City placement discussion

[AbuHab]

I find the best way to place cities is to give them 12 tiles each. This gives four major advantages:
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There are other reasons but I can't think of them all now.

Happiness is another reason! Limiting the number of tiles limits city size, which limits unhappiness. By keeping my cities at size 12 and snagging a lot of luxuries, I routinely keep my entire civ in "We Love the King Day" status for hundreds of years in a row, which reduces waste and corruption.

The best option then seems to be a quite tight fit (12 tiles each) in RCP style. Has anyone got a nice scheme / map / general plan for such city builing?

I find that the up-two-and-over-three pattern works well for me:

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[Zakharov]

Happiness is another reason! Limiting the number of tiles limits city size, which limits unhappiness. By keeping my cities at size 12 and snagging a lot of luxuries, I routinely keep my entire civ in "We Love the King Day" status for hundreds of years in a row, which reduces waste and corruption.

Very true. It also means you do not need to build too many happiness buildings, which saves on maintenance costs.

 

[Civthing]

I use the O.C.P detailed HERE

Basically each city from northwest to southeast is five tiles apart. Each NW-SE row is separated by going south 3 and southwest 1. This works wonders! Combined with Ision's 1 Wonder per city/no GL rule I've got a great game. *smiles cheesily*
... I know I sound like an infomercial!

Civthing

 

[MeteorPunch]

what does RCP matter? Why be hardlined on a certain distance - there is probably an advantage here I don't know about. Why would this be better than say, varying distance a little, but the cities averaging out the same distance?

 

[MeteorPunch]

2nd question. what is good about close cities if you start to go over the city number limit for corruption for map size? I don't understand how this works.

 

[AbuHab]

what does RCP matter? Why be hardlined on a certain distance - there is probably an advantage here I don't know about. Why would this be better than say, varying distance a little, but the cities averaging out the same distance?

I don't believe RCP does matter anymore. RCP used to give an advantage by reducing corruption because of the way rank was calculated, but that advantage has been eliminated in the later patches.

 

[AbuHab]

2nd question. what is good about close cities if you start to go over the city number limit for corruption for map size? I don't understand how this works.

There are two factors in the calculation of corruption. One factor is based on the total number of cities in your empire and involves a ranking of your cities from closest to furthest from the capital. The other factor is based on the distance of each city, in squares, from the your empire's capital. Closeness to the capital is relevant to both factors, but bunching your cities will not help you with the first factor. For more information than you ever wanted on the topic of corruption, check out this thread.

 

[The Fjonis]

RCP apparently doesn't matter any more in Conquests, but it still matters in Vanilla. That's about all I know.

I read somewhere that half distances (4,5 or 6,5 from the capital) are rounded down to 4 and 6 respectively, so that both cities built on radius 4 and those on 4,5 are counted as being in the same ring. Is this correct? If so that sure gives significantly more freedom when it comes to selecting city locations.

 

[mikezang]

Absolute, RCP doesn't work in C3C. I use Tight Build to place my cities as below: