Interesting choice - one city island or three cities colony?

Hi, guys!

In my current game I have discovered interesting dilemma. I have a snake hilly island near my capital, that big enough to place 3 cities(A,B,C). OTOH, there is a pefect place for only one city(A')
I need to make decision where to found new city now - point A or point A'? What do you think, what approach has better perspectives?

Emperor game, Terra, Standart. Playing Mehmed II. Have Great Lighthouse, so each island city brings a lot of commerce. Also, have Stone resource for Moai.

Point A(Colony strategy)
Built first city at Point A and well develope it. Found cities B and C during mercantilism era or even early. When colony expences grow high, free colony as vassal. Potentially colony could have 3 clams and 1 fish(under A)
Pros: A lot of commerce, future vassal. Little bonus: Free +1 for founding city on plain hill.
Contras: High maintenance, low production

Point A' (Heavy-production island)
Built the only city in Point A' and making it heavy-production centre (4hill mines+forest=17). Maybe add Moai. (There is another island for Moai to the north, with 2 grassland hills and 3 sea food and 14 usual sea tiles)
Pros: high production, no colony maintenance. Little bonus: +1 if keep both forests
Contras: not much commerce, full development steals one or two seafood tiles from the capital

Defenitely point A. More cities=more whip, less happiness- and healthissues, more traderoutes, more AP hammers, more free food, more EP, more drafting, more corpbenefits...The only drawback is citymaintenance wich I think is overcome by the factors i mentioned.
City A can still be ok productioncity. Also if you dont have many foreign traderoutes these cities will skyrocket economy from overseas trade. I would probably settle city A and settle B and C later when you have claimed hwat you can of your mainland as there is likely AI competition.
You have really good land but are using it poorly

civtilidy said:

Defenitely point A. More cities=more whip, less happiness- and healthissues, more traderoutes, more AP hammers, more free food, more EP, more drafting, more corpbenefits...The only drawback is citymaintenance wich I think is overcome by the factors i mentioned.
City A can still be ok productioncity. Also if you dont have many foreign traderoutes these cities will skyrocket economy from overseas trade. I would probably settle city A and settle B and C later when you have claimed hwat you can of your mainland as there is likely AI competition.
You have really good land but are using it poorly

Click to expand...

Not obvious. City maintenance grows very fast, so you can't found cities just for amount of them. You need a balance between quantity and quality.

The main dilemma - one big specialized perfect city vs. three middle ordinary cities without specialization.

If you found three city, you need build 2 additional settlers, share all islands resources among three cities instead of one, so they will grow and build more slow than the single.

More whip - yes, but a lot of this whip will be for the city's own needs.
More traderoutes - the only argument, I believe (about +16 commerce for each)
AP hammers - they only 4 (like one additional mine), and with some probability. In my game AP was built with another religion(((
More food - no. Food by itself do not give you production or commerce. You get production only with whipping, and whipping has its drawback and limited profits. You also need surplus food for fast recovering, but with shared food recources recovering will be slow.
EP, drafting and corps - yes, but its effect have seen only in a late game

Well, the 3 cities more than pay for themselves, but ..and without knowing if there are other resources around/on that island..I would not have much plans for those cities other than the benefit of GLH trade routes. 2 cities could share seafoods with Cap to grow some and be semi-productive. I"m not sure what B has going for it. But long term you may want that seafood for Cap, especially as you want it to grow large as possible for boosted trade routes there.

At minimum, you could settle the 3 cities and have them work mines at 1pop and reap benefits of oversea trade routes X4 there and elsewhere, so it does indeed pay off. They could simply build wealth/research and ignore infra. Unless there is more food I don't see. (edit: or simply settle the 3 as I said but only plan for one city -likely A - to be anything of count. The other 2 just staying at size one and doing nothing else but build wealth. "A" could probably use one or both of the caps seafoods for extend periods to get growth and whip basic infra)

As for maintenance, it should not be bad at all since all three are quite close to Cap and with GLH it is basically irrelevant. And if you keep cities at size 1 or 2 it won't impact much at all either.

Market is very poor build in Cap right now. Probably should be whipping a settler their next turn.

And send a work boat or something out to scout the coastlines to get more foreign trade routes..that is huge with GLH. Not sure what you have now but looks like coast scouting is poor at this stage. And trade for happy if you can.

If you have stone, Maoi may be worth it somewhere in a city that will benefit from it. Bursa looks great for it. But I would not bother with it for some time without stone. If you do have stone, consider putting bits of OF into it in other coastal cities before completing it in ...say..Bursa..for some very nice fail gold.

The lack of resource bubbles may be confusing but every one of thes 3 cities could have own food resource with food sharing with the cap. Fish 1S of A could be worked by B and A and C could work clams from cap which would still have 3 food resources. So they wouldn't need to work just ph mines, they could whip stuff for the empire, granary and lighthouse first, then maybe army or something.

One big city would reach happy cap probably rather fast if you would use for whipping. Get three cities, and get three happy caps to abuse.