City Spacing

[texico11]

What's the most effective city spacing? I try to encourage spreading out, but enemy civs end up squeezing cities into the gaps in my borders before they've had time to expand. But the reverse is, if the cities are too near, spacing can be awkward as cities are squished for slots.

What's most effective? Also, tips on spacing between mountains, resources, coast etc would be usefull. It can be awkward planning where you're gonna lay your cities so that there nicely spaced, not too far away, and are near resources, aswell as the coast if you want sea-ports.

How do you go about it, and is it all that important anyway?

 

[Aegis]

What works best for me is one city every three spaces. It's not crowded for workers and it is easy to defend since units can move three spaces per turn on a road.

Cities will be unable to utilize all of the terrain in their cross space until well into the Industrial ages, so it makes more sense to place cities a little closer than what would be optimal, lest the terrain goes to waste for 5,000+ years.

More cities = more commerce and more unit support, which is always a good thing. Just don't go crazy and build so many that you go far past your Optimal Number of Cities and get a lot of Rank corruption because of it.

ie, if "C" is a city and "x" is a space:

C x x C x x C

Or:

C
x
x
C

Or diagonally, which won't show up because of the spacing format of the forums.


There are obvious exceptions to this, like when there is a river off to the side, or a city would be one space away from a coastal square or I need to send a Settler way off into the distance to reserve a valuable resource/luxury, etc.

 

[vmxa]

I only use CxxC, regardless of the level. The lower the level the more you can fudge on tight spacing. Of course you cannot get every town down in the perfect scheme regardless of the scheme used.

I don't have any problems with "slots". I will only rarely have any metros, so size 12 is no problem and only good core cities need 12 tiles to work. Most can make due with much less.

I do not want many coastal towns in the first two rings. I want shields, not gold. I will let the later towns provide the beakers.

Do not worry about resources, they will be yours in time. IOW I will not plant a town to grab this or that resource or lux. I will wait to put a town down that fits with the 3 move layout.

If that adds a delay, I can live with that. That means, mountains are not an issues. I will deviate from the CxxC as I move out farther and the game is older, to let me nullify mountains more, but not incorporating them when possible.

IOW a large range of mountains may just be skirted and left unused. Eventually my borders cover them or prevent access or they are on the coast, so I can largely ignore them.

I am not real fond of coastal tiles as the have no shields and only 1 or 2 food, yeah fish and whales, and as such are not that great. I do not want to make harbors in the first place. I am fine with regular boats.

 

[TheOverseer714]

Loose CxxC with consideration for terrain is what I do. I often give my capital a little extra space, but not much. If you end up in the IA, you might need to juggle tiles and change some mines to irrigation or vice versa, but thats no biggie. CxxC is fine if you stay away from building hospitals. If you love metros then do something like CxxxC.

 

[Aabraxan]

Welcome to CFC, texico11!

City spacing is, IMO, very important. It's a topic that got worked over pretty hard a couple of months ago. Look for some threads by Pyrrhos, one of which was entitled "C-x-x-C vs. C-x-x-x-x-C" or something like that. There's another thread which may be of interest by Othniel and it's called something like "Testing Metros for Space Race Ability," or something similar.

Several factors go into figuring out your city spacing. What type of victory condition do you want? If you're going for all-out conquest or an All-War game, pull cities in tight, CxxC. That way, your cities will be easier to defend and you'll make use of more of your tiles earlier in the game. Going for a space race in which you want lots of metros? Loosen things up a bit to give those metros lots of tiles to work; just understand that most of your cities will work a maximum of 12 tiles until they get hospitals (the exception being one city that might get Shakespeare's Theater).

Terrain will also factor into your city spacing. Moving 1 tile further out to grab a valuable tile, get onto fresh water, or to give you access to a resource or luxury might make sense.

If you like sprawling empires with hundreds of cities, eventually, you'll get to the point that everything you put down is 90% corrupt. At that point, plant them as closely as you can (mostly CxC), water everything and build specialist farms.

Most of my games are military games, so I use a fairly tight city spacing (CxxC). It's easier to defend and almost all of my tiles are producing something beginning pretty early in the game. Also, I don't like having unclaimed territory inside my empire (think "donut-shaped empire") that the AI may try to claim. Depending on terrain, I may even let resources sit outside my borders until I can get another settler out.

 

[Aegis]

Regarding the "Opitmal City Number" I was referring to before:

What is the "Optimal City Number"? How is it used?
The optimal city number is a figure that has two main purposes, and differs on different map sizes. The first use of it is for the check to see if you can build the Forbidden Palace - if you have a number of cities greater than or equal to half the OCN, you can construct the FP. The second purpose of the OCN is for corruption. If a player's number of cities exceeds that number, corruption will increase dramatically in subsequent cities. This can be modified by things such as having the commercial trait, your government, if you have built the FP, and others. The OCN for map sizes are as follows:

Tiny: 14
Small: 17
Standard: 20
Large: 28
Huge: 36

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=170282#OCN

Commercial civs have a 25% bonus to this number, ie. Tiny would be 17.5, Small would be 21, Standard would be 25, etc.

And here is a good guide on Corruption in general:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=76619

I usually play well into the Modern era and rarely run into population problems if I irrigate everything and let my production come from Bonus tiles, hills/mountains and engineers.

 

[ThinkTank]

Here is a repeatable pattern where each city has 12 tiles.

 

[Aegis]

Here is a repeatable pattern where each city has 12 tiles.

http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn43/ThinkTankCFC/cityspacing.jpg

I started off playing Civ3 that way, but the AI would always roll over me because I wouldn't have many cities and they would be spread soooo far apart from one another that they had difficulty reinforcing one another. Then I came here and learned more about the game.

[Edit:] I don't think that picture is correct. From the city, it goes outward one space, and then branches forward left and right, like this:



The space directly west of Nippur would be the perfect location for a secondary city to have interlocking (but not overlapping) city fields with the "Spiceland." If it wasn't a water tile, that is.

 

[Mathias]

Not overlapping cities is generally a bad idea. Allocating 20 tiles to each city when the can use a maximum of 12 tiles for most of the game is an obvious was of 40% of the available terrain.

The image is correct. The cities are overlapping. The placement of citizens is not strictly red/green. The coloring is to demonstrate that each city can simultaneously work 12 tiles, provided there is enough food for all of those citizens. The problem with that layout is that culture in some of the cities is needed in order for all of the tiles to within the borders. It works well enough to approximate in the core of your empire, but becomes wasteful further out.

 

[Spoonwood]

Another one of these threads?

In general, I think it more important to found cities based on terrain considerations first instead of some general a priori scheme. Get cities on rivers. Jam cities into coasts so you have as many coastal tiles you can work as possible. Settler near forests for nicely timed forest chops. Settle on jungles so you don't have to work them. Settling on hills may work for games where you want a lot of commerce or need a little extra defense on your border towns.

C-x-x-x-C (that's *3* xs, not 2) probably works out best for commerce and production if you want an *a priori* scheme for most games (ThinkTank's picture lies in between CxxC and CxxxC in my opinion). Spread things out more and you might have gaps, and gaps waster good tiles (don't waste tiles in your core areas). Or *very* carefully plan so that a CxxxxC spacing doesn't waste tiles whatsoever (which works out more like ThinkTank's picture with an extra space between cities and may work out well for a histographic victory). With a CxxC you won't have the greatest tile selection for your cities.

I think it far more profitable to discuss city spacing on a specific map (especially if we have a desired victory condition in mind) than an abstract discussion like this.

 

[PaperBeetle]

I think it far more profitable to discuss city spacing on a specific map (especially if we have a desired victory condition in mind) than an abstract discussion like this.

Hear hear. That's the smartest thing anybody has said in these CX threads for a long time.

 

[Chamnix]

Bah. Almost every question that has ever been asked in this forum can appropriately be answered by "it depends", but that doesn't really help the advice-seeker very much. For a general question, you give a general answer and later you weed out the exceptions. Yes, there are some exceptions, but for the clear majority of my games regardless of map size, difficulty level, playable civ, or desired victory condition, my core cities are going to be placed to have approximately 12 workable tiles each.

I feel quite comfortable saying that is the most effective city spacing.

 

[capnvonbaron]

Bah. Almost every question that has ever been asked in this forum can appropriately be answered by "it depends", but that doesn't really help the advice-seeker very much. For a general question, you give a general answer and later you weed out the exceptions. Yes, there are some exceptions, but for the clear majority of my games regardless of map size, difficulty level, playable civ, or desired victory condition, my core cities are going to be placed to have approximately 12 workable tiles each.

I feel quite comfortable saying that is the most effective city spacing.

Agreed on all points.

Only notable exception (for me, anyways) is vast deserts. I tend to leave space around those, at least initially, so that one city is not stuck trying to use a bunch of crappy desert tiles and I'll just fill it in culturally or let the AI settle it for me. Later if I have a settler available and the desert tiles aren't being worked by metros, I'll plunk him down for the unit support if nothing else.

 

[vmxa]

Chamnix the reason many put in the depends is that others will come in and try to point out any possible exception as if the general point was just full of crap.

 

[Turner]

The only time I try to populate deserts is when there's a source of h2o relatively near, and I'm playing Agri. Otherwise, it's not worth it for me.

 

[Spoonwood]

I say it depends, because it will far more help gameplay of a player to deal with an actual game than theoretical generalities. Also, the 12 tiles per city scheme... at least many seem to think... pretty much gets refuted by the scoring system of the game. Some might argue that higher scoring games represent better played games, as the post-game screen *almost appears* to favor higher scores than "side shows" like all those different vicotry conditions. Don't think I really think of the game that way, but that's probably the devil's advocate argument.

Additionally, beyond histographic games, 20k games deserve at least consideration for something other than 12 worked tiles per city around the 20k city, and for 100k games one almost surely wants smallpox city spacing. So, 3 out of the 7 victory conditions deserve a little more thought than the 12 worked tiles/city scheme. Granted, that's still a minority of games... but it definitely seems like a potentially significant minority of games.

 

[sk8boardbob2]

^I agree. My most enjoyable game so far was a OCC 20K as Babylon and it resulted in my lowest winning score.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

I noticed nobody has mentioned city ranking in the discussions. A C-x-x-C layout for the first 9 cities will give 8 cities with 1st ranking and the least corruption. In my last two games I have gone to 12 1st rank cities in a circle around my capital. I ignore terrain for spacing to assure that they are all the same distance (+/- .5) of the capital. Once I get out of the 1st rank then I go for border integrity assuming I will get 1 or 2 cultural expansions before an AI settler tries to claim some ground. Spacing within your borders despends on your objectives, preferences - especially concerning the OCN.

 

[Chamnix]

True that city spacing is a different ballgame in PTW/Vanilla. Most here assume we are talking about Conquests unless otherwise specified.