How dense to pack cities?

[kaspergm]

Yep, that got so irritating recently that I ragequit due to this... I wonder why do the devs insist on programming the AI to do it though. I would understand if it was their 5-th city or something, but they'll often pop their second city in the crappy spot next to my capital even with plenty of nice places on their end of the continent...

To be fair, I sometimes do this to the AI knowing that a) they're likely to take the land otherwise, and b) I can settle all the nice places on my end of the continent later. Only if there is actually a nice spot near them of course, I wouldn't plonk a shoddy city down right next to them just to be annoying. Well, unless maybe I want them to DoW me instead of the other way round.

I agree, forward settling can have a lot of merit, and if they back it up by filling the gaps subsequently (which they frequently don't!), it's not a bad strategy. But I have had multiple cases of AI edging a settler through a 1-hex gap in my borders to settle a spot where they have at best one ring of hexes around their city which is then fully surrounded by my existing cities ( which would have been able to work most or all those tiles, once their borders grew to third ring).

 

[UWHabs]

FYI, those Germany clusters above can also be swapped around and still mostly work (ie. for the diamond, the CH on the outside with the Hansa in the middle), depending on what fits best for resources/rivers and other adjacencies. But it should be incredibly hard to place a Hansa without at the very least a base +5 bonus, not counting city-states.

You do have to plan how to mazimize factories, since it's not efficient to build them in every city. But especially mid-game, they're a civ that can get new cities up the fastest. Plop a city, place a Hansa, and chop a forest, and the district is basically complete. And then you're probably talking about 12 from the Hansa, plus another 3 from a factory, plus another handful for tiles, and you very well can be pulling in 20 production very early in a city's life without even dedicating a trader to them.

Japan's adjacencies bonuses, though, have the huge edge that they'll boost the hard to get adjacencies. So while in general, I find it hard to get more than +1 or +2 from a Theatre from another civ, Japan can easily surround it with a couple districts and now has a +3 or +4 theatre square. It can also help for Harbors - if you have an inlet tile, you can potentially get 2-3 districts around a Harbor, and if you can get it up to a +4 or +5 bonus, that works really nice with the double harbor adjacency card and a shipyard, although that's still a lot of production needed, plus potentially a card that's not the most valuable to run unless if you have a lot of coastal cities.

But overall, I tend to find a gap between 4-5 as optimal. I don't like "wasted" tiles in the empire (just wait until that one tile in the middle nobody has settled on is your only Niter source, and now you either need to add a city there or wait a hundred turns for your borders to spread there), but obviously if you pack cities too closely, they can easily run out of space, especially if you have lots of water or mountains in the way. But on the flipside, again, not every city needs to be productive. As long as you can get a campus down, the city's a net positive for you. I find the ideal empire has about 4 "productive" core cities that I'll focus on and try to optimize, and the rest are most just fillers that I don't need to focus on.

 

[KyivanRusCivPlease]

and if you can get it up to a +4 or +5 bonus, that works really nice with the double harbor adjacency card and a shipyard

Does the double harbor adjacency card also double production from the shipyard?

 

[ltccone]

Yep, that got so irritating recently that I ragequit due to this... I wonder why do the devs insist on programming the AI to do it though. I would understand if it was their 5-th city or something, but they'll often pop their second city in the crappy spot next to my capital even with plenty of nice places on their end of the continent...

IMO 4 tiles is just too close. 5 tiles works SO much better.

 

[Victoria]

Does the double harbor adjacency card also double production from the shipyard?

Yes... 2 sea resources and an off continent triangle will give Victoria a shipyard that gives +14 production as well as the triangle getting 19 gold. Then rock on to the card that gives both CH and Harbour's double adjacency but sadly it only gives an extra 5 gold as the other card goes.
... a seaport will not make this +18 production.

It makes Vicky sound great but it's a greedy money trap early that can make you fall behind in science and culture a bit.

Hojo's adjacency sounds great but the 3 tile city radius gets in the way. I tend to just triangulate on the city centre for +2 +2 which with a card is OK. A 7+ pop city it's +3, +3 +2 which becomes significant. Getting 2 cities to work well does not work well for me often.