Distance between cities

[stealth_nsk]

I found settlements on Firaxis streams being placed quite far from each other, so I wonder, what's the optimal distance will be so far?

Pro closer placements:

1. Now settlements can't reach resources outside their 3-tile zone (unless you play as America in modern). So to guarantee taking all the resources, you need all tiles to be reachable.
2. Adjacency bonuses are still here, so you may consider grouping settlements to support each other.

Con closer placements:

1. Settlements appear to work more tiles than before.
2. As I understand, there's no tile swap on launch (correct me if that was already patched), so unless you manage quarter placement very carefully, you could take valuable tiles from other settlements as it happened in some of the videos
3. With settlement cap you may want to grab as much land as possible and it looks like on default settings you have space for that

So, what do you think?

 

[Metecury]

I think it is also dependent on resources being central to the economic legacy in the antiquity age. It's more about settling where it is optimal for resource gathering rather than to paint the map your color. Especially since loyalty is gone.

Also settlement cap encourages more strategic placement along with the other reasons you listed.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think it is also dependent on resources being central to the economic legacy in the antiquity age. It's more about settling where it is optimal for resource gathering rather than to paint the map your color. Especially since loyalty is gone.

Yep, but with new resources appearing in each age, your optimal placement for resource gathering in antiquity could turn out to be pretty bad in exploration.

 

[AriochIV]

Settlements don't claim tiles automatically, so unless you are careless about which tiles you improve (allowing for the resulting culture bomb effect), you shouldn't be robbing tiles from priority settlements.

Having said that, since settlements don't work unimproved tiles, I'm not sure that unimproved tiles are exclusive to a particular settlement once claimed. Especially since tiles can't be swapped between settlements, it would make more sense of any tile within your borders can be improved by any settlement that has that tile within its radius.

 

[8housesofelixir]

Even back in Civ 6, citizens could not work beyond the 3-tile radius, so nothing changed from there.

In Civ 6, the main argument for settling the cities together was the adjacency bonus, or more precisely, the lack of adjacency sources:

• Every city can only have one district of each type.
• The base district adjacency bonus is only +0.5, which is also rounded down (unless you are playing as Japan).

Both limitations mean a single city cannot effectively build up its yield via "internal" adjacencies alone. Adjacency bonuses of more than +1 usually, if not always, come from "external" adjacencies, i.e., extra districts of other cities nearby. The famous "Industrial Zone Triangle" layout or the more powerful Germany Hansa layout was developed precisely because of this.

In Civ 7, this dynamic is completely changed, as there isn't a strict limitation on the number of districts or quarters anymore, while the sources of adjacency bonuses increased significantly in the form of various urban buildings, as well as wonder adjacencies being more powerful. This means the "internal" adjacencies are much more potent now.
Drongo's newest video on Civ 7 OCC is a good example of this; he could achieve very good yields in one city alone using the internal adjacencies.

As such, unlike in Civ 6, there isn't a strong need to group cities together anymore in Civ 7. I guess it will be more like Civ 5, in which cities are best settled 4 or 5 (edit: I count the tiles wrong, should be far more than that) tiles away, so the citizens are not completing tiles to work with.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Settlements don't claim tiles automatically, so unless you are careless about which tiles you improve (allowing for the resulting culture bomb effect), you shouldn't be robbing tiles from priority settlements.

Having said that, since settlements don't work unimproved tiles, I'm not sure that unimproved tiles are exclusive to a particular settlement once claimed. Especially since tiles can't be swapped between settlements, it would make more sense of any tile within your borders can be improved by any settlement that has that tile within its radius.

I totally agree that unclaimed tiles should be shared between all settlements in range, but I don't think that's the case in the current game. And if it works like this, it may be much harder to plan the growth properly.

I believe in one of the YouTube videos player accidentally took out a tile from his capital. And I watched not many videos, so there could be more cases like this

 

[AriochIV]

Even back in Civ 6, citizens could not work beyond the 3-tile radius, so nothing changed from there.

In Civ 6, the main argument for settling the cities together was the adjacency bonus, or more precisely, the lack of adjacency sources:

• Every city can only have one district of each type.
• The base district adjacency bonus is only +0.5, which is also rounded down (unless you are playing as Japan).

Both limitations mean a single city cannot effectively build up its yield via "internal" adjacencies alone. Adjacency bonuses of more than +1 usually, if not always, come from "external" adjacencies, i.e., extra districts of other cities nearby. The famous "Industrial Zone Triangle" layout or the more powerful Germany Hansa layout was developed precisely because of this.

In Civ 7, this dynamic is completely changed, as there isn't a strict limitation on the number of districts or quarters anymore, while the sources of adjacency bonuses increased significantly in the form of various urban buildings, as well as wonder adjacencies being more powerful. This means the "internal" adjacencies are much more potent now.
Drongo's newest video on Civ 7 OCC is a good example of this; he could achieve very good yields in one city alone using the internal adjacencies.

As such, unlike in Civ 6, there isn't a strong need to group cities together anymore in Civ 7. I guess it will be more like Civ 5, in which cities are best settled 4 or 5 or more tiles away, so the citizens are not completing tiles to work with.

You still get adjacency bonuses from nearby settlements, so there is still benefit to using every available tile that you reasonably can.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Even back in Civ 6, citizens could not work beyond the 3-tile radius, so nothing changed from there.

In civ5 and civ6 you could work strategic and luxury resources up to 5 tiles from the city. In Civ7 you can't.
EDIT: It's "grab", not "work", of course. Wrong term used.

As such, unlike in Civ 6, there isn't a strong need to group cities together anymore in Civ 7. I guess it will be more like Civ 5, in which cities are best settled 4 or 5 or more tiles away, so the citizens are not completing tiles to work with.

4-5 is still close - you have no gaps and utilize adjacency bonuses. I think developers settled with like 6-8 tiles between cities leaving some gaps there.

 

[Evolena]

In civ5 and civ6 you could work strategic and luxury resources up to 5 tiles from the city. In Civ7 you can't.

(In 6) You could put an improvement on them to get the resource, but you couldn't work it (as in having a population gaining the yields).

 

[8housesofelixir]

(In 6) You could put an improvement on them to get the resource, but you couldn't work it (as in having a population gaining the yields).

In addition, Civ 6 and 7 use the same engine and/or development tools (IIRC Civ 5 is the same as well), therefore many mechanic limitations in 6 continued to 7.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I believe in one of the YouTube videos player accidentally took out a tile from his capital. And I watched not many videos, so there could be more cases like this

I've watched quite a number of videos (need some activity while i'm waiting for 02/06 ) and i only remember seeing this occur once. Also that's obviously something we'll be able to avoid more easily when we get a feeling of how to play the game rather than having to think out every move.
I think spreading further away than we did in Civ6 is going to be more frequent than it was in Civ6 because :

• No Loyalty so no need to build a tight block of cities to prevent flipping
• Good adjacency will be easier to achieve
• It will be easier to grab more resources by spreading settlements and they will be more important than in Civ6
• You need to keep some room to expand your cities with Urban Districts now that they can grow quite big thanks to town support

However, i don't think it will be the only strategy, strategic positioning of settlements is going to be more important. Trying to maximize resources in the settlement radius is going to be what dictates where settlements are placed. With the culture-bomb mechanic, and assuming building-swap remains possible, it will be easier to grab resources in the 3rd ring so you can look at the full area when trying to acquire as many resources as you can, unless you are competing against an AI in which case placing a few settlements 3-tiles away from each other can help you create a "solid" border that claims all the good tiles faster. It will also depend how many increases to settlement limit you can grab with your leader/civ combo (and possibly counting your planned civ for the next age). A lot of different factors will decide how close or spread out you want to settle but i suspect for cities at least, players will want to keep more room. 4 tiles away from a city (not town) is probably going to be the minimum so that you don't steal tiles from the 3rd ring when settling as you have no control over that.

 

[UWHabs]

I totally agree that unclaimed tiles should be shared between all settlements in range, but I don't think that's the case in the current game. And if it works like this, it may be much harder to plan the growth properly.

I believe in one of the YouTube videos player accidentally took out a tile from his capital. And I watched not many videos, so there could be more cases like this

That feels like something that they *should* be able to fix without too much trouble, so you aren't forced into some weird order of claiming things. Otherwise any overlap terrain you have to make sure that whichever of the cities you expect will be the priority one grows to claim the terrain first, and it's going to be a real pain to settle some spots. You're going to have to do a lot of building cheese to make sure tiles are claimed properly.

As for settling distance, in 6 you never needed more than 6 or 7 districts in any city, and given that you could swap tiles between cities, it was always better to keep some overlap and shift things around as fit your needs. In 7, your big settlements are going to easily fill up their entire 2 inner rings, you need more space. I think you still want to make sure you have some overlap - I could see some weird cases where you have like one tile missing between all your settlements, and next age it happens to pop a resource and suddenly you can't work it.

 

[stealth_nsk]

(In 6) You could put an improvement on them to get the resource, but you couldn't work it (as in having a population gaining the yields).

Of course, but it's not that important. The difference between resource and non-resource tiles is minimal, while the effect of adding the resource to your network is empire-wide.

In addition, Civ 6 and 7 use the same engine and/or development tools (IIRC Civ 5 is the same as well), therefore many mechanic limitations in 6 continued to 7.

They probably reuse some code, but engines are different in each Civ iteration (only spinoffs like Beyond Earth reuse engines). But the logic of each tile in the empire belonging to some city is, probably, so deeply rooted in Civ concepts, so it's likely they did it the same way now, because they always did.

 

[UWHabs]

Of course, but it's not that important. The difference between resource and non-resource tiles is minimal, while the effect of adding the resource to your network is empire-wide.


They probably reuse some code, but engines are different in each Civ iteration (only spinoffs like Beyond Earth reuse engines). But the logic of each tile in the empire belonging to some city is, probably, so deeply rooted in Civ concepts, so it's likely they did it the same way now, because they always did.

Yeah, in 6 it doesn't tell you anything about tiles owned by another city when trying to place a district, whereas it will preview adjacencies for both owned tiles and unclaimed tiles (telling you how much to purchase the tile). So it would take some re-adjusting, for sure.

 

[Evolena]

Of course, but it's not that important. The difference between resource and non-resource tiles is minimal, while the effect of adding the resource to your network is empire-wide.

I agree, but you used the words "could work", not "could grab/get/..." so I had to correct the statement

 

[8housesofelixir]

They probably reuse some code, but engines are different in each Civ iteration (only spinoffs like Beyond Earth reuse engines). But the logic of each tile in the empire belonging to some city is, probably, so deeply rooted in Civ concepts, so it's likely they did it the same way now, because they always did.

IIRC one of the devs confirmed in a Civ 7 stream that citizens can only work a 3-tile radius is hardcoded, rather than an intentional design choice (which also suggests that the underlying game dev toolkit did not change much since Civ 5).

 

[stealth_nsk]

IIRC one of the devs confirmed in a Civ 7 stream that citizens can only work a 3-tile radius is hardcoded, rather than an intentional design choice (which also suggests that the underlying game dev toolkit did not change much since Civ 5).

"Hardcoded" has nothing to do with design decisions or the same engine, it just means you can't change this parameter in mods.

 

[beorn]

One thing that will likely affect town placement: the way towns support cities.

If I understand this (and I may not), specialized towns will support the cities with which they have a connection. I assume splitting that support equally.

So how far away can a town be and still be considered connected? If there is a city I am prioritizing (probably a common situation) what is the sweet spot where a town supports that city, but a further, secondary city? Or does this kind of strategizing even work?

I can imagine building a far off settlement to snag a specific resource (or perhaps a coastal location if landlocked late in antiquity), but for the most part, I would expect to be looking at settlements as support tools for cities, so I would want to stay within range.

Second thing that might affect town placement: the threat of a barbarian crisis at the end of antiquity

Third thing: strategy towards other AI civs. If it's in my interest to keep good relations (like with Himiko), I'd be more of a mind to keep to my immediate area. If my plan is more warlike, forward settle and let them burn their influence denouncing me.

 

[AW Arcaeca]

In civ5 and civ6 you could work strategic and luxury resources up to 5 tiles from the city. In Civ7 you can't.

What? Civ5's city work range is 3 tiles by default, unless you've modified the game files.

 

[stealth_nsk]

What? Civ5's city work range is 3 tiles by default, unless you've modified the game files.

I used wrong term. It's about taking resource, not working the tile.