All About Tiles Questions

Had a few questions on the "tile" concept, from about 100+ hours of playing mostly on Prince:


1) What is the maximum number of tiles out a city can potentially grow to?

2) What triggers a city to increase the number of tiles in their control?
-What is the specific ratio for it based on food and based on "culture" gains?

3) How far away can a city work a tile grid? If you have a city around 30, does it make sense to build farms/lumber mills past X number of grids?

4) How does the tile acquistion work? I notice some tiles are not available earlier yet later the city grows well beyond...does it have a max of filling all tiles 1-2-3 away before going 4-5-6 and so fourth out?

5) Later in games, AI Civs keep telling me "Your recent expansion blah blah blah blah" (You know the line) even though I haven't actually bought a tile and in fact I have gotten notices saying "You kept your border promise."

Is the AI taking it a step further and actually wanting me to check "avoid growth" on my cities to prevent even culture/food tile gains?

1. A city can only grow its culture borders out 5 rings of tiles around the city center.

2. The base formula for the culture cost of the next tile is 15 + (10*tiles already obtained)^1.1, rounded down the nearest multiple of 5. The Tradition opener changes that to 15 + (10*tiles already obtained)^0.85 (also rounded down). There is no "food" cost for tile acquisition, and no population growth trigger; just accumulated culture in that city.

3. You can only work the first 3 rings of tiles around the city center.

4. Someone once dug into the tile acquisition algorithm, but I can't find that thread right now. The city governor does prioritize resource tiles over hills and forests, but the rest is lost to memory.

5. Ignore all that.

1) I think it's 5 tiles not counting the center tile.

2) When the quota for the culture fills up for each tile. What determines when a city gains a new tile naturally is just culture, not anything else. However, certain tiles are harder to gain to others, and are less likely to be picked (usually, the purple tiles determines the next tile, multiple means that ANY of those will be picked)

3) 3 tiles. No, it doesn't, HOWEVER, improving both Luxury and Strategic resources IS logical as that DOES add them to your poll, so if you improve the furs beyond the working range you still get the happiness bonus, and same with say irons, which add to your overall resources. But since Bonus resources have no happiness effect or strategic, they don't contribute to you if you can't work them.

4) Like I mentioned before, the city acquires tiles based on the difficulty, I'm not exactly sure but I think that a hill with a forest that is on the other side of the river can be the last one to pick if you are surrounded by say desert tiles. But again, I'm not exactly sure, but there is a mechanic in which certain tiles are "harder" to expand to (you can notice that too when you purchase, certain tiles ar emor expensive than others)

5) That's just a bothersome feature, but revolves around settling and expanding of cities.

Note, food on tiles doesn't affect any of the questions above, food/population doesn't influence how fast borders grow, or if the AI gets pissed that you have expanded into what they believe is their territory.

A rule of thumb is, if you can, grow in population, since that means more science.

Hope I answered yer questions.

rover6695 said:

Had a few questions on the "tile" concept, from about 100+ hours of playing mostly on Prince:


1) What is the maximum number of tiles out a city can potentially grow to?

2) What triggers a city to increase the number of tiles in their control?
-What is the specific ratio for it based on food and based on "culture" gains?

3) How far away can a city work a tile grid? If you have a city around 30, does it make sense to build farms/lumber mills past X number of grids?

4) How does the tile acquistion work? I notice some tiles are not available earlier yet later the city grows well beyond...does it have a max of filling all tiles 1-2-3 away before going 4-5-6 and so fourth out?

5) Later in games, AI Civs keep telling me "Your recent expansion blah blah blah blah" (You know the line) even though I haven't actually bought a tile and in fact I have gotten notices saying "You kept your border promise."

Is the AI taking it a step further and actually wanting me to check "avoid growth" on my cities to prevent even culture/food tile gains?

Click to expand...

1) there exists a certain mathematical formula describing how quickly a single cultural growth of city, occurs. I haven't studied it, but.

The only "guarantee" for how many tiles are in your cultural borders, becomes from búying tiles with cash. This can always be done, in any of your cities, as long as you got gold. You can only purchase any tile, expanding 3 tiles outwards from the city center(city center=0, first tile outward=1, etc...)

In practical terms, cultural growth of city borders, seems to prioritize tiles around a ring pattern, around the city center. Tiles further away, seem to be not prioritized as much, at least initially.

3) Each city in the game, is only able to work 36 tiles (excluding the city center tile),
in other words, each city can work 3 tiles outward from city center.

Even 1 citizen cities, work 1 tile + city center tile. The city itself does "theoretically" work 37 tiles, because city tile is always worked. But there exist only 36 tiles outside city. 1 citizen works 1 tile, 10 citizens work 10 tiles, and 36 citizens should be able to work the entire city surroundings.



each citizen in city can either: work tile, or become specialist, or become unemployed citizen.

exception seems to be the freedom policy civil society. This causes so: that all specialists being employed in city, only require 1 food each, to maintain themselves. This is a discount therefore, on those citizens who already exist in the occupation of specialist in city. (but it wont help you, if specialist slots are not being worked)

each citizen requires 2 food to maintain itself, without the city starving. Starvations does kill your citizens when it is maintained for long enough.

City center does cause a small food surplus which creates growth early game. So, if you maintain each citizen beyond nr.1, with 2 food per citizen, you should keep growing slowly.

Surpluses of food, create growth of new citizen. A city can only grow by 1 citizen per turn. Oftentimes, it can take several turns for the next growth of citizen. But certain buildings make the growth faster. Also, there do exist city based food bonuses in the game, together with growth bonuses. Those things are slightly different compared to each other.

Raw food or even percentage based food-bonuses (no pun intended, raw food means e.g. +6 food basically it means extra tile yields of apples.) tend to be quite strong.

Aztecs have percentage of food bonus, kind of unique building but the city must be built next to a lake, or river.

So, basically:
-A city grows from say "3" to "4" if it has enough food, but its tiles grow ONLY based on culture
-3 tiles out is the max which can be worked
-Beyond 3 tiles out, do not build farms/lumber mills/mines....only improve tiles with resources...otherwise build trading posts

Is this it?

Don't even bother building trading posts in rings 4 and 5 -- the TP gives you no yield, so you are just providing an improvement that invading units (including barbs) can pillage to heal.

Improve any strategic or luxury resource in those rings, since they can be used for happiness (luxuries) or to build required buildings or units (e.g., coal, aluminum, etc.) or can be traded to other civs (both luxuries and strategics), even though you can't assign a citizen to work those tiles. Never bother improving non-tradeable "bonus resources" (sheep, cows, wheat, etc.) in those tiles.

If you want to build some forts in the outer rings, OK, but that should be your lowest priority (I never do it -- I would rather just delete the worker than pay maintenance costs for busy-work).

Browd said:

Don't even bother building trading posts in rings 4 and 5 -- the TP gives you no yield, so you are just providing an improvement that invading units (including barbs) can pillage to heal.

Improve any strategic or luxury resource in those rings, since they can be used for happiness (luxuries) or to build required buildings or units (e.g., coal, aluminum, etc.) or can be traded to other civs (both luxuries and strategics), even though you can't assign a citizen to work those tiles. Never bother improving non-tradeable "bonus resources" (sheep, cows, wheat, etc.) in those tiles.

If you want to build some forts in the outer rings, OK, but that should be your lowest priority (I never do it -- I would rather just delete the worker than pay maintenance costs for busy-work).

Click to expand...

Ahhhh....so I have been wasting a lot of time then!

So beyond 3 tiles, only improve tiles with luxury or strategic resources, as they can be used for happiness or trading.
Otherwise, beyond 3 tiles, leave alone?

You got it.

rover6695 said:

Had a few questions on the "tile" concept, from about 100+ hours of playing mostly on Prince:


1) What is the maximum number of tiles out a city can potentially grow to?

2) What triggers a city to increase the number of tiles in their control?
-What is the specific ratio for it based on food and based on "culture" gains?

3) How far away can a city work a tile grid? If you have a city around 30, does it make sense to build farms/lumber mills past X number of grids?

4) How does the tile acquistion work? I notice some tiles are not available earlier yet later the city grows well beyond...does it have a max of filling all tiles 1-2-3 away before going 4-5-6 and so fourth out?

5) Later in games, AI Civs keep telling me "Your recent expansion blah blah blah blah" (You know the line) even though I haven't actually bought a tile and in fact I have gotten notices saying "You kept your border promise."

Is the AI taking it a step further and actually wanting me to check "avoid growth" on my cities to prevent even culture/food tile gains?

Click to expand...

#1: You can work up to 3 hexes away by that city. It can expand up to the 5th row (unless you mod, that's in Global Defines)

#2: Every time that city fills the local cultural bucket, it grows and is emptied.
Tradition opener will greatly decrease the size of the bucket and in addition there are other things that do this as well.

#3 3 hexes, your wasting your time improving tiles past 3 hexes unless there's a luxury or stategic resource present unless you have some other city that is within 3 hexes of it.

#4 Nope, it's a fairly complex calculation that looks at "hardness" and presence/absence of resources.

#5 If you captured a city, it's possible the previous owner annexed a tile with it and when you captured it you then got both the blame for it and later the credit if you are refering to the city tile annexing complaint. However the one about planting a city too close to the AI is very similar. (And if you capture a city too close to the AIs capital it will treat it as if you founded it)

Thanks!


1) Is there anyway to know how close a city is to acquiring a tile?

2) Is there anyway to see which tile will be acquired?
-Is this one tile at a time?
-Can you manually choose which tile to acquire?

3) Just to confirm, a city adds tiles based on CULTURE only NOT population? So when a city grows from say "2" to "3" it does not automatically add any tiles?

1. If you go into the city view screen, you can see tiles outlined in purple -- those are the candidate tiles for the next tile expansion. The window at left tells you how many turns to the next tile expansion.

2. More than one tile may be outlined in purple. You cannot pick which tile is purchased with culture, but you can influence the selection process by, e.g., removing forest or jungle (both will increase the likelihood of that tile being acquired) and/or buying a tile that then makes a resource tile accessible.

3. Correct. Just culture.

Quick question, for your capital, or the place where you want to run the guilds and specialists, would you rather select a coastal location or an inland location, assuming you don't have more than 2 fish and stuff along the coast? The inland location provides more useful tiles (usually), and possibly more production, but being by the coast means sea trade routes, and that often causes a dilemma for me.

rover6695 said:

Thanks!


1) Is there anyway to know how close a city is to acquiring a tile?

2) Is there anyway to see which tile will be acquired?
-Is this one tile at a time?
-Can you manually choose which tile to acquire?

3) Just to confirm, a city adds tiles based on CULTURE only NOT population? So when a city grows from say "2" to "3" it does not automatically add any tiles?

Click to expand...

1)the left-top corner, shows the cultural output of the city, it's a purple number figure, hover the mouse on top of that in order to see what it says.

2) city grows one tile per turn, maximum, culturally

But like I said earlier, a city grows 36 tiles, in one turn, when you buy with gold, all the possible tiles. When you buy all the 36 tiles, then the city will continue to grow culturally, into any one of the 4th hexes from city center. This, costs a boatload of gold though, to actually do in-game.

The city screen shows two tiles, which have purple line outline. This means that the next cultural expansion, is EITHER tile1 or tile2. So, you make a coin-flip. The option of both tiles at the same time, is impossible. So it's either tile1, or tile2.

Sometimes though, the city screen only shows one tile, with the purple outline. This means that the next cultural expansion will be that tile (unless, you choose to buy the particular purple outline tile, before the cultural expansion, in such case, some other purple outline tile, is chosen as a possibility, I think)

In other words, if you buy tile, before the culture expands into that tile, then the tile to be expanded into culturally, changes.

Sessy said:

Quick question, for your capital, or the place where you want to run the guilds and specialists, would you rather select a coastal location or an inland location, assuming you don't have more than 2 fish and stuff along the coast? The inland location provides more useful tiles (usually), and possibly more production, but being by the coast means sea trade routes, and that often causes a dilemma for me.

Click to expand...

I think your summary was correct essentially.

The way that coastal empires can be powerful, is when you have many coastal cities, AND coastal capital.

This means, you can run food cargos in cities with granary, cities which are coastal.

Food cargo is basically, free food in the city (except the initial hammer investment) This allows you to work more hammer tiles in early game, and work less farms.

The downside of coastal cities is: you only have 1/2 useful tiles, which are land tiles. something like that. There are probably, maybe three individual fish/sea resource, three thirty-sixths tiles, represents about 8.5 % of total workable tiles (36 tiles possible). This means, that 41.5 % of tiles are garbage +2 food tiles, with no resources.

What's the point of growing a city, when you cannot work any useful tiles in that city? +2 food coastal tiles are not useful tiles.

When you really think about what a really powerful coastal city should look like, it would be something like this:

a) you only have three coastal tiles, all those tiles are sea resources. The coastal part of the city, extends three tiles from the city and connects to ocean at the 4th tile. (practically these kind of narrow bays, don't really happen in game because this kind of terrain would be very rare.

b) you have sea resources in all your coastal tiles (these kind of cities are basically impossible because there are not very tightly clustered sea resources in most places)

c) practical compromise for a great city location, I think any coastal city which has 3/4 of tiles, as land tiles, and only 1/4 coastal tiles, is quite good. Preferably there should also be a couple sea resources also.

Laurwin said:

I think your summary was correct essentially.

The way that coastal empires can be powerful, is when you have many coastal cities, AND coastal capital.

This means, you can run food cargos in cities with granary, cities which are coastal.

Food cargo is basically, free food in the city (except the initial hammer investment) This allows you to work more hammer tiles in early game, and work less farms.

The downside of coastal cities is: you only have 1/2 useful tiles, which are land tiles. something like that. There are probably, maybe three individual fish/sea resource, three thirty-sixths tiles, represents about 8.5 % of total workable tiles (36 tiles possible). This means, that 41.5 % of tiles are garbage +2 food tiles, with no resources.

What's the point of growing a city, when you cannot work any useful tiles in that city? +2 food coastal tiles are not useful tiles.

When you really think about what a really powerful coastal city should look like, it would be something like this:

a) you only have three coastal tiles, all those tiles are sea resources. The coastal part of the city, extends three tiles from the city and connects to ocean at the 4th tile. (practically these kind of narrow bays, don't really happen in game because this kind of terrain would be very rare.

b) you have sea resources in all your coastal tiles (these kind of cities are basically impossible because there are not very tightly clustered sea resources in most places)

c) practical compromise for a great city location, I think any coastal city which has 3/4 of tiles, as land tiles, and only 1/4 coastal tiles, is quite good. Preferably there should also be a couple sea resources also.

Click to expand...

LOL that's just about the ideal scenario, I've never seen a bay like that generated by the map scripts. The main question is still what would be better to go for in the capital, where you want production to get wonders, food for high pop and specialists, and those awesome sea trade routes, and it's simply not possible to cover all the bases. I've never thought of internal trade routes as the way to sustain pop, as opposed to a way to get fast growth, what's your take on them? food cargo ships are crazy, I wonder why it's still not nerfed.

Browd said:

2. More than one tile may be outlined in purple. You cannot pick which tile is purchased with culture, but you can influence the selection process by, e.g., removing forest or jungle (both will increase the likelihood of that tile being acquired) and/or buying a tile that then makes a resource tile accessible.

Click to expand...

It is however generally a bad idea in Civ V to remove Jungle unless you really have to because it provides a nice science bonus with Universities.

Clearing forest outside your cultural boundary also produces less hammers than if you wait for the tile to be within your boarders.

It is however a very good idea (unless playing the Dutch) to clear Marsh tiles, which are also hard terrain and only provide a -1 food penalty.

In addition, note that both Hills and Tundra are considered "tough" terrain in their own right, so it's not going to have much affect in these cases to clear the forest. (In addition, it's generally bad to chop Tundra Forest)

Sessy said:

LOL that's just about the ideal scenario, I've never seen a bay like that generated by the map scripts. The main question is still what would be better to go for in the capital, where you want production to get wonders, food for high pop and specialists, and those awesome sea trade routes, and it's simply not possible to cover all the bases. I've never thought of internal trade routes as the way to sustain pop, as opposed to a way to get fast growth, what's your take on them? food cargo ships are crazy, I wonder why it's still not nerfed.

Click to expand...

On the subject of coastal cities and food cargo ships.

1. Running Food cargo ships to the capital is on the best practice list for BNW Tradition (when the capital is coastal)

However, I'm fairly sure that Global Happiness concerns means that a wide liberty empire will still mostly use them for initial food burst.

2. As to the number of land tiles on a coastal city, this varies widely. I've been placed in some nice coves in some games which actually gave me just about all the land tiles that a non-coastal start would have with the power of sea resources and food cargo ships included.

3. Honestly I think they didn't have a single Tradition expert in either their Beta Testing team for BNW or their own developers. (If they did have a Tradition expert on the Beta Testing team, he wasn't listened to) It's obvious they didn't think that someone would use sustained food for their capital. (By contrast one of the achievements suggests they thought about sending a lot of sustained hammers to the capital)

4. The bad news for modders is that most of the key values regarding cargo routes are NOT exposed at the sql / xml layer.

joncnunn said:

On the subject of coastal cities and food cargo ships.

1. Running Food cargo ships to the capital is on the best practice list for BNW Tradition (when the capital is coastal)

However, I'm fairly sure that Global Happiness concerns means that a wide liberty empire will still mostly use them for initial food burst.

2. As to the number of land tiles on a coastal city, this varies widely. I've been placed in some nice coves in some games which actually gave me just about all the land tiles that a non-coastal start would have with the power of sea resources and food cargo ships included.

3. Honestly I think they didn't have a single Tradition expert in either their Beta Testing team for BNW or their own developers. (If they did have a Tradition expert on the Beta Testing team, he wasn't listened to) It's obvious they didn't think that someone would use sustained food for their capital. (By contrast one of the achievements suggests they thought about sending a lot of sustained hammers to the capital)

4. The bad news for modders is that most of the key values regarding cargo routes are NOT exposed at the sql / xml layer.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm a bit concerned about, because if I don't start coastal, would it be worth it to move my capital to a relatively good spot on the coast, or just stay in my general area? Getting a narrow bay into the capital is ofc nice, but I don't expect that.
Suppose moving to the coast gets you 1 fish but you lose 1 bonus resource and 1 lux (I'm not sure what the average case would be, just making it up here), would you do it?

I think having burst food early in the capital is important if you want to run guilds, but later on you do want to switch them out for higher gpt. 7 food initially for 100 hammers or 480 gold is better than lake victoria and hanging gardens in terms of value imo.
What's the achievement for sustained hammers to your cap?

Sessy said:

That's what I'm a bit concerned about, because if I don't start coastal, would it be worth it to move my capital to a relatively good spot on the coast, or just stay in my general area? Getting a narrow bay into the capital is ofc nice, but I don't expect that.
Suppose moving to the coast gets you 1 fish but you lose 1 bonus resource and 1 lux (I'm not sure what the average case would be, just making it up here), would you do it?

I think having burst food early in the capital is important if you want to run guilds, but later on you do want to switch them out for higher gpt. 7 food initially for 100 hammers or 480 gold is better than lake victoria and hanging gardens in terms of value imo.
What's the achievement for sustained hammers to your cap?

Click to expand...

The math involved in compounding suggests that unless this is marathon speed that you should found a city no later than turn 1. (Note that 4000 BC actually is Turn 0)

It's unlikely that moving would cost the empire as a whole the resources that the capital gave up, they'll instead be worked by what is now likely to be your second city.

For 1 guild a burst of speed is needed. For all 3 guilds in the same city (standard tradition in which case its the capital) it'a actually just as important that the food be sustained. By contrast, liberty practices will often spread the guilds out.

The achievement is called something like "Built in (almost) a Day", requires the city have 3 hammer routes going to it at the time a world wonder completes.

Thanks!