City spam - how dominant is it?

[Czacki]

Hello,

ever since the earliest civs, I never liked mass expansion and how powerful it was if done right.

Is Civ6 any different? i love the idea of building a few powerful cities and not much more (up to 10, I guess), because looking for optimal locations, specializing them,etc. was so fun for me in Civ4 (quantity beat quality there tho).

How important is the cityspam?

Cheers.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

You want to expand but I think the game do not really encourage stuff such as rapid expansion because settlers comptete with building up districts and districts are the major source of most resources in the game.

 

[Acken]

I don't feel it. You need your own quick cities but the thing is you need a strong army fast so you don't have time to spam settlers.
And once you kill the AI invasion the best use of your army is probably to take the AI cities rather than resume settler spam.

You don't have that much space anyway considering cities without freshwater are really weak unless you play rome/kongo and can spam cheap +housing districts.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

You can do very well in tech with just a very modest number of cities, much more important is to get campuses up then more cities. An early campus is naturally worth alot more then a late campus.

Now you can do very well with very modest tech if you choose what to get well and get the needed eurkas.

 

[Czacki]

That's really nice. How important is picking the spot for a city? I loved the thrill of finding the "perfect spot" in Civ4, even if it wasn't that important in the end.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I find production is very important, food is not as valuable due to housing cap but you really need the production to build a good city. Later on you can use trade routes to help out production poor cities and even later you can plant forest but in the early game you should go for production heavy locations.

 

[Czacki]

How about commerce (didn't play Civ6 yet)? Is going for specialized cities with a lot of commerce generating stuff like in Civ4 is viable as well, or is production the best thing to go for in every city?

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

There is no commerce in civilization VI. Science and gold are separate stuff and mainly earned from stuff such as districts and trade.

 

[King Jason]

I'm finding a decent enough pace of expansion - right now I typically expand a couple cities early, and enjoy a burst of empire growth between and around early empire and political philosophy. This allows one city to spam out a few settlers while the other two continue to do other things.

In regards to city specialization - that's pretty much directly tied to growth. You can build every specialty district in a city, but that city would need to reach pop 11+ to do it. So other things like housing and amenities impede this until the later eras. Cities will stay at pops 6 through 11 for decent portion of the game. So you need to decide the order of districts - adding in any encampments or entertainment hubs also use the district cap. Aqueducts and Neighborhoods do not, nor do Unique districts.

Also specialization depends on location - if you have a city with a tile surrounded by 4 mountains. You need to decide between a campus or holy site in that spot, and that also means in terms of your "budget" for districts, based on pop, you're probably going to place that district before the others. Or you may choose not to - it's goal dependent.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

To me it seems that rushing cities is quite powerful, but 4 is a quite good number for the early game.
It will allow you to make use of your Amenities and build up districts at a decent pace.

Later on, you can settle another 4 if the land around you permits it.
Overall it seems that the quality of the settle spots (fresh water + a good F tile + a good P tile makes a BIG difference.