Fill in the holes?

[tigerden27]

I'm fairly early in a game (before Gunpowder) and I've just vanquished my sole enemy on the continent. At this point, once the enemy cities grow their culture a couple of times I will have every land square on the continent covered.

There are quite a few workable sqares that are avaliable, especially between our capitals. Do I found a city here? The "helpful hints" keep trying to convince me to build settlers. But this doesn't makes sense to me. I've already got a signicant number of cities. (~16)

Right now there isn't any overlap. (very little anyway) But even adding a couple of cities will give significant overlap.

 

[tproc]

The Computer recommends for you to build setters a LOT when it is not needed. You need to use your own judgement and determine if any of those gaps are worth the overlap. In most of my games, the extra city is not worth the cost of the extra city.

 

[DwWinnebagos]

It really depends on a lot of things.
What are the surrounding cities actually doing?
Have any of them already stalled due to happiness or health, and won't get much bigger?

Is there a science center where you could give up a couple of hills for the developing new city?

One thing about filling in those holes late game, the city will grow extremely fast. And you'll normally have them working towns, not cottages, being profitable almost immediately.
(plus you can squeeze commerce out of almost every square late game)

Caste system makes it easy to maintain these fringe cities as well; bank/mark/grocer + 1 merchant is 6 gpt.

 

[Shillen]

Most of the time if you can get 5-6 good tiles in th city radius that no other cities are using then the city can pay for itself. That said, make sure all your current cities are paying for themselves before you add more. Since you just conquered them I'm guessing they all need courthouses, etc. before you worry about adding even more maintenance costs. But yes, filling in the gaps is generally a good idea.