Where and when to settle?

[thefran]

I'm consistently awful at picking good city spots and take way too much time to settle at the ones I pick.

 

[direblade99]

Ok that's great I guess, can you give details on what you do?

 

[thefran]

I basically only settle on resource clusters.

 

[joncnunn]

I play 4 city tall; and try to found cities on the four best city sites I knew about at the time.

In my current game, that ended up being 3 sites with Salt; lots of sheep in two of them; one of them with horses on my starting landmass, and then later on the 4th and and last self founded city on a different landmass right next to the natural wonder that provides 10 gold plus a unique luxury; much later than the first 3 (right after I completed all early national wonders other than Heroic Epic)

I skipped the following sites the AI would have founded: A one tile island with unique luxury [but nothing else], a site with several bonus resources but neither luxuries nor strategic resource, a 2 Iron site near the north pole with nothing else.

 

[fiish]

Not sure if this question should be its own thread, but it seems relevant to the topic at hand: how useful are the advisor's indications for placing new cities? (that little yellow icon on tiles when the Settler is selected)

 

[Vafur]

Not sure if this question should be its own thread, but it seems relevant to the topic at hand: how useful are the advisor's indications for placing new cities? (that little yellow icon on tiles when the Settler is selected)

Not really. Always try to settle on a hill or along a river. If you can manage to get both it is worth to move your settler around a bit.

 

[joncnunn]

Not sure if this question should be its own thread, but it seems relevant to the topic at hand: how useful are the advisor's indications for placing new cities? (that little yellow icon on tiles when the Settler is selected)

In Vanilla CD release; pretty awful. Some of the sites it would list would be good, but it listed many inferior sites including those 1 and 2 tiles away in addition to the good spot.
I turned it off pretty quickly.

Chances are that the fall patch that increased minimum fertility requirement for the AI to consider a city spot has thinned down the list some as that is using the same code.

 

[krc]

Not sure if this question should be its own thread, but it seems relevant to the topic at hand: how useful are the advisor's indications for placing new cities? (that little yellow icon on tiles when the Settler is selected)

Somewhere, I have a (recent) screenshot with three advisor indications, none of which is the riverside hill tile next to a mountain giving access to exactly the same set of resources. You can't trust the advisors.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

 

[Erneiz Hyde]

I'd like to ask, if nowhere but the capital has a good patch of river and no/very little food resource available in the luxes/strategic area inland, would you still try to expand or would you just sit it out and goes 2 cities supported by caravan or even occ?

 

[joncnunn]

I'd like to ask, if nowhere but the capital has a good patch of river and no/very little food resource available in the luxes/strategic area inland, would you still try to expand or would you just sit it out and goes 2 cities supported by caravan or even occ?

Personally, I'd restart. I don't have time to play games in which my starting condition would be as poor as you've described.