City placement advice?

[timtwins]

I am having a bit of trouble with city placement. I know that 6-8 cities or MORE is recommended but I often have trouble finding enough good locations for cities. How far apart should I place my cities? How do I fit 6-8 cities without going to war and capturing the cs or Civ cities?

 

[manu-fan]

They should be about 6 or 7 tiles apart. Good locations are on rivers or coastal, or one off the coast at a pinch. Mountains close by a city are good, and luxury/strategic/bonus resources are always good. There are usually plenty of those all over the map.

You might have to take out your closest neighbor to get 6-8 cities on a Standard map. You can move up to a Large Map for more space.

 

[Deaga]

You should place them wherever there are good tiles. I feel the 6-7 tiles apart metric from Civ5 is outdated; lategame you'll get most of your yields from districts, so you don't really have to work all of the city's tiles to get the most out of it. That means you're not losing much by having cramped cities... You actually get a few extras, with the Factory boost extending to nearby cities and such. However, early on the tile yields are still very important, so your first cities should be place where you can get good tiles, with later cities being placeable pretty much wherever you want.

Remember you can also send a bunch of trade routes from a new city to jumpstart its production and food, so you can get a new city running reasonably fast. This, along with local "happiness" (amenities) means settling even late in the game is viable, even more so if it gets you some new resource.

 

[chazzycat]

They should be about 6 or 7 tiles apart.

could not disagree more...

try putting them much closer. like the minimum distance or maybe 1 hex more for fresh water. that way your factories & power plants will overlap with each other quite a lot, and your cities will have a lot more production. Also, districts get adjacency bonuses from other districts next to them, even districts from another city.

if you think about it a bit, there really are very few reasons to go for the spaced-out super-tall cities like in a Civ5 tradition game.

 

[manu-fan]

Well Chazzy. I watched Maddjinn, and that's what he did. So, you may disagree and that's fine. I've been doing them with 4 tiles between them in my current game, and they do seem a bit too close to each other.

 

[Alchemy101]

Firstly I would way water access is most important for your "early" cities but after that, I must concur with Chazzy, the regional effects of factories and other 6-away effects are VERY powerful. What do you actually need all that space for? With greater overlaps then you have the opportunity to intersperse districts for better adjacency otherwise you will only have intra-city adjacencies or peripheral adjacencies.

In my opinion, more dense appears to have an edge.

 

[BrokenBokken]

You don't need your cities to get super tall either. Small dense cities with factories make a ton of production.

 

[KmDubya]

A small productive city can really help the empire.

What helps the empire? Gold, science and maybe culture.

What do you need for the above? Commercial district, campus, and an industrial district to build it all. This takes a size 7 city. Swap out the campus for a harbor if you want more gold and trade routes, for an entertainment district for zoos to help nearby cities, or a theatre district to help house art or trinkets. Dispersed science does fine as there are no multipliers, you get the science from the buildings. More culture slots to fill are better. It's only the industrial powerhouse city that will build the space port and all the missions that needs to be super productive.

If you can drop in a few of these borg cities around your optimally placed on the terrain big signature cities, your empire will prosper. You can even add them in late as you can reroute one or two trade routes to your industrial cities and get them online quickly.

I'd set the first few cities wherever the terrain was best, all things being equal I'd keep them a little closer than ciV. Then fill in the gaps, settle any luxuries and strategics even in tundra. After environmentalism you can plant trees and lumbermills in tundra river tiles and make for really nice gulag camps.

 

[civplay]

Well Chazzy. I watched Maddjinn, and that's what he did. So, you may disagree and that's fine. I've been doing them with 4 tiles between them in my current game, and they do seem a bit too close to each other.

What was the scenario? he could have been founding 7 tiles apart planning on building another city in the middle. he could have been going wide to get space. That city might have had good tiles. Dropping a well thats what I saw x person do out of context is kind of meaning less. Was this pregame release? day of? before meta?

OP so far it seems the best thing to do is build 4-5 cities close. and then settle others as you please. Basically factories give production bonus to every city within 6 tiles. So, you really want to decide where your going to put your industrial districts in a diamond shape and build cities around 3 or 4 tiles away from. Make sure to build them so that as many cities as possible are within 6 tiles of as many of the industrial districts as possible.

I've been finding that I've been expanding in waves. I build my second city as fast as possible. build up infrastructure. Then go for a second wave of expansion. build up infrastructure and then sometimes go for a third wave if theres space. (I like to add extra civs, so usually there isn't) On top of that, if I have any cities which are "misbehaving" (need housing or unhappy), I start building settlers out of them and plopping them down where ever I can. If I see a nice spot far away Ill go for it. If theres some room somewhere I'll go for it. If not Ill settle it right near my industrial complex. who needs pop when you have hammers.

FYI b/c science and culture are relatively easy to come by and hammers scale up so fast, production is king. The game is all about industrial complexes and commercial.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

If the location is good (fresh water and decent tiles like hills and non-sea resources), feel free to place cities the minimum distance apart. Being closely packed is not a bad thing. It makes your industrial zones and entertainment complexes more effective. It also makes defense and district adjacencies easier. Moreover, until very late in the game your cities won't grow enough to work anywhere close to their full allotment of tiles, so you're not gimping these cities by putting them close together. This is not like 4-city Tradition in Civ V where all of your cities are going to get big really fast.

Obviously, sometimes you should settle cities further away, to claim good spots, block AIs, that kind of thing. But when you can, packing lots of cities close together is quite effective.