City Placement Challenge - What would YOU do?

[cracker]

Eowyn,

I would definately file the grid patterns under "Nice things that I once thought were a good idea."

Use some general spacing guidelines to help match your strategy but then chose the site location to maximize the POWER of the the city location.

The graphs I have produce so far indicate that 3 and 5 are better than 4 for a city spacing when all other factors are equal because of a spacing of 3 maximizes the power of the position all the way up until hospitals are produced. 5 pushes the score up quicker by territory points but sacrifices productivity power.

In the ancient age, a spacing of 4 allocates 16 to 25 tiles per town when the average working citizens per town is only 6-7 citizens even when average fresh water distribution is present. You sacrifice the production power of 70 to 80% of your territory.

Once I choose an aproximate city site, I break ties on deciding where the city goes by looking at what the actual city center square buys us. Settling on a hill adds food and save worker turns building roads and mines. Setlling on a jungle square clears the jungle, builds a road and more than quadruples the value of the square.

When you are reaching out to the frontiers, the new city builds one more segment of the road network quickly.


Look for Power not geometry.

Someone said OCP, file that away as a nice thought as well.

 

[XOVER]

Dang, I feel bad.

In my current game which has the best capitol placement of any game I've played to date (very close to the center of the map, and not on or terribly close to the coast), I thought I was correct in getting a first ring of 6. My second ring is a pretty productive 11, but now I see where the optimal initial ring is 8 (what I will now remember as the "swastika configuration").

But guys: I almost always choose a river location or coastal location (and waste a grid or two). If I'm not on a coast, I really don't like more than one or two sea grids in my eventual city limits (due to 1 food forever).

Is this a mistake in the early game? After all, it will be centuries before I care about those 1 food coastal grids, and I need to get a city up and running now. OTOH, if you don't get a coastal city up by city 3 or 4 (I prefer 3, can live with 4, but not 2), then you've got pretty much no chance at the early sea wonders (I'm a builder, obviously, flawed as that strategy may be under current rules).

******

cracker: I do like to get a city built generally no more than 3 turns away. 4 at the most. (Though occasionally I'll go further for a luxury against an opponent's border, or a choke point, etc., then backfill.)

 

[Eowyn of Rohan]

Can you post a savegame of your game so we can see, XOVER? Thx.

 

[Bamspeedy]

forget this post, misread reply

 

[XOVER]

Eowyn: That would be fun. PM me and tell me how, and I'll put it up. BTW, nice informative post.

 

[Zur]

Originally posted by Bamspeedy
With a builder type style of play, you can have cities farther away from the capital that are more productive. Corruption isn't only affected by distance, but also by the # of cities. With fewer cities you don't experience massive corruption until you get alot farther away from the capital. Note: sometimes you don't notice the improved corruption until you put courthouses in the city, the city grows in size and you have a WLTK day. But even with a builder placement if you get far enough away from the capital, yes you will still get 95% corrupt cities, so ICS that area would be better. A builder type placement would probably not see much corruption at all for the cities that are placed on what I see of the map so far. (once they get out of despot, build courthouses,etc).

It's called a 'builder' placement, because building improvements in these cities will be more powerful, and more efficient than putting them in ICS cities.

If I am reading you correctly, we should ICS all corrupt land?

1 problem for the builder strat is knowing where the "corrupt" land starts because I find that I often rush courthouses in these areas, only to find that they don't help.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Zur, yes, it is hard knowing where the corrupt areas start and ends. And even then, you may get some 2 shield cities, but if they require a hospital to get the city big enough to actually produce the 2 (or 3) shields, it doesn't really seem worth it, does it. This takes practice and experience to get a general feel for where the corruption starts hitting you really bad.

I suggest you take a look at Alexman's corruption article in the strategy articles forum titled "Do you think you understand corruption". If I'm reading that correctly, when it determines the corruption for a city it calculates distance from capital (or FP) as one factor, then it considers how many cities are between the city in question and the capital for the other factor. So, it would make sense to keep the area around your palace spaced further apart. But once you reach max corruption any cities you add BEYOND that will not add additional corruption to your cities that are closer to your capital.

Anyone can feel free to correct me if any of that was wrongly interpretted. Alexman also has a corruption calculator posted in that thread, but the last time I looked at it (months ago), I couldn't figure out how to use it very well.

 

[Eowyn of Rohan]

XOVER: I have no idea how to put up a savegame pictures are easy, but files???

I always had the idea that there are two factors to corruption: number 1, distance from capital or FP, and number 2, total number of cities in all.

If that's true, then we can divide land into two areas: healthy and corrupt [based on the 1st factor]. Our main goal would be to get the OPTIMUM [NOT maximum] number of cities into the healthy area as possible. Remember, if we ICS the healthy area then later improvements take forever.

From my experience I think I can say that the healthy area extends for 7 squares in every direction, on Standard maps. After that corruption increases exponentially - and by 13+ the land is 1 shield no matter what you do.

Besides our "healthy" area, we would want as FEW cities as possible, because each extra city is ruining our healthy ones.

 

[Konquest02]

I'd defenitely build a city in the choke point to the south as soon as possible to prevent other civs from coming in (especially if the Russians are near. )

Someting that matters is the order of the cities. Do you build your closest cities first or you reach out for maximum space then backfill?

I personnaly prefer the second option because if a civ manages to sneak a city, it will be easier to culture flip. You therefore grab more land and have a better expansion rate.

--Kon--

 

[Barker]

The settle out and fill in strategy will only work well if you plan your road network before the cities are ready to be placed. Too many turns will be wasted in moving to the future site if no road network already exists. This can really slow down initial expansion efforts.

I find that the best raw power approach is to build you cities in optimal locatinos, and then fil in the gaps with extra cities to use all your territory once the initial land grab phase is over. It is very simple to disband these cities later on to take full advantage of your hospitals. ( I like to think of it as amalgamating my cities into metropolises, which happens IRL, and not as abandoning cities )

 

[Eowyn of Rohan]

In this situation, where I can be sure no settlers are coming on my island till Mapmaking, I would build the core cities first. Especially since the fillin ones are all to the East - which means the Russians would have to travel twice as long as landing on the West coast.