How Many Tiles Between Cities is Recommended?

I've been playing Civ 5 since the days of Vanilla, and in each game I've always wanted to maximize the output and workable tiles of my cities. Every time I settle a new city, I always plan it so that there are at least 5 or 6 tiles between all of my cities.

However, after looking on r/Civ and CivFanatics for a while, I start to see a lot of screenshots wherein the distance that people put between their cities is only the minimum (4 tiles). At first I was confused, but then seeing just how many people did this I became worried.

So, all of this leads me to ask, is it better to place your cities 6 tiles apart, or as close as possible?

Many people favor 4 tile perfect diamond-shaped placements for ICS, wide, and etcetera, but honestly I prefer at least 8 tiles apart to claim more land and wall off contenders from lands close to mine. There's no way to surely tell how far spaced your cities should be, as games vary. Choose the best available spots for cities, be it militaristic, economic or coastal availability.

Depends on the map and how resources are placed.

Unless I'm doing ICS, I don't care about how many tiles are between my cities. I will go for the best spot, number of tiles be darnned.

I tend not to spare to many tiles apart with my cities. My only recommendation is that you should make sure you can have that city grow quickly if you settle it far away. I remember a game as greece where I had all my military power in Sparta, which coincidentally helped me take the whole world when my capital fell to Genghis. He died brutally.

I usually don't care about 'optimal spacing' with city placement. I settle where there's resources I need. If they're close to another city, but not in range, I'll try and settle five or six tiles away.

I'm not the best person to ask (I'm super picky about city placement.) But if you're asking in reguards to efficiency, the minimum they should be apart is 6 hexes. Cities get yield from resources 3 tiles in all directions, so if you have two cities 4 tiles apart there will be some overlap where there is a tile that could potentially go to either city (only one city can be 'working' a tile at a time so you lose some efficiency there.).

I used to try to get my cities as close as possible together, but then I decided that getting luxuries and strategic resources is more important. Usually you want to make sure that the cities are close enough together the spiteful AI doesn't plop a city between your new city and nearby cities.

VictusUmbra said:

I'm not the best person to ask (I'm super picky about city placement.) But if you're asking in reguards to efficiency, the minimum they should be apart is 6 hexes. Cities get yield from resources 3 tiles in all directions, so if you have two cities 4 tiles apart there will be some overlap where there is a tile that could potentially go to either city (only one city can be 'working' a tile at a time so you lose some efficiency there.).

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That's not really relevant though, unless you're implying that every city will be working every hex, which is pretty ridiculous. That would be 36 pop per city not including specialists. Cities can expand well beyond their workable tiles as well, so 6 tiles of space isn't even necessary to link your territory.

Anyways the real answer is that it depends, but I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Sometimes I settle my city four tiles away, sometimes seven, sometimes 15 or 20 tiles away on an island. Always look to settle the best, most productive city possible. If it's far away from your empire, or particularly close to an aggressive enemy, think about your defensive options as well. Settling on a hill and next to a mountains, lakes, or forest can go a long way towards protecting your fringe cities from the AI/

Well, when you are trying to determine a decent location for your city, counting hexes is important, but it needs to be undertaken in a smart way.

As Xahz rightly pointed out, your city won't work most tiles. In early game, you need to make sure that your city has several decent food tiles (resources and/or grassland with rivers and/or food plains etc.) and several production tiles. If these are scarce, you should do your best not to position such tiles in working radii of more than once.
Having your 6 hexes apart from each other is the perfect situation here, however it's not always necessary or even justified.
There are also other factors to consider, most importantly access to luxuries. It's crucial in BNW. Locating luxuries in the 3rd ring of a city will cost you a lot if you make a habit of it.
It's also extremely important to be able to connect your cities via naval trade routes. It's an nonpareil source of food that will let you maintain specialist in a university and in one guild without thwarting growth of the city.

So, all in all, count the tiles but make sure to take more important factors into consideration first.

I usually do 6-7, but as is already been pointed out you never work all tiles. You can send food trade route to yourself to grow or trade with other civs to grow rich. Cities closer together are easier to defend as you can get more units to a besieged city quicker.

Depends on the map. But if you go with 4 cities, 5-6 tiles is quite good. but, if you want to found more cities, 4 tiles is the best.

Always doing the same X tiles no matter what is a bad idea in Civ V; you will permanently lock yourself out of good spots if you do this given the exclusion rules both from your own cities, but all other players including city states.

I play tall; after founding my capital I found the next three cities to bring me up to four on the best city sites I'm aware of, no matter how many tiles that is. I almost never found the minimum possible distance because there's almost always a better pattern than that.

Liberty or Tradition start?

With liberty I'd say the closer the better. The trade system makes early economies much more dependent on city connections especially a liberty civ who will be building roads earlier for meritocracy happiness and income. The shorter the better. Liberty cities do not have the growth bonus, the free stuff and monarchy gold that tradition does. Long roads are really bad for your economy so minimum placement is best. I don't mean they have to be settled in a perfect diamond grid, just close to the nearest city because short roads are the main concern here.

With Tradition I'd say you can go a little further since you don't need to build roads as early. The larger cities also make longer roads more profitable than they would be for a liberty civ with slightly smaller cities. I still shoot for anywhere between 4 and 6. Shorter roads are still better. Overlapping bombards are good for defense. Shorter distances are also easier to defend with fewer units.

With either liberty or tradition worrying about overlapping workable tiles is a complete waste of time. You will almost never work all the tiles in a city's range even if you're the Aztecs with the ToA. There's more than enough specialist slots totally worth working and you'll have those slots available long before you reach a pop large enough to work all the tiles. Sometimes it's actually beneficial to overlap a little because it gives your new city access to already improved tiles to work and the older city can usually give up some good tiles without suffering much.

I tend to settle my first 4 in the best spots I can find nearby but any city after that is usually placed at min. distance from one of my older cities. Your first cities will almost always be the largest so they can work more tiles but the later ones will be smaller and have access to specialist slots sooner in their development. They really won't need many workable tiles as long as there is a few good food tiles to work.

I usually try for 6 or 7, but sometimes you just can't avoid 4 or 5 if you're going for a particular resource/strategic location.

VictusUmbra said:

I'm not the best person to ask (I'm super picky about city placement.) But if you're asking in reguards to efficiency, the minimum they should be apart is 6 hexes. Cities get yield from resources 3 tiles in all directions, so if you have two cities 4 tiles apart there will be some overlap where there is a tile that could potentially go to either city (only one city can be 'working' a tile at a time so you lose some efficiency there.).

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Wrong. 6 tiles intercity leaves a big unusable triangle in the middle of the 3-city triangle, which is the "perfect" arrangement of every 3 cities. Just do a quick drawing and you will see.

5 tiles intercity leaves only one unusable tile in the middle of the triangle of cities, and 4 tiles intercity, as you said, has a lot of overlap. Thus, in terms of maximum efficiency of the 3-ring format, 5 tiles intercity is the best you can achieve.

I find the placement of luxuries, natural wonders, and known strategic resources combined with the exclusion zones trump geometric pleasing shapes.

Some tile types are marginal to entirely useless:
1. Mountains (useless unless you are the Incans; except for having one next to a city for an Observatory; exception if it's a desert mountain with Petra)
2. Flat Tundra no resources no forest no fresh water (almost useless)
3. Water tiles no resources (almost useless)
4. Flat desert no resources no fresh water not an oasis (almost useless unless you snagged desert faith and/or Petra; this also gets upgraded to marginal if Morocco)
5. Flat plains no resources no forest no fresh water (marginal)

Instead look for the tiles that are most useful (luxuries resources / natural wonders / strategic resources) and design your empire placement around getting those tiles worked.

I usually go between 5-7 tiles, but a lot of it depends on the map and which of the major 2 empire management social policies you want to pursue.

As mentioned before, going liberty means shorter distances. Sometimes I will leap frog a less desirable location to establish a good border city that has much better resources. Then later on I will back fill the in between city once my civ can afford the happiness and settler production.

When dealing with far flung cities sometimes it is a good idea to place another city somewhat close by. I've had a few cities that required me to build 6-8 tile long roads to get there. Having a second city that only took 1-2 tiles of roads to connect it to the main road made that trade route much less of a train on my economy.

I used to be much more careful to leave 6 hexes between cities (I think it was an old habit I learned playing Civ 2 all those years ago - the person I learned the game from said "you don't want two cities competing for resources and I kind of took it for gospel) but now I don't bother so much - I started playing standard and large instead of huge maps all the time, and I also realised that its quite rare that you actually get enough citizens to work all the tiles AND fill your specialist slots - so you can afford to have two cities competing for resources.

I'd rather have specialist slots filled most of the time anyway - so moving my peasants out of the fields and into the city into the burgeoning craft and artisanal aspiring middle classes means I can afford to have cities closer together.

In theory, if you settle 7 tiles apart, each city can work all 30 tiles surrounding it (the first 3 rings of tiles) without any overlap. When planning very large cities (30-40+ pop), placing cities closer or farther away than that is suboptimal.

I generally prefer to settle cities at the minimum distance (4 hexes), in loosely packed lines of cities strung from a few directions out from my capital. This allows for cheap road networks (3 road tiles per city) that you can justify building early and the line system helps the cities acquire a more territory per city than a perfectly packed grid ICS (a strategy where you attempt to settle as many sites as possible by arranging them in a 4 tile grid). Also, the shared tiles can be improved and passed back and forth between the two cities in the all-important early game to maximize gains.

Ultimately no plan survives contact with the map generator, though the planning itself is valuable, and bonus resources, luxuries, rivers, mountains, coastlines, wonders, etc dictate city configurations. And at the end of the day, that's what you have to make work.