Photo guide to terrain, improvements, and city placement.

[rabhison]

Terrain effects the movements of your units and some effect your cities health. Tiles without features
will cost 1mp to move units. Tiles with features(hills, forest, jungles) cost 2mp to move. Impassable
terrain include mountain peeksand glacier ice. Forests provide your city with a +0.5 health bonus
where floodplains have -0.4 and jungles a -0.25. Having a city next to a fresh water lake or river
will give your city a +2 to health.

Just a minor correction: as you correctly state later in your guide, forests provide 0.4 health bonus. Probably just a typo in the quoted paragraph, where you wrote 0.5.

All that aside, a fantastic and thorough write-up. Thanks very much for sharing it!

Rabi

 

[Stuporstar]

Actually the 0.5 figure was taken from the manual. I made the same mistake at first because of that too.

 

[BomberEscort]

Dealing only with maximum tile yields and no other consideration for city placement, in which cases is it better to settle on a resource or improve it with a worker?

 

[Stuporstar]

I would say a good strategy is to only settle on resources early in the game when that production boost is most needed, except in the case of important late-game strategic resources which you may want to protect it with a city. (enemy AI spies are notorious for pillaging oil wells, so settling on one of these to protect it is probably a good idea. I would never bother settling on top of some resources, such as ones that can't be improved until Calandar is discovered, because the commerce boost you can get from these is greater with improvements and they won't appear in your trade even if you settle on them until you research it.

 

[ZippyRiver]

Iron on Grassland does not provide a bonus to the city.

 

[ZippyRiver]

I just noticed something that eluded my attention the first time I scanned through this photo guide.

One of the screenshots shows a city founded on Ice, and another on Desert, neither of which normally has any production at all. Yet with a city on it, these tiles still produce the same 2-1-1 as most other terrain types?

If that is so, then it seems to me it would be a sensible strategy to place some cities on the least valuable tiles in the area. Over the long run, the city site would thus have one more useful tile, which would otherwise be unused Desert or Ice.

This also strikes me as exploit-ish...the sort of thing that ought to be addressed in a future patch or mod.

-- Kevin​

I don't see it as an exploit at all. Namely because how many hammers ect does you LOSE because you decided to place a city on a sweet tile (to maximize resources). If a junk tile is available and you can still get your bonuses, all the better for balance.

Current game, I had to choose between building on a grass/hill or a plains/hill. I chose the grass/hill as it put a wine resource in the fat-x and kept a peak out of it. Same map i got to settle on a desert tile and have 2 fish. I could have built the city on a plains tile, but what for. I had a perfectly desert tile i could use for the same effect.

I think the players ends up losing more to the city tile 2-1-1 limit a lot more often than the extra gained from a city or two on junk.

This thread is great... but how often do you need all this info? I mean, the computer shows you the best place to settle with the blue circles right? I did read in the walkthrough that the computer will blue circle spaces 1 away from a shore and that is a no-no (place the city on the shore). If that is the case than why doesn't the computer place the blue circle on the shore. Why have the blue circle at all if it's not an accurate suggestion? Confused.

I have seen that too early on, but as the map gets revealed I usually find that the blue circles consider a resource bonus a higher priority than ocean access. I like to explore in the direction of the blue circle before deciding which is the better placement spot. Number of times I have chosen to forego the beach. Blue circles also do not take into account city tile defensive/production increases.

 

[Thalassicus]

The sites recommended by the AI's city-placement algorithm (shown by the blue circles to a player), emphasize getting as may resources in the city's workable radius as possible, with little consideration for FPC values. Since resources can be accessed outside your workable radius, but great FPC tiles cannot, I've found I can often place better cities without the computer's recommendations visible.

After all, the human mind excels at goal-oriented planning (choosing city sites based on what your plans are in the area), something that's very hard to code.



With resources, the things to consider are 1) your total FPC values, and 2) how soon you need access.

- Will your city get more total food, production and commerce building directly on the resource, or on another tile?

- Will you get more benefit from that +1 FPC bonus building on the resource right away, with immediate access to the resource, or will you get more benefit in the long term by building elsewhere?

In some cases, it's better to build on the resource, the other 90% of the time you usually won't. Here's an extraordinary example I encountered a few weeks ago:



Rivers count as trade routes, as a result my capital city had Stone immediately upon building my second city, without the need for roads or a quarry. This city also got an early double-hammer-production bonus (from 1 to 2). In this case it was beneficial, had it been my 10th city however, the 1 extra hammer and quicker access would not have been worth it.

If it was later in the game, I would have built the city 1 tile further south to gain access to the hill to the southwest, and a quarry for the stone.

This was possibly one of the best starting locations I've ever had


Some notes in the article:
- Forests also negate the +1 commerce from rivers (in addition to Jungles). Lumbermills remove this effect.
- For clarification, placing a city on a tile with "Fresh Water" in the tooltip gives +2 health. Fresh water tiles are adjacent to rivers, fresh water lakes, or an oasis. This is often less confusing than stating a city next to fresh water gets the health bonus, as many people interpret that as meaning within the city's workable radius, or next to a fresh water tile.
- Flood plains are actually included in your 1st picture, unmarked.

 

[Thalassicus]

Here's a table of where resources can appear (sorted by terrain). Jungles and Forests are referred to as "Features" in the files. The first column is clear terrain the resource can appear in, the second is whether it can appear on flat land, hills, or by a river. The last two are if it can appear in jungles or forest, and what terrain that jungle or forest can be in (note that jungles are always on grasslands)



It's interesting to note that no luxury resources appear on featureless grassland.
If I made a mistake copying this from the XML point it out

 

[EOX]

I've got a question.



Why are there so many cities on such a small piece of land?
Is this a kind of strategy?

 

[Thalassicus]

It's just for a visual demonstration; you actually can't have cities that close without placing them in the world editor.

 

[a4phantom]

This thread is great... but how often do you need all this info? I mean, the computer shows you the best place to settle with the blue circles right? I did read in the walkthrough that the computer will blue circle spaces 1 away from a shore and that is a no-no (place the city on the shore). If that is the case than why doesn't the computer place the blue circle on the shore. Why have the blue circle at all if it's not an accurate suggestion? Confused.

The (very helpful!) blue circles suggest where the city would best be placed to the computer's thinking. It's not a question of accuracy, but of whether you may have a different strategy (longer/shorter term needs, desire to ensure or cut off access to somewhere, defensibility) than the computer assumes, and for which none of the suitable tiles look good to the computer, in which case knowing which is best is very helpful. Also, as far as I know there's no way to view the blue circles unless you have a settler nearby, so being able to figure out the desirability of a city anywhere in that patch to the North is important before sending a settler there that could instead be sent East.

 

[brokguitar]

Hello again, been a while since i was on. Wanted to send a thanks to rabhison for pointing out the error on forest health bonuses(stuporstar nailed it). Zippy, Iron grants you a bonus only on plains.
The patch has changed the science points for some techs and horses require animal husbandry to reveal.

 

[BrutalusMaximus]

I just got this game as a gift and this thread has been one of the most uesful of the many I have read so far. Thank you very much.

 

[^alon^]

changed my game point of view.......

thank u very much....

keep at it....