help with city placement

[wenamon]

hey guys,
Ive been trying to learn how to properly place my second cities. I'm pretty old school, so I sometimes find myself still putting cities close to each other to maximise tile usage. How do I stop doing this. I have been learning alot from games liek the ALC series and was hoping to get a bit of help with dot mapping.

first question. How do you guys do it in a program like paint? im pretty computer illiterate btw

second question. Here is a sample game as rome that I just started (prince, epic, large map). should I try to snag those military resources right away or should I go for a super city with the ivory, rice and stone (red dot)?
I really dont know how to place these guys and I know that sisituil wrote about adding up the food values before improvements. how exactly do I do that?

 

[warezfan]

Paint? Dot? I think you did it well.

You know the button that shows all the food, hammer, and gold on each tile, press that and then you can add it.. is that what you mean?

Go for the ivory. Ivories are always good, happiness and elephants are great benefit. The copper are not that important I reckon, for Romans you need iron for praetorian. I mean ivory is one of the most important military resource in my opinion. It can kill mounted units up to knight, and it can kill axemen since it's not a melee unit.

 

[Cam_H]

Wenamon,

1. Personally I use PaintShop Pro, which I find a lot easier to use than MS Paint. You can often buy older versions of it on eBay for less than $50 if that's of interest.

2. I doubt that you're going to be under any pressure to 'snag' those resources too quickly. As warezfan notes; playing Rome, I would chase Iron Working so you know where Iron tiles are before getting too concerned about putting your city in a sub-optimal spot in order to grab the Copper (no Copper spot is optimal, although the Copper-Wheat-Sheep on the south coast looks decent). As such, I agree that the red dot looks like the best option.

3. Doing a food count is not difficult provided you know what food surplus 'pigs on a green hill in a pasture' actually nets you (for instance). You get 2 free for the city centre, and then every extra citizen consumes 2. If you want to run a 'farm based' (specialist) economy, you'll need to net lots of food to feed the specialists as they each consume 2 without contributing any. Simply run through the city to determine surpluses (more than 2) and deficits (less than 2) and work out how quickly it might stagnate, and its capacity to run specialist citizens.

The example below shows a city that currently won't make use of all of its tiles because of lack of food (giving preference to cottages over farms, mines over windmills {except for one instance}) despite two food resources and a reasonable amount of grassland. Some knocking over of existing improvements will be needed to increase its food haul, or otherwise acceptance that the city will not reach maximum potential population.

 

[wenamon]

thanks guys for the helpful tips. I will go for iron working and see where that puts me!

 

[DarkFyre99]

I do my dot mapping in game, with signs (alt-s). That way I don't have to exit the game to do some planning.

 

[duezeone]

it's also important to recognize that on the higher levels you are constantly under pressure by opponents borders, so you definitely want to setup cities in the direction of your opponents first. Snaaty has a recent thread right now that describes this setup on the front page of this forum.

 

[Galileo44]

I echo the crowd, go for the best city you can right now irrespective of military resources, and have another settler ready as soon as you get IW. IW should be researched now.

PS. That map looks great, some wonderful high food sites in the south.