Should cities always a pop limit?

I've heard the idea that cities should not exceed 8. That does make sense when trying to avoid pollution/anger but in the late game when you have ability to have cities as big as 20 without pollution/anger what are the reasons for limiting it? Is it better to have a city at 8 with very few upgrades than a city at 20 with maybe too many upgrades?

I guess it depends on where you heard it from, but that would be a strategy for your arbitrary cities, as Seraiel calls them, for a conquest/dom game. In that case you aren't necessarily avoiding growth, you are just whipping the living daylights out of your cities for military units. You would not do this with your capital in most cases.

Seraiel given much better advice on this, but I would think that if you are looking to crush the world, it's possible if your cities are over 8 you aren't whipping hard enough although I don't remember if there was a magic number like that as far as a max limit is concerned.

I think if you were going for a more peaceful condition the only reason why you'd limit growth like that is to not exceed the happy cap.

Yeah, the main reason why cities often are kept small is that slavery is the most powerful form of production in the early game, and it is more efficient the smaller the city is. So to stomp the map as fast as possible, you usually don't need any cities growing very big. But if you are planning to play the game far into the industrial era or beyond, then you might from the medieval era be better off with caste/pacifism (+Representation if you have mids) than with slavery. In that case there's no reason to try to keep your cities smaller than happy cap. On the contrary, you want them bigger to work more tiles and specialists.

And as mentioned above, capital should usually be as big as possible to get maximum gain from bureaucracy.

Well that depends on happiness more. If you read more about happiness then you would probably get your answer.

Hi.

I wrote that in Dom / Conquest games, cities usually don't exceed size 8, because there is nothing bigger to whip than 4-pop-whips, which need 8 population as a minimum size. Often it's even better when cities are only size 6 or even 4, depending on if they do 3-pop or 2-pop whips. There are still reasons to let them grow sometimes, like if waiting for a key-military-unit, but usually the best tactic is to simply roll over the AIs from the beginning to the end ^^ .
Another reason for keeping cities so small is not only that the whip is more effective, but that having small cities also negates the from Emancipation, which the last remaining AIs could run to annoy the player.

As already mentioned, peaceful games require different strategies, in Spaceraces i. e. one wants to end with size 15-25 cities. Having those cities in a Conquest game though would mean one doesn't whip hard enough, because 20 pop could be 10 units and 10 units could be another city which again are 20 pop a.s.o. .

Hth.

[EDIT]

And yes, the capital is an exception, as is the GP-Farm. Best if you also read the next article on city-specialization (signature or strategy guides subsection) .

This game is too difficult to understand. I should've used an easier difficulty.

Maybe if it was like Civ 2 / SMAC where you needed certain buildings to grow past a certain size.

If my memory is correct, in civ3 you needed a court house to grow beyond 8 population.

In civ 1 you used to need aqueducts to get passed 10.
In civ 2 you needed sewer systems to get passed a pop limit too...

civfanchambers said:

If my memory is correct, in civ3 you needed a court house to grow beyond 8 population.

Click to expand...

Unless you were adjacent to a river or lake you needed an aqueduct to go beyond size 6. Courthouses were for reducing corruption.

reddishrecue said:

In civ 1 you used to need aqueducts to get passed 10.
In civ 2 you needed sewer systems to get passed a pop limit too...

Click to expand...

In Civ 2 you needed an aqueduct to get past size 7 and a sewer system to get past size 12.

I dont think there should be a limit because in real life there are cities that are very large in size and population and still have enough food

No. I'm glad those limitations are gone since civ4.
Although, iirc, you didn't need an aquaduct in civ3 when a city was near a river/fresh water.

Btw, in SMAC you could circumvent this by adding colony pods to a base, press <B> iirc.
Those habitation domes came way too late into the game.
There was no limit like in the civ1-3 versions where you also could raise the population of a city by adding settlers and/or workers.