So... I always thought the overlap is to be done only when there is no way to evade it. As you all say overlap even of more then 1-2 tiles is good I have to accept it is so; but I still don't understand couple of things which are written about this:
How the overlap will help this? You can switch an overlapped food tile when one of the cities reaches the pop cap but the excess food still can be used only by one of the cities so how it will feed specialists to both cities?
With free Specialists, the Specialists you get by running Mercantilism or having the Statue of LIberty for example are ment. It's very simple, more cities, more Trade-routes, more of whatever Bonuses a city gets without doing anything for it.
If in the beginning of the game there is enough good land not to overlap coastal cities why do it? Just for the reason to pack more cities? Isn't the raising upkeep for all cities eating up the income from the trade routes for an added coastal city?
You have a good point there. People "packing" cities as close as possible, usually talk about cases where they have the GLH and lots of TRs through it. With GLH, every city can pay for itself at about 30% Science 70% Gold even with 15-20 cities. As there is still some Science possible, every city hightens the Beakers while not lowering the GPT.
Without GLH this is a totally different story though, especially on the highest difficulties, there are enough players who teach "stay small" which means 6 cities (8 on Huge), not more, because this can help with tech-rate, though it's difficult to get enough production from them.
I usually follow the principle of "grab what you can, where there is Food, there must be a city" . That's why my Economy always crashes hard, but one can learn to recover it, and after that, one has got so much production that one can finish the map earlier, though being slower in the beginning.
Is this about the reaching the pop cap and growing another city instead?
It is. I usually don't understand the early Happiness problems the people have, even without any Happiness Ressource the cap is 5, even if it's reached, one can grow to 6 and produce Settlers / Workers, because 1 unhappy citizen doesn't cost Food while producing those, one can always stop Growth by producing those units, and until the point where the land completely settled is reached, one has found some kind of Happiness-Ressources or Monarchy is available.
This might be different in rare occasions or other difficulties than Deity, where the AIs tech slower.
What is ment with the statement is, that as long as Happiness is low, cities could not even work their tiles if they wanted to, therefor overlap doesn't hurt. Overlap hurts very late, and the early game advantages through sharing often outweigh it, but read further.
I understand this is about running bureaucracy. Until when to run it? Does it advantages overweight Nationhood and Free Speech?
As long as you can run deficit, Buro is always the best Civic for max-research. If you're low on money because your empire has grown very large, cheap civics like Nationhood are better. Free Speech is only something for very late game when you have tons of towns (I seldomly reach that point because game is over before that) or if you go for Cultural Victory, or, again, if you're low on money.
For Buro to be effective though, you have to learn how to put up a Super Science City, one that can easily have an output of 400 BPT alone at 1 AD.
Edit: Is this all true for marathon speed and huge maps? Because I like games with those settings mainly (actually I didn't like small maps and normal speed at all).
I also play Huge Marathon exclusively atm and Marathon has more AI DoW Checks. AI is more likely to DoW the bigger your cities are, and the less space they take, so the more overlap you used. I don't like to repeat myself, but using overlap for more than 5 tiles imo is killer at least with our settings. If I have something like 8 tiles of overlap with 2 cities because I wanna share an inner ring tile, I made the experience that a DoW is almost garantueed. Therefor I reduce overlap only to share Food or certain kinds of Luxuries.
I. e. if you want to oracle Machinery on Deity, you need something like 3-4 Golds / Gems, but 1 city could never grow fast enough and still be whipping to work all of those, especially with the low-happy-cap. Therefor, one founds 2nd and 3rd city so they can share the gold, making them able to work it virtually at size 1 while the capital is something like size 4 working 2 Food 2 Gold.
For Food, I create something like Food-Chains, i. e. if there are 2 Foods, I found the city so that it can work both, but the next city is founded with overlaping border at the Food so it can work 1 Food from city 1, + the Food it has itself, next city again. Like that you can easily distribute the Food to where it is needed, i. e. if you're IMP and a City produces a Settler, you need no Food because only Hammers get multiplied, so you distribute the Food to the surrounding cities and work hammer-heavy tiles.
Food and Lux must always be worked, therefor overlap for them is great, but don't overdo it, because is horribly dangerous, espcially on Marathon.
Sera