City Spacing

How many clear tiles between two cities if you want the citys to grow to the biggest size

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Bit confused as to these new fangled hex shapes and what difference that will make (hence the question)

johncross21 said:

if you want the citys to grow to the biggest size

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There is no biggest size, you can always add more specialists.

Theoretically you need 36 pop to work all land tiles, but there is not enough food in the game to get multiple cities that big.

If you want them reasonably high sized and not to overlap, I would suggest 4 clear tiles between them.

Cheers.

thanks Dave

the question was how much space to leave between cities (not how many citzens they can have)

although its possible that the two points are related in ways that I don't fully understand

the civopedia says something about working 3 tiles so does that make the answer 6 ?

or am I oversimplifying.

If you want two cities to be able to work all three of their rings without overlap, then you would need 6 tiles between the cities... you are correct

Yeah 6 tiles. But it really isn't something you need to worry about. It's very unlikely you will get a city that large. Concentrate instead on placing your cities and optimally as possible to maximize working the best tiles for the longest possible time.

I make my cities 4 apart usually.

4 is absolutely plenty. the chances of you ever filling enough cities to a cap in population that close together are very low, especially considering specialists. 6 is more ideal if you are using one of the many mods that boosts tile yields (playwithme, calltopower, valk, etc)

johncross21 said:

thanks Dave

the question was how much space to leave between cities (not how many citzens they can have)

although its possible that the two points are related in ways that I don't fully understand

the civopedia says something about working 3 tiles so does that make the answer 6 ?

or am I oversimplifying.

Click to expand...

The point is you need cultural control AND a citizen to harvest resources from a hex.

I don't think they made cities able to work hexes at range 3 to get cities to be able to work considerably more hexes than in previous civilization games. I think they did it, such that you'd have more hexes to choose from, and it didn't matter if you had some very bad tiles in your "fat cross", because you could work some other tiles instead.

You have to get a lot of culture (or loads of money to buy tiles for) and a lot of food to get enough citizens to work close to all possible tiles. Even when you get such a big city you're likely to want to run a lot of specialists, thus still leaving loads of tiles unworked. (At least if you get some of the social policies having half food consumption, half unhappiness, and +2 science for specialists)

Spacing cities 7 hexes apart (6 free hexes between them), will probably mean that all your cities will be surrounded by AI cities, and you won't get to join their cultural borders before very late in the game.

In addition, building roads and railroads will be very expensive. Thus you either needs to be on the coast for harbor, pay a lot extra, or forgo the trading income/rail production bonus.

I try to space cities apart 4 hexes in between them. I've yet to have seen any troubles with cities having too few tiles to work due to cities too close.

Road cost is not a problem, if city sizes match roads needed to connect them.
So it only dellays time when road pays itself.

One thing I noticed recently is that the AI tends to space cities two to three tiles apart. This provies a tremendous defensive benefit. I've been having quite a bit of trouble sieging AI cities when they place cannons and artillery in their cities. You often wind up getting hit by multiple units and cities while sieging significantly complicating the effort. I always have to have extra units to replace units in this situation.

Basically, if you need good defense, minimize the spacing. If you are planning to be offensive and don't plan to fight many defensive wars within your borders, maximize your spacing.

If you have a lot of food available to a city, plan on it growing and possibly provide greater spacing for it to grow and work the maximum number of tiles.

Bottom line, like everythign in CiV, there is no single (absolute) answer. It is all situational and based on play style, goals/objectives, and situation.

Civsassin said:

One thing I noticed recently is that the AI tends to space cities two to three tiles apart. This provies a tremendous defensive benefit. I've been having quite a bit of trouble sieging AI cities when they place cannons and artillery in their cities. You often wind up getting hit by multiple units and cities while sieging significantly complicating the effort. I always have to have extra units to replace units in this situation.

Basically, if you need good defense, minimize the spacing. If you are planning to be offensive and don't plan to fight many defensive wars within your borders, maximize your spacing.

If you have a lot of food available to a city, plan on it growing and possibly provide greater spacing for it to grow and work the maximum number of tiles.

Bottom line, like everythign in CiV, there is no single (absolute) answer. It is all situational and based on play style, goals/objectives, and situation.

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I disagree. A spacing as small as possible with resource/hill availability is always better except if you go for cultural victory with only a few cities. Even if you want to attack, having a strong base where you can build units is good.

alpaca said:

I disagree. A spacing as small as possible with resource/hill availability is always better except if you go for cultural victory with only a few cities. Even if you want to attack, having a strong base where you can build units is good.

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I don't accept absolutes in this type of game. I think the game design offers more than one "right answer." Most decisions depend on:

- Strategy
- Play style
- Terrain
- Resource availability
- Available resource types
- Civilization

There are probably other factors, but these are enough to make my point.

Civsassin said:

I don't accept absolutes in this type of game.

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That's fine, drop the difficulty level as low as you like and have fun!

Close city spacing is the absolute best strategy though.

DaveMcW said:

There is no biggest size, you can always add more specialists.

Theoretically you need 36 pop to work all land tiles, but there is not enough food in the game to get multiple cities that big.

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You can get multiple huge cities for sure.

I played a game as Siam where I had I think 4 or 5 cities with over 50 population, with my capital at 74.

On topic:

Purely from a city-growth point of view, it is obviously best to have 5 free hexes in all directions.

But in a challenging game vs human players or vs boosted AI you need to have your cities closer for more reasons, mostly for strategic placement, defence, roads system, lack of space, etc.

DaveMcW said:

That's fine, drop the difficulty level as low as you like and have fun!

Close city spacing is the absolute best strategy though.

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unfortunatly this is absolutly the best strat (possable exeptions due to choke points, resources), optimal city spaces seems to be 3 squares

DaveMcW said:

That's fine, drop the difficulty level as low as you like and have fun!

Close city spacing is the absolute best strategy though.

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That's a pretty silly statement.

I play on Emperor/Immortal Difficulty. I'm very good at Emperor and working on Immortal. Let me rephrase my statement. Perhaps your close city spacing is the "best" for the highest game level. However, other spacings are perfectly viable at up to and including Immortal. I cannot speak for Deity because I don't play there. As another author stated in this thread, spacing optimization changes as you run into game environments with choke points, mountains, and other terrain thrown in. One of my key indicators for spacing is food availability. If there is an abundance of food available in a given location, I will tend to space cities farther from the city planted there to leverage its population size in the late game. I've pushed population size up into the mid thirties late game (turn 300 or so) and worked most of the surrounding terrain for a tremendous science, production, and economic capacity.

Perhaps when I work my way to Deity, I will see things differently, but for now, it's been working well for me.

The optimal city spacing is such that I can claim most or all of "my" luxuries, plus at least one source of Iron, with 3 or 4 cities; preferably without intruding too much on aggressive neighbors (they'll declare eventually anyway, but it's good to have time to build a couple of catapults first). The rest of my cities will be puppets, and therefore follow the AI's spacing of ~3 tiles apart.

I can only speak for Emperor level, but I've grown quite fond of NC first into ICS with Theocracy.
So far it has vastly outperformed whatever the AI is doing so my answer would be: A spacing of 3.

Spacing tends to be bigger when deserts/mountains are about.