Go Wide! No.. TALL.. Go Wall!

I'd like to build a nice 6 city empire, tightly knit... what would be an ideal civ for that?

Basically any Civ can do 6 city since it's not all that tall or super wide. Only trouble is on Immortal+ you won't easily find room for 6 good cities.

Try the Incas or Mayans, you really can't go wrong.

I play on Prince and by the time I have three cities up Alexander has like 8 or 9. I'm trying to figure out how the hell he manages the unhappiness...

shattergod said:

I play on Prince and by the time I have three cities up Alexander has like 8 or 9. I'm trying to figure out how the hell he manages the unhappiness...

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I never have less than 4 cities w/tradition, except when playing Venice, of course.

Check out Indonesia. You can keep your core cities on the continent, but Indonesia's UA encourages you to send settlers off to other islands.

Yeah, Indonesia would be pretty good. Otherwise (and off the top of my head), I'd name Arabia, Ethiopia, the Shoshone, and the Maya as others you could try.

shattergod said:

I play on Prince and by the time I have three cities up Alexander has like 8 or 9. I'm trying to figure out how the hell he manages the unhappiness...

Click to expand...

Sounds like you're way too slow on building settlers. I'm guessing you have some sort of building syndrome to build all the buildings first. On prince, it's pretty crazy if Alex happen to get 9 cities up while you only has 3.

1. Don't neglect city-states.
2. Get a religion for happiness.
3. Go down tradition or liberty for happiness then go for patronage -> consolates to get friend status with city status. Unique luxury city states will give you like 2-3 happiness if you're friends with them.

shattergod said:

I'd like to build a nice 6 city empire, tightly knit... what would be an ideal civ for that?

Click to expand...

. . . any of them at all? Six cities is a pretty normal core for a Standard map. Can we get some more info on your preferred map type, goals, etc?

That said, don't try to race the AI for number of cities. It's a bad habit to get into since on higher difficulty levels you just can't do it. The AI's starting bonuses are too high.

Not sure how good is such aproach, and if this 4th5th6th cities will give anything what the 1st3 not. Nevertheless, the best would be something with early UB, even better with hapiness.
Egypt with mix of colective rule and piety for fast tombs.
Rome for obvious reasons.

Ethiopia is godlike as well. You get your pick of whatever religion you need to maintain 6 cities. Not enough unique luxuries? Get happiness. Too much Jungle? Get Production. Not enough +gold luxuries? Get Gold! With the +20% bonus you will be immovable on the defense and unstoppable on the offense. Combine that with some warmonger religion picks... GG. Don't want to be aggressive? Get some defensive religion picks. Ever see a faith healer pikeman die while fortified next to a city? I haven't.

shattergod said:

I play on Prince and by the time I have three cities up Alexander has like 8 or 9. I'm trying to figure out how the hell he manages the unhappiness...

Click to expand...

Don't compare yourself to the AI this way. They have chieftain-level happiness. They start with a lot more, and they get five from each luxury resource. At least, this is how it worked in G&K. Can anyone confirm this?

Early game it's difficult to maintain the happiness past 4 cities, and late game I'm comfortable with my empire, so I don't want to build more cities, butI have a suspicion that expanding and settling more cities (going wide) after you get an ideology, and then sending cargo ships or caravans to those new cities immediately, can pay off quite well. I did get a few more cities this way with indonesia, as I had a reason to, but I'm guessing it would work with any civ. The ideology happiness bonuses and the increase in luxury resources late game leads me to guess that expanding to more than 4 cities is profitable in the mid/late game.

shattergod said:

I play on Prince and by the time I have three cities up Alexander has like 8 or 9. I'm trying to figure out how the hell he manages the unhappiness...

Click to expand...

My best bet is he doesn't. Sometimes some AI civs play like they still have the obscene pre-BNW happiness bonus and overexpand. This becomes clear once you get to ideologies and can see how happy they are. Alex is one of the worst offenders in this department. One time he surrounded my capital with four cities by turn 100 (on epic).
My advise is to periodically check the global politics screen to see if one of the usual suspects adopts Liberty and then park some military units near their borders to to steal their settlers.

On topic: I also tend to expand more than before now that culture victories are independent of policies and the policy cost penalty per city has been reduced by 1/3. I had a 13 city empire in my latest game. First went Tradition and spammed some early wonders, bought my first settler and conquered 7 Mongol cities, including the former Egyptian capital which I annexed. After completing Tradition I adopted Liberty and started to fill in the gaps on the map with 6 cities. I didn't have any happiness problems thanks to mercantile CS and my religion (Sacred Waters, Ceremonial Burial, Pagodas, Peace Gardens). I played Aztecs and almost all of my cities cities were adjacent to a river . I also had the Forbidden palace and Meritocracy which together saved me more than 30 .

I had good luck with Poland, since with the extra policies it's easy to fill in both Tradition and Liberty. If you accumulate growth bonuses your cities will grow extremely quickly as well. In that game, I had the tradition bonus+Temple of Artemis+Fertility Rights+Swords into Plows and my cities were growing insanely quick, especially with a little lux juggling.