Where to settle our next city?

Where do we settle our next city?


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    16

Niklas

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We need to decide where we settle our city. Do we want a city on the central plains hill, for overlap? Or do we go with all cities coastal, maximizing the tiles in our borders?

Please read the discussion in the dotmap thread before voting.
 
I'm slightly undecided!

Thought I'd try and start some discussion before voting...

I kinda like the central spot, for the added defensiveness later in the game. However, I'm not dead set on that.

What's the strong argument in either direction?
 
I was under the impression that we were planning on settling the central plains hills when we were planning on fighting off an immortal rush or some other land based threat. I don't see a big advantage to it now.
 
The thing with settling the plains hill: where are the rest of the cities going to go? It has been pointed out already that having more than three cities on a landmass with the rest on another is going to cause maintenance problems. So by settling the plains hill you're dividing the island in two and either forcing a ton of unused tiles (with just three cities) or causing colonial maintenance (with enough cities to use all the tiles). If I remember correctly the plains hill settling idea was brought up well before we actually knew the lay of the land, and other than ahmedhadzi's dotmap (which has 5 cities = colonial maintenance), I haven't seen any well developed dotmap with the plains hill being settled.

All that being said, I am aware of the extreme risk with having all coastal cities vulnerable to Ragnar and his amphibious units. Also, with settling the yellow it is again optimal tile usage to have four cities, which is obviously more than the three for colonial costs (yes yes...cue the "Thank you, Captain Obvious" quips).

After all this my vote is probably going to be cast for the yellow dot as we actually have a good dotmap that maximizes tile usage with good overlap if we settle it, but I'm remaining apprehensive about amphibious raids, thus I'll not vote yet to see if someone can come up with either a counter argument (which is probable) or a good dotmap that uses the plains hill and does what the yellow dot does: uses all tiles with minimal cities (probably four).
 
I lean towards yellow dot as well. I think KingMorgan(?) said it best: If we find ourselves in a situation where we fear having our cities razed by opponent raids, we've already lost.

That said - does anyone want to make a case for settling the plains hill?
 
I don't think the maintenance of 4 cities is such an issue. Due to the way colony maintenance works, it's not so bad for colonies close to a Palace, and it only scales badly with amount of cities if the colony is far away. The cap is very quickly reached for cities ~close to the Palace.

Still, that leaves about 5 other huge points in favor of settling coastal, and only the relative safety from post-Astro razinvasions for the hill, so coastal it is for me as well.

Spoiler :
Silu said:
Colony maintenance:

((NUMBER_OF_CITIES_ON_LANDMASS - 1) * ((CITY_POPULATION + 17) / 18) * WORLD_MODIFIER * DIFFICULTY_MODIFIER)^2
0 if capital on landmass
0 if No Vassals enabled

WORLD_MODIFIER: Standard=0.45, Huge=0.30
DIFFICULTY_MODIFIER: Noble=1.00, Immortal=1.50

This is capped as well at:
Noble=2*DISTANCE_MAINTENANCE
Immortal=2*DISTANCE_MAINTENANCE
 
If we find ourselves in a situation where we fear having our cities razed by opponent raids, we've already lost.

Razzing just a single city (juicy targets) is not that uncommon. I will be surprised if that doesn`t happen this game. Maybe not to us, but someone else... In that Apoloyton walkthrough you can see that happened there as well, and Ragnar wasn`t even involved. Nor was that game even finished to completion.

I still like the plains hill. Trying to maximize tiles is totally useless. We want to whip stuff and then run an SE, not waste our time and ecco trying to grow silly cities up, only to be stuck with never ending health problems, etc. And then looking like an idiot when the industrial age comes in.

I thought we agreed earlier, few cities with lots of food. I am not a fan of JUNK or half-ass cities unless I`m trying to squeeze in city No. 6.
 
Obsolete, I think that your points are valid, however I believe that they are far outweighed by the other benefits of settling the yellow dot. Firstly, it leads to a better dotmap and superior cities (maybe not the giant unhealthy ones you're speaking of but still better overall) It also better utilizes the few land tiles we have available. And as for razing, well... our capital is already coastal and we, as well as other civs will all have most of our cities on the coast early on so that will be a factor no matter what. Also, our 2nd city may be able to help out our navy at least then by building boats. I just don't believe that the possibility of a razing should outweigh the many benefits of the coastal city and the dotmap...
 
Razzing just a single city (juicy targets) is not that uncommon. I will be surprised if that doesn`t happen this game. Maybe not to us, but someone else... In that Apoloyton walkthrough you can see that happened there as well, and Ragnar wasn`t even involved. Nor was that game even finished to completion.

I'd buy this if our island was reachable pre-Astro. In areas vulnerable to Galleys it'll be a bigger issue, but I don't think it's that important on our home rock. At that point Ragnar or not won't make THAT much of a difference, esp. since you also need Frigates if you don't want to suck up 60% culture for your amphibio-assault.
 
There is an intersite game that I suspect was the inspiration this game setup, the timings on that game favoured settling the 4th city on the 'mainland'. I suspect we will want to settle that land asap, therefore it seems reasoanable that we plan for 3 costal cities and the 4th abroad. Cramping our homeland seems counter productive taking a long term view.

We know from the map that it is likely that there is 1 entry point pre optics, we hope we can control the seas early with our MC beeline, therefore risk of razing is minimal to none.

Will 4 cities give us a econmic or production bonus, if so it's a very small and probably short term gain.
 
I voted yellow dot because it's/it'll be a good commerce or a decent GP city (2 rice, 2 dyes, 2 GL cottages [or two more farms with civil service], one GL-mine. Furthermore, coastal cities can help build boats. Although the yellow dot won't be a production powerhouse, every little bit helps. Our next city should be the production powerhouse.

In the dot-map thread, I think the red city is a trillion times better than green for a production city. It has two food and three plains-hills in addition to being a river-city (for health, more farms/workshops, and hopefully a levee later-on).

The green city in the dot thread is icky. In order to do anything it would have to take a rice away from the red city, thus lowering its (the red city's) production potential. Without that rice, it's a terrible city that could only work water tiles, one GL and one GLmine before shutting down. I don't think that the green city is worth it until much later in the game. Alternatively, when we do put it down, we could put The Statues there to rise it from horsehockey city to an ok city.

Lastly, having only three cities on our mainland for awhile will keep our score down and maintenence will be less of a problem. Probably most importantly, it will allow us to get that coveted neutral land quicker.
 
All right - I think the colonial maintenance part has me convinced on settling the yellow dot next. :)

Question is - if we go with the oracle plan, the yellow dot gets the forge, right? It's got forests and food so it could do the job that we designated before to the central city.

EDIT: If we lose a coastal city, we're lost anyway, so agree with points made above.
 
since we are going to settle yellow, we need to shift away from the original plan...

-> worker actions have to be coordinated according to this, after both gems are mined. main focus must be to get the oracle as fast as possible. mids nobody will steal us, since nobody will have stone on starting island (and going for it without stone means death;))

so timing the chops for oracle + mining another hill for capital must have prio 1 (sorry, cant do any sims right now, no access to civ for some more days:()

would be great if somebody could find the time to do the needed sim now to provide dmoc with a detailed plan on how to proceed after mining second gems...
 
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