City Placement

What are the diffrent strategies for city placement? I see some people build cities only 3 tiles away whats the point of that? I usually build them 5 away so my cities can grow to the maximum possible. What are some good strategies with city placement?

With a tight placement, you don't waste any tiles. The most effective but boring placement is as close as possible. I prefer either cxxc or cxxxc.

Some basic city patterns;

Optimal City Placement (OCP): You don't waste any tiles. Cities are at least 5 tiles apart (CxxxxC). You need hospitals to get the full benefit of the 21 tiles, but when you do, you have no overlap and powerful cities.

Loose Build: You have a small amount of overlap in your cities, but they can still get to size 12 and beyond. You don't need hospitals, but they don't hurt - even without them, you'll have an ok amount of cities with good production. Usually CxxxC.

Tight Build: Usually the tightest you can get before ICS. This is used in Always War (AW) games and games on higher levels where you won't fit in as many cities, or if you plan to have lots of wars. Units can go from one city to the next with roads in one turn, so it is useful for defending. It's CxxC.

Infinite City Sprawl (ICS): Cities spaced 2 tiles apart. Rarely get above size 6, but you get a lot of unit support. CxCxC. High corruption too, though, since you have many cities and reach the optimal city number soon.

I personally prefer OCP/loose build for my games, depending on the difficulty. Almost all of my games last until the later game, so I can get a good amount of production, yet still be prepared for the middle ages.

Tomoyo now i know what people mean when they say u post fast, helps alot when u want a quick response.

Thx Ginger Ale ur post was EXACTLY what i wanted to know, . I generally go for ocp, i love seeing cities become absolute powerhouses.

to both of you

See this thread for a bunch of city placement strategies. In there is an image I posted regarding Optimal City Placement (I would have reposted it here but I can't work the crazy CFC attachment system ).



torrasque

Wow great thread, thanks for linking it!

I'm having trouble with this too. I never even considered putting cities where they'd overlap. If I HAD to to get a resource I needed I might overlap a tiny bit but I hated it. But it looks like that is actually one of the (many) things that I've been doing wrong. I'm still not going to overlap a lot but having the boarder cities within one turn of each other would have saved me a lot of distress in the last game I played. The legonaires ate me for lunch.

Typically my cities are five to seven tiles apart, though often I get pressed into putting them closer together here or there so my map tends to look a bit unbalanced, though, really, that's that's actually more realistic, isn't it?

i try to use a combination of all the strat's to get the benefit of all of them. my core cities i try for OCP, then cities a bit further out i aim for loose build. get the cities in closer to to captial to reduce corruption. and cities near the border i use tight build of sometimes ICS, to get unit support, and choke the AI. these outter cities have high corrpution/waste anyways and so it does not matter if they not reach over pop 6/12.

then once i have a war i get the benefit of low corruption, high quality core cities which can push out modern units every 2 turns, the loose build cities at 10-20 turns per unit. and the other cities just give gold/unit support/choke on AI as well as the defense benefits.

later in the game once i have defeated the enemy, city placement tends to reverse as it approaches the AI's captial. if i can i then build the FP in their old captial and so i get:

Captial - core cities - first ring - border cities - first ring - core - FP captial.
- OCP - loose - tight/ICS - lose - OCP -

this setup gives me the benefit's of each of the tyes of city placement. and with few disadvantages. the main disad' is high corruption due to a higher number of cities. but this is not that important as it only affects the "border" cities which are not that important after they are in the centre of your terittory.

so in fin: use a mixture of the city placements depending on their location to maximise the benefits they each give.