Determining whether City Placement will Anger another Civ

Greebley

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This may be general knowledge, but I haven't seen it. I think I figured out the "rule" for whether city placement will anger another civ. This also leads to a "steal the iron" strategy. This is for PTW 1.21.

The rule appears to be

Rule
Placing a city within another civilizations 20 squares will lead to war. Outside of the 20 squares will not affect relations at all.



[Edit: A better way to state this is: If the CIV distance is 2.5 or less it will lead to war. 3 or greater will not. The 20 I am talking about above are the 20 squares your citizens can work which are also 2.5 or less away from the city.]

I had a start with no Iron. However, another civ had iron one square to the south. I tried placing a city to the SW of the iron. The civ, who was larger than me, pretty much immediately started building up forces and declare war on me. As this was an early diety game I lost horribly.

After losing, I got to wondering at what distance an AI will consider a town a threat. I knew 3 squares away was safe (except for the culture problem).

It occurred to me that the rule might be the above. Did that mean I could steal the iron even though it was one square away? What if I built the city 2 squares S of the enemy city?

I loaded up my game and tried it. I moved my settler to S of the iron and tried the same strategy I did before (rush a temple and library). The iron is equally far from us (1 N of me, and 1 S of him), so if I could get higher culture than him in my town (he was just expanding when I built the town and so had 10 culture and probably a temple) I would gain the much needed iron.

Well it worked perfectly. I got my culture over his by sacrificing some workers to rush the temple and library. Eventually the iron was in my territory and I could build swordsmen.

Even more interestingly, he was acting no more aggressively than I would have expected without the town. There seemed to be 0 difference between his behavior now as compared with what I expected if I hadn't "stolen" the iron.

So I am not 100% sure, but it seems STRONG evidence for the above rule. He didn't go from polite to annoyed. He didn't declare war or even seem more aggressive in any way.

I haven't seen this mentioned though given the large amount of information I could have EASILY missed it. My thinking was that even if it is mentioned, if I missed it after reading this site for the past month or two, maybe it would be new to others as well. The trick with the iron is one I plan to use again. It means that only if a resource is SE, SW, NE, or NE, or under a city is it safe from poaching.
 
20 squares? I think you mean 2.

I've seen the theory about 'aggressive settling' and the rule is usually 'within 2 tiles is seen as aggressive', but not sure if it is true or not. It's hard to say, because war declarations are based on the RNG, and when you build a city that uses up an RNG number. So if you build a city a turn sooner or later, random events (war declaration) will happen differently because they are drawing different RNG numbers.

Sirian has quite a few examples of aggresive settling leading to war to back up this theory. But I have had several games where I did aggressive settling and the AI wasn't any more aggressive towards me (never sneak attacked me). So I don't know.
 
Ainwood is correct. That is exactly what I meant.

In other words you can place a settler 2 away as long as it is "along the diagonal" (so N-N, E-E, S-S, or W-W).

Another way of stating it is "If you place a city at a "civ distance" of 2.5 or less, the civ is very likely to declare war on you. At distance 3 or more the closeness of the city is much less likely (or doesn't matter at all).

By "civ distance" I mean of course the internal definition of distance that is used for RCP, distance from palace calculations, etc. The following statements will use this definition of distance.

Makes sense now I think about it. If "distance to city" is a deciding factor in declaring war, then civ is likely to use its internal definition of distance. This would make 3 squares NE and 2 squares N the same.

I haven't seen much randomness, but I have played probably 1/10th the number of games as you, Bamspeedy :)

The attacks on me for placing 2 1/2 or less squares away have been pretty reliable so far though my sample size is not large. It seems very dangerous to do on the higher levels and not worth doing. So far for distance 3 I haven't noticed an immediate response from the AI (yet?).

I read somewhere that RCP is the same at distance 2 and 2 1/2. So maybe the 2 1/2 is really 2.

It just occurred to me that the culture boundary is:
1 at <10 culture so all squares 1 away are in a city radius when the city is first created. (1 1/2 = distance 1 since it rounds down)
2 at <100 culture so all squares 2 or less are in the city radius when it has 10 or more culture. 2 is also the maximum distance you can place citizens.
3 at <1000 culture or all squares 3 or less are within the city radius.
ect.

It exactly explains the pattern you get when your culture starts expanding. Cool. Makes a lot of sense too.

I seem to have rambled a bit. I think I will try aggressive distance 3 settling and see if I get in trouble for it.
 
Does this means settling within AI border at a distance of 3 is not consider an act of war? I always thought that as long as you settle within AI border, it is an act of war. I could settler at distance two if their city culture border has not expanded yet. Or is this is the likelyhood of war you are trying to say?
 
Good Point I did not clarify:

I was assuming the radius is the starting radius or one expansion. I think once he has over 100 culture then settling at distance 3 would be an act of war like you say. Before he has 100 culture you are settling outside his land so it isn't an act of war.

When I talk about settling at distance 2 I am assuming his city radius has not expanded (he has less than 10 culture) so again you are settling outside his land. This second case is when I end up getting attacked of 5-10 turns or so after settling my city close to his (at least it was about this length of time the few time I tried it).

I wonder if the computer would still attack if I was more powerful. I am not sure.
 
Okay, nothing new here then. I am less concern about AI declaring war on me since most of the time, I want them to do so to get my reverse WW.
 
If you look at how the AI places cities, you will see a placement of 3 tiles away from any existing cities and sometimes just on the edge of your land if you have the second expansion(4 tiles out).

I know the ai uses this as a method to place their cities and I think that the number can be adjusted in the editor.

I have also noticed more aggresive tendencies if I place a city 2 tiles from an existing city and sometimes the ai is aggresive if you place a city on the border of their capitol. I should also note that the ai tries to place cities on your capitol border. This exposes your capitol to attack but everyone probably knew this.
 
I have heard people say things like "Don't settler within 2 of a enemy city". When I heard that, I always considered this to include the square 2 squares to the south (or 2 north, 2 east, 2 west). (i.e. if you move south, south from the city).

The "new" part for me was the realization that these squares aren't 2 away according to the way civ works, and so you can settler there if you want.
 
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