How many cities are optimal (Emperor)

I know it depends heavily on your strategie, but I want to know which different ways there are you can go with you city numbers. And which are the most effective.

Thanks

4 self built cities + an optional puppet empire attached; being sure to raze the AI's useless cities (about half of them). Also an AI's former capital is normally good enough to annex after it comes out of resistance.

Edit:
Above is for most civs; Venice has an enforced limit of not being able to build any other city but can easily get a lot of city states. Feel free to buy out every city state other than Merchicle ones (those provide special luxaries that are lost) that you don't make an ally. (Waste of influence points to buy out a city you are already allies of)

Austria: I'm thinking only self build a total of 2 or 3 cities as them. Use your UA to marry and annex a couple of city states early (the turn before they would lose ally status).

Yeah...this seems to be a typical number for me....sometimes I go to five and on rare occasions, six self built cities.

I probably don't raze enough captured cities, though. If they are at all somewhat useful I seem to hang on to them, unless Happiness gets to be a big problem.

No more than 6, no less than 3

I probably don't raze enough captured cities, though

With the changes in BNW I as a Tradition player go 5-8 cities. Reason being is you can have your Tradition cities with tons of wonders but then I usually go into some specialized cities like a coastal trade city and a science city near a mountain/ jungle. I also like to go for a production based city but this ends up being my capital. I also like to make my 5-8 cities Really strong and "independent" in the sense that if I have to fight on 2-3 fronts cities can make units and defend it self - not just relying on capital for military production.

I have razed a ton of AI cities. might puppet some. Usually try to annex. Puppets create useless things like Barracks and Armories when those cities will never make a military unit and its costing me maintenance.

3 - 4 cities next to luxuries with tradition start if possible. Try to build all the wonders available and if the AI ends up with a Dow on me, defend and take AI's cities. Only cities that get to puppet are cities with wonders, luxurious resources nearby or the capital. All the other cities get razed.

With tradition, between 3-5 own cities. With liberty, between 5-7 depending on room and available luxury resources. If you do take a liberty approach, grab messenger god to negate science penalty and expand moderately if there is room. It worked for my Inca King game.

As for honor and piety starts, expanding early is needed to bolster military production and religious building benefits respectively.

I also second Jon's specific approaches to Austria and Venice, as well as city annexing and razing, but when razing, be wary of other AI's attempting to expand again over the new space, as well as barbarians.

4.
And please don't call me Emperor...

When given the opportunity, I settle as many coastal cities as possible as long as the surrounding land isn't garbage. With cargo ships, you can pump those cities up to be absolute beasts in no time.

Dr. D said:

When given the opportunity, I settle as many coastal cities as possible as long as the surrounding land isn't garbage. With cargo ships, you can pump those cities up to be absolute beasts in no time.

Click to expand...

This is how I do it too. The research penalty isn't as bad as people make it seem. You can take it a step further and adopt order, take resettlement and iron curtain as tenants and spam away. Your sooped up internal trade routes will have your new 4 pop cities producing enough science to overcome the research cost and more in the matter of a few turns, especially if you finished tradition. Even better, the happiness in the order tree is on buildings you'll build in these new cities anyway. Monuments, science buildings and production buildings. Exactly what you need to have a city that benefits your empire asap. That means you can get the city happiness neutral while doing what you would normally do to get a good city up and running. If any small turtling empire starts to pull ahead you use your larger production potential to squash them like a bug.

Raze everything that doesn't have a wonder or isn't a capital. Annex the rest. Puppets take a long time to benefit the empire unless you're Venice and that's only because they can gold buy necessary buildings. Puppets add to the research cost but have a 20% penalty to beaker production which pushes their break even point for the research penalty much higher than a regular city. Their build queue also stinks, favoring faith over happiness and not building science or food buildings that are necessary to benefit your empire. Puppeting is a temporary solution when you don't have the resources to annex immediately.