How close do you build your cities to each other?

The math-mind in me always thinks..."build your city where their access squares are directly beside of the next city without overlapping them"

But looking through threads, it seems like a lot of people put them where they do overlap? I know that part of it depends on how big you want your cities to be...but it seems like you are hurting yourself by overlapping unless it is necessary because of land shape, etc.

I know, probably another dumb question.

Hokie13

Right or wrong, I don't have any formula for city placement other than I try to put them close to each other wherever possible But city placment for me
is often dictated by the placement of resources on the map and the current situation in the game. If I need to go for a territory grab, I'm more likely to place my cities further apart and fill in the middle later. That said, my
personal preference is to place them close together, without overlapping, in
order to reduce corruption as much as possible.

Until you can build hospitals, you can only use 12 of the squares in your city. The other 9 are wasted tiles if there is no overlap with other cities. As you can see, you are wasting nearly half your natural resources for half of the game this way.

Sure, you'll never get the huge cities at the end, but by using your resources better earlier, you'll be stronger by this point.

The farther from your capital the more corruption becomes an issue.
I usually don't overlap my core cities but the farther from my capital the denser I build. I would rather have alot of small corrupt cities than a few huge ones.
That said I usually keep my eyes peeled for some pime realestate to build my forbidden palace. I keep city clear of overlap.

Ginger_Ale wrote an article on city placement, which you can find in the civ3 strategy articles forum - headlined "city placement".
It gives you a very good overview over the different strategies you can follow.

Personally, I also tend to minimize overlapping. playing g/cotms lately, I learned the hard way that this puts you to a major disadvantage though.
Also your city placement should correspond to your victory goal. Have a look at the gotm spoilers and study the screenshots the top-level players that are targeting a 100k cultural victory are posting. I couldn´t believe what I saw when I first did so...

Scuffer said:

Until you can build hospitals, you can only use 12 of the squares in your city. The other 9 are wasted tiles if there is no overlap with other cities. As you can see, you are wasting nearly half your natural resources for half of the game this way.

Sure, you'll never get the huge cities at the end, but by using your resources better earlier, you'll be stronger by this point.

Click to expand...

If you REALLY want those size 20 super cities, you can abandon some of your cities once you research sanitation. This can work well if you plan ahead and don't build improvements in cities that you'll eventually abandon, and switch to communism, in which the number of cities (and not distance/rank) is the only thing that determines corruption.

garyg said:

The farther from your capital the more corruption becomes an issue.
I usually don't overlap my core cities but the farther from my capital the denser I build. I would rather have alot of small corrupt cities than a few huge ones.
That said I usually keep my eyes peeled for some pime realestate to build my forbidden palace. I keep city clear of overlap.

Click to expand...

I tend to do exactly the opposite. Build cities closely (3 tiles apart) in your core, less dense farther out. This allows you to have more cities that are productive throughout most of the game. Actually, I rarely build cities far from my core. I let the AI build them for me .

All I can say is if you look at games posted for the lowest levels, they tend to have one thing in common. All have quite wide placement and hence under developed empires and wonder why they are having problems.

That size 21 placement or OCP will leave you will massive numbers of tiles that cannot be used for most, if not all of the game.

This causes workers to travel far too much, road tiles for nothing and so on.

CxxC is a reasonable placement for most games. I have use this at all levels, but not all games. IOW some games I must go even tighter, such as a game I am playing now. It is a small map and I have only played on small once before and it is an island at deity. So I need to get a bit closer. This game has turned out to be too easy as I made two MGL's in the early AA from archers.

Do not be concerned with overlaps, even in the core. Once in a while I will build hospitals, not often and only in a few core cities. They can be supported in those CxxC sites. I just take a few tiles from other cities and give them to the capitol.

gunkulator said:

I tend to do exactly the opposite. Build cities closely (3 tiles apart) in your core, less dense farther out. This allows you to have more cities that are productive throughout most of the game. Actually, I rarely build cities far from my core. I let the AI build them for me .

Click to expand...

I find the AI spaces their cities too far apart, at least for me. I always send settlers in with my forces to fill in the gaps.

In my core area, I follow one simple rule: don't waste any tiles. That usually means my cities are between CxxC and CxxxC.

Outside of my core area, those cities are so corrupt, that neither tight spacing nor lose spacing affects the outcome of the game very much. City spacing out here isn't an issue. I like to place cities where they're strategically important. Besides, I rarely get to found cities outside of my core

I tend to go with a looser pack than most folsk on the forum CxxxxC or CxxxC, depending on what will allow me to waste no tiles with minimal overlap. If a hill here or a desert there gets wasted, no biggee. This generally causes me to overlap the corners of the X (you know, those squares where, if you were playing chess, a knight could move to).

Of course, I'm a builder and still moving up in levels. I started my first Monarch game in PTW with the English and have a much tighter pack than usual, around CxxC and CxxxC. It might even be tighter, but I wanted to gobble up all the land on my island (I'm alone on it and it have five ivory luxuries ) before any other civ could land there first and make me war for it.

How knows? Maybe when I reach Deity, I'll be in line with everyone else.

Another advantage of the cxxc build, amongst the many already said, is military coverage. Most of the game your defensive units are foot soldiers. A cxxc placement is covered in 1 assuming no river.

Very interesting to see the different opinions from gamers who are far better at Civ than I am. Thanks for all of the responses. I'm anxious to start several new games just to experiment now!

Hokie13

I occupy every friggin' tile I can. Don't care at all about overlaps.

garyg said:

The farther from your capital the more corruption becomes an issue.

Click to expand...

It's not like a tight build reduces corruption either... because you will have more cities, which means more corruption.

I tend to overlap 2-4 tiles per city, it also depends on the terrain... for example if I overlap cities that are near mountains I don't care because I know that I will never reach high population there. Like someone said it also depends on the game situation and what victory I am trying to achieve. But generally my strategy is the opposite of most... my core is more tight while my borders are larger. A tight core is much, much better for a good start.

Some people have a very good strategy that requires close cities so that the cities can't get big. with feudilism the smaller the city is the more units you can have. And if you have alot of small cities real close you can build ALOT of units.

onedreamer said:

It's not like a tight build reduces corruption either... because you will have more cities, which means more corruption.

Click to expand...

Both city rank and distance from the capital/FP affect corruption - at least in every gov't except Communism. More cities does mean higher and higher city ranks, however 10 close packed cities will still suffer less distance corruption than 10 loose packed cities. Overall, close packing means less corruption.

I disagree, 10 loose cities occupy a quite wider territory than 10 packed cities, which means more land, more chances for resources, more luxuries, more "We love the Boss" feasts (which help corruption more than any city placement). There are pros and there are cons, for example you understimate communal govs too much, I play Mods where such govs play an important role in the game. Another fact... I still like to pack my core, but this means that if I expand my frontier cities will be extremely corrupted, and the empire will be overall more corrupted than with a loose core. There isn't a best or a worse, it depends on situations and tactics and preferences, you can't state that packing cities means less corruption in general... you have to look at the map dimensions, land extension, government, etc etc...

I don´t think corruption is the most important argument for city placement - especially for the core. IMO the question is: how much land will you be able to cover in your expansion phase. This depends mainly on land mass, # of AIs and the difficulty you play on.
The less land I can get, the tighter the pattern. If I don´t expect to much presure while expanding, I strech the city pattern to cover territory and prepare later powerhouses. Still I wouldn´t like to miss good tiles in my core and don´t bother some overlapping, especially if it´s mountain or desert tiles.

Looser spacing means more worker turns spent just moving or building roads on tiles your cities will not work. This means less commerce, food and shields.

Also, loose spacing actually gives you less choice of tiles to work. CxxC ideally gives you cities laid out like this:

CxxCxxC
xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
CxxCxxC
xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
CxxCxxC

The city in the center has access to all 21 tiles without the need for any culture buildings. Yes, there is overlap but chances are you are specializing your cities anyway: worker pump, settler pump, unit pump, etc. Plus early cities are small so overlap is not a big issue.

More land is only useful if you can defend it. A loose packed empire is harder to defend. With CxxC spacing, a one-move unit can always get to the next city in one turn. At upper levels, the AI starts with a bunch of extra units and then gets production discounts. They will easily out produce you and will not hesitate to go after a poorly defended city. How will you hold on to that land far from your core?

Plus, new cities spaced far leave culture gaps that the AI can simply walk through. If you leave no gaps, you are always free to tell those AI settler/spearman teams to leave.

And I will repeat: ignoring mods, in the base game you will suffer higher distance corruption with loosely packed cities.