Moderator Action: Moved to Strategy and Tips.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
You made me wonder, if you are with 4 pop and have a district already and you start a second one, change to a settler mid district production, after the settler is done and you fall to 3 pop.... can you go back building the unfinished district even without the pop requirement?
Small cities at size 3 or 4 can be quite useful. They will never be economic powerhouses, but they are useful for pumping out settlers, builders, or troops over a long period of time. Sure, they take a while to build, but 10+ cities producing military units will provide your empire with a new unit every 3-4 turns. This allows you to focus your core cities on building infrastructure, wonders, or projects.
You want to expand but building settler after settler is not the correct way to do it.
Building a few cities, tech up and then go on a conquest spree is vastly superior.
Could be.
Or it could be that these small cities do not have enough production to be helpful in the war effort as soon as the cost start going up after the ancient era (like 20+ turns to build a single knight for a size 4 city...).
Or produce enough gold to justify the additional required units cost. No new city did in CIV 5, which is why I normally wanted them to develop into assets by building a few key buildings first and let the rest of my empire handle military production to protect them. To have them focus on military production just prolong the period in which these cities are liabilities and delay them turning into assets.
Or build enough encampment / barracks to produce well trained troops that will be actual assets and not just XP fodder for a better trained army.
Intuitively, toward the classical era and beyond, I expect my miltary will mostly come from one or two of my bigger cities, cities that have an encampment district with all key buildings built and later on an industrial district to pump production. Cities that can produce a capable well trained unit in just a few turn and then has time to build some more buildings to keep developping.
The notion of pumping fresh rookies over a wide territory from small cities that desperately need to be developping instead of spending a loooong time producing one rookie unit seems unwise to me.
Against human players anyway, and probably against high difficulty AI (who seems to have combat bonuses).
If we play online and you want to test this theory, I call Gorgo. Hmm, I can taste all the free culture!![]()
Defence. This may be a concern however it may not be a significant one depending on the situation. Again, the original post is suggesting N+1 > N. With that in mind, is there cost of defending one additional city? Some may play with dedicated units to defend cities but I suspect most do not, moving the army around as needed. This may or may not be an opportunity cost.
Thankfully there are no Iroquois yet this time around.
Hiawatha is expansion obsessed, annoying creature
Also, I think veteran CiV player would be hardwired to expand to few cities only, and start managing the core cities once they have reached 5 or 6 cities. I know I am hard wired to only have 4 cities before industrial age and start expanding again (by war or filling empty tiles) afterward, especially after I got an ideology (usually Freedom) that guarantee I have enough global happiness to compensate for high number of cities.