How close do you build your cities?

[kulgan]

I admit that I am a slow learner. It took 3 months before I read the thread about newbies and the wonder addiction. Now I can play conquest games against max civs a cheiften game. I believe I maybe ready to move the game up a difficulty. However a question. How close should I build my cities?

I read in another thread someone saying that they build cities across a continent to provide a shortcut for boats, but I tried and couldn't do that. When I started playin civs I built cities allowing for expansion and so had them at least 4 squares from each other. But I found that culture flipping was easier. So lately I've built them only 2 squares apart and was wondering if even 1 sqaure would be a problem.

By having cities only two squares apart they don't grow as much but they seem to produce well.

[King Alexander]

It really depends on what do you prefer. Anyway, your cities won't use their maximum tiles early in the game, and you need to work every tile so your city get's the best benefit out of it. I think, city-1tile-city is a bit extreme, but really depends on the situation you're in and how easy can you adjust your strategy.
If you want a tight city placement, city-2 tiles-city works fine, and you can improve the terrain quickly.

[kulgan]

Its the improving of terrain advantage that I was going for. Especially with the conquest strategy. Early in the game the cities are simply pumping out warrior, workers and settlers and very little anything else so city size ends up being restricted. However I would think that city-1tile-city would be too close and city-tile-tile-city would work out better. I like to keep the core building settlers anyways. Will this kind of stategy hold up at the harder levels?

[Sneakysnaga]

Obviously, in the long run, if your cities are spaced CXXXXC (C= city, X= space) then that will allow cities to grow to metropolises without overlap.

The truth is that in the early game you only work a small minority of tiles in each city, and certainly no more than 12 until the industrial age. So this spacing is unproductive. Therefore people tend to recommend CXXXC or CXXC. I've heard of people using CXC but I've never had occasion to do that myself.

Remember too that wide spacing may increase corruption.

In practice consider that your choice should consider the amount of available land (map size, number and location of neighbours, land mass area), terrain type and location of bonuses and resources. However closely/widely you decide to space you still have to adapt that to get the best tiles worked.

There are some excellent articles/guides written on these things. They helped me immensely. Check 'em out!

[RFHolloway]

The other benefit of CXXC is that when roaded you can move units from city to city in one turn. This makes defense much easier.

[kb2tvl]

the closer your cities are together, the faster your civ can produce units.... and the faster your civ becomes.

[Nad]

There is no right or wrong answer to city spacing. Like so many things in Civ, it depends on about a hundred different factors and circumstances. A few of the important things though:

1) Try not to waste any land tiles...try to place cities so that every land tile is within the workable radius of a city. Dotmapping helps here considerably, if you're not sure how to do that, check out th succession games forum, as most games tend to have dotmap discussion.

2) Build your cities with consideration to land features. For example, in most cases you should not be placing cities that are one or two tiles away from a river if you can place them on the river. Similarly you should not have cities that are one tile away from the coast unless there's a very good reason.

3) Consider how you're going to defend your cities. For example, ceteris paribus, if you have a choice between founding a city on a hill or founding on flatlands, build on the hill for defensive bonuses. This is where the CxxC pattern is so popular, since roads can be used to shuffle between cities in one turn (provided there are no rivers to cross).

4) Consider the role of your cities, esp wrt corruption. For example, I tend to build my core cities reasonably spaced, with 17-18 tiles each, so they have a choice of tiles to use and can become powerful metropolises. I tend to build other cities much closer together, maybe 10-12 tiles each.

5) Consider terrain. If you have a whole swath of tundra to settle, ICS is the best solution to make the most of that land. If you have fertile land then space cities better.

[mac224]

Two considerations (among others):

1. Ballpark the speed of growth of the city. Can it use floodplain squares or are there a lot of bonus food tiles in it's radius? Or is it on tundra with basically no good food sources and will grow at a snail's pace and never get past size 6? In the former make sure it has it's full radius available for growth that means 4 spaces to the nearest city. However if it's the latter case then 3 spaces between is much better.

2. I'll often build extra cities next to my border for better defense, faster offensives, to get culture flips, or to just grab a few improved terrain tiles from a rival civ. This is especially useful when your culture has pushed your boundary out 3 spaces from your cities. But the result of this tactic is a cluster of cities with 2 spaces between (1 space between on a diagonal is common).

mac

[Psychonaut777]

It all depends on the lay of the land. If I can get a city on the coast/river/hill with good resources I'll do it over maintaining some kind of perfect order.

I'm playing with a new idea now.. I'm trying to keep all my cities only 2 or maximum of 3 squares apart. I was always scared of overlapping city areas before but now I think overlap isn't a huge deal. A city are covers 21 tiles but until very late in the game I'll never get a city capable of working that many tiles - that requires a huge city pop. Even with 9-12 tiles workable I won't pass that until I get to sanitation..

Early in the game having 3 moves between cities is ideal because all the early troops with 1 movement can make it between cities for better defense in a single turn, so I'm testing this style out now with very close cities.

[Symphony D.]

I've come to a strategy of OCP, adapted for terrain benefits (rivers mostly, though also resources) with an ICS ring or two around the capitol between the OCP cities for production benefits. These are built with the knowledge that beyond the Industrial Age, they'll be disbanded, so aside from Barracks and maybe Granary they can focus on primarily building units.

This is mostly for personal preference (I like big, well thought out layouts later in the game) while balancing with effectiveness earlier on. It helps to have your first or second city be a settler pump for such a thing though.