Going wide, should you concentrate growth in a few cities, or more evenly?

[Stacked_Deck]

Let's say you have 5 potentially great cities, 5 good, 5 average and 5 awful ones settled for a resource or to link borders.

Which ones do you let grow and suck up your luxuries?

 

[Frank327]

Preferably all of them. You get 0.7 science for every pop and every 3 pops gets you another potential district. So if you've got lots of big cities you don't even really need campuses to keep up with science. In practice, make sure cities with many good production tiles grow the biggest, cities with low production have less of a priority on growing big.

 

[joncnunn]

All 15 of them if possible, but I have the feeling the 5 "awful" ones don't have fresh water access nor the ability to build an aqueduct to correct the situation so those are going to suffer from growth penalties quickly no matter what until Neighborhoods can be built.
There's no global happiness penalties; and unless you are suffering from WW problems, housing capacity is the real limit on growth.

 

[Fuccimama]

You can cap awful cities at 2 or 3 pop, and still get a district in. This way, it doesn't steal luxury amenities from your big producers, and they still get the benefit of the district. You can spam 2 pop cities 9 tiles from your Capital, and get a ton of hammers out of industrial districts for instance.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Those 2-3 pop cities also need to steal internal trade route from other useful cities in order to get anything built in them, especially that first district.

 

[alpaca]

It doesn't really matter. There are no percentage modifiers that would incentivize large cities, so where you have your population is irrelevant. You should have as many cities as possible, and ideally those cities you do have should be at a pop number 3*n + 1 where n is an integer (i.e. 4, 7, etc) so that you can maximize district availability.

It is easier, however, to have small cities grow to medium size than large cities grow huge, so I usually have a more even pop distribution.

 

[A+ombomb]

It's best to pack in cities to get overlap bonuses for buildings and districts. Having one city with a very high hammer output is extremely important, however, so you can have every other city trade with it for huge bonus hammers from the route.

 

[Xenotitan]

The bonuses from internal trade routes depend on the districts at the destination, not the amount of food or hammers the destination is producing.

 

[A+ombomb]

There are no districts for food - which district improves that?

I would like to see the evidence, since empirically I have always seen the largest destination cities with the highest yields, despite being at exactly 3 districts just like most every other city.

 

[SharTeel]

There are no districts for food - which district improves that?

I would like to see the evidence, since empirically I have always seen the largest destination cities with the highest yields, despite being at exactly 3 districts just like most every other city.

City center is 1f/1p, holy site is 2f, campus is 1f, entertainment and theater are both 2f

 

[joncnunn]

You can cap awful cities at 2 or 3 pop, and still get a district in. This way, it doesn't steal luxury amenities from your big producers, and they still get the benefit of the district. You can spam 2 pop cities 9 tiles from your Capital, and get a ton of hammers out of industrial districts for instance.

There's no real point in hard limiting the awful cities to size 2/3; the purely local housing caps is the real limit. Plus the reason the awful ones are that way is that they are already so food limited (most likely by no fresh water access but could also be too much tundra or desert) that they aren't going to grow much anyway.

 

[player1 fanatic]

City center is 1f/1p, holy site is 2f, campus is 1f, entertainment and theater are both 2f

Actually all these districts add +1 food, not some +2 food.
And the remaining districts not listed here give +1 production instead.

 

[A+ombomb]

Interesting on districts....it scales with city size indirectly anyway, so that explains the coincidence. Focusing on all the +2 districts first seems particularly good.