Quick Poll: Which beginning capital city placement do you prefer?

Which beginning capital city placement do you prefer?

  • City on a hill

    Votes: 20 37.7%

  • City on flat land but next to river

    Votes: 33 62.3%
  • Total voters
    53
reddishrecue

reddishrecue

Some dude on civfans
Joined
Nov 16, 2009
Messages
6,213
I was asking this question because I felt that these starts are both equally good. So I was wondering which city start is better. City on any flat land next to river or a city off the river and on a mountain?
 
I believe settling on a river is better for the following reasons:
1) You have the ability to build a few buildings you are not allowed to otherwise (gardens, water mills (which includes floating gardens if you're the Aztec), and hydro plants).
2) Trade routs have a range increase when they travel alongside the river.

There is also the question of whether the +50% science from the observatory offsets the possible growth lost from not settling the river, and where the settler is to begin with, and how many turns it would take to get to the other spot. Since we are talking about hills here, there is at least one turn taken to move.
 
Well, hopefully you've moved your warrior and scouted a bit and made a good decision based on the 3-ring and other visible resources. That said, in a nut shell, you generally take river, depending on other circumstances.
 
I prefer hill. I like production. The extra hammer makes me love the few turns I save building the first things.
 
If all other things are equal I prefer the river location. Water mill will give you back that lost hammer, but after some turns. If you rush the wheel you can maybe rush buy a water mill, or build it instead of a granary since it also gives +2 food. You can build or rush the granary later if you do not have granary resources around. Another advantage would be the the ability to build a garden, and later on the hydro plant. A disadvantage to this is the lower combat strength so you need to be more careful about defending the capital.
 
reddishrecue said:
I was asking this question because I felt that these starts are both equally good. So I was wondering which city start is better. City on any flat land next to river or a city off the river and on a mountain?
Click to expand...

Never settled a city on a mountain!

I think it's entirely situation-dependent.
 
I think a better comparison is flat land river or on a hill next to a mountain (no river).

Do you value the
-river benefits

or
-Observatory (basically a second national college)
 
reddishrecue said:
or a city off the river and on a mountain?
Click to expand...

Next to a mountain is not one of your poll choices. I rate mountain pretty high as observatory is so OP and decent mountain spots are rare.

Note that hill is less important for cap than for expos. A single expos on flat terrain can really delay your NC.

I place great value on hills for expos, but still for all cities, I think I would rank terrain as: mountain > coast > river > hill

I feel like that I can get 2 of those features for almost every expo, and I would almost always pick a hill on the coast over flat dry terrain next to a mountain.

As others have mentioned, other variables are more important to me than even mountains. It would be neat if someone could work out a flow chart.
 
I'll take that hill, on the off chance that Alex or Atilla is close when I start a new game . I've been bum-rushed too many times to ignore a hill start .
 
Hills make it harder to gank-rush you to death and help get scouts out faster, which leads to more ruins, faster scouts, faster worker steals, etc. Settling on a hill has always been powerful. The buildings river gives are nice but I'm not sure they're nicer than a *very* early :hammers: advantage. What tips it for me is the extra defense though.
 
I voted for the hill. Pretty much the same reasons other hill advocances wrote.
 
TheMeInTeam said:
Hills make it harder to gank-rush you to death and help get scouts out faster, which leads to more ruins, faster scouts, faster worker steals, etc. Settling on a hill has always been powerful. The buildings river gives are nice but I'm not sure they're nicer than a *very* early :hammers: advantage. What tips it for me is the extra defense though.
Click to expand...

It's not always that clear cut with hills though. a city on a solitary hill is easy to attack because every AI unit has direct Line of Sight but a city behind a hill and a forest for instance makes it much harder for the AI to move siege units into position etc.
But generally I agree with you.
 
A related poll or discussion for another thread possibly is do you ever move your settler? If the start is bad, I just reroll, and if the area looks good why move? The start location is guaranteed not to have a hidden resource so why risk putting your capitol down anywhere else? Losing multiple turns to shop for a better location never seemed to pay off for me in the past.
 
Amylase_ said:
Yeah I am a hill-lady
I like that extra D.

By which I mean defense.
Click to expand...

Haha, this made me smile.

The extra defense point is certainly valid on Diety, as you need to survive to be able to get to the Garden and Hydro Plant.
 
wayneb64 said:
A related poll or discussion for another thread possibly is do you ever move your settler? If the start is bad, I just reroll, and if the area looks good why move? The start location is guaranteed not to have a hidden resource so why risk putting your capitol down anywhere else? Losing multiple turns to shop for a better location never seemed to pay off for me in the past.
Click to expand...

Is the start ever bad? I would like to see screen shots. That said, I often move, but almost never more than one turn. I suspect that most players who location shop end up re-rolling. People only post about the times it works out well! Also, I have had early and late-game hidden resources spawn near cap.
 
I prefer a hill, however in BNW the starts that depress me are

Tundra starts
All sea resource starts
And all trapping starts
 
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