Advised Distance between Citys.

[Abaddon]

Heya, below is an image, where would you found your citys?

I do this because i know there is come calculator over waste etc.. so how would the professionals advice placement?

(the image is totally random.. i just figured it would help if we were all singing off the same hymn sheet)

 

[Spatula]

Next to rivers, then next to coasts, then next to hills/mountains. Generally within 2-3 spaces of a resource/luxury.

 

[Tomoyo]

 

[siberian_wolf]

I would build my cities like this...
I'm considering my first city as the one next to the horses, so by that point I would build my cities that way...
I know lots of people would disagree with me, cause I don't follow the X--X method, where "X" is the city and "-" is an empty space, but I like to give my cities some space to work... and besides that, I'm a huge map player, so I usually have lots of cities anyway, and time to expand without getting in some civs borders...

 

[Tomoyo]

Oops. I just realized that my dotmap has a big mistake. Can anyone spot it?

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Sorry, i am not gonna draw the map for you. When i do that for my own games, i often take more than an hour to do so.

So i will give you some guidelines instead:

count the number of USEFULL tiles you have available. If you have no coast, divide this number by 13 to get the amount of cities you need (1 for city + 12 citizens for every city)
If you have a lot of coast line, you can divide it by 10 or so and expect your coastal cities to use 3-4 sea tiles (more than that would cause a production too low to be practical)

with usefull i mean substracting mountains if there are more than a very few (you can work 1 or 2 mountain tiles in a city, but not more) or small patches of desert that wont be used at all. Large parts of deserts get a seperate city that is build very last and only there to prevent the AI from settling inside your area.

If you are playing c3c, you don't need to place your cities in any pattern. Just take the best spots and there is no problem if some of your cities are at CxC distance while others are at CxxxxC. As long as they are reasonably spread over your empire.
This will alow you to place many cities on rivers. Moving the citizens around abit will still alow you to use all tiles in your rmpire.
If you play pre c3c, a city ring is advisable and things get much more complicated.

In this picture, compared to tomoyo, i would try to place less cities in the south as they will only be there to fill the lands but will never be productive with the desert and mountains.
I know some people actually build more cities in such areas as they can only grow size 3, but that will create many cities with 5 or less production. These cities are pretty useless and not worth the investment of a settler (2 pop) from your core cities.

So just calculate the amount of cities and choose the nicest spots as long as they are reasonably spread over your empire in large scale (small scale the don't need to be spread so well as i tried to explain)
good spots are:
-coast
-on river
-not on bonus
-not on hills if you have few hills
-definately on hills if you have many hills
-food accesable to a city with best corruption rank possible with production opportunities as well.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

Is it there are (at least) 3 tiles where you settled on a river yet you are 1 tile away from the coast? That could hurt later in the game.

My dot map looks pretty similar to theirs - Tighter in the south near worse terrain and the coast, and a bit more spread out in the grassland and jungle (would be grassland).

 

[Tomoyo]

@GA: When I made the map, I thought there were more tiles to the south of horse city, and I missed a grassland tile in the northeast.

 

[SJ Frank]

- Red is the capital
- Blues are first ring cities, Pink are second ring cities
- orange is a nice fishing village that lets me taking advantage of all the coastal tiles around the capital.
- 1 would be my first city
- 2 is where I'd hand build the FP
- 3 can start on a curragh for exploration
- 1 and 3 are both good sites for an ancient wonder
- if there are no AI to the south, then I'd settle around 2 first, otherwise I'd grab that iron ASAP.

 

[Abaddon]

Its cool that peoples maps are looking similar... guess it would have made more sence were i to give a starting position... but anyway.

How does the corruption ranking work?

does it go by number of citys/population/distance from captial/all three?

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Every city has rank. the higher the rank number, the more corruption.

Pre C3C, the rank was dicided by the number of cities closer to the capital, including the capital itself. Cities at the same distance were not included in this number. So if you have multiple cities at the same closest distance, they all have rank 1.

in C3C, the rank is decided similar, but when multiple cities are at the same distance, the first built city gets the lowest number and the younger city gets the next.

This rank corruption is only part of the corruption. The other part is distance corruption. This part as the name sais is simply determind by distance to capital. Relatively close to the capital (less than 8 tiles or so on standard map) the rank part is much bigger than the distance part.

 

[SJ Frank]

Wolf's map and mine are so similar, I just need to shift my cities 1 tile to the NE where possible

@slozenger:

I think this is the thread that you're looking for:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=76619

 

[Abaddon]

@ SJ.. yes thats very helpful, thankyou!

but i did also want to see peoples placements... noone builds exaclty to a grid... some modification for the lay of the land etc.... is nice to see how other people play... especially seen as i am still playing low leveled games.


Basically i always tried to expand my borders as much, figuring that the enemy cant use what it hasnt got! But did mean a lot of my citys were next door to useless... perhaps if i concentrate more on building core citys etc, i will be much more successful at the higher level.

 

[Renata]

@ Tomoyo -- I thought you were going to say your mistake was building one of your cities right next to a volcano.

Renata

 

[Tomoyo]

True, I did, but I will probably build that city really late, and that means less chance of having the volcano going all kablooey on it.

EDIT: And I don't have C3C, so it wasn't an instinct thing for me.

 

[CrazyScientist]

Is it really ok to have cities overlap by as much as shown? I try to avoid having my cities' workable tiles overlap each other by more than one or at most two per pair of cities. Perhaps this is why I suck at civ3 beyond regent difficulty. How much overlap is ok?

 

[punkbass2000]

Tons of overlap is fine. CxCxCxC works really well, but I usually go CxxCxxC. Your cities don't use anywhere near 21 tiles for most of the game (AKA the important part ).

 

[WackenOpenAir]

cute :cute:
mwe doesn't even do anything

 

[Tomoyo]

I wish we could have this smilie (for cute):

 

[siberian_wolf]

Since I like huge maps, I usually use CxxxCxxxC, and sometimes CxxxxCxxxxC, so I can use all the tiles available. I have plenty of time to build my empire before getting in a civ borders, so I can use that... but it really depends on your game style, and yes, the map size! You can't afford to lose important land on Standard Maps, you have to build the cities very close to each other, so you can have more unit support and less corruption.
What Punkbass said is right, you don't use the 21 tiles in 90% of the game, so you shouldn't waste this important land in smaller maps.