City placement, and how many?

[Manick]

What would you define as an obtainable, and typical good spot to place your cities? Is the AI recommendations always correct? I haven't quite gotten the hang of it, but I do understand that being next to flood plains/rivers helps a city grow fast, and that being next to hills/forests will make a good production city, but for some reason I can never make consistent decisions and some cities end up not only growing slow, but producing slow as well much to my suprise. One of my problems is, I don't understand how cities are supposed to grow. All I know is that more food = city grows faster, thats it. But im also confused why some cities won't grow even with an overabundance of food, and will just stay at its current population.

Also, what kind of area of terrain should I make cities that bring in lots of commerce, and can afford for most of the tiles it works to be towns? Every time I try to make anything other than farms, such as cottages, it never wants to work on them, because it grows way faster. But if I spam farms near a city during its development, then change them all to cottages after it grows, won't the city starve? How is it possible to make a city with lots of towns if the town will starve without farms? Sorry for the nub questions, but I've read the booklet and I still haven't fully grasped the game yet and haven't even beat the computer on the default difficulty.

 

[Multiplicity]

I personally like spots where there is an abundance of resources and food. Since it takes 2 units of food to support 1 unit of population, you need to make sure you can produce 40 units of food to hit a population of 20 to fill up every workable tile (assuming you don't have desert or peak tiles which are useless). So how do you get this? Well, certain resources like corn and pigs generate surplus food. Other ways are planting farms on grassland or food plains tiles. This will let you work tiles that generate 0 or 1 unit of food without falling short. Sometimes you might not end up with enough grass land or food plains tiles to make up for the deficit, so placing windmills on hills can help, but I try to avoid them if at all possible.

Before choosing a place to settle, I like to count how many units of food the 20 tiles surrounding the city center naturally generate (including any resources since you're going to use the improvement that takes advantage of the resource). Then I take the difference from 40 and see how many, if I need, I need to offset. So if I need 3 more food to work all the tiles, I'll have to plant three farms for that town, or use windmills on hills. Farms add +1 food to the tile (+2 if you have Biology). Windmills add +1 food. For farms, you need fresh sources of water. So rivers and lakes are what you want to keep your eye on when settling. Otherwise, you might be having trouble getting your city to grow until Civil Service where you can irrigate (through chains of farms) from fresh water to your city.

Ultimately, go to the strategy articles section on this forum. They have great information for new players to the game.

 

[JujuLautre]

But im also confused why some cities won't grow even with an overabundance of food, and will just stay at its current population.

Some possibilities:
- lots of citizen work and bring 0 or 1 food (hills, plains, specialists...)
- the city is in an unhealthiness/unhappiness state
- you forgot to uncheck the "avoid growth" button

Otherwise, you should search for articles on city placement/specialization or dotmapping, there are plenty of them

 

[Manick]

Thanks for the advice, I think the reason I got confused was because I didn't realize that making workers or settlers halted a cities growth when they are being produced. I found out on my own purely by mistake.