and subject to the FP intervening city count?

That would be too convenient. ;)
They are not excluded. Such cities increase the intervening city count for both Palace and FP. That's why it's often best to have your FP and Palace with minimum overlap, even if that means putting one of them in a far corner of your Empire that would increase average distance corruption.

I was wondering if this (RCP) in any way would affect communism.
I know this may sound silly, and this is just a wild shot in the dark, in hopes there might be another programming loophole.

Logic says that communism's corruption is based solely on # of cities. But what if it is set to be based on the 'city rank' of the worst city?

So if you have say 30 cities on a standard map, corruption in communism is just pitiful. But what if 15 of the farthest away cities would all rank as the #15 city by using the ring placement? So would the game consider that you have 15 or 30 cities?

Basically, I just want clarification that the game does count each and every city in communism (regardless if they share the same distance), and not just by using the worst city as a base to figure corruption for all your other cities.

P.S.
I'm getting a vision of some sort of extreme variant (that wouldn't happen in a 'normal game') where you have your capital, and then 10-20 tiles away you have some sort of 'super ring' of a whole slew of cities and they all would rank as the #2 city, thus since you only have '2' cities, corruption should be extremely low.

Very interesting point/question, Bamspeedy.Originally posted by Bamspeedy
P.S.
I'm getting a vision of some sort of extreme variant (that wouldn't happen in a 'normal game') where you have your capital, and then 10-20 tiles away you have some sort of 'super ring' of a whole slew of cities and they all would rank as the #2 city, thus since you only have '2' cities, corruption should be extremely low. Gee, if you can get that to happen in an actual game I'll eat my clothes and give ya 20 bucks! ;)

Originally posted by WillJ
Very interesting point/question, Bamspeedy.Gee, if you can get that to happen in an actual game I'll eat my clothes and give ya 20 bucks! ;)

No problem, Huge pangea map, Chieftain level :p

I just tested this, and this is not exploitable for communism. I had a ring of 24 cities at a distance of 10, and each city I built added to the corruption. What really shows how sucky communism is, if you have only your capital, you still suffer 24% corruption (deity level, tiny map). I went from 24% corruption with just the capital, and each city added ~1% corruption, so at the end I had 46% corruption when I built the last city.

I must admit that I hate playing this way, it seems so .... mathamatical/mechanical. But, when I tried it, it really works. I did a ring of 3 and a ring of 5 due to the map. I think I would rather try and fit a 3 and a 6 in ordere to use all 12 square allowed before hospitals.

Now I have to work on draining workers from the cities I don't want and abandoning them.

Has one one tried 3 rings? What/How does that look?

Not complete rings, but in one game I was working with 5 distances from both the capital and the FP (starting with 3.5 and 5).

Originally posted by serttech2003

Has one one tried 3 rings? What/How does that look?

I have a 3/6/10 ring arrangement started on my special test map that I should finish this weekend when my playing Gotm21 gets too intense and I need a break.

Nice analysis of this strategy I did this in gotm19 but only with one ring at a distance of 3. That game was too land bounded in all directions so a second ring would not have gained much.

At any rate if the biggest gain is in the second ring then the initial ring you could be much more loose with, for instance you could use a combination of say 3 and 3.5 (which many have used inadvertantly for ages) or 2 and 2.5 for a very squarish ICS. Both of them would give you 8 inner cities so the second ring still has 9th city corruption. Whereas the two inner rings have second and fifth city corruption (4 cities in each group) with assumbably better placement.

Its a tough estimate but I think for the early game the inner ring will benefit more by better placement than equal distance from the capital, for instance settling on a river shieldland is a big loss. With that in mind and with what others have said this may be best used for your FP and/or palace jump for midgame or later. Not to mention with that in mind you could better plan your FP or palace once you've seen all the land and find a spot where two rings are unimpeded by mountains, etc.



On a completely difference note, I can't say I like the looks of this strategy in that if it is much better than "normal" placements its going to require everyone to use it to stay competative, which reduces the variability of the game greatly. And then removes one of the most hotly contended facets of the game, city placement. ;)
Since there would be no way to enforce this as an exploit I think this is merely a code bug, even when two cities are the same distance they are still ordered in some fashion and the 3rd city is still the 3rd city, this is more a fault of the corruption algorithms than a plain error on firaxis' part.

Originally posted by Smirk
Its a tough estimate but I think for the early game the inner ring will benefit more by better placement than equal distance from the capital, for instance settling on a river shieldland is a big loss.

I certainly think this is a reasonable alternative. The larger the number of cities in the ring, the more important to have them all at the same distance (i.e., the larger the benefit from RCS over random placement). The outer ring (generally) has more cities, so exact placement is more important there.

That said, I find in a couple of tries that it can work pretty well to stick with a fixed distance for the inner ring, but not build all the sites. If you choose a small ring, then it may well have more sites than the number of cities you really want to have that close in, and they overlap quite a bit, so the ring cities on either side can generally use the spaces from the cities you leave out. For example, in GOTM20, I had an inner ring at distance 3.5; there are 8 sites at that distance; one was unbuildable water; one was on the edge of the coast and would have mostly had water spaces available to it; one was surrounded by a fair amount of desert which isn't that valuable to work; so I only built on the other 5. Also of course I chose the 3.5 distance based on the fact that it worked well on this particular map, particularly considering the resources and the availability of fresh water.

[Note Added: the ICS style is to build even more cities than this, but I think that ICS in the inner core (as opposed to farther out) isn't particularly compatible with RCP; RCP gets its benefit from having a ring with a lot of cities with low corruption, and so it doesn't really make sense to have a bunch of small cities close in, not producing all that much (because they are all small) but adding corruption to all of the cities in the outer ring.]

BTW, I don't particularly agree that settling on a river shield grassland is a bad location. Once you grow to size 7, the city core generates an extra shield for the shield on the terrain, so settling on the shield grassland and operating an adjacent regular grassland gives you just the same result as settling on the regular grassland and operating the shield grassland. When your city is smaller than that, you do potentially lose a shield, but often when your city is small you have several reasonable tiles to work anyway.

And, aside from the shield, settling on rivers is much better than settling away from them.


With that in mind and with what others have said this may be best used for your FP and/or palace jump for midgame or later.


In GOTM20 I found that the game went so fast, and my main core was so productive, that I had the game well in hand before I got any significant amount of output from my second (FP) core. I think that if you're playing fairly aggressively, that this may end up being true pretty consistently: you can already roll over the AIs by the time you get your second core going. Perhaps this will be less true on huge maps; I'm not sure.


On a completely difference note, I can't say I like the looks of this strategy in that if it is much better than "normal" placements its going to require everyone to use it to stay competative, which reduces the variability of the game greatly. And then removes one of the most hotly contended facets of the game, city placement. ;)


I don't really think that RCP does remove much variability. Several people have expressed an intention to try some form of RCP in GOTM21. It will be interesting to see what those games look like, but my suspicion is that they will all look quite different. There are still a lot of choices to make.


Since there would be no way to enforce this as an exploit I think this is merely a code bug, even when two cities are the same distance they are still ordered in some fashion and the 3rd city is still the 3rd city, this is more a fault of the corruption algorithms than a plain error on firaxis' part.

As you say, it's hard to ban: How can you tell people they can't build cities where they like? So unless Firaxis decides to change the formulas in a patch, I think it's just something we have to live with, for better or worse. I don't think it makes the games less fun on its own, but I do think that perhaps it's one of a number of game techniques that people are learning to take advantage of that all together are too powerful, making the game too easy to win quickly and decisively, even at high difficulty levels. Every technique that we discover and refine and that the AI doesn't understand and can't use, puts it at more and more of a competitive deficit. That's sort of too bad, but I don't see what to do about it.

Originally posted by Smirk
On a completely difference note, I can't say I like the looks of this strategy in that if it is much better than "normal" placements its going to require everyone to use it to stay competative, which reduces the variability of the game greatly. And then removes one of the most hotly contended facets of the game, city placement. ;)

I don't agree. RCP means you really have to think much more about city placement. Earlier, you just plopped them down in good locations (next to coast/river, near bonus/luxuries), but now you have another factor to include, corruption. I don't see how this would make city placement any easier.

Control Freak, That’s exactly what I was thinking (and working hard to implement). I have several plans ready for trial but the thing is that the ton of planning is a bit hard to handle and that the map might influence your pre-designed plans.

Smirk, I would agree with you only for the first part of the game, and this would go with the switch from Capital to Forbidden Palace. But my test trials were usually for the first ring (didn’t get to use the second ring), and still saw a lot of improvement over my original productivity. What I would do is consider the ring distance based on strategic reasons. This is how I would choose between 3, 3.5 and 4 distance which all allowed 8 cities.

I don’t know about you but I prefer the 3.5 – 7.5 ring city distances. They look very good and allow more cities in ring two with enough tiles for growth in ring one. Consequently I prepared these two designs. The first one is a standard design RCP (3.5, 7.5).

The second is a Jump Capitol design. The legend follows: The numbers in parenthesis are distance to Capitol and distance to Forbidden Palace. X says that the city will be disbanded. The result will be:

Stage one: around capitol: Ring one 4 cities @ 2.5 (A and B). Ring one and a half 4 cities @ 3.5 (C and T). Ring two 5 cities @ 5 (D and E).

Stage two. Capitol is abandoned. T cities are abandoned. around FP: Ring one: 4 cities @ 3.5 (A and F*) + 4 new cities @ 3.5 (also A). Ring two: 6 cities @ 7.5 (B, C and D) + 14 new cities. Ring three: 3 cities @ 10.

I guess you’ll agree this sounds very good in theory. The real problem is applying it. Like I said before I’m applying “Jump Capitol RCP” derived strategies in GOTM 21 but matching the theory with the map seems like a disaster for now.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/rcp.jpg

Originally posted by DaviddesJ
I don't really think that RCP does remove much variability. Several people have expressed an intention to try some form of RCP in GOTM21. It will be interesting to see what those games look like, but my suspicion is that they will all look quite different. There are still a lot of choices to make.


I don't expect we'll have to wait long, I assume at least 10 people are going to try it this gotm.


So unless Firaxis decides to change the formulas in a patch,...


That is if its a design error. If not say hello to rings! ;)

Many powerful strategies, valid or not have been cut back, some severly enough that they remained useless for years like pop-rushing. I like the strategy and it seems obvious enough that it can be a generic skill for anyone, but at the same time it seems to fill in a spot of the corruption algorithm so much that it then looks like a flaw in the corruption algorithm.

Originally posted by Smirk
That is if its a design error. If not say hello to rings! ;)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'm sure no one at Firaxis thought about it, one way or the other, when they wrote the code. Whether it's an "error" is rather subjective.

Many powerful strategies, valid or not have been cut back, some severly enough that they remained useless for years like pop-rushing.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but I don't know all of the history. Pop rushing certainly isn't useless in the current version (PTW 1.21f).

My impression is that Firaxis considers themselves pretty much done with fixing game balance issues. Sure, there were some changes in early patches, but nothing in a long time now. If they are open to some changes, there are some other things than this that I'd like to see changed (i.e., bigger exploits for the human players).

Wow, powerful idea, great research. I'll try it on the next GOTM with a favorable map.

You gotta love a game discussion forum that includes references to engineering paper, spreadsheets, and homemade graphical overlays! Where do you all find the time??? The culture here is as enjoyable as the strategic analysis!

Originally posted by DaviddesJ
I'm sure no one at Firaxis thought about it, one way or the other, when they wrote the code.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but I don't know all of the history. Pop rushing certainly isn't useless in the current version (PTW 1.21f).


Thats my point. Many of the game design and balance issues were the same thing. Pop-rushing as a way of life was obviously not considered in early game testing since it was very powerful. (BTW This is circa 1.17 back when Civ3 first came out.) The initial knee-jerk reaction was to cut the production down to half in addition to some other changes. It wasn't truelly fixed until around civ1.25: back was the 20s production, no bottom to the unhappiness and the unhappiness stays with the civ when abandoning a city. (This isn't the case when the AI does it, only the human.)

I'm not so sure about the game balance issues, why would they just stop when there is still another expansion planned? They may not be updating Civ, but PTW and their expansion may get the changes.

I don't want to sidetrack the thread, so only time will tell weither firaxis cares or not.

Perhaps a not-crazy idea is to try to time the palace jump to coincide with a change in government (for non-religious civ). This would give several turns to relocate cities while not worrying about increased corruption from the overlap. Unfortunately, you can't rush production in anarchy, so you can't get the people out of your old cities, which is really the time-consuming part of the move. So there's no great way to do it, except accepting several turns of overlap, or abandoning many citizens. Unless there's something I'm missing.

I agree with Smirk and the others who value strategic placement over RCP in the first ring of cities.

In the short term, an extra bonus shield or freshwater can outweigh the corruption benefits of first ring RCP. In the long term, these cities will be the first to benefit from roads, republic, courthouses, and WLTKD; eventually there won't be any corruption for RCP to eliminate.

The second ring is where RCP really shines. RCP gives increasing returns as the number of cities increases, and you can fit a lot of cities into the second ring. There isn't as much pressure to have immediately productive second-ring cities; you can afford to place them correctly and watch them grow into powerhouses.

For a palace jump, you should ignore first-ring RCP and concentrate on getting a good second ring around the FP.

Originally posted by DaviddesJ
Unfortunately, you can't rush production in anarchy, so you can't get the people out of your old cities, which is really the time-consuming part of the move.

Shield adding processes still work, like cutting a forest or disbanding a unit. Just get the settler almost finished, revolt then disband or cut the forest and the settler should pop. I don't know if I've ever done this myself, so there may be some food micromanagement, not sure.

Originally posted by Smirk
Shield adding processes still work, like cutting a forest or disbanding a unit. Just get the settler almost finished, revolt then disband or cut the forest and the settler should pop.

I guess you could do this by disbanding units. But if you have several cities with 6+ pop to get out, that's a lot of shields of units to disband (i.e., you could use 6 turns of anarchy to get 6 workers out of a size-6 city, but you'd have to have 240 shields of units to disband, which seems hardly worthwhile).

Originally posted by Smirk
I don't expect we'll have to wait long, I assume at least 10 people are going to try it this gotm.

:thumbsup: 1 of the 10 getting caught up here for the first time...i had not noticed this thread before. i would like to thank the guys for posting the graphics for determining distance, because much like Moonsinger, I was having a hard time figuring it out exactly from the text.

I can definately see a difference applying this technique in gotm21...but there certainly are enough variables (how far to make each ring mostly) in there that i think comaparing GOTM games of people who used the strategy should be educational.

this is a powerful idea and I appreciate the work that went into it, might be mandatory at higher levels. But for most who play at lower levels, I would suggest you use the more pragmatic less esoteric approach. Expand toward strategic resources, the trade resources, and the natural boundaries of your civ, fill in the empty space later. Let's face if you get all the 8 trade goods for your civ and the right wonders your citys will spend a large portion of the game in WLTKD and corruption is not an issue then. If you have steel and saltpeter and your neighbor dosen't he's basically dead meat.

Question for DaviddesJ (or anybody else that tested the RCP and the corruption formula):

Say I have a 3.5 ring around the Capitol and I build the FP on the other side of the map. Will the new ring around the FP be influenced by the one around the Capitol?

Should I also build the ring around the FP at 3.5 to minimize corruption?

In my game I built rings of 3.5, 7 and 10 around the FP and rings of 5.5, 8 and 14 around the Palace. Is this less than optimal?

The two sets of rings are entirely independent (unless they overlap). It makes no difference whether you choose the same distances or different distances. In other words, you did fine.

Yndy, would the palace be in Berlin, by any chance?

DaviddesJ, what confuses me about the "overlap" question is that, in theory, two rings will eventually overlap. I guess the ideal would be that the overalpping area is so far from either core that it is totally corrupt. But if a city could theoretically fall under the "gravitational pull" of both palace cities, is it safe to say that the palace it's geographically closest to will dominate... or would it be where it ranks in terms of city number for that series of rings?

For each city, figure out which core it's closer to (Palace or FP), and then compute the corruption based on its distance to, and rank from, that core.

If the Palace and FP are relatively close together, then the rings will "overlap". Essentially, that means that some of the locations are wasted, and you aren't getting the full benefits of RCP.

For example, in Yndy's example (rings at 3.5/7/10 from the Palace and 5.5/8/14 from the FP), suppose that a city at distance 10 from the Palace is also distance 7 from the FP. Then the Palace distance is probably irrelevant (the corruption based on the FP will be lower), so there's no point in putting the city at that particular location, as there's no benefit to fitting into the distance-10 ring, and it's not getting the benefit of RCP.

Now, suppose the city at distance 10 from the Palace is distance 11 from the FP. Then the ring placement does help that city get low corruption in terms of its distance from the Palace. But the city is a misaligned city from the point of view of the FP: it increases the corruption of all of the ring cities at distance 14 from the FP, even though that city itself isn't getting any benefit from the FP.

Hope this helps.

Just out of curiosity have you compared this rather complex formula with a slightly simpler method where you just count the number of squares in the NE,NW,SE,SW directions ONLY to come up with a total distance from the origin?

I noticed that by going exactly 5 squares (and building on the "6th" square that my corruption stayed extremely low in all the cities and I was able to expand my next ring using the exact same formula and the 2nd ring was also extremely efficient. I also noticed that I was able to very efficiently use the map using this strategy (mind you 5 square in the same direction would waste 3 useable squares in the middle and I tended to go 4 and 1 or 3 and 2 to space the cities out).

I was also surprised at how easy it was to then find squares for which the same formula would apply to all adjacent cities as well so that just about all my cities obeyed this rule for distance between them???

Any comments?

DaviidesJ, thanks for the thorough explanation. You answered questions I had yet to formulate.

One of RCP's drawing cards is that while not as simple as 2+2, it's fairly easy to grasp its concept and, having done so, doesn't require high game-playing skill to employ it. RCP helps everyone, but it should supercharge the games of mid-level players.

This is working out better than I thought. I had no intention to restrict myself to use this in GOTM21. But after unintentionally place 3 cities in RCP position, I kept to it and liked the reduce corruption very much.

Originally posted by Txurce
Yndy, would the palace be in Berlin, by any chance?
No, even if I considered it.

I'm contemplating whether the AI tries to build a 5.5 RCP ring or it just happens to do so. I spotted several positions to build the palace on former AI lands and to get 2-4 cities at 5.5 RCP.

5.5 is decent distance for minimal overlap actually.

The AI placement algorithm seems to aim for covering all territory with minimal overlap (OCP style), which often puts their cities 5.5 apart. So (at least in my limited experience), when I try to modify their existing city placement to an RCP style, I often end up with a 5.5 ring.

IMHO this is ok if the FP is well inland, so that you get a complete or nearly complete 5.5 ring, and also if you don't happen to hit many mountains or lakes or other tiles you really don't want to build on. It may be too far out for a good inner ring if the FP is near the coast. Of course, unlike the initial place, you can generally choose where your FP goes; it doesn't have to be the AI's capital, so it's usually easier to get a good location, as opposed to the potluck you get when you start.

Originally posted by nimbus99ca
Just out of curiosity have you compared this rather complex formula with a slightly simpler method where you just count the number of squares in the NE,NW,SE,SW directions ONLY to come up with a total distance from the origin?


Effectively what you are saying is that you have two oscillating rings in each level, 3 squares going along the tiles is a distance of 3, whereas going diagonal (across the tiles) its 3.5. A simple case of this would have 4 cities at 3 which will all have the same corruption as a second city, and then 4 at 3.5 will have all the same corruption as a 6th city.


This was talked about briefly in the first page, and the difference in corruption will be small for most maps, and you could stand to benefit by more flexibility in placement. But for the second ring and beyond this wouldn't really help out all that much unless you stay under the optimum number of cities for a map.

My method of counting just imagine you have a knight piece in chess and it turns direction each time it hits one of the eight axis. And in cases it did not hit right on the axis, it is a mirror image around the axis.

Yikes! I just spent 2 hours trying to figure out what distance to put my second ring after popping an advanced tribe in a solo game. Would anyone care to take a look at a picture and make some recommendations? (there are two slight mistakes in the second maroon distance (7.5) but just ignore the two tiles that are wrongly colored)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/Speaker_-_Map.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/Speaker_-_CRP.jpg

RCP gives you very little advantage in this start. No matter what radius you choose, over half your second ring locations will be in the ocean.

You can still reduce corruption by placing a few cities at equal distance, but you won't see any powerful low-corruption rings.

You sure Dave? CB's picture a few pages back was similar to this one, although he had a bit more room. I could fit in 4-6 cities in the first ring and 6-8 in the second ring at either 7 or 7.5. It might be worth it, no?

Sorry, I was a too general in my last post. I meant to address the 2nd ring question.

That first ring with New York does look good. You could fit 5 cities in with no problems, and they all get a nice early production boost. The 6th city (4 tiles southeast) would have to give up freshwater to fit in.

In the second ring you could fit in 7 cities at radius 7.5, but a couple of those are in bad locations (on top of shielded grassland with no freshwater; in the middle of 1-food tiles). RCP certainly wouldn't hurt, but I can't see a huge benefit either.

The pink dot next to the 6th city hides a wheat resource, fyi, and I'm not sure if it is off the water. It looks like it might be on the river.

I've been taking lots of screenshots and doing some editing for my own "urban planning." Thought this might help:

http://members.cox.net/dox4242/Speaker_-_Map-rings.jpg

Without regard to recourses, here's how the numbers add up:

(+x indicates predicted water squares, not guarantee of accuracy, of course ;) )

dist......city sites
4.........7
4.5......5
5.........4
5.5......5
6.........6
6.5......7
7.........6+2
7.5......8+1
8.........7+3
8.5......9+2
9.......10+3
9.5.....11+2

I will post an updated screenshot sometime soon here. I've played a bunch more turns and have finished most of (all? can't remember) my first ring.

I can't really comment on the situation above, not having reviewed it carefully, but I thought that I'd offer some quick analysis numbers for all land squares (ie pangea) in the target area:

As noted in the initial charts, but not counting adjacent squares:
Distance 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 ... 7.0
# Sites 5 5 5 9 9 9 13 13 13 17 21

More analysis shows that you can maximize the number of squares used at 5.5 (178 squares) counting shared squares as 0.5, and unused as 0. The best % utilization is at 5.0 in a "crossed H" pattern, with 7 cities, 10 shared & 2 unused for 95.2%.

Ciao!

I've spent ages trying to work out a decent RCP placement during this month's GOTM (printed out the map so far and put lots of coloured numbers on the tiles!), and am thinking about adding an app into my CIVReplay stuff to do this. What I'm thinking is you open up a .SAV, it shows you the map (as seen in CRpViewer/CRpSettleLoc but with FOW), you select a city from the list of those available, it overlays the map with pretty colours and useful RCP distances. Would anyone be interested?

Originally posted by Dianthus
... and am thinking about adding an app into my CIVReplay stuff to do this ... Would anyone be interested?
Yes!! I think that would be a wonderful present! I mostly gave up on RCP this month (I managed distances of just a few early towns) because it was so tedious (to me :) ) working out all the options. Decided to just barrel ahead without. I'd love a utility like that and would use it.

One request from me: allow selection of any tile as the center, not just a selection of any city. I hit my limit of frustration thinking about RCP this month while trying to pick the best location for my new Palace town - I was choosing among possible center locations before settling it and eventually gave it up, just picking the place I liked most without considering RCP.

Me too. I was thinking about a photoshop overlay but using an interactive screen that comes from an existing sav would be awesome!

I've downloaded your CivReplay but never fired it up. This would be a great excuse for me to get it going.

Keep up the good work.:goodjob:

Originally posted by SirPleb
I'd love a utility like that and would use it.

I'll probably get this into the next release of the CIVReplay stuff at the end of this month, assuming this months GOTM doesn't steal all my "free" time :).

Originally posted by SirPleb
One request from me: allow selection of any tile as the center, not just a selection of any city.
I'm not sure I'll get this into the 1st release. I don't currently have a way of associating a mouse click with a particular tile on the map. That's why I mentioned the city list as it's easier! I'll give it a go though as I want to be a able to do context sensitive stuff in CRpViewer/CRpSettleLoc anyway.

Originally posted by ControlFreak
I've downloaded your CivReplay but never fired it up. This would be a great excuse for me to get it going.
ControlFreak, make sure you look at the latest version (I updated it about a week ago). It looks a lot better with the forest/jungle/hills/mountains/rivers/resources!

I realized I never even installed the first one. Just downloaded the zip. I trashed it and got version 2.1. It looks great! (other than the part about everyone elses lines being higher than mine:lol: )

Question, will this work for 1.27 patched games? I'm guessing you'll have to release another version. (Sorry for threadjacking.) I think RCP overlay will be a fabulous feature!

Originally posted by Qitai
RCP
Notice that my 3 distance town and 3.5 distance town has the same corruption level. Break away from game to do some testing on corruption. Test result shows that I always get same corruption for cities at n and n+0.5 (e.g. 10 and 10.5 gets same corruption). [/B]

GOTM spoiler link deleted

Trying to gather the info in one place. Thanks Qitai. :goodjob:

Edit: Sorry Chieftess :blush: And thanks

DP

Has it been confirmed that for "City Rank" in the corruption calculations is only based on the number of cities closer to the capital than the city in question? Or is there a secondary criteria for determining rank such as the age of the city?

Originally posted by sysyphus
Has it been confirmed that for "City Rank" in the corruption calculations is only based on the number of cities closer to the capital than the city in question? Or is there a secondary criteria for determining rank such as the age of the city?

When I first started testing I was labeling cities by order of creation and distance from palace. Sometimes outer cities were placed before inner cities and the age of a city never made any difference. All cities in any particular ring all had the same corruption.

As far as anyone knows, and until we get evidence suggesting otherwise, rank depends only on distance. :)

I believe every time you place a new city (or capture one, etc) the corruption is recalculated. I've noticed this in a recent game where I got a hut settler and settled it a good distance away from the capital, and then once I placed my third city closer the corruption increased a noticable amount.

There also seems to be a minor slow down (especially with a lot of cities) when placing cities so thats a clue that some intensive calculations are going on. It can only be cultural borders and/or corruption.

Originally posted by Smirk
I believe every time you place a new city (or capture one, etc) the corruption is recalculated. I've noticed this in a recent game where I got a hut settler and settled it a good distance away from the capital, and then once I placed my third city closer the corruption increased a noticable amount.

There also seems to be a minor slow down (especially with a lot of cities) when placing cities so thats a clue that some intensive calculations are going on. It can only be cultural borders and/or corruption.

The corruption of a city is a function of the distance from the palace and the number of cities closer to the palace so any time you place a city closer than an existing city the corruption of the farther city is recalculated.

If you had an inner circle with 4 cities and an outer circle of 12 cities then decided to double the number of inner cities to 8 you would notice a marked increase in the corruption of the outer 12.

So is it confirmed that city rank rounds down the numbers?

I don't want to screw up my current games to find out. ;)

Originally posted by anarres
So is it confirmed that city rank rounds down the numbers?

I don't want to screw up my current games to find out. ;)
Yes, it's confirmed. Take a look at the Do you think you understand corruption? (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1169878#post1169878) thread.

Originally posted by Smirk
I believe every time you place a new city (or capture one, etc) the corruption is recalculated.

Yes, definitely.

There is a bug where corruption isn't recalculated when you build a city. Once you move a slider it is though - it should be easy to reproduce:

- Check F1 corruption.
- Build a city near the FP/Capital (so it affects the city rank for many cities).
- Check F1 corruption, it is the same as before.
- Move a slider and set it back, it is increased.

I have not checked yet to see if not moving the sliders will actually give you the gold that should be lost to corruption, but I will do that later.

I suspect the bug is that the F1 screen isn't updated when you build the new city, not that the corruption in existing cities isn't recalculated at all. I can't test it right now (I'm typing this on my cellphone!), but when I was originally investigating RCP, I believe I did see that corruption and waste in outer cities would go up when I built a closer city.

There are other situations where the F1 screen doesn't update until you move a slider (e.g., if you add a new luxury, happiness on F1 isn't automatically updated).

duplicate post

Any ideas, rules of thumb how to build the ring(s) around the forbidden palace? Probably not to everlap, is that right?
Pls share the knowledge... ;)

I am going to give this strategy a go in my next game, my only worry is that the rings have too much cross over between cities.
this is i have found can greatly weaken cities.

i mostly build cities with none or only a few squares of cross over.

Originally posted by garner
I am going to give this strategy a go in my next game, my only worry is that the rings have too much cross over between cities.
this is i have found can greatly weaken cities.

i mostly build cities with none or only a few squares of cross over.

IMHO, a dense build, with a lot of overlap is far more powerful, as there is a lot less corruption this way, compared to widely spaced cities...

If you are talking about having your core cities overlap then surely you are going to suffer greater problems then if if your first eight cities which are going to be close to the capital anyway have nearly all their resources to themselves.

the dense build can make sense if you want to grow a large empire after this initial 8 city build. i agree a far flung empire suffers alot of problems in corruption.
but the cities close to the capital will lose more long term if they only can use 15 of their squares. thats more wasteful

The decisions you are talking about are to have a high productivity in the ancient and middle age or in the industrial and modern age. You don't need 15 tiles to work if your maximum size is 12. Many of the players here will dominate the game before the end of the middle ages. In that case, overlapping 3-4 or even more tiles allows you to work all of the tiles closest to your capital (least corrupt).

0-1 tile overlap is better for a modern age victory like spaceship, or if you're not fast enough to win earlier.

True if you aim is to reduce corruption to the point that you are stiffled late game.
Personally i find that corruption is only a problem outside your core cites. so there is no need for this huge overlapping.
whats more you are right, i do like to play it a little slower in the early game and dominate the industrial age onwards.
but the fact of the matter is, if you are conquering other nations, then they are going to be fringe cities any way so how does that help you.

Originally posted by garner
Personally i find that corruption is only a problem outside your core cites. so there is no need for this huge overlapping.

One of my biggest leaps forwards in playing the higher difficulty levels was in improving my initial settlement speed. A lot of this came down to settling the initial cities close together and micromanaging the allocation of shared good/improved tiles. This may not be so important on easier levels, but on harder levels you really need to start quick or the AI just runs away with it!

As promised earlier (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1168632#post1168632) I've been working on a tool to help with RCP placement. It's pretty well complete now, so I'm intending to release it real soon now (this weekend, or Monday, so should be in time for all you GOTM nuts :)).

Here's a tanalizing screenshot for you all :
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads5/CRpRingsPreviewSmall.jpg
Click for a large version (159Kb) (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads5/CRpRingsPreview.jpg)

I'll be releasing it along with my CIVReplay stuff here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52902).

Originally posted by Dianthus
Here's a tanalizing screenshot for you all
I'm drooling, tantalizing indeed! :)

Does it read tile info out of the .sav file, or .gifs/.jpg/etc?

Can it highlight the 20 tile radius (and maybe even the overlap?) Select and deselect cities in the rings (are the highlighted rings selectable?) and show a ratio of single/shared workable tiles under each city site? (12/20=60%)

Sorry, to pummel with suggestions (that was what I was looking at when taking a dozen screenshots and doing a lot of point-and-clicking).

Otherwise, that program looks great, I can't wait to try it out. :crazyeye:

PS: I thought the .5 rings counted separately (3, 3.5, 4, 4.5....)

Originally posted by Dox4242
PS: I thought the .5 rings counted separately (3, 3.5, 4, 4.5....)
There's a post a page back in this thread by Yndy about Qitai's recent discovery that the x.5 distances count the same as x. So there are actually 1/2 as many rings as originally thought. This will give RCP another big boost in value of course :)

Originally posted by Dox4242
Does it read tile info out of the .sav file, or .gifs/.jpg/etc?

It reads out of a .sav file. It uses the FOW info and hides resources not visible in the game by default, so should avoid spoiling your game.

Originally posted by Dox4242
Can it highlight the 20 tile radius (and maybe even the overlap?)

Currently it highlight 3 rings, the distance is configurable. By overlap do you mean overlap between Palace/Forbidden Palace? Currently there is only one centre, so no.

Originally posted by Dox4242
Select and deselect cities in the rings (are the highlighted rings selectable?)

No, though I can see that would be useful. The only intelligent thing it does (other than showing the rings) is to not highlight locations that can't be settled because of terrain (coast/sea/ocean/mountains). I'll probably have to do some work on this in the future because it's possible to change which terrain is settleable, but it's fine for default rules.

Originally posted by Dox4242
and show a ratio of single/shared workable tiles under each city site? (12/20=60%)

No, it doesn't. What constitutes workable?

Originally posted by Dox4242
Sorry, to pummel with suggestions (that was what I was looking at when taking a dozen screenshots and doing a lot of point-and-clicking).

I'm interested in suggestions for future releases. I won't change much about the current version before releasing it though as there isn't much time before GOTM23 is release!

Originally posted by Dox4242
Otherwise, that program looks great, I can't wait to try it out. :crazyeye:

Cheers!

Originally posted by Dox4242
PS: I thought the .5 rings counted separately (3, 3.5, 4, 4.5....)
I see Sir Pleb answered this. Qitai's discovery was timed to perfection, just before I started this project, saving me having to change the display engine to be able to show floats rather than integers :).

Dianthus,

i will look into closer concentrations of the core cities. but i am having no problems winning games at emperor. with the way i play which is optismising city placement rather than getting over worried about corruption. i win game late, by dominating the later ages and give up wonders in the early game.

but as i have said my next game i will try the RCP approach, as it looks strong

>By overlap do you mean overlap between Palace/Forbidden Palace? Currently there is only one centre, so no.

I was envisioning the de/selecting cities option, and showing the 5x5, lopsided 'X' around each city. Any tiles shared by cities would be darkened, or something. Another question: does it read the location of the Palace from the save, or can one select which tile to use as center? Zoom function?


>>show a ratio of single/shared workable tiles under each city site? (12/20=60%)

>No, it doesn't. What constitutes workable?

The 20 tiles around the cities that the citizens work on. These numbers should be polled after de/selecting cities within each ring. You could probably do a couple math loops and come out with an weighted suggestion, once the ring distance is set (maybe even suggest an optimal ring selection). That's a lot of number crunching, though. :(

However, if you like crunching numbers, you could calculate food production and population potential (with and without improved tiles?), and suggest optimal placements for cities of size 12 and 20 (or maybe a variable city size).

Well, I should stop before trying out the first version. :)

hm, I am gone for 8 weks and the most important thing since PTW came out pops up...

I have used RCP in a number of games now...

Even if your map isn't ideal for 2 complete rings you can still use equidistant cities to great use. There are people here who look at maps and say "that's not suited to RCP", but really RCP is now part and parcel of every cities placement.

I have also come to realise that in certain situations a tightly packed close second ring and a very lightweight inner ring (3 or 4 cities) can be ultra-powerful. With a city rank of 4 or 5 for all your outer ring cities you can get 15 or 20 very powerful cities, and you can still get maybe 12 tiles per city.

I have also started relying much more on getting aleader to build my FP core. This is then (usually) a much more optimal RCP layout, with an inner ring of 6 or 7 cities, and an outer ring of 20 or so. My games have yet to get to the point of realising this second FP core since they are all PBEM's and have some time to go before I am there.

The only other strategy I have found is when your capital is not optimal. Instead of Palace jumping I have found it more useful to build my FP in the 'center' spot of my rings, and have the capital in the inner ring of my FP core. Then a leader can be used to jump the Capital - in the meantime you get even better corruption reduction. The only downside is needing 'OCP' number of cities before you can build the FP - but until then your corruption is still low anyway, since you are building cities close to your capital.

Firstly, I am a big perfectionist, so all this optimum game mechanics stuff really makes my day! Cheers to all you hardworking people! :goodjob:

Now, onto the subject. I like the idea of combining several of the techniques that enable me to be a 'builder' to the fullest. In case you don't understand the title above, they are Ring City Placement (obviously), Optimal City Placement, the Palace Jump and Alexman's hybrid idea (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1070698#post1070698). First, at the beginning of the game, plan to have the centre of your rings not at the current capital, but at the first city you found. Note that the (then) capital should be in the first ring of the future RCP arrangement. After the position of future RCP centrepoint is sorted, build rings around it as you normally would your capital using RCP.

OCP comes into it with what ring distance you choose - on larger maps I'd choose maybe 5.5 (/5) as the first ring. What's important is to keep as many workable squares per city available - in the case of the 5.5 distance ring you just have to put a city on one city site, then miss out the city site to the side, then put one on the next site (i.e. every other city site). This leaves you with a ring of minimal corruption cities with ~16 workable squares each! The second ring could then be all the way out to distance 10 or something similar, again trying for as many workable squares as possible (preferably without wasting land). Loadsa workable squares = big production ring.

The Palace Jump comes into what I was saying earlier about how the capital wasn't the centre of your rings. You should have worked out by now that at some point (well, as early as possible) you're meant to build the Forbidden Palace in the centre of the rings. Then that can lead to the almighty Palace Jump...and guess what. You can start another load of rings around the new Palace site, whether it's on the other end of your continent, the other side of the world or whatever!

And finally we come onto where to put the rest of the cities...well, we use Alexman's hybrid approach of course! Shove the remaining cities in whatever beneficial positions you want (coast, wheat floodplains, resources...) knowing that it won't adversely affect your ultimate production rings, and knowing that you don't have to have the hassle of calculating any more distances (or that you don't have to settle on that bonus resource). Plus, the corruption in the outer cities won't be too bad anyway, unless you have a huge empire, at which point it won't really matter.

Welp, that's the basic theory behind my idea/combination of other peoples' ideas. One of the beauties of it is that it is fairly flexible - put the rings at whatever distances suit your playing style, and it won't make it any worse (unless you're perfectionist builder types like me), and you could have more than two rings if you want. Another big benefit is that you get a much wider choice for your FP centre position than you would for the starting capital (without making things more difficult for yourself). If you're on the coast, place the FP centre inland to get as large a production ring as possible. If you have scouted around and see mountains or bonus resources in annoying positions, try to place the FP centre so that all other cities can be founded on the ring without having to miss out. With Qitai's x.5 ring discovery it makes it even more flexible. etc etc.

Finally, note that this is all blissful speculation - I have yet to try it out due to my addiction to strategy posts until I find the ultimate playing style that best suits me. What do you guys think of it?

Originally posted by blobglob
Firstly, I am a big perfectionist, so all this optimum game mechanics stuff really makes my day! Cheers to all you hardworking people! :goodjob:

You may want to read Qitai's latest discovery in A Rank Corruption Discovery and Exploit to negate rank corruption (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62851), it would make your strategy less than perfect :).

Gah, now that's some bad timing. I could at least have posted all that before Qitai's discovery. Heh, but thanks anyway.

Edit: Hm, you could use the Palace Jump to get the Capital to the other side of the map though. So it's not useless. :)

Edit2: Except RCP round the the FP doesn't make any difference...so it is useless...ack.

............................F F F
........................F F E E E F F
....................F F E E D D D E E F F
................F F E E D D C C C D D E E F F
............F F E E D D C C B B B C C D D E E F F
..........F E E D D C C B B A A A B B C C D D E E F
........F E D D C C B B A A 9 9 9 A A B B C C D D E F
........F E D C B B A A 9 9 8 8 8 9 9 A A B B C D E F
......F E D C B A A 9 9 8 8 7 7 7 8 8 9 9 A A B C D E F
......F E D C B A 9 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 A B C D E F
....F E D C B A 9 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 A B C D E F
....F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 5 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
..F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 4 3 3 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
..F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
..F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
..F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 4 4 3 3 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
....F E D C B A 9 8 7 6 5 5 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
....F E D C B A 9 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 A B C D E F
......F E D C B A 9 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 A B C D E F
......F E D C B A A 9 9 8 8 7 7 7 8 8 9 9 A A B C D E F
........F E D C B B A A 9 9 8 8 8 9 9 A A B B C D E F
........F E D D C C B B A A 9 9 9 A A B B C C D D E F
..........F E E D D C C B B A A A B B C C D D E E F
............F F E E D D C C B B B C C D D E E F F
................F F E E D D C C C D D E E F F
....................F F E E D D D E E F F
........................F F E E E F F
............................F F F

Hey Jansen, even better, you could use my CRpRings program to overlay the rings directly onto the map for the game you're currently playing. See the link in my sig.

Originally posted by Dianthus
Hey Jansen, even better, you could use my CRpRings program to overlay the rings directly onto the map for the game you're currently playing. See the link in my sig.

What link? I don't see any link in your sig except your CivReplayer. If you have a CRpRings program, I would like to try it out. Thanks!:)

Originally posted by Moonsinger
What link? I don't see any link in your sig except your CivReplayer. If you have a CRpRings program, I would like to try it out. Thanks!:)
You know, I'd forgotten to update my sig to mention the new 2.2 version of the CIVReplay stuff. CRpRings is included in the 2.2 distribution. Go to the CIVReplay link and take a look at the screenshots :).

Originally posted by Dianthus
You know, I'd forgotten to update my sig to mention the new 2.2 version of the CIVReplay stuff. CRpRings is included in the 2.2 distribution. Go to the CIVReplay link and take a look at the screenshots :).

Thanks!:) I just tested it out and left my message in that thread.

Originally posted by Dianthus
Hey Jansen, even better, you could use my CRpRings program to overlay the rings directly onto the map for the game you're currently playing. See the link in my sig.

Yeah, I know there were much better things around, however, I had developed this ASCII chart before I had actually registered in this forum, but dirctly after I had read David's RCP concept. Having already been familiar with Alex's corruption work from Apolyton, this was easy for me to comprehend right off.

So, in order to better understand the concept myself, I took the liberty of plotting each absolute value on a monospace font page in Textedit, starting with one quarter, mirroring it, then doubling it upwards. Yes, I did that totally by hand and mathematical reasoning.

Think of it less as a helpful post and more as an object d'art, or something that anyone could use (you have my permission to steal and post it) in a text-only FAQ or guide.

Oh, that is, only if it contains no errors.

I have just tried out the RCP planner. This is truely superb. I have been a big fan of the replay wiewer for a while now. Replaying crp files of different games is one of the highlights of GOTM for me, but this really is the business. :goodjob: :goodjob:

Great work Dianthus. You're the best.

Your August Sirs,

I am a newbee and was lucky enough to read the original post on RCP because I was frustrated with corruption (who is not?). Not having the benifit of your "ring" concept at that time, I worked out the tightest fit of "fat X" city boundaries topologically. It is interesting that it closely matches the 5 space ring. It has been very effective in my recent play. I have been staying Despotic and no courthouses. A remote FP anywhere is great too. I do not think that you need to worry about the rings interfering with each other between the palace and the FP. 8 good cities in the first ring and 9 more on the FP and all the ones in between are good!

I do have a question, the overlap of city boarders has to reduce the effectiveness of any city in a 2, or 3 ring. They are trebled up on map squares in many instances. How does this effect Their output? Are you not losing the very productivity that you are trying to achieve with RCP and corruption reduction. Yes is the answer I think. I would suggest No rings under 4 spaces (ok, maybe 3.5) but if you can get 8 at the 5 space ring that do not steal productivity from each other it is an awsome engine. Put them all on wealth and watch them cook!

Sorry if I have missed something, I am just coming up to speed.

Regards,

Jack Noir
PS Why is HTML turned off? Javaphobia?

this is changing in conquest i understand.

But your question was about reduced power of cities because they are so cramped. Even before Ring placement people would cram alot of cities right around their capital. Its all about an explosive start with low corruption. For the most part regardless of if i was on an island or the lay of the land i would put 8 cities down in each direction on the map all within 2 to 4 moves of my capital. (1 north, 1 northwest, 1 west etc) and if i had a coast square to the north and my citys to the north and northwest had to be only 2 squares away from capital and 2 squares apart from each other then so be it. If i notice after i got 8 cities all within 2 to 4 of my capital that 3 squares arnt covered and theres a fish nearby i could get ill plop down another settler too. And then as if to add insult to injury ill mine everything instead of irrigating~

Though i should note that i prolly dont play rank as well as i should and i dont play Pop rush as well as i should.

The only thing im testifying too is:
an explosive start trumps perfect cities 2500 years down the road.

Originally posted by Jack Noir
I do have a question, the overlap of city boarders has to reduce the effectiveness of any city in a 2, or 3 ring. They are trebled up on map squares in many instances. How does this effect Their output? Are you not losing the very productivity that you are trying to achieve with RCP and corruption reduction.
The answer is really "It depends" rather than yes or no :). This is because the Rank corruption bug (See A Rank Corruption Discovery and Exploit to negate rank corruption (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62851)) means that RCP is of no use later in the game when you can ensure that your main core is around your forbidden palace and closer to it than to the palace (which you've moved to a long distance away).

Therefore RCP is only of use early in the game. At this point (prior to building the forbidden palace and moving the palace) you would normally be building lots of cities close together, maintaining a low population in each city (typically < 6 or 7) by building workers/settlers. To get the most use out of the tiles you want to place the cities close together so that the low population can still use as many tiles in your territory as possible.

Your August Sirs,

Thank you jeremiahrounds, and Dianthus. I knew that there had to be a reason, that dense placement frankly looked silly to my uneducated eye. I have tremendous problems with getting early growth, so now the dense pack makes some sence. I had not even thought about moving "kick-ass central" (Palace) I will go read the posting on Rank Corruption now!

One of the problems that I have had with "quilting" citys across the landscape in a edge to edge fit is that the landscape does not cooperate! So I have to jump and leave a hole in a desert for instance. Well of course the Germans come by and populate in the hole! Should I just be making Settlers rapidly and fill everything? That looks like what the AI does. At least the Germans in the game I am playing now are following that strategy. (If you must know, I am keeping up with the AI so far)

I have also discovered (by reading a great post in the academy) the Granary expansion. The dense ring and use of the granary are mutually exclusive I believe. The Granary strategy relies on rapid production of population which is hard for the dense ring. Or is this another case of "it depends"?

Regards,
Jack Noir

Can anyone confirm this is fixed in Conquests?

Originally posted by anarres
Can anyone confirm this is fixed in Conquests?

Whenever Amazon gets around to delivering it, I'll test this.

Originally posted by Jack Noir
I have also discovered (by reading a great post in the academy) the Granary expansion. The dense ring and use of the granary are mutually exclusive I believe. The Granary strategy relies on rapid production of population which is hard for the dense ring. Or is this another case of "it depends"?

My logic on city placement is very simple:-

- Population is power. It makes civilians to produce gold, shields and food. It makes workers to magnify the efforts of the civilians and to increase mobility and trade, and it makes settlers to make more cities to escalate the whole cycle.
- Granaries make population grow faster, so granaries are powerful. The can achieve acceleration of any or all of these three pop-related power factors. Granaries don't just make big cities.
- Until you get hospitals you can't get past pop 12 no matter how good your granaries are, so there's a limit on the number of civilians you can make using them before then.
- Hospitals don't happen until Sanitation.
- Sanitation doesn't happen until half way through the Industrial age.
- By half way through the Industrial age the good players have either finished the game, or they are in control of the game, or at least they have the infrastructure in place ready to take control.
- I wannabe like the good players ;)

This means I need city placement optimised for pop 1 to 12, when my fastest growth of territory, population, military units and infrastructure are taking place, regardless of whether I'm emphasising conquest, domination, culture, or diplomacy. Once I get past Sanitation, who cares if I have to thin out a few cities to give the others room to grow. If I haven't won already I can afford whatever investment I fancy by then.

I tried this method for the first time when I went up to Regent Difficulty (I'm fairly new to CivIII). Let me tell you, this absolutely rules for corruption purposes.

**Warning: Image is a composite of multiple screenshots and is just over 700kb in size. If you're on dial up it will be a slow viewing...

In this screenshot here (http://users.mn.astound.net/bryan.carlson/YAR_Map.JPG), I started on the right side in Thebes, and as I expanded I planned ahead and used ring placement. Once I got going, it wasn't too tough to do. I didn't even have to change my palace location which was nice.

Also what was nice was that in my first war against the Germans, it opened up another area of map big enough to place my forbidden palace and another set of rings around that. As I was warring, I built settlers and pikemen, and starved the german cities so I could eventually get egyptians in those cities and then get rid of them (the cities). I placed Tanis while still in war, and as the war was going, I started putting up my cities and defenses around Tanis.

I got a military leader during the war which really sped things up. Of all things I've ever rushed built with a leader, RBing that FP in Tanis was the most beneficial that I recall.

In the end, I have two sets of rings set up with a couple citys in between so that I can rail between all my cities still. I also have a couple other cities that I either decided to keep that flipped to me, and those I placed to get resources. I was without coal when I hit steam power, and I put some cities in odd places to get luxuries and resources as well. I was also without Oil when I hit Motorized Transp.

YAR, that looks a bit too symettrical! You do realise that cities at 4/4.5 are in the same ring don't you? Check out my CRpRings application, that'll make it a lot easier to do :).

I don't get what you mean. 4 and 4.5 are the same ring? I thought it was an exact science so figured the first ring all had to be an exact distance from the cap and the second ring another exact distance.

Oh BTW, Very nice work on those apps. So far, I've only used MapStat to make tracking Diplo trades and Happiness/flipping stuff. But even that alone is very convenient for Micro Management (eases a lot of the time contraints).

4 = 4.5 in integer ;).

See >> this post << (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=1169521&postcount=104) by Qitai in the "Do you think you understand corruption?" thread.

[Edit: Fixed the URL]

thanks for explaining this! this will make a huge difference early on. Also thanks "ilovetoast" your colour coded map will be great for choosing the size of the ring.

Hey duranliam, take a look at my CRpRings program (part of CRpSuite, see my sig). It opens a .sav file and displays the map with the rings overlayed.

Someone mentioned that ring-placement doesn't work in Conquests. But it still works with vanilla, even with 1.29f patch, right? Don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out the system without knowing that it works...

Yes, RCP works with Vanilla (all patches) and PTW (all patches).

Here's a gratuitous screenshot of my CRpRings program (part of CRpSuite, see my sig):
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/CRpRings282.jpg

Oh yes, it certainly works all right. I play on Monarch (second time ever!), and got a very good start on a large grassland field, and I made almost complete rings at 3, 7 and 11 distance. They produce like crazy. It's now approximately 200 AD, and I am faaar ahead of the others in terms of technology. I develop techs at the fastest rate, have quite a considerable army, yet I still make 40 or so GPT. I am now constructing a second ring around the Forbidden Palace.

WTF? This isn't like any other game I've played before. Last time I tried monarch, I was defeated quickly, and the AI was far ahead in tech all the way. Though very cool, I think the ring city placement is somewhat of an exploit and not entirely fair, as the AI don't have a clue how to use it, so they fall behind terribly.

Does anyone agree? Guess I'll try Deity next time around :dance:

Does anyone tell me why ROP doesn't work in C3C?

Does anyone tell me why ROP doesn't work in C3C?
I guess you mean RCP? If so, it's because the corruption model was re-written in C3C. RCP is actually exploiting a bug in the original corruption model, which was fixed in C3C.

Sorry, you are right, I mean RCP.
So it is no longer a strategy and useless?

Sorry, you are right, I mean RCP.
So it is no longer a strategy and useless?
That's correct, don't bother with RCP in C3C, just settle more naturally (I.e. on rivers, near resources etc).

Sorry, I am still not sure about this. Can you explain more detail?
Th RCP means the ring cities have the similar distance from Capital, so the corruption will be decreased, is it right?
Then about FP, the online help said it is second Capital, is it still right?

Well, now I understand what changed in C3C about Corruption and Waste.
It is the RANK that depends on max(x,y)+min(x,y)/2 then built year.

I have been trying to purposely avoid RCP, but since I notice its legal I will have to try to use it more. Distance of 3 looks very good.

Also, for a more detailed formula easier to get at, why not just unassemble the code ... I will have to have my students try this some day.