What is your strategy for city placement?

[BjoernLars]

36 potential tiles for my cities to harvest! Yowzers!

In my previous game as Babylon, I placed my cities far apart so that almost every city would have potential to use all of their tiles.

End game, when my cities were averaging a city size of about 20, I saw that most of the cities were only harvesting about 9 tiles, and all the other citizens were specialist. Mind you I had three Maritime allies.

Another interesting tidbit, my southern cities never connected territorially with my main northern cities.

I see that putting your cities somewhat close together won't really punish your cities as long as you have adequate food for each cities. The down fall is that you won't be able to land grab as much since you are limited on population size due to happiness.

 

[al-rashid]

Also unsure of how far to place them, recently ive been going with the 4 tiles away rule which the ai seems to do, other than the odd ocassion they stretch to get resources, problems with doing that are eventually youll have to fork out more for road maintenance and the japanese can settle inbetween your cities with only 4 tiles up for grabs -_-

 

[Senethro]

Maximize strategic resources, maximize luxury resources, maximize hammers (which means hills, forests or plains/rivers), count 14 good tiles that can be worked with anticipated food assistance from city states. Then I consider which of the tiles it is most important to have now, which later and which are at risk of being stolen by an opponent.

Unless you're Gandhi then stop caring about overlap. You can be try to maximize use of space or be efficient with time but the second is usually what wins you games. Don't pick the location that will give you the best return after 600 turns, pick the best return after 25 or 50 turns.

 

[Varelse]

At first I was placing them far apart, trying to utilize as many hexes as possible. Then I discovered, like you did, that even when your cities become huge, you still don't need all those tiles. Also, considering the fact that you can grow your cities in whatever direction you want to, there is little danger in putting your cities closer together. As long as you leave yourself room to grow in one direction with decent tiles, you'll be fine.