Domestic T4 D2: Fill in the Blanks.

Ok, for a culture victory we're going to need plently of cities, and we've got some gaps left, and they'll need to be filled.

I'll be putting together a dotmap of the places to build cities soon. How dense will we be able to put them? How many more should we be needing?

In the outlying corrupt regions we can build as close as possible (ICS) that's CXCXC. Leave the productive core alone, don't cram more cities in there. As for how many - as many as you can fit in!

Ditto Furiey.
Try not to settle on food sources.

Adding onto what zyxy and Furiey said (both of which I agree with): I would consider the line of our 'productive core' across the desert where we have already started to ICS. Striders Haven and below I would consider our productive core.

Here is a proposal for a dotmap. It allows for 58 + 19 = 77 new cities, for a total of about 150. Not a lot, it would give about 1000 cpt I think, and we could backfill our core after that to get more cpt.

First, here is a indication of where the border of total corruption (90%) is:


Here is the dotmap, with zoom-ins. Red dots indicate cities we can build now, for the blue dots we need to do some conquest first:

West:

Middle:

North:

East:


A full size version can be downloaded here.
We are 226 tiles from domination. We'll gain about 145 tiles in Persian territory, and 92 (if I counted right) due to border expansions and backfilling in our own lands. The easiest way to lower the tile count is not to build the three towns in the east, near Gordium (should save about 20 tiles). Alternatively, abandon Allegory (North of Lisbon), don't build the other town North of Lisbon, and block the peninsula with units (saves 16 tiles).

I would not build beyond Gordium as beyond that point the border expands out again. Those last two towns give us 2 cities and a tile to defend rather than 1 and a tile.

Zyxy's dotmap is pretty good. If the domination calculations work out that we can expand to Gordium (and it sounds like they do), I still like that plan. Would still like to get up to about 200 cities, but if we build enough unis & cathederals, 150 will be enough to win in a timely manner.

Thanks zyxy, sorry I took too long.

Anyway, that looks good, I'll put up a poll tomorrow to see if that's good, maybe see if I can get that 200 city one Bertie wants to run against it.

Why spend time (and waste gold) right now on all of those city sites when we could be rushing culture right now? There's a lot of cities without culture, and they need it.

Bertie said:

Zyxy's dotmap is pretty good. If the domination calculations work out that we can expand to Gordium (and it sounds like they do), I still like that plan. Would still like to get up to about 200 cities, but if we build enough unis & cathederals, 150 will be enough to win in a timely manner.

Click to expand...

We can get more cities by ICS in the core region as well. In the last stage, I would do that to speed things up a bit. I didn't check how many cities will fit in, but a few dozen should be possible, I think.

Thanks zyxy, sorry I took too long.

Anyway, that looks good, I'll put up a poll tomorrow to see if that's good, maybe see if I can get that 200 city one Bertie wants to run against it.

Click to expand...

Don't worry, I hope I didn't step on your official toes .

Chieftess said:

Why spend time (and waste gold) right now on all of those city sites when we could be rushing culture right now? There's a lot of cities without culture, and they need it.

Click to expand...

For various reasons.

Each of the new cities can start on a culture building right away. The sooner they start, the lower the cashrush cost will be. The cashrushed settlers you are referring to come from totally corrupt cities that gain no production from having more than 1 citizen.

We will have engineers in 10 turns or so. Again, the more cities we have, the more effective use can be made of engineers. Also, each new city raises free unit support and brings in 1 gpt.

Settlers not only cost shields/gold, but also food. Meaning you cannot postpone building settlers too long (than your cities grow to size 7 and you're essentially wasting food).

On the other hand, rushing culture is very expensive. Each new library will cost ~ 300 gold to rush, each temple ~230. They also eat 1 gpt maintenance per turn.

Just to note, a couple of those sites have been founded already. Also, we're nearing 66% quickly, so we should watch where we build....

We are at 63%, or 58 tiles to win by domination according to MapStat. We need to watch this very closely. Perhaps we should concentrate on inland cities that do not expand our external borders. We definitley must not build beyond Gordium, and I would be tempted to rush no more culture in Gordium to prevent the borders expanding there too quickly (currently expand in 43 turns).

I recalculated our territory and expansion. As you can see in the map below, it looks like we'll gain 57 tiles by culture expansion, not counting the tiles gained by Gordiums next expansion in 43 turns - this would add another 6, I think. According to Mapstat and CivAssist, we are 57 or 58 tiles from domination. Their results differ by 1, I don't know why. Maybe CivAssist counts to the limit, and Mapstat just 1 beyond?
I don't really know how well we can trust these two programs, btw.

It looks like we'll have to give up some territory to avoid a domination victory. I think Gordium or Allegory (just North of Lisbon) are good candidates.Both take up a lot of tiles, because they are on a thin edge.

Another issue: do we want to keep Persepolis? It is in a bad location in the sense that it blocks two other sites. Unfortunately, we already have rushed some culture in Persepolis...

I say, let's just forget about more cities, and concentrate on culture right now, especially in the interior cities. Putting citites on coastal cities only pushes us that much more towards domination.

I am not advocating that we grab more territory, in fact we should give up some. The "red" tiles in the picture are tiles that we will get through culture expansion of existing cities. We should build more cities inside the region that we already have, to ramp up culture production. IMO it will not go fast enough with our current number of cities (close to 100, I think).

Just abandon the Peninsula teritory cities Gordium and perhaps Persepolis. BLock it off with units and fill up the rest of our lands.