Concerns about the 3-hex reach

Celevin

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Jul 21, 2010
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This might just be extreme OCD on my part (I have it BAD, as in loss of sleep and counting everything BAD).

In Civ4, whenever I am positioning a city, I don't mind overlap with other cities. It doesn't hurt my OCD at all. What really gets me though is having sea tiles on a non-maritime city. I just can't do it. Either a city is inland with no sea tiles, or is coastal, period. It limits me, but not enough to actually change the outcome of the game; after all, it's very rare you'd want a non-coastal city with ocean tiles.

So we come to Civ5 and its 3-hex radius. To make matters worse, it looks like it takes a long, long time for a city to actually sprawl to its full growth. Assuming there will be an equal number of hexes compared to squares from Civ4 to Civ5, I wonder how many non-coastal cities I'll actually be making! While I'm sure there will be some, I'm also positive the number will be greatly reduced as compared to Civ4.

I'm wondering how many more poor saps like me are out there?
 
I'm don't suffer from OCD, but prior to civ 4 I would always feel compelled to cover every usable land tile with a city radius, and I would be quite annoyed if that meant I had to put extra cities in. A "good" map for me was often something with all the land optimally covered by a few cities.

I got over this to some degree in civ 4 by telling myself that normal land didn't matter anymore, as long as I got all of the resources. :) Still, it led to some frustrating situations!

I'm hoping that the 3 tile radius in civ 5 cures me... since it should now be possible to easily get all resources within some city's potential radius. The idea of useful land being forever out of reach because of early city placement always frustrated me far more than it should have.

Anyways, I can't relate perfectly, but I can definitely sympathize with your concerns! :)
 
I also had a slight ODC about this when I played Civ 3, but that was mostly because the AI put cities in useless places if there was any land available. Civ 4 helped cure this for me because if they built a useless city by me I knew that it hurt them economically, plus I could easily take it from them if I wanted to or a resource popped up.

Hopefully Civ 5 continues with what Civ 4 had in this respect, or if they don't have that then at least they might have a AI that doesn't build worthless cities on land that I don't want but is "within" my empire.

I feel your pain though in regards to wanting all the land, but I feel it will take way to long to fill the 35 or however many tiles a city can work, so I'll probably overlap just to fill the land up faster and get the resources I want.
 
I'm don't suffer from OCD, but prior to civ 4 I would always feel compelled to cover every usable land tile with a city radius, and I would be quite annoyed if that meant I had to put extra cities in. A "good" map for me was often something with all the land optimally covered by a few cities.

I got over this to some degree in civ 4 by telling myself that normal land didn't matter anymore, as long as I got all of the resources. :) Still, it led to some frustrating situations!

I'm hoping that the 3 tile radius in civ 5 cures me... since it should now be possible to easily get all resources within some city's potential radius. The idea of useful land being forever out of reach because of early city placement always frustrated me far more than it should have.

Anyways, I can't relate perfectly, but I can definitely sympathize with your concerns! :)

I'm a lot like you I think. In civ2 I use to have to build cities to use every single land square I could (one reason was to prevent the ai from building in the middle of your empire of course). In Civ4 I was a little better at this, but I still used most every tile unless it was Tundra or Desert (although if it had resources I would still build a city utilizing those resources- even if it only grew to size 3 or 4 :)). Even regular grassland/plains I would put cities. A real bad habit.

I eventually was able to hold off putting bad cities on grassland/plains that had no rivers or resources until later in the game. Then I'd just put one in for the hell of it since it made my map look better.
 
Well, it's not about me wanting all the land, or overlap, or anything like that. I just can't stand to see a city with, 1-4 sea tiles, yet not be coastal! It bugs me.
 
Yeah it's not that great. You get what, one food and a couple of commerce? Kinda sucks when you can't build lighthouse and fishing hut (I'm talking ROM mod here)
 
Well, it's not about me wanting all the land, or overlap, or anything like that. I just can't stand to see a city with, 1-4 sea tiles, yet not be coastal! It bugs me.

Just imagine that the sea tiles are mountain or desert or tundra or ice. You wouldn't miss them then.

I'm not sure how the 3 hex radius is going to work out in practice. Purchasing hexes in the third ring seems pretty expensive and resources, even though there seem to be more of them on the map, have lower bonusses than in Civ4. Most important thing so far seem to settle next to a river, a) because you will have both banks of the river in the first ring which means you don't have to pay any penalty when you purchase hexes on the other side of the river, and b) fresh water farms now get +1:food: as early as Civil Service.
 
I have issues with this as well.

I actually will stop the game and bust out a calculator and figure in national wonders, etc... to figure out the optimal placement of cities and then put "signposts" down to label the cities, what national wonders they have planned, and what their role will be.

Civ5's city radius size and way of expansion is going to make me need pills to stay sane.
 
Well, it seems like they intend for you to not care about overlap, and just found it good places. If you look at the screenshots they found cities quite close, 3 or 4 tiles from each other. Hopefully this means that Celevin will probably be able to build non-coastal cities with sea tiles that are actually used by proper coastal cities.
It also would appear to mean that your entire empire will be workable.
 
Well, it seems like they intend for you to not care about overlap, and just found it good places. If you look at the screenshots they found cities quite close, 3 or 4 tiles from each other. Hopefully this means that Celevin will probably be able to build non-coastal cities with sea tiles that are actually used by proper coastal cities.
It also would appear to mean that your entire empire will be workable.
 
Another thing to consider is that, in all likelihood, no city will ever use all 36 tiles within its 3 hex reach, so some overlap will be useful if you want to use all of them. Or, having some "dead" tiles will not be as much of a problem as it was in previous versions - since the city will never use them.
 
i think it shall be worse in civ 5, with a non-costal city having up to two hexes out to sea, i'd like to see a port improvement that can be built on the coast, that effectively turns a non-coastal city into a coastal city. (but maybe with a 50% penalty to do with ocean things e.g. lighthouse 50% effective, ships take twice the time to build. etc)
 
I suffer from a similar form of OCD... I often delay building cities far longer than I should because the terrain isn't perfect. In addition to no allowing an inland city to have a water tile, I also don't like my cities to have any desert or mountain tiles. A city also must not overlap with another cities fat cross, but you also can't waste any good tiles inbetween cities. I never build the National Epic until I find a place to build a city that I can completely surround with grassland farms. It's maddening.
 
So your complaint has nothing to do with gameplay

Moderator Action: Please keep your replies civil and comment on the players argument only
 
Since it'll take so long to reach the third ring around the city, I wouldn't worry. By then, you'll have a self-sustaining city. Afterall, the goal is to get the best out of a city, not use literally every tile (which you wouldn't be able to do anyway).
 
Grr - I can identify somewhat (although I can convince myself to build non-coastal cities with ocean tiles). What I expect will bother me most about the new layout is that cities often won't be symmetrical, given the expansion by one tile at a time. I know I'll find myself wanting to claim sub-optimal tiles just to regain a symmetric city border.
 
I feel like one of the most important skills in other civ games is the ability to get over these sorts of OCD habits, and just make the decisions that are good for strategy even if they don't please you aesthetically. In Civ 4 a lot of people want to build every single building in every single city, even though this is a horrible strategy some people just can't help but do this. Likewise, building 1 tile off the coast is annoying but sometimes preferable (and it has the advantage of making the city a lot less vulnerable to amphibious invasions).
 
What really gets me though is having sea tiles on a non-maritime city. I just can't do it.

I used to feel the same but it's not that different from overlapping with another city (and having that city "own" the tile) and it's less useless than having a mountain tile since you could at least sorta work the tile.

In most late-game screenshots the city populations seem pretty tame. I haven't seen anything close to what I often hit in Civ IV. If your city pop is ~15 you can't possibly work every tile in a 3 range radius.

So, I don't think overlapping will be that big a deal if you wanna "capture certain resources" and/or you can spread your people more to be focused on resources or shifting priorities if you're city does sprawl to full radius.

Overall the potential and flexibility seems high - can't wait to try it.
 
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