Amount of cities for each victory type?

Has anything changed since Gods and Kings in that regard? Are 4 cities still ideal for culture? How many for science or diplomatic victory? Been experimenting and it seems 3 is workable too, but I don't want to gimp myself on higher difficulties.

3 seems to be the best for everything except domination at this point.

Why should this be set in stone? Isn't five good cities better than three good cities? It's not like I'm gonna ignore a good spot just because I was going to try playing with specifically four cities. If a city will provide something, as long as your happiness can handle it, go ahead and settle/capture it. Since number of policies is now irrelevant for culture victory, you don't need to limit yourself in that regard either.

Piobmhor said:

Has anything changed since Gods and Kings in that regard? Are 4 cities still ideal for culture? How many for science or diplomatic victory? Been experimenting and it seems 3 is workable too, but I don't want to gimp myself on higher difficulties.

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Culture - 3, 4 or 5 are enough. You don't really need to expand much beyond these ones, plop them down as early as possible and on ideal locations with good resources.

Science - as many cities as possible that have decent locations, start off with 5-6, and in the industrial era, either plop down about 15 more, or go to war with someone and puppet their cities.

Diplomatic - really doesn't matter, having a large amount of cities for extra gold would help to upkeep gold gifts to city states. So maybe 15+...

Four is often better than three for culture, if you aren't planning on puppeting anyone. It's just that little bit easier to keep the tech coming in at a good rate all the way to the end.

What difficulty levels are people playing on that they can drop 5 cities for a Culture VC and 15+ for a Science VC???

I've played about 8 BNW Culture VC games on Emperor and have found that 3 cities is ideal, but 2 is fine if you can't get a good 3rd city. Only time I dropped 4 was as Indonesia (Spice Islander) on an Islands map -- never would have settled there with any other Civ. Note that if you only have 2 cities, your Capitol needs to have decent food terrain since you will need to run 2 Guilds there. I think it is harder to win Culture VC with OCC unless you have insane food around your Cap (note that you won't have any internal trade routes to boost your food). Also means that if you miss out on the Hanging Gardens, it will probably be a rough game.

For Science VCs, I found that 3 or 4 usually works best, but you can certainly conquer more if the game goes in that direction (either when you get Trebs, or later on Cannons).

For Diplo VCs, I've done it as OCC and also with 2 and 3 cities -- only settling in premium spots. You generally want more external trade routes (for more Gold rather than internal city growth/hammers) with a Diplo VC so having only 2 premium cities makes it easier to do that.

I can understand why it isn't necessary to expand for a cultural victory, but I can't see why having a lot of cities is a liability to a cultural victory.

Exactly what gets in the way of a cultural victory for having 10 cities instead of 5?

This sounds particularly wrong to me in case of civs like France and Polynesia. It goes without saying that the more cities you have with them, the more tourism you can produce per turn.

Moreover a higher science output will grant you a faster acquisition of modern era key techs, as well as giving you a head start for building key wonders.

I've played about 12 games of BNW on Immortal and the answer is that there is no correct answer. I've won a CV with Mongolia using a combination of taking down 3 - 4 AI capitals and using Autocracy tenents to influence and coerce and conquer the other AIs. I've won Diplomatic Victory with 2 Cities using Siam.

The map, AI civs, and randomness are all going to dictate the number of cities you should use.

Killlbray said:

I can understand why it isn't necessary to expand for a cultural victory, but I can't see why having a lot of cities is a liability to a cultural victory.

Exactly what gets in the way of a cultural victory for having 10 cities instead of 5?

This sounds particularly wrong to me in case of civs like France and Polynesia. It goes without saying that the more cities you have with them, the more tourism you can produce per turn.

Moreover a higher science output will grant you a faster acquisition of modern era key techs, as well as giving you a head start for building key wonders.

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The more cities you have the more you have to defend your Civ from unhappiness and other Civs. This takes hammers away from generating Tourism

More Cities increase technology cost by 5% If you have a Capital that's producing 200bpt, new cities will have to get to 10bpt just to justify their existence plus you have the increased costs of maintaining those cities happiness buildings cultural buildings, etc.

Resipsa said:

The more cities you have the more you have to defend your Civ from unhappiness and other Civs. This takes hammers away from generating Tourism

More Cities increase technology cost by 5% If you have a Capital that's producing 200bpt, new cities will have to get to 10bpt just to justify their existence plus you have the increased costs of maintaining those cities happiness buildings cultural buildings, etc.

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You need to give an explanation that specifically works for a cultural victory and not for another victory.

For example your point that more cities would be detrimental for the science output would make more sense for a science victory path, but obviously the threshold beyond which it isn't advantageous to found more cities isn't 3 and it isn't 5 either.
And that's why nobody said that for a science victory it's best to have 3-4 cities, so your argument isn't sound.

The defending part is equally true for diplomacy and science. But generally you have a better chance at defending with a bigger empire than with a small one, simply for the fact that you can support a larger army. And the larger is your army the less likely you are to be attacked.

The hammer issue makes even less sense because having more cities you don't have the bottle neck production problem that you have with 3-4 cities, this is ironically particularly true for archaeologists which cannot be bought. If you are going for a cultural victory chances are that you want to build the Louvre, so with more cities you can build more archaeologists by the time your capital is occupied building the wonder.

Thanks for all the answers. I know that the number of cities fluctuate depending on civ played and other factors. Just wanted to see if something has changed in that regard since GNK. Rough numbers help

More cities is better now.

Since a single city can't generate tourism as well as a wide empire, due to needing slots for art/writing/artifact items.

I play immortal/diety and my fastest win so far has been a OCC culture game funnily enough, with Poland on turn 247 on standard Pangaea Immortal. I've finished about 15 games so far to, if you want to win fast pick Poland.

As OCC you get policies faster, extra cities don't produce much extra culture now so its a flat 10% penalty per city that doesn't get offset by the cities +cpt. Also much of your money comes from trade routes now. As long as your capital is next to a mountain for the observatory, and you make friends with everyone as fast as possible and spam RA's you will have no problem getting to internet as a massive tech leader, even on OCC. With Congress you want to do the +3 cpt from wonders, followed by World fair and +landmarks bonus. That's about all i have time for before the end of game.

I basically ignored tourism stuff until the late game. Then within a very short timespan i went from 10 tourism to 670 tourism. Every Victory is a science victory now. You want to get to Hotels/Airports/national centre/internet ASAP. You want to save the Musicians guild for later in the game so you can rush out a couple of high yield Tourism bombs.

Killlbray said:

You need to give an explanation that specifically works for a cultural victory and not for another victory.

Resipsa said:

I've played about 12 games of BNW on Immortal and the answer is that there is no correct answer. I've won a CV with Mongolia using a combination of taking down 3 - 4 AI capitals and using Autocracy tenents to influence and coerce and conquer the other AIs.

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In that game I built 4 Cities, razed about 10 and kept the 4 capitals as puppets for that CV. I could have built more cities but they wouldn't have helped and would have added to the cost of national wonders, necessary happiness buildings, I probably needed the 4 cities I did build because of increased production value. I could have annexed the 4 puppets and had 8 cities for a CV it wouldn't have mattered too much on policy costs as I had the Liberty Tree and the Sistine Chapel.

Killlbray said:

For example your point that more cities would be detrimental for the science output would make more sense for a science victory path, but obviously the threshold beyond which it isn't advantageous to found more cities isn't 3 and it isn't 5 either.
And that's why nobody said that for a science victory it's best to have 3-4 cities, so your argument isn't sound.

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My argument is that there is no optimal number of cities for any victory condition, In my Mongolia CV I had 8 cities but you could have gone with a 1 or 2 city empire and build world and national wonders to store great works and been okay too or 4-5.

Killlbray said:

The defending part is equally true for diplomacy and science. But generally you have a better chance at defending with a bigger empire than with a small one, simply for the fact that you can support a larger army. And the larger is your army the less likely you are to be attacked.

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Not necessarily, larger empires attract more attention and leave less room for the AI, in that Mongolia CV game I had wars on 3 separate fronts simultaneously, In a recent Siam 2 City DV, I built a scout and an archer the entire game although I did get various CS military units and took the French Foreign Legion tenet I spent the entire time mostly wonder whoring while the rest of the world tore itself apart. Why was I able to do this, I was well defended and was tucked into a small corner of the world.

Killlbray said:

The hammer issue makes even less sense because having more cities you don't have the bottle neck production problem that you have with 3-4 cities, this is ironically particularly true for archaeologists which cannot be bought. If you are going for a cultural victory chances are that you want to build the Louvre, so with more cities you can build more archaeologists by the time your capital is occupied building the wonder.

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More cities require more infrastructure or hammers; happiness buildings, additional military to defend, more monetary buildings to cover the maintenance cost for units and buildings, Science buildings to make up for the increased tech costs, and increased costs for national wonders. The benefit of having more cities in a passive CV is more slots (Amphitheatres, Opera Houses, and Museums) to fill without having to build world and national wonders.

spfun said:

I play immortal/diety and my fastest win so far has been a OCC culture game funnily enough, with Poland on turn 247 on standard Pangaea Immortal. I've finished about 15 games so far to, if you want to win fast pick Poland.

I basically ignored tourism stuff until the late game. Then within a very short timespan i went from 10 tourism to 670 tourism. Every Victory is a science victory now. You want to get to Hotels/Airports/national centre/internet ASAP.

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This is true for every victory condition except for domination every game is a science game.

Killbray, more cities will always result in higher bonuses as long as you make an effort to develop them. Even culture victories in G&K.

The catch is that the longer the game goes on, the more gold/hammers are needed to get a city caught up. Thus, it is often easier just to hold on to what you got, and spend those gold/hammers into more city-state alliances, wonders, etc.

From my own experience, late-game techs take too long with 3 or less cities unless you are either A.) abusing RA's as much as possible or B.) have a ridiculous capital (river, mountain, insane population, etc.). My usual game plan is to start with 3 while pushing population, NC, and such. Then around medieval/Renaissance or so, expand my borders. It is early enough in the game that the additional cities will get caught up and contribute to whatever win I am pursuing.

I also wouldn't worry about the 5% science penalty. It is stupid easy to at least match that unless you are capturing a ton of cities in the very late game. And if you are, then chances are you are going for domination anyway, so you can just keep rolling along and forget about science at that point.

Miravlix said:

More good cities is better now.

Since a single city can't generate tourism as well as a wide empire, due to needing slots for art/writing/artifact items.

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Small correction.

Of course spots that are marginal for settling a new city become more attractive as the game goes on when you can start shipping food or hammers via trade routes, when you have enough gold so you can buy some basic infrastructure and/or important tiles in a newly founded city etc.

What nobody is mentioning is that more cities makes it difficult to build the national wonders that require a building in each city. This is much easier done with 3 or 4 cities than with more than that. That can affect each victory condition since you're unable to build specific wonders until later on the more cities that you have.

The answer, it depends on your civ, victory, and era now.

Before, you would either spawn out cities like your the Zerg, or sit still with a powerful capital. Ancient era is hard with the lack of happiness, gold, and no diplomatic relations. You risk deficit, unhappiness, and distrust. Other civs can.

Example, Egypt can get away with tall and 3 cities as the wonders will provide mass of tourism. Polynesia will go wide to plant moais everywhere when hotels and airports kick in. Egypt will have strong economy if they get everyone attracted to trading with them while Polynesia will have more internal gold revenue. Polynesia will also dedicate more time to archaeology since they have the space which a 3-city Egypt won't have (you'd rather get art for your wonders like Uffizi, Sistine Chapel, except the Louvre which needs artifacts). Also, Polynesia with gold from Moais can redirect trade routes from their cities for production or food.

TLDR: Really depends now! Though science is better tall unless you got awesome growth means.

It's looking to me like best for any victory type in BNW given that most of the national wonders are powerful enough to always want to build is 4 self built cities + an optional puppet empire attached. (And if they are really good sites such as a former capital or if playing Austria and marrying a city state you can also annex some of those.)

This is basically the same as pre-BNW except that in old Culture, it seemed that 1 self built city with a puppet empire attached was ideal to avoid slowing down cultural policy acquisition.

The number of cities depends upon the saying, location, location, location.

I usually build only 3 cities until the industrial age. Then I try to find a good coal source or two if I currently don't have one, then enough cities later to get adequate aluminum.

Any additional cities I build are usually just to get resources.