Are there disadvantages with with having fewer cities at all?

MadHaxxor said:

the disadvantage is you have less cities. Less land. Less archeological digs. You should have less gold if the large empire builds the right buildings. More cities means harder to be taken. Less musuems to hold your great works. Large empires can have specialists in every city for extra gp generation. Less total production, a small empire (shouldn't) be able to pump out as many units as a large one. Less luxury and strategic resources. Their are more, just can't think of any off the top of my head.

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I don't agree that a smaller empire means fewer luxary and strategic resources. In my current hotseat game with my friend I have only 4 cities, and yet I easily have vast amounts of luxary resources (I sometimes reach 30+ happiness) and a considerable amount of strategic resources. Why? City states.

Ally with enough city states and you can easily get all the resources you want.

EDIT: Also, why do some people here claim that fewer cities means less production? A huge city will have more production then 2 or 3 small ones. Its not just the number of cities that matters, but also overall population. To go back to my hotseat game, I am actually outproducing my friend even though I have only 4 cities while he has almost a dozen.

Disadvantage. I just died (nasty early war vs. the Mongols) because I couldn't get enough units out

It really depends.

If you already have a lot of gpt and if new cities would be more vulnerable than profitable, you may want to stay small and focus on population growth.

If you are overflowing in happiness and there are still many great city sites, expanding could pay off.

Also remember that you can create internal trade routes to prop up new cities with food or production, so cities take less time to get operational, or you could even use your non-capital cities to send food or production to the capital for growth or wonder snatching.

I had 6 cities in my Indonesia game and was able to use internal trade routes to prop up my 2 island cities to where they had like 17 pop in the late game. Don't underestimate them.

I think it's down to personal preference whether you prefer tall or wide empires. There are so many variables that come into which is "better". My playstyle usually involves 4 or 5 "core" cities and then puppeting and annexing when cities reach 10+. In my last ever G&K game on a huge map I had ~45 cities when the game finished in 1935. In my current BNW game I'm going to go tall (for a change) and aim for a cultural victory.

I think the main advantage of wide over tall is the amount of resources you can get. For me, having control of all of the luxury resources on the map is a bit of an OCD thing and having a decent amount of strategic resources is paramount to winning the game (how else am I going to build factories and field a decent army?) Yes, you can get lots of resources from city states and the AI but this costs gold which I want to keep for myself (and if I own the resources then I can sell them )

The second best thing about wide over tall is the shear amount of GPT you can generate. I admittedly haven't fully explored this yet in BNW but with vanilla and G&K you could create an insane amount of GPT with puppets. (And now starts the debate about whether a puppet empire is "wide"...)

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that wide empires can be used to great effect from a strategic military standpoint - placing a city at a key chokepoint or having a colony the other side of the map can be great against aggressive civs or when going for domination victory. Building units in a tall empire may be quick but they will likely have a long way to travel if waging war and you can only build a few at a time.

Tall empires have the edge at the start of the game when happiness is limited and are obviously much easier (and quicker) to manage. You can create a more focused empire and really get some super cities going. However, I still personally favour wide because I just love spreading my civilization across the map and I try and offset many of the disadvantages of wide empires through the way I play, e.g. settling near luxuries (happiness sorted), only take key cities from the AI (grab those wonders!), annexing puppets once they reach 10+ (culture penalty, unhappiness and stupid AI buildings sorted) etc. If I've got spare happiness I'll usually plop or capture a city if there is a decent enough spot on the map.

It really just depends on how you play, try going tall and wide. Once you've got happiness sorted out you can have a pretty amazing civilization (just be prepared to micromanage!)

I'm not sure whether the claim of "less production" can be applied to tall empires.

IF you can designate one, hill-laden city to be your production/unit spamming/great engineer city, then, while you may have less production overall, you will have enough production for the more pertinent arenas, i.e. massive production of an army in a quick amount of time (which would be useful against hostile, more wide neighbors). And you might be able to get some of the key, early wonders out if you play your cards right and chop down enough forests in enough time (in addition to the domestic production trade routes).