second city?

[dbarandiaran]

ok I just read cracker's opening moves article, which gave me a ton of new insight into openin the game. I have started a new game at regent, continents, 70% water, normal clim, 4 bil. age, roaming, and got a great start: two cows, coast nearby, on the eastern edge of the map about at the equator. I have just built my first settler. I have also attached a screenshot of my start. My quandary is this... should I build the second city directly on the river (north side, between the wheat tiles) to take immediate advantage of the wheat, or go northwest one square to have better access to shields and get the wheat on cultural expansion?

[dbarandiaran]

btw, my capital is very capable of producing both settlers and cheap mil units due to two cows and game

[dbarandiaran]

one last fyi, the are two incense just off-screen to the west, you can see the edges of my warrior's visibilty, he is right next to these incense

[dbarandiaran]

...and still no reply... anyway I have already placed the city as well as 4 others, but I would still like to see some feedback about what you would do. as for the placement, i did not place on the river, went nw on square and got the wheat on cultural exp. I figured that there would be more potential food in the end, even though I would not get a free aqueduct from the river... plus I could not turn down the shields from the extra plains

[Tone]

Well I can't leave you hanging on with no reply so let's see if my one gets the ball rolling

You look like you're going to need plenty of workers with that wide expanse of plains heading towards that incense so I would have placed it south of the river directly between the two wfp tiles and I would build nothing but workers from it. Shields could come from the hills and desert later on.

I thought about the first ring of cities would go when deciding upon this. You don't say whether you're playing C3C or vanilla/PtW so I did RCP distance 4. Of course if you were playing conquests the distance from the capital could vary. The attachment shows what I would do.

[Randy]

My second city would go between the 2 wheats on eather side of the river.
3rd close to wines.

[dbarandiaran]

ok here is an update... after building a couple more cities, i ended up in a minor war with russia over the iron between the two of us. I razed a city since i didn't like their placement and am planning to go for mil. victory, and built directly on the iron, and they attacked and took it as well as kagoshima, i ended up destroying the iron city trying to retake it, and now there is a settler with spearman (yellow arrow) going back to reclaim. russia built on my shore, so i built a city right next to it to get a flip, should happen pretty soon as i will pop rush the temple as soon as i can. i like tone's plan, i know i will get the hang of things eventually. as for the placement of the second city, i decided to place it where it is because of the long term potential of the 21 square footprint as opposed to the immediate benefit of wheat. more comments welcome!

[dbarandiaran]

sorry one more note... i am playing vanilla

[Ignatiuz]

Originally Posted by Randy

My second city would go between the 2 wheats on eather side of the river.

If i had this opening my second city would be placed on the second wheat just south of the mountain to avoid overlaping.

Why would your site be better?

I recently restarted to play Civ3 and i have lost some of the basic "know how"
But Im working on it!

[Drendor]

Why are you building harbour in Edo when its a size 6 city?
And why a granary in Satsuma when its a size 6 city? Is it a settler factory?

Build road up north to the contested iron resource. Will let your troops reach the front faster as well.
Roads=a good war investment.

I would build the iron city one hex north(on hill) of the ore to be able to mine the ore later on. Or one hex southeast on hill.
Build city walls and turn it into a fortress city. Build units in all cities. Declare war on Russia and let them bleed themselves trying to capture your city on hill with city walls.

[Twonky]

When it comes to city placement, there is one thing that I value extremely high - it´s almost like an obsession: fresh water access! I always try to build next to rivers or lakes to get free aquas. Building those costs a lot of shields, I´m willing to sacrifice a lot to avoid it.
And dbarandiaran, you might want to familiarize yourself with the ring-city placement (RCP) that Tone already mentioned. You can find everything you need to know about it in the war academy. This strategy (some would even consider exploitive) takes you a long way!

[Tone]

Originally Posted by Ignatiuz

If i had this opening my second city would be placed on the second wheat just south of the mountain to avoid overlaping.

Why would your site be better?

If you will permit me to reply to this as I also said that I would place the new town between the wheats....

Why is overlapping bad? Overlapping is absolutely no problem until you get hospitals as no city can work more than 12 of the 20 tiles in its city radius before then. Even then I don't find it a problem as I prefer to have cities that are happy and so having them at size 20+ is not so good. I have seen many people argue that they like to have powerhouse metros in Modern Times but I haven't seen it from players that I know play at the top level. Draw your own conclusions!

I like to have my first ring at around 4 tiles from the capital as it allows them all to grow to size 12 comfortably but it decreases corruption in my core cities (closer to the capital) and it uses more of the tiles in my territory. On Deity and Sid I will often place them just three tiles apart to enable units to shuffle between towns in one turn-useful for defensive purposes. I'm not sure if this was the key factor but when I started to build a more compact core, I quickly moved up through the difficulty levels. The trouble is that there are so many things that I learnt from this site that it is difficult to decide which ones were more important.

@ dbarandiaran: On reflection I would change my placements a little to get another city in but no matter now. If you are playing vanilla then I suggest that you look up Ring City Placement as it seriously increases productivity and commerce. There are utilities out there that help you determine where to place cities in rings. Let me know if you can find them but Dianthus' CRPsuite is the one I use for this purpose.

[Ignatiuz]

Originally Posted by Tone

Why is overlapping bad?

I never said it was bad!

If you build a town over a wheat do you get it bonus in food?

[Tone]

Originally Posted by Ignatiuz

I never said it was bad!

sorry, I obviously infered something that was unintended. However I believe that the closer site is better due to lower corruption, more towns using more tiles and...

If you build a town over a wheat do you get it bonus in food?

no, and that's a big bonus to lose!

[Ignatiuz]

Originally Posted by Tone

no, and that's a big bonus to lose!

Thanks!
I guess that goes for all rescources and luxaries too?

[Ignatiuz]

Ooops double post!

[Tone]

Originally Posted by Ignatiuz

I guess that goes for all rescources and luxaries too?

If you just mean food then that is correct. IIRC commerce is never lost, so settling on silks for example is no problem. Shields are more complicated but you generally get the bonus, although you cannot improve the terrain. For example, when dbarandiaran settles on that iron, the city centre will produce 2 shields (3 when he gets out of despotism). However he obviously cannot mine or rail the tile and so will not get the full shield bonus for the terrain, but at least he does get an extra food from it. Other examples of getting two shields in the city centre during despotism are furs on plains and cows on plains.

See this thread by DaveMcW for full details.

[dbarandiaran]

Originally Posted by Drendor

Why are you building harbour in Edo when its a size 6 city?
And why a granary in Satsuma when its a size 6 city? Is it a settler factory?

Build road up north to the contested iron resource. Will let your troops reach the front faster as well.
Roads=a good war investment.

I would build the iron city one hex north(on hill) of the ore to be able to mine the ore later on. Or one hex southeast on hill.
Build city walls and turn it into a fortress city. Build units in all cities. Declare war on Russia and let them bleed themselves trying to capture your city on hill with city walls.

both the improvements in question were started before the cities reached max allowable size. I also am building directly on the iron to make it more difficult for AI to deny me the resource.

btw thanks everyone for the feeback! it seems most ppl post here in the morning... I was starting to think that my post was not worthy of your interest like I said I am still getting the hang of all the ideas i have read about, i already read about RCP, but have also read like 10 other articles in the last week or so, it is almost too much to incorporate at once, but all your comments are most welcome. before you know it I will be thinking about diety!

[MAS]

I would do It like this!


Do you have a safe file of 4000 BC ? (maybe in your autosafe folder) I'd like to play it a bit. (what is your patch version btw?)

[Ignatiuz]

Originally Posted by MAS

I would do It like this!

Does this work?
I never placed my cities that close.

If you have the savefile I would like to try it too...