How fast do you expand on new continent?

[bonniepbilly]

Playing Communitas map with all players on same continent. I find the new continent, not yet settled. I have access to pioneers, am playing a culture game. Save attached (10/23 version).
How good does a settlement site need to be? Do you mostly manage happiness limits or do you refuse to settlement good locations not to slow down culture/science?
Do you sacrifice some culture/science growth to secure possible strategic resources (iron for navy, coal, archeological sites..)?
Thanks.

 

[andersw]

I'm not good at CV it probably depends on how wide you are and how wide you CAN go when aiming for CV.
I find pioneers too expensive when going wide, they often end up costing more than wonders.

 

[Stalker0]

If I’m going CV there’s only 2 reasons I expand beyond my core cities:

1) the new spot has a strategic i truly need.

2) it has very high strategic value. Aka it’s a good spot to set up trade routes with key civs, or a possible staging area if I think war may be necessary.

but only in those cases and pretty rarely.

 

[lunker]

I almost never expand later on in the game. If I do, it's probably for a rare Strategic Resource like Uranium or for creating a staging area for a war. For these cities, I usually only build things that give production since other buildings will take a while and won't have as much time to pay off.

 

[bonniepbilly]

Thank you all for your feedback!

 

[CrazyG]

A cool trick is to build a settler before you unlock banking, and use gold to upgrade it to a pioneer. This can help you settle the extra city much faster.

I might expand late if I have progress, but usually not with tradition or authority.

 

[bonniepbilly]

Thanks. Is it more likely for you to expand if you play domination, for the extra unit support, and when science/culture slowdown is less detrimental (and if you have extra happiness)?

 

[CrazyG]

Thanks. Is it more likely for you to expand if you play domination, for the extra unit support, and when science/culture slowdown is less detrimental (and if you have extra happiness)?

No, I'll just let someone else settle it and capture it. Unless I'm really low on iron or something like that.

 

[MarvelOfRain]

I take over other civs instead of expanding to new continents. It is usually because I ask myself what would those new cities give me and the answer is very little.

Depending on how many turns it takes you to research a tech you can kinda guess how much science per turn you need from the city to not slow you down and it usually takes a lot of build-up to actually make a profit. Production is usually spent to catch up on buildings. Military cap is rarely a problem for me unlike unhappiness which is a constant struggle in any domination game even outside of war where you get even more from war weariness and occupied cities. Archeological sites are super not worth it since you can get artifacts from them anyway and the 7% decrease in tourism is really bad if you are going for a culture victory. So it is really only about the gpt and luxuries / resources.

If you need strategics (mostly coal, oil and iron are quite important and needed in huge quantities for large empires) it might be worth to place a new city if there is some really good spot where you can get about 10ish copies of it, but other then that taking over other players is much better. It usually gives you reasonably developed cities and there is a ton of stuff giving bonuses upon city conquest.

I have also placed a new city to grab a good monopoly (for example one that lets you found one of the more powerful corporations - culture, science, extra great people points), have more production towards naval units and at strategic spots to prepare for an invasion, but I don't think I ever build a bunch of mid-game expansions or even used more than one pioneer in a game.

Of course all of the above applies for authority/progress playthroughs where you often go to war, if you play a tradition game you basically never want to go above 4-5 cities since your main strengths (great people, your awesome capital with crazy tourism output) do not scale with the number of cities you have.